A Poem for Dorothy

How the carving looks through my magnifying glasses


See the little repair on the ascender of the word at the bottom right? Superglue!

I mentioned a few posts ago that I've been auditing a Smith College course this semester called "Material Culture of New England." The class takes place in Historic Deerfield, a museum and historic village, and most of the objects we study are from the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts and Vermont. In one of our readings we encountered a poem written by Lucy Terry Prince who was the first known African American poet. What struck me about the poem, and I think this is true of all early American poetry, is that it has such a strong meter and rhyme. Nothing wrong with meter and rhyme, but the poem is about a horrible battle in Deerfield, so the sing-song rhythm and rhyme seem totally out of synch with the gravity of the topic.

One night as I was falling asleep during the planning stages of the Dorothy May print a little poem popped into my head and I've decided to include it in the piece. The poem, in a style similar to Lucy Prince's poem, is this:

On a bright sunny day
while her husband was away
Bradford's wife Dorothy May
slipped overboard into the bay
and drowned.

I considered omitting the text, but because this is not a story that most people are familiar with I decided it was an important thing to include.