Little Things

Little things I’ll give to you—
Till your fingers learn to press 
Gently 
On a loveliness;

Little things and new—
Till your fingers learn to hold
Love that’s fragile,
Love that’s old.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 24, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Little Things” originally appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Volume XVII, Number V) in February 1921. For the September 1925 issue, founding editor Harriet Monroe observed several women poets and noted, “The women poets of our time, in short, have been content to be women; and in thus accepting their destiny they have invaded a field comparatively open to their advance.” Monroe goes on to review Strobel’s first book, stating, “Once in a Blue Moon, gives us the modern girl, the modern young woman—the various rainbow colors of her prismatic emotional experience, registered in a technique audaciously personal and felicitous. Her flirtations are here, in all their ephemeral intensity; her friendships, even her athletics; also her observations of characters and situations, presented with irony, compassion, or reverence, but always with a keen sense of drama. We have her whole vivid and varied experience of life, an experience unusually fortunate, ending with the charming ‘Songs to Sally,’ a fresh and fair revelation of young motherhood. There is exquisite tenderness in such poems about her friends […] as also in this brevity, ‘Little Things.’”