Skipwith Cannéll

Skipwith Cannéll Poems

Skipwith Cannéll Biography

Skipwith Cannell was an American poet associated with the Imagist group. His surname is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable. He was a friend of William Carlos Williams, and like Ezra Pound he came from Philadelphia. Cannell studied at the University of Virginia and was enthusiastic about the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the free verse of The King James Version of The Bible. He was briefly married to Kathleen Eaton Cannell, who was generally known as 'Kitty'. Cannell met Pound in Paris in 1913. Pound sent some of Cannell's poems to Harriet Monroe. Back in London, Pound took Cannell and Kitty to visit Yeats and found a room for the couple below his own in Church Walk, Kensington. Cannell's work appeared in the first Imagist anthology, edited by Pound and published by Poetry Bookshop in 1914 Des Imagistes and The New Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson in 1917 and later in Richard Aldington's Imagist Anthology in 1930. Cannell and Kitty divorced in 1921. There were no children from this first marriage. Cannell married secondly Juliette Del Grange, a French national with whom he had two daughters, May and Sarah. His second marriage also ended in divorce. He married a third time to Catherine Pettigrew, with whom he had five additional children, David, Mary, Michael, John and Susan. He was closely involved with Alfred Kreymborg's magazine Others: A Magazine of the New Verse.)

The Best Poem Of Skipwith Cannéll

The King

SEVEN full-paunched eunuchs came to me,
Bearing before them upon a silver shield
The secrets of my enemy.

As they crossed my threshold to stand,
With stately and hypocritical gesture
in a row before me,
One stumbled.
The dull, incurious eyes of the others
Blazed into no laughter,
Only a haggard malice
At the discomfiture
Of their companion.

Why should such T h i n g s have power
Not spoken for in the rules of men?

i would not receive them.
With my head covered i motioned them
To go forth from my presence.

Where shall i find an enemy
Worthy of me as him they defaced?

As they left me,
Bearing with them
Lewd shield and scarlet crown,
One paused upon the threshold,
insolent,
To sniff a flower.

Even him i permitted to go forth
Safely.
. . . . . .

Therefore
i have renounced my kingdom;
in a little bronze boat i have set sail
Out
Upon the sea.

There is no land, and the sea
is black like the cypresses waiting
At midnight in the place of tombs;
is black like the pool of ink
in the palm of a soothsayer.

My boat
Fears the white-lipped waves
That snatch at her,
Hungrily,
Furtively,
As they steal past like cats
into the night:
And beneath me, in their hidden places,
The great fishes talk of me
in a tongue i have forgotten.

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