1. Now Let No Charitable Hope
By: Victoria lupi, Lucia Frias and Victoria Quiroga
2. Writer: Elinor Wylie
Although she is known by Elinor Wylie this is actually her third surname. Born a Hoyt (a
prominent American family full of politicians and a couple of writers), she married and had a
child with Philip Hichborn in 1906 before leaving him due to his mental issues. After this she
ran off to London with Horace Wylie, a married man who had stalked her for years.
Eventually he got divorced and they married in 1916, but it didn’t last for long and she
remarried by 1923 to William Benet. Five years later she’d returned to London on her own
and proceeded to fall in love with her best friend’s husband, Henry de Clifford Woodhouse.
She died back in Benet’s apartment in New York, while preparing to publish a series of
sonnets about her love for her Woodhouse
3. Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am in 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.
We begin with Wylie shutting out any hope of things getting better in
her own head as hope will only serve to leave her confused about
what she can get out of life. The hope she is referring to is compared
to an eagle and an antelope, which suggest she is thinking about
freedom and possibly also togetherness. She dismisses these
thoughts as irrelevant to her.
The second stanza expands upon this. She stresses the fact that she
is alone and complains that as a woman life is full of difficulties. To
expand upon this she compares a woman’s life to trying to get water
from a stone, demonstrating an extremely negative perspective of the
life prospects of women.
In the final stanza, she speaks of disguising her pain in public and
plodding along despite the lack of joy in her life. Life is presented as if
it drags by, but she says it never quite becomes too terrible that she
cannot bear it anymore and she finds some tiny elements of joy that
keep her going.
4. First stanza analysis ‘Now’ immediately indicates a shift in attitude from her previous view.
This suggests the poetic voice is trying to convince herself to abandon
a hope that has previously existed. Not only this, but she is definitive
about it as she has room for ‘no charitable hope’. She wants to purge
any last trace of hope from her mind, which tells me that this hope has
held her down or misled her to suffering previously.
A very basic definition of charity would be something set up to make
someone in need feel a bit better. However, they are not a lasting
solution to problems, but a temporary measure to get people back on
track. In this case it is the hope that has been providing a short term
medicine to the wounds that have left our poetic voice hurt and
miserable. As such this form of hope is merely a short term plaster
that deceives her from the reality of life and one she therefore feels
she needs to rip off in order to face the truth. In the next line she
represents the hope as ‘confuse my mind’, which implies that she feels
her hope has no chance of being realised.
Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am in nature none of these.
5. These dreams she is now trying to dismiss are compared to an ‘eagle’ and an ‘antelope’. These animals
represents two things: freedom and togetherness/family. The eagle is a particularly powerful symbol in the US:
the bald eagle was adopted as a national symbol in 1782 just 6 years after freedom was won from the British.
This association seems obvious when we see eagles hunting solo in empty skies, soaring high and proud.
Antelopes are a less clear symbol of freedom, but their nimbleness and speed mean that they are able to escape
and outrun their predators (most of the time). However, antelopes are also heavily associated with their state of
togetherness. They roam in large herds and flock together as another form of protection. An eagle can also be
seen to represent togetherness as they mate for life and thus could reflect the image of perfect, monogamous
marital existence.
Then we see what Wylie presents her poetic voice/herself as not possessing. She states ‘I am in nature none of
these things’, which acknowledges that her life shares neither of these connotations.
6. Second Stanza
I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.
She stresses that ‘being human, [I am] born alone’, which show a degree of
cynicism about the world we enter as she feels that humans are born without
love and support. The word alone is highly emotive and conveys a sense of
despair for her situation as it is termed so absolutely and as if this is an
indisputable fact. This comment is at once about her existence and also a
comment on the wider human condition and paints the human world as
somewhere very bleak and cold.
Following on from this she associates her gender with even greater difficulties.
She presents women as being ‘hard beset’, which means they are faced with
many problems and this relates directly to the gender inequality meaning that
women were not free to pursue their own lives, but rather were brought up to
serve men.
Also, she uses a metaphor comparing her joy in life being achieved through
‘squeezing from a stone’. When you squeeze a stone you do not get any liquid
coming out and thus she feels like she is striving hard to get something out of
the stone/life, but receives ‘little nourishment’. Nourishment suggests that what
she is striving for (or what she was hoping for), namely freedom and love, is an
absolute basic necessity for keeping us alive and healthy.
7. Third
StanzaIn masks outrageous and
austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped
my smile.
In the third stanza, she faces life in ‘masks outrageous’, which implies that has to
wear a disguise in public to hide her misery. The fact this disguise is ‘outrageous’
stresses just how difficult she has found it to put on a brave face as the disguise
must be completely divorced from the reality of her emotions.
We get a sense of just how melancholy an existence she lives as she describes it
as ‘austere’ and with years going ‘by in single file’. Austerity is the very basic
existence, doing just enough to survive and nothing more. Contrast this with the
common idiom time flies when you are having fun. Misery seems to drag on
forever.
However, the ‘But’ at the beginning of the second last line tells us that despite her
suffering there is some way she can survive. Her saviour here is the fact that ‘none
has merited my fear’, meaning that she has never sunk so low into misery that she
has had enough. ‘None has quite escaped my smile’ finally gives us a tiny ray of
light as even in her misery, at lacking freedom and true love/togetherness, she is
able to find some joy in the world.
8. Themes
Love could be one of the themes since this poem is about someone who feels unfulfilled and
bereft of love. It also has a gender aspect, as love and fulfillment is positioned as something
extremely difficult for a woman to achieve.
Tone
We have an opening wobble of emotions and deep misery as hope is put to bed, but then
a cold acceptance of the reality of her fate. Within this acceptance we find a slight glimmer
of joy peaking out in the final line.
