The Land of Beginning Again by Louisa Fletcher Tarkington

-Louisa Fletcher

1878 - 1957

Laurel Louisa Fletcher was born 12 Dec 1878 in Indiana to Stoughton J Fletcher and Lizzie Laurel Locke. Evidently, life in her wealthy family was tumultuous, anarchistic and marred past several suicides. Her own mother died when Louisa was only six. The family was considered eccentric at best and scandalous by some due to their deviance from the strict norms of the day.

Louisa, equally she was known, would be no exception. She would ally and divorce 3 times in an age when divorced was frowned upon, at the very least. One written report states that she was the first in her circle of friends to "bob" her pilus, or cut it brusque, which was also crusade for tut-tutting in her mean solar day.

Nick-named "The Abbess" by her family, Louisa was bitten by the theater problems at a immature age. Information technology was during the course of a production in Indianapolis that she met her first husband, Newton Booth Tarkington, who would twice win the Pulitzer prize for novelists and produce a number of popular novels and plays. They married on eighteen June 1902 in Marion, Indiana.

Louisa was an accomplished woman in her own correct, having graduated from Smith higher in 1900. She manifestly collaborated with her husband in adapting some of his novels for the phase. The couple had a daughter, Laurel Louisa, in 1906. But Tark, every bit he was known by friends, was a hopeless alcoholic, and the couple divorced in 1911.

By 1915 Louisa was in honey over again, and married her 2nd husband, Willard Connely, a professor of English at Chocolate-brown Academy, in Washington D.C. on 15 May of that year. Information technology was during this wedlock that many of the poems found in Louisa's volume were composed, and several were published in a variety of periodicals including "Harper'southward Monthly" and "Cosmopolitan".

The Connelys had a daughter, Nancy, in 1922, only a year after her self-publication of The Country Of Commencement Over again, a drove of Louisa'southward verse. Her poem of the same name was considered one of her finest, and it muses about the enticing possibility of existence able to go to a place where one could begin again, the consequences of past mistakes undone and forgotten.

Sadly, Louisa's elder daughter died at the historic period of about 16 in 1923. Louisa once more divorced and found herself the single parent of her three twelvemonth one-time daughter Nancy in 1925. In 1931 she married, if only briefly, over again to Dr. Peter Knoefel. That marriage ended in 1932.

Louisa was to become grandmother to Nancy's family unit of five in her subsequently years, which surely must have been a comfort to her after the trials and sorrows of her earlier life. She died vii February 1957 at the age of 78. There is a very well done page with more information on Louisa and her fascinating family past a relative which can be seen here.

<<< This portrait of Louisa was washed by famed artist by Mary Shepard Greene Blumenschein in 1912, presently afterwards her divorce from Newton Booth Tarkington.

The State of Start Again

The Land of Beginning Again

I wish that there were some wonderful identify

Called the State of Beginning Again

Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches

And all of our poor selfish grief

Could be dropped, like a shabby old coat, at the door,

And never put on again.

I wish nosotros could come on information technology all unaware,

Like the hunter who finds a lost trail;

And I wish that the ane whom our incomprehension had washed

The greatest injustice of all

Could be at the gates, like and onetime friend that waits

For the comrade he's gladdest to hail

We would observe all the things we intended to do

Simply forgot, and remembered -- besides late,

Like praises unspoken, little promises broken,

And all of the thousands and one

Fiddling duties neglected that might take perfected

The day for ane less fortunate.

It wouldn't be possible not to be kind

In the Land of Kickoff Once again;

And the ones nosotros misjudged and the ones whom we grudged

Their moments of victory here

Would feel in the grasp of our loving handclasp

More than penitent lips could explicate.

For what had been hardest we'd know had been best,

And what had seemed loss would be proceeds;

For in that location isn't a sting that volition not take wing

When we've faced it and laughed information technology away;

And I call back that the laughter, is almost what we're afterward

In the State of Beginning Over again!

Then I wish that at that place were some wonderful place

Chosen the State of Beginning Once again,

Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches

And all of our poor, selfish grief

Could be dropped, like a shabby old coat, at the door,

And never put on once again.

You are not gone. I observe you everywhere;

In every fragrance trembling on the air,

In every colour that you loved to wearable,

I discover you there.

Each tune you lot sang, each tale you knew,

The paths we traced together, and the blueish

Reflected in the willowed pool, renew

the thought of you.

I must not grieve. I must be sure the clear

White dawn is but a sign of you, nor fear

Lest sometime, in a sugariness, uncounted year,

I'll find yous, dear.

When windows give upon a lawn -- equally these--

Stupendous with majestic, shadowy trees,

I cannot help but feel that -- gazing out

Upon such splendor tapestried about--

Fifty-fifty the paltriest heed, housed briefly hither,

Must find all worldly longings disappear,

And yield itself, abandoned, at beauty's shrine;

Some subconscious fount of strange, exotic wine

Must flood its long-stale channels of delight

And probe a nameless rapture at the sight

Of mighty cedars, dreaming in the wind.

What songs awake, what legends prick the listen,

Of Puck and Pan and dryad-haunted trees,

When windows requite upon a lawn, as these!

She is a creature of a fair

Unclouded sky, a vessel rare

Wherein the elemental fire and snowfall

Past cunning abracadabra are blent. This i

is Deirdre -- all a woman, all a child,

All to be loved. Yet she is wild

As wood nymphs are, shy without fear,

With optics of wonder, and elusive foot,

A lip where laughter nestles, and a breast

heaving to faintest music. She is blest

beyond her kind, for in her slender hands

She bears the souvenir of sweet encouragement

And they who one time the wearier manner have trod

Find in her their desire, the smile of God.

I am eager for winter to come

And fold its white arms 'round this home,

This tangled and flower-spent backyard.

I am eager for winter to come up.

I am longing for winter to sing

In the thin-pencilled treetops, and bring

Sudden gusts down the chimney's wide throat.

I am longing for winter to sing.

I am homesick for lamplight and dreams,

For the firelog that flickers and gleams--

Pranking shadows that play on the wall.

I am homesick for lamplight and dreams.

Thoughts for my poems are similar hidden nests;

A leaf turned back, a foliage snap't, there they prevarication!

That they are secret is the joy that rests

And comforts me: that I may keep them hidden,

Knowing that I may return when woods be still,

And coax the nestlings into life at will.

That they are mine to warm, and urge, and railroad train

To spread their wings and utter notes of joy,

Mine to behold equally scrap by bit they proceeds

A plumage worthy of their empery,

This single rapture to my life belongs--

An endless brooding o'er my fledgling songs.

The hour is belatedly and we have drifted far--

Far into the enchantment of the night;

The starlit maze of blossom upon the shore

Melts into one white line, and before long the wave

That bears us on shall hibernate that too from sight.

The hour is late, and see, a flock of dreams

Follow, all drowsy-winged, the wave where dips

Our shallop'south prow. Ah, Sweet, sing on, for then

The brigand dreams volition abscond the beckoning dawn,

Nor hush my joy, the vocal upon thy lips.

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Source: https://www.obscurepoetess.klsparrow.com/1920-1929/louisa-fletcher