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Let No Charitable Hope

1885 –

1928

Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am by nature none of these.

I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 8, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

Elinor Wylie was born in Somerville, New Jersey, on September 7, 1885.

Themes

About this Poem

“Let No Charitable Hope” appears in Elinor Wylie’s collection Black Armour: A Book of Poems (George H. Doran Company, 1923). In A Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor Wylie (Kent State University Press, 2003), Evelyn Helmick Hively, former professor of English and director of American studies at the University of Miami, writes, “‘Let No Charitable Hope,’ often mentioned as Wylie’s best poem, brought from critics favorable comparisons with T. S. Eliot’s work, even beyond the obvious references to masks. [Malcolm] Cowley’s ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’ [in The Dial, vol. 74 (June 1923)] mentions similarities in meter, images, and vocabulary, although he stresses differences in their personality. Wylie used this angry poem to reply to a letter from [William Rose] Benét during one of their many quarrels before they were married: ‘I don’t think I am a falcon. I think I am a life with a broken wing. I know it. But read that poem—‘Let no charitable hope.’ Now you know, red lizard.’”

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More by this poet

Velvet Shoes

Let us walk in the white snow
    In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
    At a tranquil pace,
    Under veils of white lace.

Elinor Wylie

2021

Silver Filigree

The icicles wreathing
   On trees in festoon
Swing, swayed to our breathing:
   They’re made of the moon.

She’s a pale, waxen taper;
   And these seem to drip
Transparent as paper
   From the flame of her tip.

Molten, smoking a little,
   Into crystal they pass;
Falling, freezing, to brittle
   And delicate glass.

Each a sharp-pointed flower,
   Each a brief stalactite
Which hangs for an hour
   In the blue cave of night.

Elinor Wylie

1921

Sunset on the Spire

All that I dream
      By day or night
Lives in that stream
      Of lovely light.
Here is the earth,
      And there is the spire;
This is my hearth,
      And that is my fire.
From the sun's dome
      I am shouted proof

Elinor Wylie

1921

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Let No Charitable Hope

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