Adelaide Crapsey - Two Poems
November Night
Listen. . . With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall.
Niagara
How frail Above the bulk Of crashing water hangs, Autumnal, evanescent, wan, The moon.
As I post this, I realize that the pieces I’ve chosen lately have all been pretty morose. I need to find something a bit more upbeat for the future. Adelaide Crapsey, unfortunately, doesn’t have many upbeat poems to choose from. Her early work is heavily influenced by the premature death of both her younger and older sisters while she was in college developing her love of poetry. She would go on to be diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain lining a decade later and eventually find herself in a sanitorium in upstate New York.
During this time, she invented a form of poetry called the cinquain that was heavily inspired (by her own admission) by Japanese forms. The Cinquain is a five-line poem that progressively increases the number of stressed syllables from 1 to 4 before ending in a final single stress line. The form itself is quite fitting, as it seems to represent the abruptness of illness and death. How it comes when one is just beginning to build a flow. She died at 36, abruptly cut while building her own flow of work.
“November Night” is perhaps the go-to Crapseian Cinquain. It is eerie. It captures nature in a haunting way, feeling slightly spiritual but still quite based in concrete imagery. The penultimate line paints a rich image of the impermanence of beauty and life “the leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees” that should really be developed more but, in the perfection that is the Cinquain, abruptly comes to an end “And fall.”
When reading Crapsey, the form and the choice of final words are doing half the emotional lifting.
Similarly, in “Niagara” she makes a claim that is not common (as far as I know) in poetry, a form that tends to highlight the celestial power of the moon. Instead, Crapsey projects her own frailty and ephemerality onto the satellite. The glow often talked about for its beauty or its magic elsewhere is a paleness invoking the image of sickness. True power is found in the relentless violence of crashing water here on earth — an unstoppable force, not unlike the disease that was slowly eating away at her life.