baker ruth stephens (1 Ergebnisse)

Softcover. Zustand: Near Fine. Manuscript. Two slim octavo volumes. 37, 16 [1 index] pp. Clothbacked card wrappers, the later volume with cover labels completed in manuscript. One label with loss, wrappers with light wear and staples a bit oxidized, near fine. Each poem Signed and dated by Baker. With a small manuscript poem Signed, reproducing one of the poems as a Christmas greeting, laid in. A collection of charming original poems by a young Ruth Stephens Baker (1882-1965). Baker was born in Philadelphia and attended Friends' Central School there. She then studied at Smith College, received her Master's from Columbia, and in the 1930s worked as the head of the Departments of French and German at Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. These poems date from October 1894 to November 19, 1901, while Stephens was a student at Friends' Central School and at Smith. The two volumes contain 32 well-executed poems in rhyming verse. Titles in the first volume (1894-98) include: "To A Cloud," "Pulpit Rock," "The Tramp Cat's Daughter" (with two small drawings), "Philip of Macedon" (20 four-line stanzas), and "Fourteen" ("Fourteen long years have come and gone, / Not one will ere return."). Titles in the second volume (1898-1901) include "Les Miserables" and "Class Poem - F.C.S. '99," as well as a sonnet and translations of two of Horace's *Odes*. However, our favorite poem is "Puff-Puff," an elegy for her dearly departed pet written when she was about 13. The first stanza: "Can it be true that you are dead / And never more will scratch, / In new-made garden, flower bed, / Or early onion patch, / My little bantam rooster?" A charming collection of rather accomplished poems by a young female scholar.