We remember Edith Wharton (1862–1937) primarily as a fiction writer, author of “The Age of Innocence” and “The House of Mirth.” We picture her literary stomping ground as the Gilded-Age New York of her debutante youth, that world with its fixed social rites and moral codes. We think, perhaps, of the broken engagement, the marriage that ended in the husband’s incurable mental illness, the scandal of an affair: all the stuff of her novels. There, perhaps, the imaginative space we allot to Edith Wharton runs short. In 1911, however, on the collapse of her marriage, Wharton removed herself from that world we think of as hers. At the outbreak of World War I, she was at Paris, living in an apartment in the Rue de Varenne, aiding the French war effort and active in efforts to resettle the flood-tide of Belgian refugees. In early 1915, with a friend, she traveled by car through devastated French villages to the front lines, visiting the trenches, hearing firsthand the noise of artillery fire. The war articles she wrote during these tours of the front first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, before being collected into a book, “Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.” These experiences, so far removed from the complacent glitter of the American Belle Époque, inform this 1920 poem, “The Young Dead.” It’s a truism that while poets make good novelists, novelists make poor poets, but Edith Wharton’s weightless touch with meter and rhyme gives the lie to that generalization. Observe, in today’s poem, the unforced iambic-pentameter lines, disturbed only by a dactylic substitution in line eighteen. Observe how the rhyme scheme, abbac, in each quintain sets up the opening rhyme for the following stanza. Wasted young life is the theme of World War I poetry, but the mark of the good poet is the capacity to make fresh art of a reiterated thought. Wharton’s war dead, imprisoned in the earth but still able to feel the world going on without them, are all the dead of every war poem ever written. But in this intricately patterned poem, suffused with the beauties of springtime, both death and the world that is weary of it are made new.The Young Dead by Edith Wharton Ah, how I pity the young dead who gave All that they were, and might become, that we With tired eyes should watch this perfect sea Re-weave its patterning of silver wave Round scented cliffs of arbutus and bay. No more shall any rose along the way, The myrtled way that wanders to the shore, Nor jonquil-twinkling meadow any more, Nor the warm lavender that takes the spray, Smell only of sea-salt and the sun. But, through recurring seasons, every one Shall speak to us with lips the darkness closes, Shall look at us with eyes that missed the roses, Clutch us with hands whose work was just begun, Laid idle now beneath the earth we tread — And always we shall walk with the young dead. — Ah, how I pity the young dead, whose eyes Strain through the sod to see these perfect skies, Who feel the new wheat springing in their stead, And the lark singing for them overhead! ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
