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.
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.
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.
Said the tiger to the lily,
Said the viper to the rose,
Let us marry so our children
May attain the double pose.
In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose,
Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?
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.
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.
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.
The gods released a vision on a world forespent and dull;
They sent it as a challenge by the sea hawk and the gull.
A single-motored miracle, a lead mine on each flank;
Below a shadow swept and awed the hundred-fathom bank.
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