Poems of Cheer — Reading Notes

Art as a Borderland

The first poem, “Worth While,” imagines crossing a “mystic border-land” into the “wonder-world of Art.” Wilcox describes this realm as free of “discord” and “idle sorrow,” where “tears turn into rainbows.” The speaker feels awed and unworthy, calling herself “only the singer of a little song.” This self-deprecating posture recurs throughout the collection. In “The Unattained,” a poet pursues a vision that declares itself “the phantom of desire” and “the spirit of all great endeavour.” The vision warns that it can never be claimed: “All shall pursue, but none shall claim me.” These poems frame artistic ambition as a noble but unfulfillable quest, a theme that aligns with the volume’s title only ironically.

The Mask of Cheerfulness

Several poems directly challenge the notion of cheer. In “In the Crowd,” Wilcox observes a social gathering and imagines what would happen if everyone spoke from the heart: “What a hush would come over the laughter! / What a silence would fall on the mirth!” She calls the crowd “maskers” and “sad-hearted,” suggesting that public gaiety conceals private despair. The poem “Life and I” personifies life as a lover with whom the speaker quarrels and reconciles, but ends with a threat: “I shall one day throw him over, / And plight troth with Death.” Even the title Poems of Cheer begins to feel like a protective facade. The excerpts offer no poems that sustain unalloyed optimism; instead, they repeatedly undercut cheer with mortality.

Rhyme, Meter, and Repetition

Wilcox writes in regular rhyme and meter, often using quatrains with alternating rhymes. In “The Unattained,” she employs a dream-vision structure with a dialogue between poet and ideal. The poem “In the Crowd” uses a series of rhetorical questions and exclamations to build dramatic tension. A notable structural feature is the repeated use of anaphora: “How they bow, how they bend, how they flutter” and “We live, we love, we woo, we wed, / We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.” This last couplet, from “The Year,” compresses the life cycle into a single line. The catalog subject “American poetry” is accurate, but the excerpts show a poet more concerned with universal emotional states than with any specifically American setting or theme.

Readers approaching Poems of Cheer through its catalog entry should set aside expectations of science fiction or utopia. The value of this collection lies in its candid treatment of the gap between social performance and inner life. Wilcox’s regular forms and direct language make the poems accessible, but their content often resists the very cheerfulness the title promises. A useful approach is to read the poems in sequence, noting how the speaker’s relationship with death and disappointment evolves across the volume.

That rainy day, Poems of Cheer kept slipping from my fingers, its bright verses hiding a stubborn ache. I kept thinking about masks, the ones we wear. Later, half-dreaming, I reached for The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems — A Closer Reading and found the same quiet sorrow, wrapped in a different language, waiting under the eaves of home.