Sunday Morning Poetry

It's October 16th and the ghoulies are starting to stir a bit so the poetry I'm posting for the next few weeks is going to rattle yer bones.  Ready?

"Full Moon" is by Elinor Wylie, an American poet who died in 1928.  In life she was a scandalous woman; she married three times and lived with her second husband openly before he divorced his wife.  She was an editor at Vanity Fair, Literary Guild and The New Republic.  A successful novelist, she was also a fan girl:  her novel The Orphan Angel imagined Romantic poet Shelley's years in the US after being saved from drowning.

Full Moon

My bands of silk and miniver

Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The ermine muffled mouth and chin;
I could not suck the moonlight in.

Harlequin in lozenges

Of love and hate, I walked in these
Striped and ragged rigmaroles;
Along the pavement my footsoles
Trod warily on living coals.

Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,

In their corrupt disguises clothed,
Morality I could not tear
From my ribs, to leave them bare
Ivory in silver air.

There I walked, and there I raged;

The spiritual savage caged
Within my skeleton, raged afresh
To feel, behind a carnal mesh,
The clean bones crying in the flesh.


 You can find more about Wylie and other poets at The Poetry Foundation.  Have a creepy week!