Twelve poems — Story, Setting & Ideas

From Provençal Landscapes to Interior Drama

The first half of the collection is anchored in the Mediterranean—Provence, the maquis, Les Salettes, Segesta. These poems are rich with place-specific imagery: 'stony mountain-trail,' 'green slopes, through tamarisk and pine,' 'the pale world of dunes / A foam of asphodel.' Wharton uses the landscape as both setting and emotional correlative. In 'Mistral in the Maquis,' the wind becomes a force that strips and reveals. The poems shift from outward description to inward reflection, often within a single piece.

Later poems turn toward more explicitly personal and dramatic situations. 'The Tryst' and 'Battle Sleep' introduce human figures in states of waiting or suspension. The most striking shift occurs in 'The First Year,' a long poem in four parts that abandons the third-person descriptive mode for a first-person monologue spoken by a dead woman. The voice is immediate, colloquial, and unsparing: 'Don’t wake me,' it begins, and proceeds to describe the experience of lying in a grave, hearing the cries of a neighboring corpse, and then rising to revisit her former home.

Recurring Images: Roots, Earth, and the Body

Across the collection, Wharton returns to images of roots, earth, and bodily sensation. In 'Nightingales in Provence,' the birds are 'like spring’s invisible pollen blown / On the wild southern gale.' In 'The First Year,' the dead speaker describes 'Thrusting up like a willow in spring, / From my hair / Untwine the thick grass-hair carefully, / Unbind the cool roots from my lids.' The same image recurs in different keys: roots as connection, roots as entanglement, roots as the medium of memory.

The body is rendered with precise, sometimes unsettling physicality. The dead speaker notes 'the cry of the girl just below me: / “Don’t go, don’t go ...”' and later feels 'the fresh smell of things' and 'the scent of my box-border.' Wharton uses sensory details—the taste of apples, the feel of a broken latch, the sight of a pipe-burn on a table—to anchor the supernatural premise in the concrete. The poem's power comes from this tension: a ghost who remembers the weight of a cushion, the sound of a kettle, the 'old rent in the rug, where I tripped.'

Movement Between Scenes: The Shifting Gaze

Wharton structures several poems as sequences of scenes, moving the reader through space and time without explicit transition. In 'Nightingales in Provence,' the poem shifts from the birds' origin ('From whatsoever depth of gold and blue') to the speaker's position among the thyme, then to a meditation on sound. 'The First Year' is divided into four numbered sections, each with a different spatial and temporal focus: the grave, the ascent, the house, and the chair.

This technique creates a sense of disorientation that mirrors the speaker's condition. The dead woman's perception is fragmented: 'How light the air is! I’m dizzy ... my feet fly up ... / And this mad confusion of things topsy-turvey.' The poem moves from the grave to the garden to the window to the chair, each shift marked by a change in sensory focus—from earth to air, from smell to sight, from memory to imagined presence. Wharton uses these jumps to suggest a consciousness no longer bound by linear time or physical continuity.

Voice and Address: The Directness of the Dead

The most distinctive formal feature of the collection is the direct, unadorned voice Wharton gives to the dead speaker in 'The First Year.' The poem opens with a command: 'Don’t wake me.' The tone is intimate, almost irritable, as the speaker complains about the 'cry of the girl just below me: / “Don’t go, don’t go ...” the poor coward!' This is not a solemn ghost but a person with opinions, memories, and a sharp eye for domestic detail.

The poem's address shifts between internal monologue and direct apostrophe to objects: 'O my Chair ... / But who sits in you?' The speaker sees a young woman in her place, 'Aflame yet invisible,' and recognizes that she herself is now 'Lips and hands only— / Since soul cannot reach him without them.' Wharton uses this directness to explore the limits of presence and absence. The dead woman can see, smell, and remember, but cannot be perceived. The poem's final lines—'I part the branches and look....'—leave her suspended in a gesture of observation that can never be returned.

Readers coming to this collection from Wharton's fiction will find a different kind of attention: not the social panorama of The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, but a concentrated, almost painterly focus on single scenes and voices. The poems reward slow reading, especially the later dramatic monologues, where the rhythm of the lines often mimics the hesitations and rushes of thought. Pay attention to the small, broken things—the unmended latch, the dust on the mirror, the pipe-ashes—because Wharton uses them to hold the weight of the whole.

Reading Twelve Poems, I was struck by how Edith Wharton’s ghostly speaker lingers in echoes and half-light. It reminded me of Shelley’s own restless spirits, who also drift between memory and air. I pulled down The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete — A Reader’s Guide and found the same fragile boundary there. Both writers seem to write from just beyond a door, looking back.