Elinor Wylie

Under oak, ash and thorn
My soul was born.

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

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