She sat at a bay-window where she saw
First open carriages and buggies pass!
And then Victorias with horses docked
And bits and buckles, chains of shining brass.
And then the horseless carriage, till at last
The swallow-gleam of varnished limousines
Silent as shadows took her lifted eye,
Uplifted from a book. She always sat
In her bay-window with a book,
And with a tinted fan in summer-time.

But first she was a bride
Before the war.
Springing from honest blood, her place
Passed over lightly as her grandeur grew:
She was of seed too vital to decay
Wholly in any soil, the sort that grows and blooms
Where never gardener comes.
And this bay-window! An aging man of gold
Had plucked her up, and here she rests and breathes
The free air of Chicago’s reclamation.
And then she is
A wonder-bride for her brown hair,
And gray-blue eyes, and laughter, sunny wit,
And naturally patrician ways and speech,
(Acquiring French now that the chance has come),
And she is eighteen and is born to rule.

And her great merchant husband with blue eyes,
And strong beaked English nose,
Walks straighter for a pride that she is his.
Gives her a country place spaced out in walks,
And flower beds, where now such flimsy flats
Confront Grand Boulevard!
And for a city house he builds a house
Three stories high at Twentieth street,
Where then the manifest was sand and oaks,
And what is now the Loop, was just as far
As Hyde Park from the Loop is now.

In this bay-window then she sits a bride,
And sees the scrub oak cut and mansions fill
Gradually year by year the waste of sand.
For fashion follows her and builds beside her,
Till Prairie Avenue becomes the street
Of millionaires, who hear from traveled wives
What London is, what Paris is,
And open purses to unfolding tastes
For canvases and sculpture.
For every one grows rich now in Chicago.
And in the seventies women go to Paris,
Herself among the first, at least the chief,
See Egypt and see Rome.
And when returned drive down where wondering eyes
Along the marble terrace promenading,
Where Michigan Avenue was bounded by
The Lake across the street,
Behold the striped silk of their parasols
Fluttering over plumes and dancing eyes,
And purple velvet of Victorias.

For now it is the classic age!
There is the driving park,
There is the Palmer House,
There are cathedrals too.
There are the lofty ceilings walnut trimmed,
And foliate chandeliers of polished brass,
And marble-slabbed buffets with heavy cupids,
And clustered fruits carved in their sombre wood,
And square pianos with their rosewood legs
Swelled out with oval figures like great plums.
And paintings deeply daubed in brown asphaltum
Where chiaroscuro ends were lost in shadows,
Not lost in light, depressionistic things,
From which her lambent intuition led her.
She was among the first to catch the psychic
Waves that sweep around this little world
And change all things.
She traveled much and lived in Europe much,
Returning to her window where she watched
The city pass and bow its admiration,
The half of whom she knew as time went on,
Though all knew her and said “there is the queen,”
Or “there she is who thinks she is the queen.”

And when the opera came she was the queen,
At least a queen whose sovereignty withstood
Encroaching claims to ripen into rights.
But then if all were lost where not a million
People lived as yet, and where, oh well
Packers and others threw their heavier gold
In what was once a scale of primogeniture,
Rome stood and London stood and Paris.
Have your own way at home, the mood began,
I am off here where you can scarcely come.
The next place is the best, a far off place
Has teasing witcheries to those at home.
Her husband now was dead some years, the children
Grown up, or off to school, a daughter married
To an Italian count kept state in Florence
Where Browning came, with whom our queen would fence
In spiritual dialectics. In her travels
She had known Ibsen, Patti and George Eliot,
Sat as a dinner guest by Beaconsfield,
And taken tea upon Hawarden’s lawn.
And so in escritoires and cabinets
She kept mementoes of her days abroad:
Like letters from George Eliot,
“Ferishtah’s Fancies” inscribed by Robert.
And in the course of time this three-floored house
Was filled with treasures, tapestries,
Etruscan things, and faience peacock blue;
And oriental jade with letters of gold.
And there she reigned, but lived alone
The house kept by French maids
And impeccable butlers.
And so the years went, and she saw at last
The city start to slip away from her
And make her royal isolation
An ignorant solitude!

Yet she was beautiful at forty years,
Some years a widow then and very rich.
She was most fresh and matronly at fifty.
At fifty-five and sixty she could charm
A man of any age. And master-men
Paid suit to her and gained
The stimulating richness of her mind.
Some said they did not want her, others said
Her wisdom and self-mastery froze their

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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