A Review
Perry’s love for the word preceded her success as an artist and was arguably more expected, given her marriage to a renowned English professor and her close friendship with Henry James. Perry published four volumes of verse between 1886 and 1923: The Heart of Weed (1887), From the Garden of Hellas (1891), Impressions (1898) and The Jar of Dreams (1923) (Martindale 102). Perry approached her poetry with an entirely personal agenda; the pieces were mostly inspired by her own emotions. One piece typical of her technique and approach to verse is To a Bride from Impressions:
Thy youthful roses all to lilies turned,
Thy head drops shyly like a lily fair:
Thy slender height new dignity doth wear:
Sweet seriousness thy very smile hath learned
And eyes now wistful sink, where late have burned
Bright girlish flames. - And yet a charm more rare,
A sweet pathetic grace, now lingers there
And tells of joy that yet hath grief discerned,
Since only those who know the high delight,
The awful bliss of loving with the whole
Informing force that lives in a pure soul,
Can dimly guess at Sorrow’s deadly might.—
But far from thee may Sorrow ever dwell,
Encompassed round by love—then—Fare thee well.
(Perry, Impressions, pg. 76)
Just like her portraits and landscapes, Perry’s poems were technically sound if not revolutionary pieces. In this poem, a modified sonnet, Perry uses two introverted quatrains followed by a couplet. Perry did not associate herself with any organized movement of poetry, and as a result the style of her compositions was not new for her time.
The first image of the work sets the tone for this conflicting piece. For this recently minted bride, the roses that symbolize love and passion have now turned to lilies, the symbol of undisguised purity, now that she is committed to a husband. Perry goes on to explicate the flower metaphor by pointing to how the bride has given up her “bright girlish flames” for “a sweet seriousness”.
Perry suggests in the second quatrain that marriage is not entirely a positive union. The bride now has a “sweet” but “pathetic” grace and now has the “awful bliss of loving with the whole”. The piece ends with a hope that the bride will not be visited by the personification of Sorrow and a bittersweet “Fare thee well”.
There is little first-hand evidence that suggests Perry was unhappy with her marriage, but having juggled raising her three children with a career as an artist, at the very least she understood completely the challenges of being a wife. Perry herself once proclaimed that the genuine artist communicated the “innate beauty that lines in emotion” (Martindale 2). In her poetry, she channeled the emotions of femininity and brought them onto the page.
Image:
First editions of two of Perry’s anthologies, From the Garden of Hellas and Impressions