Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt wrote poems about Kentucky, Ohio, Washington, D.C., the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath, Cork and other parts of Ireland, daily news, flowers, figures from European and American history, legend and folktale, Goethe and Lincoln, marriage and romantic love. But for the last half of her publishing career, from the 1870s through the 1890s, her characteristic subjects were children: babies or toddlers or school-age children or young people in their teens, some dead, some alive, some perhaps her own and some clearly not. Nineteenth-century readers recognized her talent for depicting children and childhood, as did her publishers, who sorted her poems about or for children into their own smaller books as well as making them segments (“in company with children”) within larger volumes: they noticed the interest in motherhood even if they did not see what Mary McCartin Wearn in 2006 called “the decidedly maternal focus of Piatt's cultural critique.”1 Starting with Paula Bennett and Jess Roberts in the 1990s, critics recovering Piatt's powers have reacted against her image “primarily as a wife and mother”—an image that, as Karen Kilcup says, contributed to her twentieth-century erasure—by emphasizing her other subjects.2 And yet her contemporaries got something right: for all her range as a periodical poet and a poet of current events, the Piatt of the single-author volumes, compiled with her assent if not her direction, saw her world, its past and future, and herself, most often as a mother, trying to look out for her own (and not only her own) children as they grew (or would have grown). “Whenever reviewers mentioned Piatt's maternal focus, we can hear subtextual charges that her poetry is unoriginal or narrow.”3 It was neither—but the maternal focus was real.As in topics, so in genre, we can find in Piatt (if we look for it) great variety. She wrote several-page narratives, landscape descriptions, and poems that might well be songs along lines laid down by Byron or Tennyson. But the poems that we recognize today as most her own, the ones that stand out and end up in modern anthologies (now that she does end up in anthologies) are almost always dramatic monologues or dialogues or a hybrid genre (also perfected by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) that we might call dramatic lyric: compact poems distinguished by “double-voicing” (in Kilcup's words) whose characters speak and interact in real time, poems whose sizes and shapes and topics also place them in post-Romantic traditions of lyric.4 These dramatic lyrics of parenthood, children and childhood show how, as Jess Roberts put it, “the very conventions that ostensibly restrict her writing are also the tools she uses to illuminate and examine those restrictions.”5 Roberts has examined at some length her “highly conventional sentimental infant elegy,” and indeed a book like A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles (1874), in effect a new-and-selected, hands the reader dead children (to modern taste) alarmingly often. And yet it is in Piatt's poems about live children that we can see her most original tonal and affective inventions.The sight may disturb us. Piatt's obsequies over dead children share with Piatt's more nuanced poems about live children the sense that adulthood on this Earth is just not worthwhile, and that growing up amounts largely to disillusion, dejection and disappointment. We may recognize that sense as post-Romantic, as Wordsworthian or (remembering the Dejection Ode) Coleridgean. But for those men the fortunate child is usually solitary, alone with his joys, and growing up (as in the Immortality Ode) amounts to a graph of diminishing returns, an increasing distance from nature's joys, whether or not the poet can find consolation in what remains behind.For Piatt's children, on the other hand, time is a short line or a tiny circle, and whatever lies beyond boyhood and girlhood is likely redundant, or at least not worth the trouble. Her boys, in general, do not grow up: she has little interest in adult men. But her girls do: they arrive at an age of balls, parties, and the patriarchal promise of a future husband who will let them down. At their best they will become mothers, and motherhood itself amounts to the only clear justification for adulthood, the only emotional reward a person gets for becoming adult.What reward? New attention to children's feelings, and the ability to be happy when children are happy, which of course means being sad when they are sad (or dead). That sadness in turn comes from looking at children (not at oneself) and seeing what life has in store for them, and then (again, unlike Wordsworth) resolving to care for them, to organize one's life around them, for as long as we can. We can see here what Zachary Finch calls, accurately, Piatt's “highly riven, melancholic constitution,” with its “nihilistic attitude towards the future,” both the future that faces individual children and the future of the United States after the Civil War.6 We can, though, also see here what we might call a counterpressure, a maternal resolve. And we can see a characteristic, intellectually complex, relationship to the way in which lyric poems create senses of time: recurrence, rebirth and time's one-way passage take place one way in the minds of Piatt's child characters, and in the opposite way in the mind of the disappointed, melancholy, resolute mother who stands behind the poem.Piatt's strongest poems about this dilemma view it in the lives of boys, girls and young women old enough to ask questions about the future, and to report on their own early lives. As Paula Bennett has emphasized, these poems rely on ironies: the mothers who speak them know more than the children can about the disappointments in store, not just for them but for all of us. Before we look at those older children, it might prove helpful to find this same dynamic in its most compact, concentrated form, in the double quatrain from Dramatic Persons and Moods (1880) called “One Year Old”: So, now he has seen the sun and the moon, The flower and the falling leaf on the tree(Ah, the world is a picture that's looked at soon), Is there anything more to see?He has learned (let me kiss from his eyes that tear), As the children tell me, to creep and to fall;—Then life is a lesson that's taught in a year, For the baby knows it all.7This baby (compared to Wordsworth's children, or to the children in earlier Poetess poems) appears aggressively secular. He knows no other world, only the joys and the sorrows of this one, all the joys and all the sorrows that matter: sun, moon, flower, spring and “fall,” a word on which the poem depends (Piatt could not have known Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”—but Hopkins, in Ireland in the 1880s while Piatt was publishing there, could well have read her). A baby who already crawls, and who can fall down (presumably because he is trying to walk), has learned how to move away from his caregiver, into new experiences that will (in adult eyes) seem anticlimactic: the world is not a comedy or an adventure but a picture, one we can assimilate all at once, whether or not we love it. The rest is commentary.We might also say that the rest is narrative. As in painting, so in poetry: Piatt takes the Horatian admonition in an un-Horatian direction, portraying both “a picture” and lyric poetry as arts of all-at-once-ness, against the anticlimactic “life” story that the baby has yet to know. Piatt in Dramatic Persons and Moods set this poem on its own page, rather than among the continuously paginated poems she labeled “Double-Quatrains,” likely because the “Double-Quatrains” all deploy nothing but rhymed iambic pentameter. “One Year Old” instead adopts three lines of anapestic tetrameter with iambic substitutions, and then an anapestic trimeter in the fourth lines, as if the stanza itself had ended too soon. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Caroline Levine's careful reading of that English poet, Piatt “evokes traditional meters while altering them” to produce a sense of “incommensurable temporalities.”8 Piatt, like the baby, has “learned” it all, surprisingly soon, and what do we get from that knowledge? A tear—and a new, strange, maternal sense of time. That maternal sense of time brings its own ironies and its own pathos, and it is perhaps Piatt's clearest contribution to the already-existing body of Western poetry about childhood, and loss, and growing up.It is also a theory of maternal lyric. Everyone who has a theory of lyric seems to have a theory of time. For Sharon Cameron lyric tries to stop time outright. For Jonathan Culler lyric implies a recurring, ritual time, as against the ongoing nature of character, speaker and story. Scholars of dramatic monologue, going back to Robert Langbaum, and theorists of post-Romantic poetics, such as Allen Grossman, posit that certain kinds of poems emphasize the reality of character, speaking beside us in fictive time. Every poem that depicts a speaking character may take advantage of the time that it takes to say and hear the poem (determined by pace of speech as well as by length of poem, rhythms, vowel shape and so on) as well as of the time frame that the events within the poem imply (as when Thomas Hardy's “During Wind and Rain” presents a succession of generations). Poems about first and last things, perhaps lyric poems generally, deploy two other senses of time: one in which time does not pass—the “picture”; the lyric instant—and one that follows a single human from birth to death, the life story that shadows all protagonists, from Cleopatra to Housman's athlete dying young.We can find all these kinds of time in Piatt's compactly sad quatrains. We can find, too, the very familiar Romantic and proto-Romantic sense that all life stories are sad: she would have known, for example, Thomas Gray's “Ode on a Prospect of Eton College,” with its apothegmatic conclusion “Where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise,” though Piatt goes beyond Gray's admonition. A baby who realizes that to advance is to “fall,” and who can cry about it, already “knows it all” (imagine the savings on school tuition). The live babies in Piatt's other poems (“The Christening,” for example) face similar falls, whatever their adults expect.But the baby's timeline is not the only one in the poem. Piatt's speaking character identifies herself as a caregiver, and (in the context of Piatt's poems) as a mother, and even as a good (or, to use an anachronistic but relevant term, as D. W. Winnicott's “good enough”) mother. She will see and know the baby as he becomes a child and then a young man: she will shepherd him through the crawls and falls, the suns and the moons, and all the anti-climaxes to come. And this double sense of time for mother and child gives Piatt's poems about older children their characteristic braid of grit and melancholy, resignation to the disappointing adulthood that awaits her radiant children and resolution to see them through to maturity nevertheless, assuming they live (not a safe assumption). Motherhood is, as Finch says, “a raw, troubling, realistic, empirical experience” for Piatt, but it does not lead to breakdown or inaction. Instead, it creates resolution alongside irony, the irony that Paula Bennett calls “the organizing principle of her verse.”9 Children in Piatt treat setbacks as catastrophic when, as adult readers know, they will bounce back, just like the seasons. Mothers, however—a modern teacher might want to say “parents,” but they are always mothers—treat time as cyclical, wiping away tears and readying kids for another day, even though mothers know that time is one-way, progressing from childhood to something like adolescence, marriage, motherhood, old age and death.This double sense of time matches what Wearn calls Piatt's “divided maternal consciousness,” and it makes for various affects depending on whether the thing that the mother fears most for her child is death, or disillusion (as in “Why Should We Care?”), or entrapment in courtship and patriarchal marriage, or entrenchment in an economic system whose inequality the child has only begun to realize.10 In “The Palace-Burner,” her “most frequently reprinted poem,” the problem is economic inequality.11 In “After the Quarrel,” it is romantic dejection: the mother tells her daughter (in the same seven-syllable catalectics that Auden would use for “Lay your sleeping head, my love”) that her first breakup does not mean the end of her world, nor even the end of her courting life: There are men, and men, and men— And these men are brothers all!Each sweet fault of his you'll find Just as sweet in all his kind.None with eyes like his? Oh—oh! In diviner ones did ILook, perhaps, an hour ago[.]12Again, the child believes her loss irreparable, her story one-of-a-kind, while we readers know that it recurs. The mother consoles the child with the idea that events are cyclical, or recurrent, while the mother herself knows (but will not admit directly) that time moves one way. Finch may go too far in suggesting that for Piatt “all true love stories are tragedies” about “the death of Youth,” but—as the mother knows but will not say—they might be.13 The poem's arrangement of dialogue gives the reader-as-overhearer a sense of what the mother, but not the daughter, already knows. Indeed that sense is what she gets from literary reading, the ultimate (and notably secular) consolation for women lost to romantic love: “Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, ay, / Good King Arthur, if you will” and “Raphael—he was handsome too.”14 These men will never reject the women who love them, because we encounter them through works of art; on the other hand, they will not return our love.And they are, of course, dead. “After the Quarrel” regards the adult dead, the famous dead, in company with the living; it stands apart from her elegies on dead children, though in company with Roberts’ readings of them. Piatt could even anticipate and mock the conventions of those elegies in poems like “The Sad Story of a Little Girl.” The eponymous girl was sweet—Why do I cry? Because—her mother loved her so.I told you that she did not die; But she is gone. “Where did she go?”Ah me,—I do not know.15The trappings of child elegy—we even see an outgrown shoe—introduce a “lost one” who has gone because she has become an unruly teen, as if she had been replaced by an evil fairy: This Changeling, German tales declare, Makes trouble in the house full soon:Cries at the tangles in its hair, Beats the piano out of tune,And—wants to sleep till noon.16Anti-climax? Of course, and far preferable to dead kids. And yet the conclusion feels far from frivolous: the mother knows, as the child cannot know, how much she has changed, and may change again soon.A much broader comic poem, Piatt's “Last Words,” takes up the passage of time—which mothers see as children cannot—not only from year to year, but also from hour to hour. Her targets here include not only the sentimental elegy on a dead child but the Byronic song of romantic regret: Good night, pretty sleepers of mine— I never shall see you again:Ah, never in shadow or shine; Ah, never in dew or in rain!17Does Piatt say, “through these teardrops,” “Good-bye!” to the sleeping children because they will die, or because she will die, or because one or all of them plan a great journey? Of course not: after another tearful “Good-bye!”, after four stanzas in which we learn that the “buds” of their pretty faces will “fade . . . to flowers,” we learn that the sleepers are going away forever because when they wake they will be “older . . . by hours!” Children, to parents and caregivers, really do seem to change that fast, though no one except the parent seems to know.By the last lines of “A Lesson in a Picture” that maternal knowledge has tipped over into regret, or even resentment, directed less at the mere passage of time than at the circumstances of compulsory heterosexuality and courtship under patriarchy. The girl in the poem, to whom the mother speaks, has just attained the age when young men visit. “The blonde young man who called to-day” “only rang to leave a book?— / Yes, and a flower or two, I say!”18 The girl turns her attention from his absence to the mother, to “this picture here,” “A maiden leaning half in fear,/ From her far casement” over an antique lover. The girl sees herself in the tower, almost (but not quite) ready to descend and join him, or to let him rescue her. But the mother, of course, does not want her to go. Piatt casts herself as a blocking agent in the familiar Rapunzel plot: might she want her daughter to stay in mid-air;— Rope-ladders lead one to the ground,Where all things take the touch of tears,And nothing lasts a thousand years?19Again, the poem stands out for its mixed feelings, and for its melancholy, resolute, maternal double sense of time, which—in the terms that Elizabeth Renker has applied to Piatt's earlier poems—we might call both romantic and realist: “romance, although fraudulent, is seductive, and it's the thing that won't stay dead—even under the realist gaze that sees through it.”20Romance and realism, child's time (whose disillusion mothers must address) and maternal time (whose disappointments nothing cures): these, put together, make up a Piatt poem. For Christa Vogelius, Piatt's ironic ending to “A Lesson,” with its “two radically different scenarios,” “effectively splits the speaker into two independent characters.”21 Another reader might say that one mother, as usual, sounds as if her mixed feelings split her in two. Piatt's reluctance to trust herself here, her division between supportive motherhood and knowing dread, dramatize what Renker calls Piatt's “juxtaposition . . . between what one speaker says and another thinks, or what a speaker says out loud and then thinks to herself.”22 Nobody in a late-nineteenth century poem would cast herself as Mother Gothel (though Anne Sexton might). Piatt does not pretend that she would try to stop her daughter from marrying, neither in the fairy-tale picture-life nor in her real home. But she does not want it: she dreads not only the one-way passage of time that leads to death but the wedding, the end of courtship, and the beginning of maternity for the girl whom she can still call, for now, “my child.”Piatt knows the tradition in which she works, and in which she is trying to raise her girl (in life, Piatt's only daughter, Marian, never married). The maternal poet also knows what her daughter cannot about how courtships end. She has married, of course, and raised children, and she listens to children now: their words color the memory of her own experience, but the reverse cannot be the case. “After Her First Party” might well take place just a few weeks before or after “A Lesson in a Picture”: “It was just lovely, and mamma, my dress Was much the prettiest there, the boys all said:They said too that I looked—my best. I guess These ribbons suited me. . . . “I wish you didn't want me to wear white, With just a flower or two. Rose wears such things.They're so old-fashioned. She was such a fright!”23The poet-mother wishes that her daughter would stay virginal and young, while the daughter mocks her mother's nostalgia and her mother's age: “You must be / Thinking of Adam. Here's a bud he gave/ You once in Eden.”24 The recurring character Rose appears here, as usual, as a kind of foil for Piatt's own daughter, a friend or companion or frenemy who does whatever the daughter will not do, and whose mother does too: “Rose's grandmother knows / Love stories,” for example, which Piatt in “Love Stories” does not want to tell. In “After Her First Party” the mother's old beau has probably died, which explains (though the daughter seems puzzled) why “he cannot write.” The two women talk past each other, each on one side of the great and over-praised middle of a woman's life, in which the world expects her to look her best, and find a man, and settle down. (Sympathetic models for this kind of conversation are few: Tracey Thorn's pop song “Hormones” is one of the few.)At this point we can generalize about the double motion in Piatt's poems. Growing up, children encounter heart-breaking problems they see as unique or unsolvable, though those problems are common and recur; mothers tell themselves, their children, and their readers that the children will recover, though the mothers in turn know that time moves only one way. That double sense of time might recall Isobel Armstrong's far broader notion of the “double poem,” the characteristically Victorian work that invites readers to affirm the consciousness of a speaker whom we nevertheless critique.25 But the double motion in Piatt's poems of motherhood emerges not from any general properties of language, meaning, or history but from the specific circumstance of caring for children. And that double motion takes place within the mind of the mother who listens or feels or speaks: she knows what she is about, and the ironies, resolutions, and antimonies belong to her. The imagined lifetimes the children might lead interact with the rhythmically regulated time inside a poem, the exchange of imagined conversation or recitation, to generate the fortitude and the melancholy in Piatt's strongest poems, and it works in poems about babies, poems about girls and young women, and poems about boys and young men.It does not always work the same way. “A New Knight” makes a kind of companion to “The Palace Burner,” as its “schoolboy . . . with a picture-book” looks at a knight—at the fabulous past—rather than at the present-day bird that flies by: “He sings too low and he sings too near?— / It is Roland's horn you would like to hear?”26 He prefers the fantasy and the history to the ahistorical present of birdsong. Though she uses the six-line stanza common to English verse romance (compare Robert Browning's “Childe Roland”) Piatt chooses against iambic pentameter, instead casting this poem in the apparently lighter anapestic tetrameter common in her poems about and for children. She would like to generate some less martial, more hopeful message for the new “horn” the boy might hear. But the boy has eyes and ears only for his fantasy about the old: the potential one-way progress of modern history is something for the poet to know and the child to find out: You would storm some fortress?—You never will, You sleep and you dream too much for that.Take care lest the boy below the hill, With the one wild rose in his torn straw hat,Who climbs the rocks, while they're dim with dew, To bring you milk, make his squire of you!27A Marxist reader here could have a field day: the most important part of the scene, the tableau on which Piatt ends, is not the lyric timelessness nor the recurrent present of birdsong, not the medievalizing story of Roland, but the class struggle that threatens to upend daily life today. The schoolboy in this poem might live in Ireland, where Sarah and her family resided in the 1880s and 1890s, or in the United States, where compulsory education was not reliably enforced until the twentieth century. To be in school, rather than out delivering milk, was a middle-class privilege, one that might obscure the real dimension of inequality that the child in “The Palace-Burner” can see. The dreamy schoolboy cannot see it; the double knowledge of history belongs to the adult alone.That double knowledge sets apart some of Piatt's poems of Civil War memory too: “Marble or Dust?” (the question mark belongs to her title) adopts the quatrains of Thomas Gray's “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” to address a child who addresses a statue of Abraham Lincoln. A modern reader might think he addresses the Lincoln Memorial, though that structure opened to the public only in 1922. This earlier Lincoln looks sadly out from a face carved in marble, and that marble “must meet the years. . . . Without the bitter sweetness of my tears— / Without the love which dust must have for Death.”28 It is better to be made of dust and to be sad about dying, because that way we can at least watch over our children as they grow up.Piatt's attention to maternal time takes on other dimensions elsewhere. In “Two Voices” it anticipates the critique of domestic labor that would animate Charlotte Perkins Gilman's late-nineteenth-century feminism, and (much later) Betty Friedan's “feminine mystique.” The child in that poem calls her attention, and ours, to a succession of conventionally poetic beauties, each of which might be the only thing of its kind. “One bird is come. It's blue. But there is not any other.” A unique rose is “the first of all,” and will fade, like the roses in so many earlier poems. “A star is out,” and like the one in Wordsworth's Lucy poems it is the only one in the sky, and of course the child himself will shine and change, if not fade, as he grows. A more conventional poem would ask adults to seize the day and be like him, or see as he sees. Piatt would love to do so but cannot: “I must hush your pretty crying brother,” she replies, and later: “I would hear the bird singing, I would see the rose was red, / If only I had a little of the long, long leisure/ I shall have—when dead.”29Childhood is leisure for lyric moments. Motherhood is labor, both in the labor movement's sense and in Hannah Arendt's: comparatively undignified, socially disfavored, and governed by “the motion of the process itself” rather than by a craft-based end product.30 As students of social life from Gilman to Arlie Hochschild know, that kind of gendered labor seems never to end. Piatt's poem, by contrast, ends abruptly, with a stanza-final line half the length of the rest: death is the only conclusion she can imagine, the only excuse for not tending to the endless round of indoor, practical chores. This sense of maternal time as labor hooks up after all with maternal time as progressive loss: “Two Voices,” too, joins the constellation of Piatt's great poems on mothers and children and their contradictory, doubly ironized senses of time. Children see time as one-way, each instant unique, while we know how often children's experiences are typical and recur; mothers tell children that they will recover, heal, and be whole, concealing the one-way journeys adulthood can bring. And this double vision, or double voicing, joins—as Roberts has recognized—the poems about living children to Piatt's poems about the dead: “living is dying, and to love a child is to love a creature who will die,” even if one has to be an adult, no longer a child, to realize as much.31Short poems that seem at once dramatic and lyric—the kind we now recognize as Piatt's best work—do justice to these multiple, opposing cycles: they feel at once tragic and joyful, driven by pathos and supported by practical parental resolve. A mother can cry all night over her child's lost toy or her daughter's dashed hopes, but in the morning someone has to make sure that both young people dress and eat and leave the house when they ought: Piatt's mixed feelings and her multiple senses of time do justice to that sense of obligation, too, as few poets (then and now) could.Very few; but some. The exhaustion of domestic labor forms the emotional core of Rita Dove's famous poem “Daystar” from Thomas and Beulah (1986), where the poet's exhausted grandmother finds a moment to herself, and does “nothing, / pure nothing, in the middle of the day.” She gets this time only because her children still nap: “She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared/ pouting from the top of the stairs.”32 And, of course, the men and children around her cannot understand why she needs this time out: they do not wear themselves ragged, nor do they seem to know how they wear her down.The contemporary poet who has approached Piatt's ironies most clearly, who has pursued these kinds of ironies in poems about motherhood for much of her career, has to be the Michigan writer Laura Kasischke, who began publishing during the 1990s, and whose first poems about mothers and children appeared in Fire & Flower (1998), a volume that reacted in more than one poem to the very unfashionable and in the 1990s not much critically defended line of sentimental child elegy. “Infants Corner,” from that book, visits the corner of a church or cathedral where infant dead were interred: I usedto walk among those namesof babiesand their graves, Samuel, Sarah, Vaughn.Vowels like yawns. Allthose damp lambs down there snufflingeternity calmlyout of the fur of the dirt.33Is she mocking the dead, or the epitaphs, or sentimental traditions of commemoration? Of course she is but she will not end there: like a modern scholar of sentiment (Bennett, or Kerry Larson, say) she stops to acknowledge the loyalty that the elegists must feel to the people they bury and the social function of commemoration among parents who themselves share fears of more loss. A figure who mocks epitaphs, or treats them frivolously, “knows nothing yet about/ the awfulness of love, the hot- / washcloth stars that fall / when an infant turns,” perhaps deathly ill, perhaps not.34 The double vision here might belong to a reader of Piatt—or to her Midwestern practical heir.Kasischke's double visions of motherhood grew with her son, following him (for example) into a field of Civil War re-enactors (“Mom, he says . . . you're holding the battlefield upside down”) or listening in a prose poem to “my son practicing the violin”: “each note is a beautiful ancient kingdom precariously balanced at the edge of a cliff above the sea.”35 The son, like the song, might at any moment fall in, as the mother knows but the son may not. “My Son in the Cereal Aisle” makes Kasischke, like Piatt, at once a typical mother in the fears and the indignities she survives and an uncommonly self-aware one: “Today I am one of a hundred mothers / who loses her child at the grocery store.” Of course she feels like “the world has come to an end,” and of course her son turns out fine: was she right to panic? Who can know?36But Kasischke as mother—loyal, passionate, divided, fretful, pessimistic—can know some things, just as the maternal Piatt can; both poets derive wrenching sadness and fitful humor from the gap between what they know and what they can say to their children. “Happy Meal” starts at a McDonald's “drive-thru window” and proceeds to a “little monster, this fact / at the bottom of the bag,” as small and hard and useless as the “complimentary toy” that comes with the meal. The fact is (as in Piatt) the knowledge of death, and the mother's awareness that the child will come into that knowledge, while she, the mother, will die. Piatt imagined walking her surviving children to and past her own grave, advising them “kiss me and be good / For you can go back home and play,” and grow up without her.37 Kasischke's poem, too, ends not with nihilism but with a fortitude that subsumes ambivalence, with a mother's “blessing”: “May some beautiful evening in the future find you / sipping wine with your beloved/ in a peaceful foreign country . . . and my death, if it has come, not troubling you a bit.”38 Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt could not have put it better herself—and few other poets could even come close.