Poem: Willa Cather's "The Hawthorn Tree"






THE HAWTHORN TREE
by Willa Cather
ACROSS the shimmering meadows--
Ah, when he came to me!
In the spring-time,
In the night-time,
In the starlight,
Beneath the hawthorn tree.

Up from the misty marsh-land--
Ah, when he climbed to me!
To my white bower,
To my sweet rest,
To my warm breast,
Beneath the hawthorn tree.

Ask of me what the birds sang,
High in the hawthorn tree;
What the breeze tells,
What the rose smells,
What the stars shine--
Not what he said to me!



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Willa Cather (1873 - 1947)
Willa Cather






Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved with her family to live in Webster County at the age of nine. After graduating from Red Cloud High School in 1890, she attended the university in Lincoln, Nebraska for five years, then moved to the east coast for the remainder of her life. She died in 1947 and was buried in New Hampshire.

The years in Red Cloud were important and formative years in the writer's life. Six of her twelve novels are set in the Red Cloud and Webster County of her youth, including One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.

For more information about Cather's life, visit these sites:

Willa Cather Site by Anne Lindhard. A beautiful site divided into Bibliography, Cather's Works, and Biography. Also included is Ms. Lindhard's own essay, "Frontier Nobility and Deep South Desolation: Comparative Analysis of Willa Cather's Neighbor Rosicky and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying."

Cather Page at Nebraska Department of Travel and Tourism offers a biography of Cather.

Willa Cather. From Domestic Goddess. Four critical essays in the Criticism section. A brief biography as well as a bibliography.

Willa Cather Archive, a hypermedia archive sponsored by the University of Nebraska Press and supported by Text Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Willa Cather Home Page from Harvard University (Scott Newstrom) is organized into these categories: Events (no longer updated), Publications, Locations, Quotations, Biography, Other. One of the earliest Cather sites on the Web.

Source: www.willacather.org



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