heek
would seem like the springing panther at one's throat. Dramatic
vividness is certainly her chief distinction. No playfulness here, but
a stout reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record the element
at its best that played so fierce a role in her life. She writes her
own death hymn, lays her own shroud out, spaces her own epilogue as if
to give the engraver, who sets white words on white stone, the clue,
stones the years stare on, leaving the sunlight to streak the old
pathos there, and then settles herself to the long way of lying, to
the sure sleep that glassed her keen eyes, shutting them down too soon
on a world that held so much poetry for her.

The titles of her cinquains, such as "November night", "The guarded
wound", "The warning", "Fate defied", and the final touch of
inevitability in "The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last
moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey companion of the
covering mists. It must be said hurriedly that Adelaide Crapsey was
not all doom. By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book attest
to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical wonders of the hour. Her
fervour is the artist's fervour, the longing, coming really to
passion, to hold and fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to
her. That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, and his
last distress. No one wants to give in to a commonplace world when the
light that falls on it is lovelier than the place it falls on. If you
cannot transpose the object, transport it, however simply, however
ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is transport!

Adelaide Crapsey was efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as
she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than
painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping
aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She
wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been
content with just matrix, with here and there embedded chips. She was
a washer of gold, and spared no labours for the bright nuggets she
might get, and the percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud
hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was dimmed.

"In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In the waters of ice; Myself
Will shiver, and will shrive myself
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place