Great Poems by American Women by Susan L. Rattiner Read Free Book Online

(1806-1893)
    One of the first American women to lecture on abolition and women’s rights, Oakes-Smith was born in North Yarmouth, Maine. She married a newspaper publisher when she was seventeen and had four sons. In the 1840s, Oakes-Smith edited The Mayflower, an annual published in Boston. She also wrote poems, criticisms, and essays under her own name and under the pen name of Ernest Helfenstein. Some of her published works include: The Sinless Child and Other Poems (1843), and children’s stories such as The True Child and Rosebud (1845). Woman and Her Needs (1851) was originally published as a series in the New York Tribune. At the age of forty-five, Oakes-Smith was a public speaker on women’s rights, and in 1868, she became a charter member of Sorosis, the first women’s club in New York.
    Ode to Sappho
    Bright, glowing Sappho! child of love and song!
Adown the blueness of long-distant years
Beams forth thy glorious shape, and steals along
Thy melting tones, beguiling us to tears.
Thou priestess of great hearts,
Thrilled with the secret fire
By which a god imparts
The anguish of desire—
For meaner souls be mean content—
Thine was a higher element.
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    Over Leucadia’s rock thou leanest yet,
With thy wild song, and all thy locks outspread;
The stars are in thine eyes, the moon hath set—
The night dew falls upon thy radiant head;
And thy resounding lyre—
Ah ! not so wildly sway:
Thy soulful lips inspire
And steal our hearts away!
Swanlike and beautiful, thy dirge
Still moans along the Ægean surge.
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    No unrequited love filled thy lone heart,
But thine infinitude did on thee weigh,
And all the wildness of despair impart,
Stealing the down from Hope’s own wing away.
Couldst thou not suffer on,
Bearing the direful pang,
While thy melodious tone
Through wondering cities rang?
Couldst thou not bear thy godlike grief?
In godlike utterance find relief?
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    Devotion, fervor, might upon thee wait:
But what were these to thine? all cold and chill,
And left thy burning heart but desolate;
Thy wondrous beauty with despair might fill
The worshipper who bent
Entranced at thy feet:
Too affluent the dower lent
Where song and beauty meet!
Consumed by a Promethean fire
Wert thou, O daughter of the lyre!
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    Alone, above Leucadia’s wave art thou,
Most beautiful, most gifted, yet alone!
Ah! what to thee the crown from Pindar’s brow?
What the loud plaudit and the garlands thrown
By the enraptured throng,
When thou in matchless grace
Didst move with lyre and song,
And monarchs gave thee place?
What hast thou left, proud one? what token?
Alas! a lyre and heart—both broken!
    The Drowned Mariner
    A mariner sat on the shrouds one night;
    The wind was piping free;
    Now bright, now dimmed was the moonlight pale,
    And the phosphor gleamed in the wake of the whale,
    As he floundered in the sea;
    The scud was flying athwart the sky,
    The gathering winds went whistling by,
    And the wave as it towered, then fell in spray,
    Looked an emerald wall in the moonlight ray.
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    The mariner swayed and rocked on the mast,
    But the tumult pleased him well;
    Down the yawning wave his eye he cast,
    And the monsters watched as they hurried past
    Or lightly rose and fell;
    For their broad, damp fins were under the tide,
    And they lashed as they passed the vessel’s side,
    And their filmy eyes, all huge and grim,
    Glared fiercely up, and they glared at him.
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    Now freshens the gale, and the brave ship goes
    Like an uncurbed steed along;
    A sheet of flame is the spray she throws,
    As her gallant prow the water ploughs,
    But the ship is fleet and strong:
    The topsails are reefed and the sails are furled,
    And onward she sweeps o’er the watery world,
    And dippeth her spars in the surging flood;
    But there came no chill to the mariner’s blood.
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    Wildly she rocks, but he swingeth at ease,
    And holds him by the shroud;
    And as she careens to the crowding breeze,
    The gaping