I sat up half the night last night looking at Patience Worth’s selected poems Light From Beyond (Patience Worth Publishing, New York, 1932), trying to decide if this ghostly poetess, novelist, and dramatist supposedly from the 16th century, was a good writer. She wasn’t. But what’s interesting about her work (really the “inspired” writing of a woman named Mrs. Pearl Curran) is that it does have flashes of interesting–even startling–language.

Snow tweaked ‘neath thy feet,
And like a wandering painter stalketh Frost,
Daubing leaf and lichen. Where flowed a cataract
And mist-fogged stream, lies silvered sheen,
Stark, dead and motionless. I hearken
But to hear the she-e-e-e of warning wind,
Fearful lest I waken Nature’s sleeping.
Await ye! Like a falcon loosed
Cometh the awakening. Then returneth Spring
To nestle in the curving breast of yonder hill,
And sets to rest like the falcon seeketh
His lady’s outstretched arm.

Often Patience Worth offers startling beginnings (see her poem “I made a song of the dead notes of his birds,” for instance), and it’s obvious that Patience/Pearl was familiar with the Metaphysicals like Donne, Vaughn, and Herbert. How far from Herbert’s “The Collar” is the following by what I will call, the Patience Poet:

Ah, God, I have drunk unto the dregs,
And flung the cup at Thee!
the dust of crumbled righteousness
Hath dried and soaked unto itself
E’en the drop I spilled to Bacchus,
Whilst Thou, all-patient,
Sendest purple vintage for a later harvest.

The poem begins with a mini-drama, but seems to founder on Victorian sweet-cake by the end. The question is: how did this woeful writing gain such wide publication in its day? Why did so many men and women of letters take this stuff seriously, and why did the work of the “British” Patience Worth make barely a ripple in her home country?

I think, ironically, Patience Worth was an American phenomenon, because the writer she most resembles, and the writer that paved the way, as it were, for this mysterious female presence to be accepted by the literary establishment, was Emily Dickinson. Literary America in 1916 was still in the grip of the discovery of the truly gifted Emily Dickinson, and many of Patience Worth’s supporters, like the critic William Marion Reedy, had participated in the gradual flowering of Dickinson’s posthumous career. ED, of course, is an American metaphysical, using the energetic tropes of Donne, Herbert and company, in her own incredible way. Her work was also decked out in Victorian titles in their earliest printed embodiments, and her lesser poems in which more standard and hackneyed sentiments are present, were among her most celebrated in the early part of the 20th century. So it’s no surprise that a women (if even the alleged ghost of one) who weilded metaphysical conceits in a cloud of Victorian sugar, would attract attention. In addition, this was the age of free verse. Amy Lowell was writing her exotic “Amygist” poems at that time, so she too must have helped make the climate conducive for a free-verse Ouija board virtuoso. Still, it’s an intriguing subject, as are all considerations surrounding the creation of literary careers, and, of course, the creation of “inspired writing.” (More on that subject later.)

Oh, and like the Patience Worth Poet, Emily Dickinson didn’t make much of a stir, till much, much later, in Britain.

A pdf version of Light From Beyond is available on-line at www.spiritwritings.com/LightFromBeyondWorth.pdf.