Contents -Volume INDEX -AUTHOR INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

Mariette

By Dora Read Goodale (1866–1953)

TOO rash is she for cold coquette,—

Love dares not claim her:

I can but say, “’Tis Mariette,”

Nor more than name her!

She mocks the world her arrows reach

With light derision;

Yet who would choose the softer speech,

The graver vision?

An eager glance, and incomplete,

Repays you, after;

A voice to make all satire sweet—

Delicious laughter!

I think no woman’s warmth is hers—

How could she use it?

Another’s pain no passion stirs,

Nor would you choose it.

Can warning tame the maiden gaze

That dares discover?

Pride, mirth, ambition, thirst for praise—

They’re hers—you love her!

No grief should shake the gay disdain

That will not fear it,

Or mar by one subduing pain

So rare a spirit.

Who ever watched that rounded grace,

Born of the minute,

Nor thought the world a prettier place

That she was in it?

You ask no larger gift than this,

No nearer honor,—

It is enough for happiness

To look upon her.

The oval check, the rising tread

In careless measure,

The wilful, bright, ethereal head,

Alive with pleasure:

On these the old desire is stayed

That long has waited,

For soul and body, rightly made,

Are fitly mated.

But what have I, whom men forget,

To offer to her?

A woman’s passion, Mariette,

There is no truer.

The Century Magazine, 1883.