Today’s Poem: Fides, Spes

Willa Cather as poet

Pacific dogwood (Wikimedia Commons)

We know Willa Cather (1873–1947) primarily as a novelist and master of the short story. Her fiction, set in unsparing American landscapes, finds lyricism in those landscapes and in the visionary people whose lives unfold there: priests, artists, ordinary men and women who long for more beauty, love, and meaning than their places in the world readily afford them. Cather was the author of twelve novels, including the 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning One of Ours, plus five books of short fiction published in her lifetime.

What we tend not to know, or tend too easily to forget, is that Cather also published two books of poetry. Rather, she published one book, the 1903 April Twilights, with a 1923 expanded reissue, April Twilights and Other Poems. Compared with the body of her work in fiction, her verse output is small, overshadowed by her other achievements. Yet we really can’t relegate Cather to the category of the amateur poet, the generally competent person with enough education in prosody to knock out creditable verse when the occasion calls for it. Though fiction, as became obvious, was Cather’s primary calling, and the first version of April Twilights appeared to such mixed reviews that its author bought up the publisher’s stock and burned it, still she set out, at least, to be a serious writer of poetry.

Willa Cather in 1921 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, “Fides, Spes,” is one of those early April Twilights poems. In this poem, Cather’s eye for a landscape’s intrinsic drama lights on the disconnect between the dogwoods, redbuds, and other little blooming trees that rush the spring with abandon, and the oak and sycamore, still enduring their long winter barrenness.

The poem’s title, Latin for faith, hope, makes something theological of this discrepancy in the natural world’s timing, an assurance of things not seen. The form plays on the traditional common or hymn measure, with odd-numbered lines in trimeter or tetrameter, and even-numbered rhyming lines in dimeter, an improvisation on a familiar theme that renders it new and maybe a little jarring. But this jarring is intentional, rousing us to notice what is familiar, present to us every year, yet strange and strangely moving. 

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Fides, Spes

by Willa Cather

Joy is come to the little
     Everywhere;
Pink to the peach and pink to the apple,
     White to the pear.
Stars are come to the dogwood,
     Astral, pale;
Mists are pink on the red-bud,
     Veil after veil.
Flutes for the feathery locusts,
     Soft as spray;
Tongues of the lovers for chestnuts, poplars,
     Babbling May.
Yellow plumes for the willows'
     Wind-blown hair;
Oak trees and sycamores only
     Comfortless, bare.
Sore from steel and the watching,
     Somber and old,—
Wooing robes for the beeches, larches,
     Splashed with gold;
Breath o' love to the lilac,
     Warm with noon.—
Great hearts cold when the little
     Beat mad so soon.
What is their faith to bear it
     Till it come,
Waiting with rain-cloud and swallow,
     Frozen, dumb?

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