POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
Come with arms outstretched to take me,
Come with lips pursed up to cling.
Come, for life is a frail moth flying
Caught in the web of the years that pass,
And soon we two, so warm and eager
Will be as the gray stones in the grass.
At least a dozen other songs are as perfect as these—Longing, Debt, Joy, Morning, Dusk in War Time—too many to mention. So let us end with this quatrain, Swallow Flight, because it expresses with such rare precision this poet's temperament:
I love my hour of wind and light
I love men's faces and their eyes,
I love my spirit's veering flight
Like swallows under evening skies.
Miss Widdemer has a motive and a message. Certain tyrannies of modern society—child-labor, prostitution, war, over-worked poverty—are an anguish in her heart, and her wrath flames out in the Poems of Now; achieving in one or two, especially Teresina's Face, the high beauty of true lyric passion, and in others, like The Beggars and A Modern Woman to her Lover, the less rare beauty of more consciously studied rhythmic statement. Such poems, being the intense expression of an individual woman's emotion, speak for all womanly women, utter their pity and wrath, their increasing power against wrongs new and old.
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