Today’s Poem: March
Ella Wheeler Wilcox on the month of March as a street preacher
Poems of Sentiment was the name Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) gave to her 1892 collection of verse — and just in the title itself one can hear what would cause a sneer in later generations. Sentimentality as a goal for art did not age well through the nineteenth century, and even as the steam-driven presses of the time spread sentimental literature and artistic reproductions more widely than ever before, a critical decision had been made against it.
If someone like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was good enough to survive the turn against sentiment, someone like Ella Wheeler Wilcox was not. If she survives at all, it’s mostly as a figure of derision. “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone,” from her 1883 poem “Solitude,” is one of her few lines with any currency, and hardly anyone who quotes it remembers the name of its author.
In truth, Wilcox deserves some of the dismissal. “A mighty conflagration. Ah the cost! / House, home, and thoughtless child alike were lost,” she writes in a poem warning maidens not to be too free with their swains, lest they metaphorically burn the house down. But she wasn’t uniformly awful. When she wasn’t straining for sentiment or grandiosity, Wilcox could produce competent and whimsical verse.
Since it’s March, let’s take, for example, “March” from her 1892 collection. Playing with the idea of a woman calling for religious reformation — someone who, like John the Baptist, prepares the way — Wilcox indulges the image of the month of March as a raging and ragged street preacher. The poem’s twelve lines of rhymed pentameter are clever and well observed. The scraggly prophet’s “loud insistent tones” prove “more rasping than the wrongs which she bemoans.” She “wearies all who hear, / While yet we know the need of such reform.”
And that’s March, isn’t it? “She is not fair nor beautiful to see. / But merry April and sweet smiling May / Come not till March has first prepared the way.”
March
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Like some reformer, who with mien austere,
Neglected dress and loud insistent tones,
More rasping than the wrongs which she bemoans,
Walks through the land and wearies all who hear,
While yet we know the need of such reform;
So comes unlovely March, with wind and storm,
To break the spell of winter, and set free
The poisoned brooks and crocus beds oppressed.
Severe of face, gaunt-armed, and wildly dressed,
She is not fair nor beautiful to see.
But merry April and sweet smiling May
Come not till March has first prepared the way.
Oh, that's actually lovely. And true.
This may be an unwelcome remark, but when I read the poem I thought not of a religious reformer but of a feminist, or perhaps some other sort of political reformer. (I read the poem first, commentary after.) Taken that way, the speaker's attitude seems, in the context of the presumptively Christian times, a little more ambivalent about the reforms being pushed.