Alice Cary

Alice Cary Poems

Among the beautiful pictures
That hang on Memory's wall,
Is one of a dim old forest,
That seemeth best of all;
...

WE'RE married, they say, and you think you have won me,-
Well, take this white veil from my head, and look on me;
Here's matter to vex you, and matter to grieve you,
Here's doubt to distrust you, and faith to believe you,-
I am all as you see, common earth, common dew;
Be wary, and mould me to roses, not rue!
...

ALONG the still cold plain o'erhead,
In pale embattled crowds,
The stars their tents of darkness spread,
And camped among the clouds;
...

I dreamed I had a plot of ground,
Once when I chanced asleep to drop,
And that a green hedge fenced it round,
Cloudy with roses at the top.
...

I LITTLE care to write her praise,
In truth, I little care that she
Should seem as pure in all her ways,
To others, as she seems to me.
...

I did love thee, Lily Lee,
As the petrel loves the sea,
As the wild bee loves the thyme,
As the poet loves his rhyme,
As the blossom loves the dew -
But the angels loved thee, too!
...

I did love thee, Lily Lee,
As the petrel loves the sea,
As the wild bee loves the thyme,
As the poet loves his rhyme,
As the blossom loves the dew -
But the angels loved thee, too!
...

Upon the silver beeches moss
Was drawing quaint designs,
And the first dim-eyed violets
...

Leave me, O leave me! my o'erwearied feet,
O my beloved! may walk no more with thee;
For I am standing where the circles meet
That mortals name, Time and Eternity.
...

KISS me, though you make believe;
Kiss me, though I almost know
You are kissing to deceive:
Let the tide one moment flow
Backward ere it rise and break,
Only for poor pity's sake!
...

Talk to my heart, oh winds -
Talk to my heart to-night;
My spirit always finds
With you a new delight,
...

No glittering chaplet brought from other lands!
As in his life, this man, in death, is ours;
His own loved prairies o'er his 'gaunt, gnarled hands,'
Have fitly drawn their sheet of summer flowers!
...

As white as the moonlight that fell at her feet
She stood, but for blushes, as many and sweet
As the tops of the blossoms that grew in the wheat,
And softly caressed me -
...

Emily Mayfield all the day
Sits and rocks her cradle alone,
And never a neighbor comes to say
How pretty little Cyrus has grown.
...

Among the beautiful pictures
That hang on Memory's wall,
Is one of a dim old forest,
...

Three men that three gray mules bestrode
Went riding through a lonesome road -
Dust from the largest to the least
Up to the fetlock of each beast.
...

Her casement like a watchful eye
From the face of the wall looks down,
Lashed round with ivy vines so dry,
...

OH, sweet was the eve when I came from the mill,
Adown the green windings of Mulberry hill:
My heart like a bird with his throat all in tune,
That sings in the beautiful bosom of June.
...

My house is low and small,
But behind a row of trees,
I catch the golden fall
Of the sunset in the seas;
...

Come, thou of the drooping eyelid,
And cheek that is meekly pale,
Give over thy pensive musing
And list to a lonesome tale;
...

Alice Cary Biography

Alice Cary (April 26, 1820 – February 12, 1871) was an American poet, and the sister of fellow poet Phoebe Cary (1824–1871) Alice Cary was born on April 26, 1820, in Mount Healthy, Ohio near Cincinnati. Her parents lived on a farm bought by Robert Cary in 1813 in what is now North College Hill, Ohio. He called the 27 acres Clovernook Farm. The farm was 10 miles north of Cincinnati, a good distance from schools, and the father could not afford to give their large family of nine children a very good education. But Alice and her sister Phoebe were fond of reading and studied all they could. While the sisters were raised in a Universalist household and held political and religious views that were liberal and reformist, they often attended Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist services and were friendly with ministers of all these denominations and others. According to Phoebe, Though singularly liberal and unsectarian in her views, [Alice] always preserved a strong attachment to the church of her parents, and, in the main, accepted its doctrines. Caring little for creeds or minor points, she most firmly believed in human brotherhood as taught by Jesus; and in a God whose loving kindness is so deep and so unchangeable that there can never come a time even the vilest sinner, in all the ages of eternity, when if he arises and go to Him, his Father will not see him afar off, and have compassion upon him. When Alice was 17 and Phoebe 13, they began to write verses, which were printed in newspapers. Their mother had died in 1835, and two years afterward their father married again. The stepmother was wholly unsympathetic regarding the literary aspirations of Alice and Phoebe. For their part, while the sisters were ready and while willing to aid to the full extent of their strength in household labor, they persisted in a determination to study and write when the day's work was done. Sometimes they were refused the use of candles to the extent of their wishes, and the device of a saucer of lard with a bit of rag for a wick was their only light after the rest of the family had retired. Alice's first major poem, "The Child of Sorrow," was published in 1838 and was praised by influential critics including Edgar Allan Poe, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, and Horace Greeley. Alice and her sister were included in the influential anthology The Female Poets of America prepared by Rufus Griswold. Griswold encouraged publishers to put forth a collection of the sisters' poetry, even asking John Greenleaf Whittier to provide a preface. Whittier refused, believing their poetry did not need his endorsement, and also noting a general dislike for prefaces as a method to "pass off by aid of a known name, what otherwise would not pass current". In 1849, a Philadelphia publisher accepted the book, Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, and Griswold wrote the preface, left unsigned. By the spring of 1850, Alice and Griswold were often corresponding through letters which were often flirtatious. This correspondence ended by the summer of that year. The anthology made Alice and Phoebe well-known, and in 1850 they moved to New York City, where they devoted themselves to writing, and garnered much fame. There, they also hosted receptions on Sunday evenings which drew notable figures including P. T. Barnum, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Greenleaf Whittier, Horace Greeley, Bayard Taylor and his wife, Richard and Elizabeth Stoddard, Robert Dale Owen, Oliver Johnson, Mary E. Dodge, Mrs. Croly, Mrs. Victor, Edwin H. Chapin, Henry M. Field, Charles F. Deems, Samuel Bowles, Thomas B. Aldrich, Anna E. Dickinson, George Ripley, Madame Le Vert, Henry Wilson, Justin McCarthy; in short, all the noted contemporary names in the different departments of literature and art might fairly be added to the list. Alice wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Putnam's Magazine, the New York Ledger, the Independent, and other literary periodicals. Her articles, whether prose or poetry, were gathered subsequently into volumes which were received well in the United States and abroad. She also wrote novels and poems which did not make their first appearance in periodicals. Among her prose works were The Clovernook Children and Snow Berries, a Book for Young Folks. Alice died of tuberculosis in 1871 in New York at age 51. The pallbearers at her funeral included P. T. Barnum and Horace Greeley. Her burial is in the Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York. Alice Cary is buried alongside her sister Phoeobe in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn The Cary Home stands today on the east side of Hamilton Avenue (US 127), on the campus of the Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in North College Hill.)

The Best Poem Of Alice Cary

Among The Beautiful Pictures

Among the beautiful pictures
That hang on Memory's wall,
Is one of a dim old forest,
That seemeth best of all;
Not for its gnarled oaks olden,
Dark with the mistletoe:
Not for the violets golden
That sprinkle the vale below;
Not for the milk-white lilies.
That lean from the fragrant ledge,
Coquetting all day with the sunbeams,
And stealing their golden edge;
Not for the vines on the upland,
Where the bright red berries rest,
Nor the pinks, nor the pale sweet cowslip,
It seemeth to me the best,

I once had a little brother
With eyes that were dark and deep;
In the lap of that dim old forest
He lid It in peace asleep;
Light as the down of the thistle,
Free as the winds that blow,
We roved there the beautiful summers,
The summers of long ago;
But his feet on the hills grew weary,
And, one of the autumn eves,
I made for my little brother
A bed of the yellow leaves.

Sweetly his pale arms folded
My neck in a meek embrace,
As the light of immortal beauty
Silently covered his face;
And when the arrows of sunset
Lodged in the tree-tops bright,
He fell, in his saint-like beauty,
Asleep by the gates of light.

Therefore, of all the pictures
That hang on Memory's wall,
The one of the dun old forest
Seemeth the best of all.

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