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Home  »  The New Poetry  »  Our Lady of Idleness

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Our Lady of Idleness

By Florence Wilkinson

THEY in the darkness gather and ask

Her name, the mistress of their endless task.

The Toilers
Tinsel-makers in factory gloom,

Miners in ethylene pits,

Divers and druggists mixing poisonous bloom;

Huge hunters, men of brawn,

Half-naked creatures of the tropics,

Furred trappers stealing forth at Labrador dawn;

Catchers of beetles, sheep-men in bleak sheds,

Pearl-fishers perched on Indian coasts,

Children in stifling towers pulling threads;

Dark bunchy women pricking intricate laces,

Myopic jewelers’ apprentices,

Arabs who chase the long-legged birds in sandy places:

They are her invisible slaves,

The genii of her costly wishes,

Climbing, descending, running under waves.

They strip earth’s dimmest cell,

They burn and drown and stifle

To build her inconceivable and fragile shell.

The Artist-Artisans
They have painted a miracle-shawl

Of cobwebs and whispering shadows,

And trellised leaves that ripple on a wall.

They have broidered a tissue of cost,

Spun foam of the sea

And lilied imagery of the vanishing frost.

Her floating skirts have run

Like iridescent marshes,

Or like the tossed hair of a stormy sun.

Her silver cloak has shone

Blue as a mummy’s beads,

Green as the ice-glints of an Arctic zone.

……

She is weary and has lain

At last her body down.

What, with her clothing’s beauty, they have slain!

The Angel With the Sword
Come, brothers, let us lift

Her pitiful body on high,

Her tight-shut hands that take to heaven no gift

But ashes of costly things.

We seven archangels will

Bear her in silence on our flame-tipped wings.

The Toilers
Lo, she is thinner than fire

On a burned mill-town’s edge,

And smaller than a young child’s dead desire.

Yea, emptier than the wage

Of a spent harlot crying for her beauty,

And grayer than the mumbling lips of age.

A Lost Girl
White as a drowned one’s feet

Twined with the wet sea-bracken,

And naked as a Sin driven from God’s littlest street.