Nora May French, photograph by Arnold Genthe, 1907 or earlier. Larger.
The natural majesty of California inspires great reverence in her writers, but nearly as often it evokes visions of apocalypse, sometimes deep, pensive feelings of melancholy.
A member of a prosperous family, poet Nora May French grew up in Los Angeles and eventually moved north, settling among the Carmel bohemians in 1907. Only twenty-nine years old, she committed suicide, leaving us with a small, but richly imagined body of work, such as "Ave Atque Vale."
It gathers where the moody sky is bending, It stirs the air along familiar ways–
A sigh for strange things forever ending, For beauty shrinking in these alien days.
Now nothing is the same; old visions move me: I wander silent through the waning land,
And find for youth and little leaves to love me The old, old lichen crumbling in my hand.
What shifting films of distance fold you, blind you, The windy eve of dreams, I cannot tell.
I know they grope through some strand mist to find you, My hands that give you Greeting and Farewell.
French published only a handful of works before her death, though collections of her poems have been published posthumously. Unfortunately none of these have ever circulated widely.
"Distant Rain," from Ocean Beach in San Francisco, photograph by Mila Zinkova, 2006. Larger.
Northern California's coastal climate is known for sudden storms as well as tranquil interludes, a metaphor, says the poet, for the ebb and flow of human love.
A New York native, Nora May French migrated to Los Angeles with her family in 1888. She began writing poetry in her teens, and after moving to the Bay Area in 1906, drew on the region for inspiration, as in the lovely sonnet "Between Two Rains":
It is a silver space between two rains; The lulling storm has given to the day An hour of windless air and riven grey;
The world is drained of color; light remains.
Beyond the curving shore a gull complains; Unceasing, on the bastions of the bay, With gleam of shields and veer of vaporing spray
The long seas fall, the grey tide wars and wanes.
It is a silver space between two rains: A mood too sweet for tears, for joy too pale— What stress has swept or nears us, thou and I?
This hour a mist of light is on the plains, And seaward fares again with litten sail Our laden ship of dreams adown the sky.
Nora May French eventually settled in the town of Carmel and joined the area's Bohemian literary circle. She committed suicide in 1907 when she was only 26.
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