Adelaide Crapsey
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet. In the years before her death, she wrote much of the verse on which her reputation rests. Her interest in rhythm and meter led her to create a variation on the cinquain (or quintain), a five-line form of twenty-two syllables influenced by the Japanese haiku and tanka. Her cinquain has a generally iambic meter and consists of two syllables in the first and last lines and four, six and eight syllables in the middle three lines.
Verses (1915)
- The old
Old winds that blew
When chaos was, what do
They tell the clattered trees that I
Should weep?- "Night Winds"
- These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow...the hour
Before the dawn...the mouth of one
Just dead.- "Triad"
- Listen.
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.- "November Night"
- I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.- "Amaze"