Elaine Goodale Eastman

Elaine Goodale Eastman Poems

Elaine Goodale Eastman Biography

Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863–1953) and Dora Read Goodale (1866–1953) were American poets and sisters, who published their first poetry as children still living at home, and were included in Edmund Clarence Stedman's classic An American Anthology (1900). Elaine Goodale taught at the Indian Department of Hampton Institute, started a day school on a Dakota reservation in 1886, and was appointed as Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas by 1890. She married Dr. Charles Eastman (also known as Ohiyesa), a Santee Sioux who was the first Native American to graduate from medical school and become a physician. They lived with their growing family in the West for several years. Goodale collaborated with him in writing about his childhood and Sioux culture; his nine books were popular and made him a featured speaker on a public lecture circuit. She also continued her own writing, publishing her last book of poetry in 1930, and a biography and last novel in 1935. Dora Read Goodale published a book of poetry at age 21 and continued to write. She became a teacher of art and English in Connecticut. Later she was a teacher and director of the Uplands Sanatorium in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee. She attracted positive reviews when she published her last book of poetry at age 75 in 1941, in which she combined modernist free verse with the use of Appalachian dialect to express her neighbors' traditional lives. Elaine and Dora were born in the 1860s to Dora Hill Read and Henry Sterling Goodale, a farmer and writer in Mount Washington, Massachusetts. From 1876-1879 their father served as a delegate to the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture. His poem "Does Farming Pay?", in the October 1880 issue of Harper's Monthly, was reviewed in the New York Times as a "terrific" piece of dialect verse.)

The Best Poem Of Elaine Goodale Eastman

June

For stately trees in rich array,
For sunlight all the happy day,
For blossoms radiant and rare,
For skies when daylight closes,
For joyous, clear, outpouring song
From birds that all the green wood throng,
For all things young, and bright, and fair,
We praise thee, Month of Roses!
For blue, blue skies of summer calm,
For fragrant odors breathing balm,
For quiet, cooling shades where oft
The weary head reposes,
For brooklets babbling thro' the fields
Where Earth her choicest treasures yields,
For all things tender, sweet and soft,
We love thee, Month of Roses!

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