Puritan Sonnet by Elinor Wylie

Painting by Bruce Crane (1857-1937)

The Fall Season

PURITAN SONNET

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones

There’s something in this richness that I hate.

I love the look, austere, immaculate,

Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.

There’s something in my very blood that owns

Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,

A thread of water, churned to milky spate

Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,

Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;

That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,

Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,

Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,

And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

Elinor Wylie

From “Wild Peaches,” in Nets To Catch The Wind.

New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921.

WHY THIS POEM?

It’s 1975 and I am quite the la-dee-dah young professional.

A recent college graduate, I’m working for a well-known educational publisher in New York City. My office is in a high-rise not far from Times Square. I wear heels every day, and I report directly to the Vice President of the textbook division. On breaks, I sip cappuccino at the stand-up counter in a coffee shop run by an old Italian who flirts with me. I stroll up Fifth Avenue as if I have the means to shop. I wander past the Museum of Modern Art and stop to read a chapter of Jane Austen in a tiny urban garden nestled between two skyscrapers.

Let’s face it: I am That Girl, the Mary Tyler Moore of Manhattan, fearless and confident in the Big Apple. Except later, back at my desk, scanning the proofs of a language arts textbook for high school students, I land on this sonnet and it slaps me in the face. I start weeping. I miss home.

In the 40 years since I first discovered this gem, I have found myself returning to it at various times, often when I am trying to explain to Keith why I put my feet in the ocean every time we go near it, why I’d rather go to Ireland for the 100^th time than journey to Japan, or why I prefer the blue-grey-green of water-stones-trees to the dusty red clay of deserts in the Southwest.

It’s not that I can’t appreciate the beauty and majesty of lakes, cherry blossoms, or cacti. I can. I think “How gorgeous!” But it is just that--a thought. It’s an aesthetic response alone, unlike the deep tug my heart experiences in places that connect, somehow, to my sense of self. You know, places that feel like Home.

THE POET

American poet Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) was born into a socially prominent family. Her grandfather was a governor of Pennsylvania and her father held a federal position as the U.S. Solicitor General in the Department of Justice. An ethereal beauty who was educated to be a society wife, she was as notorious for flouting society’s rules in her love life as she was famous for her poetry and novels.  “Puritan Sonnet” is the last in a four sonnet sequence she collectively titled “Wild Peaches.”

THE POEM

In 1910, at the age of twenty-five, Elinor Hoyt Hichborn abandoned her mentally unstable husband and three-year-old son to run off with Horace Wylie, a man seventeen years her senior. To escape opprobrium, they fled to England, where they lived under assumed names. A few years later, when WWI broke out, they discussed moving back to the States to escape the war. Horace Wylie apparently described Virginia, where they would in fact end up, as a peaceful garden of earthly delights where they could be alone together, safe from the troubles of the world.

The first sonnet in the “Wild Peaches” sequence begins:

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town . . .

Wild peach trees. Not just regular peach trees, burdened with voluptuous ripe fruit, but wild peach trees that require no cultivation or care. The suggestion is that, in a place where Nature has free reign, natural impulses may also be indulged with abandon.

You’d expect a woman in love to respond positively to her partner’s depiction of an Edenic setting where juicy sensuality is theirs for the taking. Instead, in the third sonnet, often published separately as “Puritan Sonnet,” Wylie announces her rejection of the luxuriant landscape and the life of ease it implies: “There’s something in this richness that I hate.”

The poet could have written “I hate something about this richness.” Instead, she emphasizes the word “hate” by placing it at the end of the line where it has definitive power. As blunt as a bumper sticker, this key line in the sonnet conveys the depth of her feelings, which Wylie attributes to her New England roots--“the Puritan marrow of my bones.” The idea that a sense of place is intertwined with identity is emphasized when she says her “blood . . . owns bare hills.” She lays claim in her heart to a simple rural landscape with hills, streams, and stone walls.

Wylie’s allusion to the Puritans suggests that she sees them as people with whom she shares some commonality. She once said, ““I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose.” Puritan theology emphasized human sinfulness, stemming from Adam and Eve’s original sin, and posited a link between hard work and salvation. Disparaging idleness, Puritans saw, in the harsh, rocky terrain of the New World, an opportunity to create something beautiful, a religious community that would set an example for the world. As John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, told his shipmates aboard the Arabella, “we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”

Wylie feels drawn to a spare landscape because it reminds her of what her ancestors believed—that hard work is essential if we are to create beauty that will last. Like her Puritan ancestors, the poet claims to eschew “richness,” preferring that which is unadorned. The hills are “bare.”

What she really does, though, is redefine richness. She describes the understated beauty of her favorite landscape using words associated with wealth—“pearly” and “silver.” The color palate in her landscape is “slate” or “snowy” grey, “milky” white, and “thin blue.” It’s a subtle beauty, like that of an elegant evening gown.

In the last six lines, the poet describes the harshness of the landscape she loves. Fields are “sparse-planted” and the harvest is “meagre.” These farming images call to mind the extreme hardship Puritans faced while living in survival mode. For Wylie, this inhospitable setting serves as a reminder of her ancestors’ strength in adversity and of the transitory nature of time. In such a place, life passes quickly. By the time you catch the scent of an apple blossom, spring has already gone by. Summer is even briefer. “Swift autumn” goes up in smoke, disappearing in a “bonfire of leaves.” The only thing you can count on is the long winter, which is “like the sleep of death.”

In this last line, Wylie hints at the underlying reason she prefers and identifies with the austere New England landscape. A land where peaches grow wild will not suit her a questioning intellect. She has no wish to be lulled into a lethargic contentedness.

Though she was raised for a life of ease, Wylie faced serious hardship in her personal life. Not long after she eloped with Philip Hichborn, he was diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. Her scandalous choice to leave him and run away with the much older Wylie was published in newspapers nationwide.

Ostracized by her family’s aristocratic circle, she drew additional fire when Philip, who had become increasingly unstable, committed suicide. To add to her stress, while abroad with Wylie, Elinor suffered multiple childbearing losses: several miscarriages, a stillbirth, and the death of a days-old premature baby.

In 1916, after Wylie’s wife had agreed to a divorce, Elinor and Horace married. By 1921, however, they had separated. Elinor’s literary ambition had drawn her into a circle of writers whose conversation and companionship fueled her work. In the next phase of her life, she clearly rejected the drowsy state of leisure symbolized by wild peaches; in just seven years, she published four volumes of poetry and four novels.

In this sonnet, Wylie seems eager to embrace cold, harsh truths: Life is full of suffering. Survival requires effort. Time passes. The rugged landscape reminds her—and the poet reminds us—that all too soon we will have no choice but to be idle. In death, we will sleep forever. We had best begin the work we were meant to do.