A Book of Poems by Amateur Poet Mary S. Fay, With Several Concerning Temperance and Women’s Suffrage.
Reading, Vermont: 1911–1943. 156 pp, with approximately 207 poems, plus a 1934 rejection letter from Perry Mason & Co. Spine broken, cover nearly detached and pages coming detached; some toning and wear to edges of pages, with smell. Overall very good minus. Item #List3433
A book of poems by Vermonter Mary S. Fay (likely 1875–1968). Fay’s topics include friends’ special events; current events such as “Titanic” (May 15, 1912) and “America We Are Ready” (1915, presumably concerning World War I); nature themes and seasonal poems; and especially nostalgic and sometimes defensive poems about Vermont, including “Strike Not The Land That Shelters”, which was “Written on learning slurs cast in Vermont by alliens who come to Vermont to reside”.
However, Fay sometimes took up expressly political causes in her poetry. For instance, in April 1911 she penned “Equal Rights Proclaiming”:
“Sister Woman, look ahead, / For there dawns the gladsome time / When thy queen, Equal rights, treads / O’er the land with light sublime: / O, raise your voice on high, / Loudly in sweet acclaim, / ‘Till they reach yonder sky / And there, the rights proclaim. [...] Sister Woman, of today, / Thou have striven long and well, / Thou’ve waited in twilight grief / For the ring of Freedoms bell. / Though at times all seem’d as lost / Thou upheld thy banner height; / And you counted not the cost / But press’d onward thru’ the night.”
In March 1915, she took up the topic again, in a poem titled “Enfranchisement”:
“Fled the years of servile shame! / Woman ‘tis this hour at last, / Honor thy glorious name, / Spread thy banner to the blast. / Brave my sisters, in thy might, / Steadfast yet and valiant be; / On thy noble standard write / Equality, law and liberty. [...] Enfranchisement, thus we vow, / Shall be ours ere we abate / Our strife which thru and thru / Of our life’s blood we consecrate / Upon the altar, upon the shield / Equality for all eternity; / Shall be ours at home, afield:- / Equality, law and liberty.”
Despite the efforts of groups such as the Vermont Equal Suffrage Association, formed in the early 1880s, Vermont women did not get the right to vote until the rest of the country did, ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment in 1921.
She also writes an intriguing, more general protest poem, seemingly for labor rights, titled “Justice Where?” (August 1911):
“Tho labor’s toils in day by day / Beneath the heat and the cold; / While the oppresser sits in grandest state, / With a mere pittance to pay, / To keep hunger from the fold, / And in false pride his tyranny relate. / Awake, all ye toilers [?], / Drive at the oppresor bold! / Unfurl thy glorious standard of Right, / O’er many a dear home fold, / And thus ever protect it with thy might.”
Another of Fay’s causes was temperance; in 1914 she wrote “A Temperance Boy”, dedicated to “six year old Clark A. Ritchie”:
“A little temperance boy am I, / And proudly its banner I will fly. / Pure cold water is what I drink, / And its the best of all I think. / A big promise, don’t expect of me / for I’m only a little boy you see.”
She objects to smoking as well, writing in “Why is it” (1932) that “I must relate, / smoking I hate. / ‘Be a sport girls’ / That is the cry / If in the whirl / They are a bit shy.”
Overall a charming document of a woman’s progressive politics, expressed in verse.
Price: $1,500.00