The Poetry Corner

Lines On A Fly-Leaf

By John Greenleaf Whittier

I need not ask thee, for my sake, To read a book which well may make Its way by native force of wit Without my manual sign to it. Its piquant writer needs from me No gravely masculine guaranty, And well might laugh her merriest laugh At broken spears in her behalf; Yet, spite of all the critics tell, I frankly own I like her well. It may be that she wields a pen Too sharply nibbed for thin-skinned men, That her keen arrows search and try The armor joints of dignity, And, though alone for error meant, Sing through the air irreverent. I blame her not, the young athlete Who plants her woman's tiny feet, And dares the chances of debate Where bearded men might hesitate, Who, deeply earnest, seeing well The ludicrous and laughable, Mingling in eloquent excess Her anger and her tenderness, And, chiding with a half-caress, Strives, less for her own sex than ours, With principalities and powers, And points us upward to the clear Sunned heights of her new atmosphere. Heaven mend her faults! I will not pause To weigh and doubt and peck at flaws, Or waste my pity when some fool Provokes her measureless ridicule. Strong-minded is she? Better so Than dulness set for sale or show, A household folly, capped and belled In fashion's dance of puppets held, Or poor pretence of womanhood, Whose formal, flavorless platitude Is warranted from all offence Of robust meaning's violence. Give me the wine of thought whose head Sparkles along the page I read, Electric words in which I find The tonic of the northwest wind; The wisdom which itself allies To sweet and pure humanities, Where scorn of meanness, hate of wrong, Are underlaid by love as strong; The genial play of mirth that lights Grave themes of thought, as when, on nights Of summer-time, the harmless blaze Of thunderless heat-lightning plays, And tree and hill-top resting dim And doubtful on the sky's vague rim, Touched by that soft and lambent gleam, Start sharply outlined from their dream. Talk not to me of woman's sphere, Nor point with Scripture texts a sneer, Nor wrong the manliest saint of all By doubt, if he were here, that Paul Would own the heroines who have lent Grace to truth's stern arbitrament, Foregone the praise to woman sweet, And cast their crowns at Duty's feet; Like her, who by her strong Appeal Made Fashion weep and Mammon feel, Who, earliest summoned to withstand The color-madness of the land, Counted her life-long losses gain, And made her own her sisters' pain; Or her who, in her greenwood shade, Heard the sharp call that Freedom made, And, answering, struck from Sappho's lyre Of love the Tyrtman carmen's fire Or that young girl, Domremy's maid Revived a nobler cause to aid, Shaking from warning finger-tips The doom of her apocalypse; Or her, who world-wide entrance gave To the log-cabin of the slave, Made all his want and sorrow known, And all earth's languages his own