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The Venus of Milo

1849 –

1916

O peerless marble marvel! what of grace,
Or matchless symmetry is not enshrined
In thy rare contours! Could we hope to find
The regal dignity of that fair face
In aught less beautiful? We would retrace,
At sight of thee, our willing steps where wind
The paths great Homer trod. Within whose mind
Wast thou a dream, O Goddess? Nearer pace
Brave Hector, reckless Paris, as we gaze;
Then stately temples, fluted colonnades
Rise in their sculptured beauty. Yes! ’tis Greece,
With all the splendor of her lordliest days,
That comes to haunt us: ere the glory fades
Let Fancy bid the rapture never cease.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 11, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

In 1876, Ray’s poem “Lincoln” was read at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C. Ray died in 1917.

About Henrietta Cordelia Ray

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Themes

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About this Poem

“The Venus of Milo” first appeared in Henrietta Cordelia Ray’s collection Poems (The Grafton Press, 1910). As Heidi Morse, lecturer in the department of Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan, writes in “Black Classical Ruins and American Memory in the Poetry of H. Cordelia Ray,” published in Legacy vol. 34, no. 1 (2017), Ray’s Italian sonnet to the famed sculpture of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, “brings into play an implicit tension between the idealized female form of the Venus and the ‘symmetry’ and ‘contours’ of the traditional European sonnet, which itself is strongly associated with women’s bodily objectification [. . .]. While deploying the sonnet’s formal structure, Ray invokes and then disrupts its traditionally gendered gaze. [. . .] [T]he [B]lack female poet displaces Venus’s commercialized, racialized, and sexualized American appropriations and becomes a direct witness to and inheritor of Greece’s ‘glory.’”

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My Easter Dove

There came a dove, an Easter dove,
When morning stars grew dim;
It fluttered round my lattice bars,
To chant a matin hymn.

It brought a lily in its beak,
Aglow with dewy sheen;
I caught the strain, the incense breathed,
And uttered praise between.

Henrietta Cordelia Ray

1910

July

Sunshine and shadow play amid the trees
In bosky groves, while from the vivid sky
The sun’s gold arrows fleck the fields at noon,
Where weary cattle to their slumber hie.
How sweet the music of the purling rill,
Trickling adown the grassy hill!
While dreamy fancies come to give repose

Henrietta Cordelia Ray

1910

Niobe

O mother-heart! when fast the arrows flew,
   Like blinding lightning, smiting as they fell,
   One after one, one after one, what knell
Could fitly voice thy anguish! Sorrow grew 
To throes intensest, when thy sad soul knew
   Thy youngest, too, must go. Was it not well,
   Avengers wroth, just one to spare? Ay, tell
The ages of soul-struggle sterner? Through
The flinty stone, O image of despair,
   Sad Niobe, thy maddened grief did flow
In bitt’rest tears, when all thy wailing prayer
   Was so denied. Alas!

Henrietta Cordelia Ray

1893

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The Venus of Milo

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