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Saying of Il Haboul

Adelaide Crapsey

1878 –

1915

^{Guardian of the Treasure of Solomon

And Keeper of the Prophet’s Armour}

My tent
A vapour that
The wind dispels and but
As dust before the wind am I
Myself.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 28, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

Adelaide Crapsey was born on September 9, 1878, in Brooklyn Heights, New York. She was the third child of the Reverend Algernon Sidney Crapsey and Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey. Within the first year after Crapsey was born, her father became rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Parish in Rochester, New York, where the family then moved.

About Adelaide Crapsey

Themes

About this Poem

“Saying of Il Haboul” appeared in Adelaide Crapsey’s Verse (The Manas Press, 1915). The poem is one of Crapsey’s cinquains, a form of her own invention that, as poet Louise Townsend Nicholl describes, in her review of Crapsey’s Verse published in the New Republic vol. 426 (January 31, 1923), follows a format of “five lines, one-stress, two-stress, three-stress, four-stress, and then caught back suddenly again to one-stress [. . .].” Shortly after the publication of Verse, in his critical anthology The Poetic Year for 1916 (Small, Maynard, and Company, 1917), William Stanley Braithwaite lauded Crapsey’s cinquains as “marvellously chiselled gems.” About this cinquain, Susan Sutton Smith writes, in her introduction to The Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey (State University of New York Press, 1977), that a “juxtaposition or superposition forms the poem’s heart: the vulnerability and impermanence of the speaker and his tent (body) are set against the eternal forces of the wind and the dust whirled before it. The title of the cinquain adds a further ironic contrast: the evanescent speaker, only a little more permanent than his flimsy dwelling, announces himself as a symbol of security, an officially recognized bulwark protecting the precious and perishable against change [. . .].”

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More by this poet

Amaze

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

Adelaide Crapsey

1915

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Every day, 
Every day, 
Tell the hours 
By their shadows, 
By their shadows.

Adelaide Crapsey

1915

November Night

Listen …
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

Adelaide Crapsey

1915

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Saying of Il Haboul

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