“And love is less kind than the gray twilight, / And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn”

For Poetry Monday:

The Girl Takes Her Place Among the Mothers, Marya Zaturenska

“To link the generations each to each.” —Tennyson

I wake in the night with such uncertain gladness,
Fearing the little pain beneath my heart,
The little pains that cease again and start,
Delicious fear that aches with a strange madness.

“And is this I,” I say, seeing my shadowed face
In the old mirror where I laughing saw
So long ago, beautiful without flaw,
Its delicate young lines, and careless grace.

This pain, these happy pains that seem to blend
In my young blood with old forgotten mothers,
Daughters of my race and unremembered others,
The pain that foretells life’s beginning and end.

“And is this I,” I say, beholding my body’s line,
Fragile and young and sweet but not the body I knew,
Now I am drunken with the ancient wine—
“Child, as it was with others, so with you.”


The epigraph is from In Memoriam A.H.H. Zaturenska (1902-1982) was born in Kyiv (or possibly Minsk or Moscow, bios disagree) and immigrated with her family to New York City in 1907 or 1910 (again disagreements). She left high school at 14 to work in a garment factory but continued her education at night school and eventually started publishing poetry—and the attention she got for the latter resulted in a university scholarship in 1920. This one was published in Poetry in 1923 while still a student, under her original surname Zaturensky (she changed it to Zaturenska to sound less Jewish in 1925, shortly after her marriage to poet and translator Horace Gregory). Her first collection wasn’t published until 1934, but her second collection, Cold Morning Sky, won the 1938 Pulitzer for Poetry. Her later publications include a biography of Christina Rossetti.

---L.

Subject quote from Into the Twilight, W.B. Yeats, which I should post sometime.