The golden whales of California, and other rhymes in the American language

Chapter 37: MY LADY IS COMPARED TO A YOUNG TREE

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About This Book

The collection gathers lyrical and narrative poems that range from long, scene-setting pieces celebrating California's landscapes and the new art of the moving picture to playful rhymed scenarios and verse games. It interleaves meditations on history, myth, science, and religion with comic sketches and dialectal songs, moves into wartime reflections and elegies for fallen poets, and closes with local, Midwestern vignettes and personal tributes. The poet shifts between high-lyric description, satirical invective, and vernacular rhythms, experimenting with form and voice to present an uneven but energetic portrait of American life, technology, and regional identity in early twentieth-century verse.

MY LADY IS COMPARED TO A YOUNG TREE

When I see a young tree

In its white beginning,

With white leaves

And white buds

Barely tipped with green,

In the April weather,

In the weeping sunshine—

Then I see my lady,

My democratic queen,

Standing free and equal

With the youngest woodland sapling

Swaying, singing in the wind,

Delicate and white:

Soul so near to blossom,

Fragile, strong as death;

A kiss from far off Eden,

A flash of Judgment’s trumpet—

April’s breath.