A sonnet has already been given from Mrs. Dunbar-Nelson to which I think Mrs. Browning or Christina Rossetti might have appended her signature without detriment to her fame. It is one of a series entitled A Dream Sequence, the rest of the sequence being as yet unpublished. Instead of pillaging this sequence, marring the effect of the individual member so dislocated, I will take from her compilation, The Dunbar Speaker,[3] so named for her first husband, the poet, two of her original poems. The first is a war poem, doubtless, but the occasion is immaterial. The spirit of rebellion against confinement to the petty thing while the something big calls afar might be evoked into play by any of a hundred situations.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
I SIT AND SEW
I sit and sew—a useless task it seems,
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—
The panoply of war, the martial tread of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath—
But—I must sit and sew.
I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe—
But—I must sit and sew.
The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream
That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,
It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?
The second poem I shall give is also not unrelated to the recent World War, and to all war: the lights alluded to, shining across and down the Delaware for miles, are the lights of the DuPont powder mills. It is a poem of fine symmetry, highly poetic diction, and great allusive meaning—a poem that will bear and repay many readings, never growing less beautiful.
THE LIGHTS AT CARNEY’S POINT