Nathalia Crane (1913 – 1998)
Poet and novelist who became famous as a child prodigy after the publication of her first book of poetry at age 10.
Treating the sword blade the same as the staff,
Turning the chariot wheel into chaff.
Toppling a pillar and nudging a wall,
Building a sand pile to counter each fall.
Yielding to nothing — not even the rose,
The dust has its reasons wherever goes.
You cannot choose your battlefield,
God does that for you;
But you can plant a standard
Where a standard never flew. QOTD 2007·11·01 Sound file
A single-motored miracle, a lead mine on each flank;
Below a shadow swept and awed the hundred-fathom bank.
The gods released a vision on a world forespent and dull;
They sent it as a challenge by the sea hawk and the gull.
Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.
A year ago, to a startled public, was revealed the most extraordinary prodigy of them all — Nathalia Crane, 11-year-old poet, "The Baby Browning of Brooklyn," whose first volume of verse, The Janitor's Boy, was heralded by critics to be a work of genius.
Such words as "blastoderm", "sindoc," "peris," "parasang," "sarcenet," "teazel," "nullah," "cantatrice," "barracan," "sistrum," writhed and hissed in her verses. One poem began with the nebular hypothesis and ended with prohibition; others cantered with a Eugene Fieldian humor; still others coldly glowed with the passion-weary detachment of a woman who has had her fill of life and its motley follies. Critic-Poet Louis Untermeyer chortled with elation. Poet William Rose Benét wrote a preface. The English Society of Authors and Playwrights (of which Thomas Hardy is President) asked Nathalia Crane to join them.
The sun shall shine in ages yet to be,
The musing moon illumine pastures dim,
And afterwards a new nativity
For all who slept the dreamless interim.
In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose,
Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?
Said the tiger to the lily,
Said the viper to the rose,
Let us marry so our children
May attain the double pose.
The starry brocade of the summer night
Is linked to us as part of our estate;
And every bee that wings its sidelong flight
Assurance of a sweeter, fairer fate.
Nathalia can explain practically every line she has ever written; I have heard her uncertain treble clarify passages that have puzzled erudite authors. No poet that ever lived delighted in amassing such curious, half-forgotten sounds; not even Francis Thompson had so great a vocabulary of rare and archaic terms. . . Nathalia collects words the way a boy of her age collects postage stamps; she had thumbed Noah Webster's work (in various editions) and made a glossary of her own. The dictionary is her playbox and she knows exactly where every odd toy is concealed.
Cloud-made mountains towered,
Beckoning to me;
Visionary triremes
Talked about the sea...
Oh, we have had great lovers that we followed to the pyre;
Our boasts out-do the Sabine girls—the Mosque of St. Sophia.
And we are very sure of ours, for when a city falls,
They seize us and they love us and they hurl us from the walls.
When you return, the youngest of the seers,
Released from fetters of ancestral pose,
There will be beauty waiting down the years —
Revisions of the ruby and the rose.
He'll carry me off, I know that he will,
For his hair is exceedingly red;
And the only thing that occurs to me
Is to dutifully shiver in bed.
Great is the rose
Infected by the tomb,
Yet burgeoning
Indifferent to death.
The rose has told In one simplicity.
That never life
Relinquishes a bloom
But to bestow
An ancient confidence.
Lo and behold! God made this
starry wold,
The maggot and the mold; lo and
behold!
He taught the grass contentment
blade by blade,
The sanctity of sameness in a shade.
Great is the rose
That challenges the crypt,
And quotes milleniums
Against the grave.
A precious place is Paradise and none may know its worth,
But Eden ever longeth for the knicknacks of the earth.