Today’s Poem: The Watchers
Women waiting for news that will break their hearts
The Watchers
by William Stanley Braithwaite
Two women on the lone wet strand (The wind’s out with a will to roam) The waves wage war on rocks and sand, (And a ship is long due home.) The sea sprays in the women’s eyes — (Hearts can writhe like the sea’s wild foam) Lower descend the tempestuous skies, (For the wind’s out with a will to roam.) “O daughter, thine eyes be better than mine,” (The waves ascend high as yonder dome) “North or south is there never a sign?” (And a ship is long due home.) They watched there all the long night through — (The wind’s out with a will to roam) Wind and rain and sorrow for two — (And heaven on the long reach home.) ═══════════════════════
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Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we’re indebted to William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962) in his role as editor of the Anthology of Magazine Verse series, published annually from 1913 until 1929. In particular, the Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920: And Year Book of American Poetry has introduced us to poems and poets we might otherwise never have read: Scudder Middleton, Lew Sarett, and the phantom Jacob (really Joseph) Auslander, whose early poem “I Come Singing” appeared here last October.
In more recent years, the Best American Poetry anthology series, edited by David Lehman from 1988 to 2025, has granted the reader a 75-poem view of, if not actually all the best poetry published in America in a calendar year, then at least what that year’s guest editor considered to be definitive of excellence in American verse. Similarly, Braithwaite’s anthologies offer fascinating insights into trends and developments in American poetry in the first part of the 20th century, as observed by Braithwaite, who himself had launched two short-lived poetry journals before embarking on his yearly anthology project.
His inclusions in the Anthology of Magazine Verse reflect all the expected publications: the Dial, the Nation, the North American Review, Poetry, the Yale Review. But in the case of Lew Sarett, for example, Braithwaite was clearly reading American Forestry as well as the leading literary magazines of the day, and anticipating that good poetry in America might be found by casting a wider net.
This editorial sensibility coheres with his biography. The son of a father from the West Indies and a mother whose own mother had been enslaved in North Carolina, Braithwaite received his education at home until the age of 12. That year, 1886, his father died, and the young Braithwaite had to abandon his studies in order to contribute to the family’s support. As a publisher’s apprentice, he learned to set type — and also to read poetry. Self-educated as he worked, steadily publishing poetry, fiction, and criticism, and assuming various editorial roles, he eventually attained a position as a professor of creative writing at Atlanta University (a historically Black school), despite never having earned any formal academic credential.
Although he operated successfully in the self-referential system of a university, his own life experience had taught him that education and literary discourse are not limited to such systems. And although his editorial choices in the Anthology of American Verse series reflect the nascence of an American literary system that would become, over ensuing decades, increasingly self-referential and self-enclosed, they also reflect the presence of poetry in surprising places, offered to audiences at least as concerned with trees, among other things, as they were with verse.
Meanwhile, Braithwaite not only anthologized poetry, but also wrote it. His two collections of verse, 1904’s Lyrics of Life and Love and The House of Falling Leaves, published in 1908, represent an early burst of poetic productivity that would, so it seems, be occluded by his work as an editor and educator. His Selected Poems appeared in 1948, but although he was a prolific literary critic and published four books of fiction, he produced no more books of poetry. After his retirement from the university, in 1945, and his subsequent move from Atlanta to Harlem, his output tapered off. He continued his writing and editorial pursuits until his death in 1962, but his poetic surge was largely behind him.
Today’s Poem, which appears in Lyrics of Life and Love, belongs to that early surge. As an anthologist, Braithwaite would record Modernist movements in American poetry as they developed. But “The Watchers” belongs to the century’s turn: not exactly looking back to the 19th century, but not exactly looking forward, either. Like the mother and daughter keeping watch on the sand for the ship’s return, the poem itself seems part of a moment when whatever is bound to happen has not happened yet, or even appeared on the horizon.
Caught between eras, thematically and formally, “The Watchers” feels strangely timeless. Its subject — women waiting for news that will break their hearts — is as old as Euripidean tragedy, yet renewed with every fresh disaster. Its ballad-like abab quatrains, tetrameter except for the final trimeter line of each stanza except stanza 2, have the feeling, rather like Yeats’s “Down by the Salley Gardens,” of an old song that has never not been sung.
There’s something theatrical, too, in the way the even-numbered lines provide, like a Greek chorus, commentary on the poem’s narrative. The villanelle-like repetitions of the first stanza’s even-numbered lines roll in relentlessly, like the waves the women’s eyes search for the ship “long due home.” The wind may roam where it will, but for the storm-doomed ship, there’s only “heaven on the long reach home.”
Congratulations on the growing readership!
Thanks for the useful and interesting introduction to Braithwaite as a poet and maker of anthologies.