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August 14, 2021

Exile

Winifred Welles

I have made grief a gorgeous, queenly thing,
And worn my melancholy with an air.
My tears were big as stars to deck my hair,
My silence stunning as a sapphire ring.
Oh, more than any light the dark could fling
A glamour over me to make me rare,
Better than any color I could wear
The pearly grandeur that the shadows bring.
What is there left to joy for such as I?
What throne can dawn upraise for me who found
The dusk so royal and so rich a one?
Laughter will whirl and whistle on the sky—
Far from this riot I shall stand uncrowned,
Disrobed, bereft, an outcast in the sun.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 14, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Exile” appeared in The Hesitant Heart (B. W. Huebsch, 1919).

Winifred Welles was born around 1893. She authored many books of poetry and prose, including The Hesitant Heart (B. W. Huebsch, 1919); This Delicate Love (Viking, 1929); and The Lost Landscape: Some memories of a family and a town in Connecticut, 1659-1906 (Grey Walls Press, 1948). She died around 1939.

Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920
(Small, Maynard & Company, 1920)

“Snow-Flakes” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“41 [No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,]” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Thanks to Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water (Milkweed Editions, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Watch a Q&A about Ali’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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Poem-a-Day - "Exile" by Winifred Welles

Exile

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