Enchantment
Here
crawls
moon—
—
Out
of
this
Hole
out
of
this
hole—
—
slips
moon —
out
of
this
cloudhole
Traditional
she
points
Lightdipped
toetips.
shrill
insectchimes
turn
me
Rigid.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 4, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Enchantment” first appeared in The Transatlantic Review vol. 2, no. 2 (August, 1924). The poem was selected for publication by a twenty-five-year-old Ernest Hemingway, who served as the guest editor of that particular issue. In Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (MIT Press, 2011), biographer Irene Gammel and scholar Suzanne Zelazo write, “There are at least eight variants of this poem. The first bilingual versions, titled ‘Juli’ and ‘July,’ respectively, were written in conventional lines without the visual effects and submitted to [The Little Review] presumably around 1918–1922. [Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven] reworked the poem prior to its publication in 1924, gave it the new title ‘Enchantment’ (‘Verzauberung’ and ‘Zauber’ in German), and added a visual arrangement. The 1924 publication is most likely based on a handwritten version. The typescript is so heavily annotated with [her] marginalia that she recopied the entire poem. (Her concern was with specific word choices, suggesting use of the word trowels instead of crawls for the moon’s movement and removal of of, stripping the poem of its syntactic connectors.)” Regarding an alternate ending featuring the verb “smite” in place of “turn,” Freytag-Loringhoven wrote to her friend and editor Djuna Barnes, “If you think ‘Turn’ better—take Turn/I am uncertain about it anyway!”