Fresher by ,The exotically named Adelaide Crapsey was a New York-born poet and English literature teacher whose short life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis. Her poetry output was fairly substantial but she will best be remembered by students of 19th and 20th-century poets as the inventor of a writing technique called “the cinquain”. This was probably born out of her love of the Japanese “tanka and haiku” forms of writing. It’s a kind of compressed style of writing that had many admirers including another famous writer, Ezra Pound.
Fresher by Adelaide Crapsey
han spring’s new scents
The winter’s earliest wind
Blows from the hills the first faint breath
Of Snow.
Why have I
thought the dew
Ephemeral when I
Shall rest so short a time, myself,
On earth?