Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Feminine Talk

Maxwell Bodenheim

First Woman.DO you share the present dread

Of being sentimental?

The world has flung its boutonnière

Into the mud, and steps upon it

With elaborate gestures!

Certain people do this neatly,

Using solemn words for consolation:

Others angrily stamp their feet,

Striving to prove their strength.

Second Woman.Sentimentality

Is the servant-girl of certain men

And the wife of others.

She scarcely ever flirts

With creative minds,

Striving also to become

Graceful and indiscreet.

First Woman.Sappho and Aristotle

Have wandered through the centuries,

Dressed in an occasional novelty—

A little twist of outward form.

They have always been ashamed

To be caught in a friendly talk.

Second Woman.When emotion and the mind

Engage in deliberate conversation,

One hundred nightingales

And intellectuals find a common ground,

And curse the meeting of their slaves!

First Woman.The mind must only play

With polished relics of emotion,

And the heart must never lighten

Burdens of the mind.

Second Woman.I desire to be

Irrelevant and voluble,

Leaving my terse disgust for a moment.

I have met an erudite poet.

With a northern hardness

Motionless beneath his youthful robes.

He shuns the quivering fluencies

Of emotion, and shifts his dominoes

Within a room of tortured angles.

But away from this creative room

He sells himself to the whims

Of his wife, a young virago

With a calculating nose.

Beneath the flagrant pose

Of his double life

Emotion and the mind

Look disconsolately at each other.

First Woman.Lyrical abandon

And mental cautiousness

Must not mingle to a magic

Glowing, yet deliberate!

Second Woman.Never spill your wine

Upon a page of mathematics.

Drink it decently

Within the usual tavern.