Joyce Kilmer

Chapter 99: THE GRASS IN MADISON SQUARE

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About This Book

A biographical memoir accompanies a wide selection of poems, essays, and letters that together trace the author’s life, friendships, and artistic growth. The poems alternate between nature and devotional themes, domestic observations, and wartime and memorial pieces composed both abroad and at home. Essays and correspondence reveal literary preferences, personal affections, and religious sensibilities, while photographs and facsimiles supplement the personal record. The collection balances lyrical short poems with occasional longer pieces and critical or biographical sketches, offering a compact portrait of a poet engaged with faith, ordinary life, and the moral and emotional stakes of his historical moment.

THE GRASS IN MADISON SQUARE

The pleasant turf is dried and marred and seared,

The grass is dead.

No soft green shoot, by rain and sunshine reared,

Lifts up its head.

I think the grass that made the park so gay

In early spring

Now decks the lawns of Heaven where babies play

And dance and sing.

And poor old vagabonds who now have left

The dusty street,

Find fields of which they were in life bereft,

Beneath their feet.