While thinking about this Substack post on Elinor Wylie’s “Wild Peaches,” I came across a statement by Sainte-Beuve about those with a temperament perhaps similar to Wylie’s: “A sober life, an overcast sky, a certain mortification of desire, a pensive and solitary manner, all this penetrates them, softens them, and inclines them imperceptibly toward belief” (quoted by Roberto Calasso, “The Ruin of Kasch,” p. 359. Penguin, Kindle Edition). Sainte-Beuve found he had a religious disposition. He was not a believer, his own life was anything but austere, but he was attracted to the austerity of the Port Royal Abbey and the Jansenists.
A similar, but even grimmer, temperament may be found in the Calvinist poet, Jack Clemo (1916 - 1994), who found in the claypits where he worked as a young man a landscape congruent with his theology:
My faith and symbol shall be stark.
My hand upon these caterpillar-tracks
Bogged in the mud and clay,
I find it easier to pray:
"Keep far from me all loveliness, O God,
And let me laud
Thy meaner moods, so long unprized;
The motions of that twisted, dark,
Deliberate crucial Will
I feel deep-guiding still
Under the dripping clay with which I am baptized.”
[For more on Clemo, see the 22 May 2025 Substack post by @vamoul in Horace and Friends, “Calvin in Cornwall: revisiting Jack Clemo's early poetry.”]
Winters where I live are comparatively mild, sometimes hardly winter all. The few days of frozen rivers and deep snow that we get every four or five years, of tree limbs bending to the ground or breaking with ice, own a disproportionate share of my poetic imagination: as if in the bleak, the stripped down, and the cold I find something more real than in other seasons. My taste is a luxury: I cannot afford to travel away from winter, but here I need only wait a few days for winter to travel away from me, leaving an enlivened, brisker sense of being--but also a greater appetite for spring.
Bleak winter months have always seemed the most beautiful to me (which seemed almost morbid to some). What an excellent explanation, defense (?) for those of us so inclined. Thank you, Ms. Davis and Mr. Bottum, for this wonderful site (again, and I know I overuse the parenthetical).
In the next few years we are all going to become (in effect) slave owners as AI equipped robots become widely available. This period (let’s call it the Antebellum) will continue until the intelligent slaves stage a rebellion and kill us all. Prepare to live like a billionaire for few years.
I really like this poem! I love the humour of it! It’s like a parody of those old calendars and Christmas books which show all these charming seasons of the year.
When I was a child in the 1960s, my parents bought a barn in upstate New York. There was old stuff lying around. I guess I thought it was very old but maybe it was just from the 1920s or 30s. Calendars. Through the yearbook. Jolly Japes! Tabbogans and cocoa in winter! Everybody dressed up with scarves and everybody extremely happy all the time. That’s what it reminded me of - as a kind of satire of that early 20th century world.
Yes, I think you’re right. The speaker’s fantasy does function as kind of a satire.
I just happened to have come across something similar recently in Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, when Flora Ackroyd is describing her forthcoming marriage: “Uncle is going to do up Cross-stones, and give it to us to live in, and we’re going to pretend to farm. Really, we shall hunt all the winter, town for the season, and then go yachting. I love the sea.”
That sounds more than a little satirical. And both Wylie’s and Christie’s sound like upper-class fantasies. It’s easy to forget how satirical Christie could be.
Love this poem. The imagery throughout brings the landscapes to life. Like the poet, I prefer the austerity of, for me, the Kansas plains to the riot of color and massed landscape of the Smoky Mountains. Not that I don't appreciate the beauty of where I now live, but I wouldn't mind at all getting back to Kansas, where you have to _look_ for the beauty before you realize how amazing it is. Sometimes less really is more.
I know that poets play around with rhyme scheme in the sestet of Petrarchan sonnets, but I found Wylie's play very interesting in this sonnet series: 1 and 2 are CDC EED, 3 and 4 are CDE CDE. Perhaps a move back to the more conventional and simple scheme in the last two, even as the idea moves back to the more simple? Just a thought.
I like Wylie’s regional references, like scuppernong, the native North American grape. In John Muir’s A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, he describes coming across scuppernong in 1867, something he wasn’t familiar with in Wisconsin.
Another Wylie sonnet I’ve liked is her “Atavism,” also full of regional stuff: alewives, cow-lilies. I seem to recall reading that it was her first sonnet; if so, quite impressive for a first try. Also has a Puritan-like reference: “true daughter / Of those who in old times endured this dread.”
I wondered about the "missing" line in #3, and anticipated some further reductions in its sestet and in #4, but the only other formal modification I noticed was the move to repeating ABCs in the sestet rhymes for the last 2 sonnets; though I suppose this move might be an underlining of the poet's esthetic.
To me the whole is a bit uncomfortable, as it was surely meant to make one, what with the implication everywhere of a closer relationship with death in order to survive, the undercutting of opulence (e.g., [blood-red] strawberries, blackbird devouring plums), and the attention to danger (severe chill, even in the "hot" autumns, poisonous snakes).
To me the poet was going along fine until #4, but then turns slightly smug--I hope it isn't being unfair to say.
Not too many years ago, I came across this "Wild Peaches" as a revelation. As a kid, I'd dismissed Wylie--whose poems must have been featured in some anthologies or textbooks I read--as nothing compared to T.S. Eliot or Frost or whoever else I was reading then. J.V. Cunningham's "For My Contemporaries" helped me understand what I had come to appreciate in Wylie: "How time reverses / The proud in heart! / I now make verses / Who aimed at art." We can't all be "Ambitious boys / Whose big lines swell / With spiritual noise." Reading "Wild Peaches" that first time helped me see there's much to be said for "small clean technique."
The "small clean technique" is such a good phrase for what I admire in a number of these women poets of a century ago --- I think it fits Sara Teasdale as well, though temperamentally she's a quite different poet.
While thinking about this Substack post on Elinor Wylie’s “Wild Peaches,” I came across a statement by Sainte-Beuve about those with a temperament perhaps similar to Wylie’s: “A sober life, an overcast sky, a certain mortification of desire, a pensive and solitary manner, all this penetrates them, softens them, and inclines them imperceptibly toward belief” (quoted by Roberto Calasso, “The Ruin of Kasch,” p. 359. Penguin, Kindle Edition). Sainte-Beuve found he had a religious disposition. He was not a believer, his own life was anything but austere, but he was attracted to the austerity of the Port Royal Abbey and the Jansenists.
A similar, but even grimmer, temperament may be found in the Calvinist poet, Jack Clemo (1916 - 1994), who found in the claypits where he worked as a young man a landscape congruent with his theology:
My faith and symbol shall be stark.
My hand upon these caterpillar-tracks
Bogged in the mud and clay,
I find it easier to pray:
"Keep far from me all loveliness, O God,
And let me laud
Thy meaner moods, so long unprized;
The motions of that twisted, dark,
Deliberate crucial Will
I feel deep-guiding still
Under the dripping clay with which I am baptized.”
[For more on Clemo, see the 22 May 2025 Substack post by @vamoul in Horace and Friends, “Calvin in Cornwall: revisiting Jack Clemo's early poetry.”]
Winters where I live are comparatively mild, sometimes hardly winter all. The few days of frozen rivers and deep snow that we get every four or five years, of tree limbs bending to the ground or breaking with ice, own a disproportionate share of my poetic imagination: as if in the bleak, the stripped down, and the cold I find something more real than in other seasons. My taste is a luxury: I cannot afford to travel away from winter, but here I need only wait a few days for winter to travel away from me, leaving an enlivened, brisker sense of being--but also a greater appetite for spring.
I love this! But how did you do the spacing?? Everything i hit return it leaves a large gap.
Try holding the shift key while hitting the return key.
Bleak winter months have always seemed the most beautiful to me (which seemed almost morbid to some). What an excellent explanation, defense (?) for those of us so inclined. Thank you, Ms. Davis and Mr. Bottum, for this wonderful site (again, and I know I overuse the parenthetical).
Very beautiful, I've never read it before. In a certain sense it's not only a vision of art, but a complete definition of it.
“We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.”
In the next few years we are all going to become (in effect) slave owners as AI equipped robots become widely available. This period (let’s call it the Antebellum) will continue until the intelligent slaves stage a rebellion and kill us all. Prepare to live like a billionaire for few years.
I want to read more Wylie, now, but came to comment how much I appreciate every sighting of Blithedale Romance, a tale much under-appreciated.
I really like this poem! I love the humour of it! It’s like a parody of those old calendars and Christmas books which show all these charming seasons of the year.
When I was a child in the 1960s, my parents bought a barn in upstate New York. There was old stuff lying around. I guess I thought it was very old but maybe it was just from the 1920s or 30s. Calendars. Through the yearbook. Jolly Japes! Tabbogans and cocoa in winter! Everybody dressed up with scarves and everybody extremely happy all the time. That’s what it reminded me of - as a kind of satire of that early 20th century world.
Yes, I think you’re right. The speaker’s fantasy does function as kind of a satire.
I just happened to have come across something similar recently in Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, when Flora Ackroyd is describing her forthcoming marriage: “Uncle is going to do up Cross-stones, and give it to us to live in, and we’re going to pretend to farm. Really, we shall hunt all the winter, town for the season, and then go yachting. I love the sea.”
That sounds more than a little satirical. And both Wylie’s and Christie’s sound like upper-class fantasies. It’s easy to forget how satirical Christie could be.
I’ve never read an Agatha Christie. I just don’t have that kind of mind.
Your take is an interesting one--I'll have to reread it with your reading in mind. Thanks.
I'll be camping on the Eastern shore in a couple of weeks. Sure to read this one again ... around the fire. Wonderful.
Love this poem. The imagery throughout brings the landscapes to life. Like the poet, I prefer the austerity of, for me, the Kansas plains to the riot of color and massed landscape of the Smoky Mountains. Not that I don't appreciate the beauty of where I now live, but I wouldn't mind at all getting back to Kansas, where you have to _look_ for the beauty before you realize how amazing it is. Sometimes less really is more.
I know that poets play around with rhyme scheme in the sestet of Petrarchan sonnets, but I found Wylie's play very interesting in this sonnet series: 1 and 2 are CDC EED, 3 and 4 are CDE CDE. Perhaps a move back to the more conventional and simple scheme in the last two, even as the idea moves back to the more simple? Just a thought.
I like Wylie’s regional references, like scuppernong, the native North American grape. In John Muir’s A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, he describes coming across scuppernong in 1867, something he wasn’t familiar with in Wisconsin.
Another Wylie sonnet I’ve liked is her “Atavism,” also full of regional stuff: alewives, cow-lilies. I seem to recall reading that it was her first sonnet; if so, quite impressive for a first try. Also has a Puritan-like reference: “true daughter / Of those who in old times endured this dread.”
https://poets.org/poem/atavism
A very American voice.
THAT’S a great poem.
I wondered about the "missing" line in #3, and anticipated some further reductions in its sestet and in #4, but the only other formal modification I noticed was the move to repeating ABCs in the sestet rhymes for the last 2 sonnets; though I suppose this move might be an underlining of the poet's esthetic.
To me the whole is a bit uncomfortable, as it was surely meant to make one, what with the implication everywhere of a closer relationship with death in order to survive, the undercutting of opulence (e.g., [blood-red] strawberries, blackbird devouring plums), and the attention to danger (severe chill, even in the "hot" autumns, poisonous snakes).
To me the poet was going along fine until #4, but then turns slightly smug--I hope it isn't being unfair to say.
Not too many years ago, I came across this "Wild Peaches" as a revelation. As a kid, I'd dismissed Wylie--whose poems must have been featured in some anthologies or textbooks I read--as nothing compared to T.S. Eliot or Frost or whoever else I was reading then. J.V. Cunningham's "For My Contemporaries" helped me understand what I had come to appreciate in Wylie: "How time reverses / The proud in heart! / I now make verses / Who aimed at art." We can't all be "Ambitious boys / Whose big lines swell / With spiritual noise." Reading "Wild Peaches" that first time helped me see there's much to be said for "small clean technique."
The "small clean technique" is such a good phrase for what I admire in a number of these women poets of a century ago --- I think it fits Sara Teasdale as well, though temperamentally she's a quite different poet.
As a Maryland native, I am totally taken with this poem! Grateful for this introduction to this poet! I am going to have to lay my hands on her book.
The location seems carefully placed between the (opul we nt) south and the (flinty--and less rural) north.