"POPPIES ON LUDLOW CASTLE"

by Willa Cather (1873-1947)

"THROUGH halls of vanished pleasure,
And hold of vanished power,
And crypt of faith forgotten,
A came to Ludlow tower.

A-top of arch and stairway,
Of crypt and donjan cell,
Of council hall, and chamber,
Of wall, and ditch, and well,

High over grated turrets
Where clinging ivies run,
A thousand scarlet poppies
Enticed the rising sun,

Upon the topmost turret,
With death and damp below,--
Three hundred years of spoilage,--
The crimson poppies grow.

This hall it was that bred him,
These hills that knew him brave,
The gentlest English singer
That fills an English grave.

How have they heart to blossom
So cruel and gay and red,
When beauty so hath perished
And valour so hath sped?

When knights so fair are rotten,
And captains true asleep,
And singing lips are dust-stopped
Six English earth-feet deep?

When ages old remind me
How much hath gone for naught,
What wretched ghost remaineth
Of all that flesh hath wrought;

Of love and song and warring,
Of adventure and play,
Of art and comely building,
Of faith and form and fray--

I'll mind the flowers of pleasure,
Of short-lived youth and sleep,
That drunk the sunny weather
A-top of Ludlow keep."


Before Willa Cather went on to write the novels that would make her famous, she was known as a poet, the most popular of her poems reprinted many times in national magazines and anthologies. Her first book of poetry, April Twilights, was published in 1903, but Cather significantly revised and expanded it in a 1923 edition entitled April Twilights and Other Poems. This Everyman’s Library edition reproduces for the first time all the poems from both versions of April Twilights, along with a number of uncollected and previously unpublished poems by Cather, as well as an illuminating selection of her newly released letters. In such lyrical poems as “The Hawthorn Tree,” “Winter at Delphi,” “Prairie Spring,” “Poor Marty,” and “Going Home,” Cather exhibits both a finely tuned sensitivity to the beauties of the physical world and a richly symbolic use of the landscapes of myth. The themes that were to animate her later masterpieces found their first expression in these haunting, elegiac ballads and sonnets.

Source: Everyman's Library