Miss Angelina Grimké
Not less distinctive in quality than Mrs. Johnson’s, and not less beautiful in artistry, are the brief lyrics of Miss Angelina W. Grimké, also of the city of Washington. If hers should be called imagist poetry or no I cannot say, but I am certain that more vivid imaging of objects has not been done in verse by any contemporary. This, too, in stanzas that suggest in their perfection of form the work of the old lapidaries. Nor is there but a surface or formal beauty. There is passion, there is beauty of idea, the soul of lyric poetry is there as well as the form. I am weighing well my words in giving this praise, and I know that not one in the thousand of those who write good verse would deserve them. But I ask the sceptical individual to re-read them after he has perused the poems themselves.
I will present several without interrupting comment:
DAWN
Grey trees, grey skies, and not a star;
Grey mist, grey hush;
And then, frail, exquisite, afar,
A hermit-thrush.
A WINTER TWILIGHT
A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath;
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their crests ’gainst a sky green-gold;
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.
THE PUPPET-PLAYER