Ethelwyn Wetherald

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

Ethelwyn Wetherald Poems

The Great soft downy snow storm like a cloak
Descends to wrap the lean world head to feet;
It gives the dead another winding sheet,
...

With slender arms outstretching in the sun
The grass lies dead;
The wind walks tenderly and stirs not one
Frail fallen head.
...

When I see,
High on the tip-top twig of a tree,
Something blue by the breezes stirred,
But so far up that the blue is blurred,
...

Muck of the sty, reek of the trough,
Blackened my brow where all might see,
Yet while I was a great way off
...

I saw a mother holding
Her play-worn baby son,
Her pliant arms enfolding
The drooping little one.
...

How dear to hearts by hurtful noises scarred
In the stillness of the many-leavèd trees,
The quiet of green hills, the million-starred
...

Here in the crowded city's busy street,
Swayed by the eager, jostling, hasting throng,
Where Traffic's voice grows harsher and more strong,
...

Hearing the strange night-piercing sound
Of woe that strove to sing,
I followed where it hid, and found
A small soft-throated thing,
...

If one might live ten years among the leaves,
Ten–only ten–of all a life's long day,
Who would not choose a childhood 'neath the eaves
...

Open your doors and take me in,
Spirit of the wood;
Wash me clean of dust and din,
Clothe me in your mood.
...

My orders are to fight;
Then if I bleed, or fail,
Or strongly win, what matters it?
...

The wind of death, that softly blows
The last warm petal from the rose,
The last dry leaf from off the tree,
...

Unto my friends I give my thoughts,
Unto my God my soul,
Unto my foe I leave my love–
These are of life the whole.
...

O Master-Builder, blustering as you go
About your giant work, transforming all
The empty woods into a glittering hall,
...

Dear grey-winged angel, with the mouth set stern
And time-devouring eyes, the sweetest sweet
Of kisses when two severed lovers meet
...

When I shall go to sleep and wake again
At dawning in another world than this,
What will atone to me for all I miss?
...

Here where tumultuous vines
Shadow the porch at the west,
Leaf with tendril entwines
Under a song sparrow's nest.
...

One day I caught up with my angel, she
Who calls me bell-like from a sky-touched tower.
'Twas in my roof-room, at the stillest hour
...

19.

Thank God for pluck–unknown to slaves–
The self ne'er of its Self bereft,
Who, when the right arm's shattered, waves
The good flag with the left.
...

Ethelwyn Wetherald Biography

Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald was a Canadian poet. She was born at Rockwood, Ontario, the daughter of Rev. William Wetherald, a Quaker minister. She was educated at the Friends' Boarding School in Union, New York, and at Pickering College. She sold her first poem to St. Nicholas Magazine at 17, and soon was contributing to many publications throughout Canada and the United States, including The Globe, The Week, and Rose-Belford's Canadian Magazine. She co-wrote a novel, An Algonquin Maiden (1887), with Graeme Mercer Adam, and in 1895 published her first volume of poetry. She worked for several decades as a proofreader, journalist, and editorial assistant at newspapers in Ontario and the north-eastern United States. For a time she 'conducted the Women's Department' of the under the pseudonym "Bel Thistlethwait." She adopted a child, Dorothy, in 1911 when she was 54, and in 1921 published a book of children's verse, Tree-Top Mornings, dedicated to Dorothy. Reviewing her 1907 book, The Last Robin, The Globe pronounced: "The salient quality of Miss Wetherald's work is its freshness of feeling, a perennial freshness, renewable as spring. This has a setting of harmonious form, for the poet's ear is delicately attuned to the value of words, both as to the sound and the meaning.... The sonnets are an important part of the volume, and, to some minds, will represent the most important part. Miss Wetherald's sonnets are flowing in expression and harmonious in thought; some are beautiful." The Dictionary of Literary Biography calls the best of her poems "musical, restrained, and precise," and "equal to much of the work of her better-known Canadian contemporaries such as Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott." On occasion, it adds, "her themes and images recall the poetry of Emily Dickinson.")

The Best Poem Of Ethelwyn Wetherald

The Snow Storm

The Great soft downy snow storm like a cloak
Descends to wrap the lean world head to feet;
It gives the dead another winding sheet,
It buries all the roofs until the smoke
Seems like a soul that from its clay has broke.
It broods moon-like upon the Autumn wheat,
And visits all the trees in their retreat
To hood and mantle that poor shivering folk.
With wintry bloom it fills the harshest grooves
In jagged pine stump fences. Every sound
It hushes to the footstep of a nun.
Sweet Charity! that brightens where it moves
Inducing darkest bits of churlish ground
To give a radiant answer to the sun.

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