"Enchantment" by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

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March 4, 2023

Enchantment

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

                          Here
                          crawls
                          moon—
                             —
                          Out
                          of
                          this
                          Hole

                                               out
                                               of
                                               this
                                               hole—
                                                 —
                                               slips
                                               moon —

           out
           of
           this
                          cloudhole
Traditional
        she
        points
        Lightdipped
        toetips.
shrill
                          insectchimes

                          turn
                          me
                                                                           Rigid.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 4, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Enchantment” first appeared in The Transatlantic Review vol. 2, no. 2 (August, 1924). The poem was selected for publication by a twenty-five-year-old Ernest Hemingway, who served as the guest editor of that particular issue. In Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (MIT Press, 2011), biographer Irene Gammel and scholar Suzanne Zelazo write, “There are at least eight variants of this poem. The first bilingual versions, titled ‘Juli’ and ‘July,’ respectively, were written in conventional lines without the visual effects and submitted to [The Little Review] presumably around 1918–1922. [Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven] reworked the poem prior to its publication in 1924, gave it the new title ‘Enchantment’ (‘Verzauberung’ and ‘Zauber’ in German), and added a visual arrangement. The 1924 publication is most likely based on a handwritten version. The typescript is so heavily annotated with [her] marginalia that she recopied the entire poem. (Her concern was with specific word choices, suggesting use of the word trowels instead of crawls for the moon’s movement and removal of of, stripping the poem of its syntactic connectors.)” Regarding an alternate ending featuring the verb “smite” in place of “turn,” Freytag-Loringhoven wrote to her friend and editor Djuna Barnes, “If you think ‘Turn’ better—take Turn/I am uncertain about it anyway!”

Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was born on July 12, 1874, in Swinemünde, Pomerania, then part of the German Empire. An artist, poet, and performer associated with the Dada movement, she frequently published her work in periodicals such as Transition, Broom, and The Little Review. She died on December 14, 1927.

Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
(MIT Press, 2016)

“The Dreamer” by Djuna Barnes
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“Amores (VI)” by E. E. Cummings
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Thanks to Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Seuss’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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