Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

 

 

Text
Editionsbericht
Literatur: Piatt
Literatur: Poetologische Lyrik

 

                        A Prettier Book.

 

5   "HE has a prettier book than this,"
   With many a sob between, he said;
Then left untouched the night's last kiss,
   And, sweet with sorrow, went to bed.

A prettier book his brother had? –
10      Yet wonder-pictures were in each.
The different colors made him sad;
   The equal value – could I teach?

[98] Ah, who is wiser?... Here we sit,
   Around the world's great hearth, and look,
15   While Life's fire-shadows flash and flit,
   Each wistful in another's book.

I see, through fierce and feverish tears,
   Only a darkened hut in mine;
Yet in my brother's book appears
20      A palace where the torches shine.

A peasant, seeking bitter bread
   From the unwilling earth to wring,
Is in my book; the wine is red,
   There in my brother's, for the king.
25    
[99] A wedding, where each wedding-guest
   Has wedding garments on, in his, –
In mine one face in awful rest,
   One coffin never shut, there is!

In his, on many a bridge of beams
30      Between the faint moon and the grass,
Dressed daintily in dews and dreams,
   The fleet midsummer fairies pass;

In mine unearthly mountains rise,
   Unearthly waters foam and roll,
35   And – stared at by its deathless eyes –
   The master sells the fiend a soul!

[100] ... Put out the lights.   We will not look
   At pictures any more.   We weep,
"My brother has a prettier book,"
     And, after tears, we go to sleep.

 

 

 

 

Druckvorlage

S. M. B. Piatt: A Voyage to The Fortunate Isles, etc.
Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company 1874, S. 97-100.

Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck (Editionsrichtlinien).

URL: https://books.google.fr/books?id=KskRAAAAYAAJ
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/miun.abj8513.0001.001

 

 

 

Literatur: Piatt

Bennett, Paula B.: Poets in the Public Sphere. The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900.. Princeton 2003.

Hooks, Karin L.: "It is Difficult to Disengage a Single Thread from the Living Web of a Nation's Literature": Sarah Piatt and the Construction of Literary History. In: American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity. Hrsg. von Melanie V. Dawson u. Meredith L. Goldsmith. Gainesville, FL 2018, S. 27-55.

Kilcup, Karen L.: Who Killed American Poetry? From National Obsession to Elite Possession. Ann Arbor 2019.

Renker, Elizabeth: The 'Twilight of the Poets' in the Era of American Realism, 1875-1900. In: The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry. Hrsg. von Kerry Larson. Cambridge 2011, S. 135-153.

Renker, Elizabeth: The "Genteel Tradition" and Its Discontents. In: The Cambridge History of American Poetry. Hrsg. von Alfred Bendixen u.a. Cambridge 2015, S. 403-424.

Renker, Elizabeth: Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900. Oxford 2018.

 

 

Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer