Elinor Wylie

Elinor Morton Wylie (7 September 1885 – 16 December 1928) was an American poet and novelist popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

Under oak, ash and thorn
My soul was born.

Quotes

Under thorn, oak and ash
My body bent to the lash.

• Under oak, ash and thorn
  My soul was born.
  Under thorn, oak and ash
  My body bent to the lash.
  • "Beltane", published in Last Poems of Elinor Wylie (1943)

Nets to Catch the Wind (1921)

Full text online at Project Gutenberg

Wild Peaches

Full text online at Poetry Foundation

• When the world turns completely upside down
  You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
  Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
  We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
  You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
  Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
  Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
  We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.
  • 1

• The winter will be short, the summer long,
  The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
  Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
  All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
  The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
  Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.
  • 1

• When strawberries go begging, and the sleek
  Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak,
  We shall live well — we shall live very well.
  • 3

• Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
  There’s something in this richness that I hate.
  I love the look, austere, immaculate,
  Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
  There’s something in my very blood that owns
  Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
  A thread of water, churned to milky spate
  Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
  • 4

• I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
  Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
  That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
  Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
  Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
  And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.
  • 4

A Crowded Trolley Car

A bell is clanging, people sway
Hanging by their hands.

Full text online at Poetry Foundation

• The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray
  Sharp as golden sands,
  A bell is clanging, people sway
  Hanging by their hands.

• Orchard of the strangest fruits
  Hanging from the skies;
  Brothers, yet insensate brutes
  Who fear each others’ eyes.

• One man stands as free men stand
  As if his soul might be
  Brave, unbroken; see his hand
  Nailed to an oaken tree.

Quotes about Elinor Wylie

• Wylie and Millay were standard in high school-women whom I really loved.
  • 1978 interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)

• It is not in the power of an organization which has insulted Elinor Wylie, to honour me.
  • Edna St. Vincent Millay 4/18/1927 letter to the League of American Penwomen, anthologized in Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters edited by Andrew Carroll

External links

• Elinor Wylie at the Poetry Foundation - Biography and 8 poems (A Crowded Trolley Car, Cold Blooded Creatures, Epitaph, Full Moon, Little Elegy, Speed the Parting, Valentine, Wild Peaches)
• Works by Elinor Wylie at Project Gutenberg
• Poems of Elinor Wylie at Poemtree.com
• Poems of Elinor Wylie at Poets' Corner