The Mourner ,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.
The Mourner by Adelaide Crapsey
I have no heart for noon-tide and the sun,
But I will take me where more tender night
Shakes, fold on fold, her dewy darkness down.
And shelters me that I may weep in peace,
And feel no pitying eyes, and hear no voice
Attempt my grief in comfort’s alien tongue.
Where cypresses, more black than night is black,
Border straight paths, or where, on hillside slopes,
The dim grglimmer of the olive trees
Lies like a breath, a ghost, upon the dark,
There will I wander when the nightingale
Ceases, and even the veil`ed stars withdraw
Their tremulous light, there find myself at rest,
A silence and a shadow in the gloom.
But all the dead of all the world shall know
The pacing of my sable-sandall’d feet,
And know my tear-drenched veil along the grass,
And think them less forsaken in their graves,
Saying: There’s one remembers, one still mourns;
For the forgotten dead are dead indeed.
