Fussell, inPoetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965), calls “the pleasantly predictable, manageable world of the iambic.”

Mood

All the characteristic traits and tricks of Reese’s poetic voice are exemplified in the first stage of her long literary career. Her thematic concern with the “departing mood”—to an extent that theme and tone become one—consistently typifies the poems of the early period. Reese is not, however, merely a poet of mood like the poetasters who contributed sentimental verse to the ladies’ magazines. She is, rather, a poet who locates the gentle irony where the woof of a pleasant image interlaces, and thus partly obscures and softens, the warp of hard reality. The bittersweet, the wistful, and the poignant form the emotional province of Reese’s voice, but these emotions come from an artistic distance, from an awareness by the lyric persona that mood is not only crystallized feeling but also recaptured thought. Mood is then, for Reese’s lyric speaker, a complex response to the sensory appeal of imagery, and the mood itself becomes the healthy equilibrium between the venting of emotion on one hand and the containing of emotion on the other.

“In Time of Grief”

“In Time of Grief,” from A Quiet Road, illustrates the essential method of Reese’s early lyricism. The poem combines an array of images within its tight structure of three ballad-stanza quatrains. Noteworthy is the emphasis on olfactory imagery, for Reese knows that the sense of smell, as effectively as sight or sound, evokes memories and their associated feelings. The lyric speaker, referring to the box shrub along the “wall of stone,” says that “Its odor through my house was blown/ Into the chamber there.” Compatibly mixing her sensory impressions, she defines this “scent” in auditory and tactile terms: “As though one spoke a word half meant/ That left a sting behind.” The brief resolution of the poem leaves the speaker uncertain about the abstract quality of “grief” but comforted in the knowledge of “how keen the box can be/ After a fall of rain.” Thus Reese’s lyric persona encounters an ironic variation: The “reality” of abstractions (grief, love, beauty, truth) is hardly separable from the masking, imagistic “appearance,” because, unexpected and unsummoned, the departing mood may instantly return when the sensory conditions are right.

“Tears”

Published in 1909 on the threshold of the New Poetry, A Wayside Lute represents an advance in stylistic variations and dramatic vigor, even though Reese’s standard themes of mood and memory, along with her poetic staples—the poplar trees, the color white, the month of April—remain the same. Unexpectedly, it is the Petrarchan sonnet “Tears”—a poem neither concerned with the departing mood nor informed by her usual images—that distinguishes this collection. In “Tears,” Reese still relies on the heavy monosyllabic diction, the trochaic inversions, and the auditory imagery (“A call to battle,” “The last echo,” “The burst of music”), but she widens her poetic scope to ponder the brevity of life and, in the apostrophe that comprises the sestet, to ask the “Chieftains, and bards, and keepers of the sheep” to release her from a mood she can no longer tolerate: “Loose me from tears, and make me see aright/ How each hath back what once he stayed to weep.” The understated effect of “stayed,” suggesting only a pause, exercises the ironic control that prevents the poem from stumbling into sentimentality. In the climactic last line, the lyric speaker who wants an “intimation of immortality” cites two—one a bard and one a keeper of the sheep—who stayed to weep: “Homer his sight, David his little lad!” Here, in one memorable line, Reese sweeps up, and juxtaposes, two representatives from the great shaping forces of Western civilization: the Hellenic tradition of humanistic culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition of religious hope. The optimistic thread in each branch justifies the enlightening exclamation that closes the sestet—a lyric shout back to the “old, old dead” that the promise of immortality is implicit in the ironic brevity of life.

Spicewood and Wild Cherry

In the third stage of her career, Reese reaches the height of her lyric voice, achieving her finest sustained yet tightly controlled lyricism. This control is evident in Spicewood, where half the poems are Petrarchan sonnets, each one containing six, rather than the prescribed five, rhymes in one of two patterns: either abba, cddc, efg, efg, or abab, cdcd, efg, efg. In poetic voice and imagery, these sonnets are typically Reese’s, but they are plaintive notes of a speaker who is more introspective and less exuberant, and fully prone to sound the characteristically modern theme of alienation still comprehended in the resonance of mood and memory.

In this period, Reese elevates some of her favorite images to the eminence of symbol. The color white, for example, makes the transition from a descriptive to a symbolic term, becoming what Robert D. Rhode calls “a manifold symbol. . . . It is a spiritual force that inspires, tortures, and subdues.” “In Vain,” one of the finest lyrics in Wild Cherry, illustrates the new symbolic aura for the word “white.” In the first three quatrains, the lyric speaker, remembering a lost lover, cries “for a world empty of you” but realizes that “Some small thing thereabout/ Would bring the same hurt back again.” As usual, the speaker emphasizes the aching, inescapable mood that sensory impressions will inevitably provoke. In the climatic quatrain, struggling against the lovesick mood, the lyric “I” yearns for “the smell of yarrow flowers . . . set/ In a lost field.” Then, reinforcing the olfactory imagery, the forsaken lover simply repeats the desire with the modifying color and conditions: “White yarrow flowers,/ Out in the August wet.” There is no complete subject/verb relationship in the quatrain; it works its culminating effect strictly through the exposition of imagery. One should not incorrectly conclude that the flowers have an antecedent in “some small thing” that would remind the lyric “I” of the lost lover or that, in the opposite direction, they represent a remedy for heartache. The speaker simply ponders submission to the sensory assault of the strongly scented yarrow and its eye-catching whiteness—a whiteness meaning, on the sensory level, more than brilliance or color, and meaning, on the metaphorical level, more than “pristine” or “virginal,” and pointing, ironically, toward the muted eroticism of a “lost field . . ./ Out in the August wet.” Here, as in other notable lyrics from this period (“A Puritan Lady,” “Fog,” “Alien”), Reese invests the color white with a private symbolism that defines a complex mood and finally rounds, in “Reparation,” to the philosophy that “what is fair is permanent.” For Reese, the single word that best renders the essence of “fair”—not merely as synonym but as the natural stimulant of, and symbolic correlative for, mood and memory—is “white.”

Readers of The Selected Poems of Lizette Woodworth Reese should be aware that the George H. Doran Company could not get permission from the Norman, Remington Company, the publishers of Spicewood and Wild Cherry, to reprint poems from these two volumes, thus precluding a proper estimation of Reese’s talent by anyone who mistakenly believes that the book contains a representative “selection” of her best work.

Little Henrietta

Little Henrietta, written in thirty-nine ten-line stanzas, excluding a three-couplet poem titled “Shelter” and “An Epitaph,” is actually an elegy for a child whom the young Reese knew in Waverly. Uncharacteristically, Reese does not employ regular rhyme, although there are occasional true and slant rhymes. With a sure sense of her own talent, Reese knew that the traditional elegiac mode offered her poetic voice a perfect medium with its flower symbolism, meditative mood, and expression of grief that submits to Christian consolation. A significant part of her achievement is in the poem’s structural design: The first fifteen stanzas serve as an introductory narrative that details Henrietta’s childhood and the impression that she made on her friends and elders, leading up to her death in stanza 15. The last twenty-four stanzas follow the general pattern of the pastoral elegy with a questioning invocation in stanza 16: “Have we not waked at time,” the narrator asks, “And thought our eyes amiss?” The digression on the church, in stanzas 22-25, is not condemnatory, as in John Milton’s “Lycidas,” but the narrator feels the irony of the funeral that “left us naked by a churchyard wall.” A neglected contribution to the elegiac genre in American literature, Little Henrietta ranks with “Tears” as Reese’s major achievement.

Later years

The poems from Reese’s last period, written after she had turned seventy, betray a weakening of her poetic voice. Although White April and Pastures contain poems that recapture the old lyric energy—“White April” and “Women” in the former volume, “A Country Doctor” and “Cynical Advice” in the latter—there is a tendency, avoided in her early work, toward didactic conclusions and moral sentiment.

Published posthumously in 1936, The Old House in the Country is a curious addition to the Reese canon. It is a rhymed, autobiographical poem in fifty-two ten-line stanzas, the structure used so successfully in Little Henrietta; yet, without the internal conventions of the elegy, this poem lacks unity, causing single stanzas to fragment into separate poems.

Reading Reese’s work from this distance, one necessarily considers it on two levels: first, on the basic plane of its lyrical beauty—developed and extended by a poetic voice that maintains its typifying notes and themes throughout her work—and, second, on the plane of its influence, where Reese promoted by example a trend that hastened American lyricism away from a pseudoclassical gentility toward an image-conscious modernity.