Sunday Poetry - Eleanor Wylie

I hadn't heard of Eleanor Wylie (1885-1928) until I came across her in this anthology but she was a friend of Edna St Vincent Millay, who I was reading earlier this year. She also caused quite a scandal by leaving her husband & children to elope with an older married man. She & Horace Wylie went to England where Elinor began to write poetry. She was in her mid-thirties when her first book of poetry, Nets to Catch the Wind, was published.

Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am in nature none of these.

I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.