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Elinor Wylie

By Alexis Mayfield

Sea Lullaby

A Crowded Trolley Car

Orchard of the strangest fruits

Hanging from the skies;

Brothers, yet insensate brutes

Who fear each others’ eyes.

One man stands as free men stand

As if his soul might be

Brave, unbroken; see his hand

Nailed to an oaken tree.

She came up to meet him

In a smooth golden cloak,

She choked him and beat him

To death, for a joke.

Her bright locks were tangled,

She shouted for joy,

With one hand she strangled

A strong little boy.

Now in silence she lingers

Beside him all night

To wash her long fingers

In silvery light.

The old moon is tarnished

With smoke of the flood,

The dead leaves are varnished

With colour like blood,

A treacherous smiler

With teeth white as milk,

A savage beguiler

In sheathings of silk,

The sea creeps to pillage,

She leaps on her prey;

A child of the village

Was murdered today.

The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray

Sharp as golden sands,

A bell is clanging, people sway

Hanging by their hands.

Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff,

Snatch and catch and grope;

That face is yellow-pale, as if

The fellow swung from rope.

Dull like pebbles, sharp like knives,

Glances strike and glare,

Fingers tangle, Bluebeard’s wives

Dangle by the hair.

Marriages

Early Life

Career

  • Known for a lot of scandal
  • Wylie, during her first marriage was being stalked by Horace Wylie, who later became her husband
  • Wylie's literary friends encouraged her to submit her verse to Poetry magazine
  • Her first commercial book of poetry, Nets to Catch the Wind was an immediate success
  • Later she published Black Armor and Jennifer Lorn
  • She worked as the poetry editor of Vanity Fair magazine
  • Her third book published was Trivial breath
  • Wylie left her first husband and her son to marry Horace
  • After him came another man, William Rose Benét
  • Benét was in Wylie's literary circle
  • Benét influenced Wylie greatly
  • Born in Somerville, New Jersey September 7, 1885
  • Grew up in Rosemont, Pennsylvania and Washington DC
  • Father - Lawyer
  • Unhappy childhood
  • Father was unfaithful
  • Two brothers attempted suicide, one succeeded
  • Her sister died unexpectedly
  • Wylie suffered from migraines and high blood pressure which would kill her by means of stroke at 43 years old.

Sea Lullaby Analysis

A Crowded Trolley Car Analysis

Wylie wrote this poem as if the character was sitting on the beach watching the sea and a little boy. Wylie starts out with the visual of a smoke-tarnished moon and dead leaves with the color of blood. She personifies the sea as a murderous female and making the little boy the victim of the crime she committed. She explains his painful and harsh death and how selfish the sea was, keeping her prey to herself, and shielding it from anything else.

There is also irony in the title. A lullaby is supposed to comfort a child and help them go to sleep, however, in this poem the child is in danger and is "put to sleep eternally."

Irony: Both the sea and the moon are mentioned as females and females are normally thought to be motherly but in this poem both the moon and the sea are disgusting and vengeful

In this poem, Wylie is simply explaining the people within a trolley car. She uses a lot of morbid imagery and allusions. There is an expressed dissatisfaction with the realities of life which was a huge theme in many of the poems written in the book, Nets to Catch the Wind, which contained A Crowded Trolley Car.

Allusion to Bluebeards wives: tale about a man who secretly killed all his wives and hung them up in a locked room. When his new wife discovered what was in that room, she revealed her husband's atrocities to her sister and brothers, who killed Bluebeard.

Works Cited

Dungy, Camille. "A Crowded Trolley Car." <i>Poetry Foundation</i>. Poetry Foundation, n.d.

Web. 10 June 2014. &lt;http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175338&gt;.

""Sea Lullaby" by Elinor Wylie." <i>"Sea Lullaby" by Elinor Wylie</i>. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 June

2014. &lt;http://www.poemtree.com/poems/SeaLullaby.htm&gt;.

Dungy, Camille. "Elinor Wylie." <i>Poetry Foundation</i>. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 June 2014. &lt;http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/elinor-wylie&gt;.

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