Poetry of and about Niagara Falls & the Niagara River – the waterfalls, the city, the history, the stunters, and everything else Niagara
crapsey
How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.
Source: Adelaide Crapsey. Verse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922.
Also in the anthology Niagara Mornings by Andrew C. Porteus, 2016.
About the poetic form the cinquain
adelaide biography
Adelaide Crapsey was born on September 9, 1878 in Brooklyn, New York. She was the third daughter of Episcopalian Rev. Algernon Sidney Crapsey and Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey. She was an honours student at Vassar College, and then became a teacher. She contracted tuberculosis somewhere around 1903, and died on October 8, 1914.
She had been working on a study of metrics that proved too exhausting for her to continue after the onset of her illness, and so she concentrated on poetry. She is known as the inventor of the cinquain – a poem of 5 short lines of unequal length, of which Niagara is one. Her poems were published posthumously.
See her poem Niagara, Seen on a Night in November
Closely related to the Japanese hokku is a little form invented by Adelaide Crapsey. She called it a cinquain. Verse published after her death contains twenty-eight poems in this pattern. They too are exquisite little atmosphere poems. They suggest, as do the Japanese poems, the feeling of things and circumstances. Absence of rhyme gives them the same elusive charm. The scheme is five iambic lines arranged one foot on the first line, two feet on the second, three on the third, four on the fourth and one on the fifth. Substitutions frequently vary the music.
As an expression of the frail inventor’s spirit, the cinquain form has special poignancy. Miss Crapsey was a victim of tuberculosis. She wrote most of the poetry which we have today at Saranac*. In fact she gathered her poems together as her memorial.
Her pattern inspired young versifiers. When their first experiments appeared in print a reader remarked that they irritated her. “They promise so much,” she complained, “touch the feelings and then leave one nowhere to think it all out for one’s self!” That is exactly what Japanese poetry and cinquains are intended to do: they “tease one out of thought’ as Keats says it.
About the Cinquain From: Wrinn, Mary J. J. The Hollow Reed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935
*Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium, later the Trudeau Sanatorium, in Saranac Lake, New York.
Nor similes nor metaphors avail!
All imagery vanishes, device
Dies in thy presence, wondrous dream of ice!
Ice-bound I stand, my face is pinched and pale,
Before such awful majesty I fail,
Sink low on this snow-lichened slab of gneiss,
Shut out the gleaming mass that can entice,
Enchain, enchant, but in whose light I quail.
While I from under frozen lashes peer,
My thoughts fly back to take a homeward course.
How dear to dwell in sweet placidity,
Instead of these colossal crystals, see
The slender icicles of some fairy “force,”
And break the film upon an English mere!
Source: Professor Gregory Betts, Brock University, Department of English. First published 1891.
conn
We used to joke about honeymooning here, be home
in time for dinner at my mother’s every night.
But only if we could play movie stars, arriving
by train under a canopy of thick gray celluloid smoke.
I’d even marcel my hair.
We’re here now on a whim. A drive without anticipation,
almost detouring into the mall at the last minute.
We forget to open the windows after customs, until
the sound thuds against the glass, that low, deep thunder
under the asphalt, the precise moment when the road joins
the adventure. We follow the tourists; we need them
to help us fully appreciate this. Besides, it is too loud
to discuss which way to go. Whoever takes the lead must lead.
We’re handed slickers before the ride begins; I carry mine.
I didn’t come to be wrapped in plastic and float safely
through the mist. I want to kick something into the rush
and track its furious ride down the cascade of water
drawn from deep in the earth and slammed back in its face.
I step back into you; you lift a damp lock of my hair
and it coils on your finger. It is so loud.
Your heart, or mine, or both, responds with the same pulse,
or is it always there, the only beat the earth knows.
Source: The author, 2001.
Originally published in The Buffalo News.
In the Maytime, at Niagara,
As a Sabbath morning broke,
Full of glory, peace and beauty,
From his dreams the sleeper woke.
All was quiet, save the thunder
That forever there prevails —
That, throughout the gathering ages,
Never pauses, never fails.
But the thunder of the torrent
Of a sudden died away,
Just as if a spell of silence
On the rampant waters lay.
For a robin, at the casement,
Trilled its carols sweet and strong,
And he heard the roar no longer —
It was vanquished by the song!
On thine ear the roar and tumult
Of the noisy world must fall,
But a little song of love and trust
Will overcome it all.
Source: Kevin McCabe, ed. The Poetry of Old Niagara. St. Catharines, Ont. : Blarney Stone Books, 1999.
Originally published in Poets and Poetry of Buffalo. 1904.
Composer and conductor Harris Loewen set this poem to music in 2018, published by Cypress Choral Music. Listen to the composition on Soundcloud. Many thanks to Prof. Loewen for permission to post this here.
chester chester