460 Making It New: 1900–1945realm of her nativity,” not only returns to the mother but is herself transformed into
Demeter. This is the case, for example, with the title poem of a volume Le Sueur
published in 1975, “Rites of Ancient Ripening,” which, like much of the later writing,
mixes ancient Greek myth with the legends of American Indian cultures to create a
sense of continuity, a continuous harmony between the human body and the body
of the earth. In “Rites of Ancient Ripening” it is, in fact, the Demeter–mother–earth
figure who speaks. “Luminous with age,” she is anticipating death, but death will be
a renewal, since her body will nourish and fertilize the earth. “The rites of ancient
ripening / Make my flesh plume,” she declares. “And summer winds stir in my
smoked bowl. / Do not look for me till I return.” That sense of affirmation is there
too, sometimes, in the earlier work, although divorced from the Persephone myth or
any other legend. In “Annunciation” (1935), for instance, the bleak world of a
pregnant woman is transformed by her “inward blossoming.” The pear tree outside
her tenement porch, producing its fruit even in the “darkest time” just like her,
becomes a symbol for rebirth and the continuity of life. Le Sueur had herself decided
to have a child in 1927 as a deliberate affirmation of life in a world that she felt
had become “dead” and “closed” thanks to social injustice and oppression. And
“Annunciation,” which she began in the year of her pregnancy, in the form of notes
to her unborn child, communicates a profoundly personal as well as deeply
passionate sense of “the bud of a new flower within the time of the old.” Conducting
“a kind of conversation” with her unborn baby, the young woman of the story feels a
deep sense of kinship with the flowering she perceives around her. “I feel like a tree,”
she declares, “in a trance of wonder.” “The alley below and all the houses are to me
like an orchard abloom, shaking and trembling”; the pear tree outside her window
participates like her in this “slow time of making,” “the leaves are the lips of the tree
speaking in the wind as they move like so many tongues.” What woman and tree
share is what the speaker in “Rites of Ancient Ripening” experiences: the secret of
life, renewal, resistance to death and the deathlike institutions of society. Creativity,
the blossoming of the earth, the human body and human speech and writing, is set
in fierce opposition to a time of darkness, and in a “strange and beautiful” way, as the
young woman reflects, it is triumphant.
“People are ready to flower and they cannot.” That comment in “Annunciation”
suggests just how closely the political and the personal, the social and the mythic, are
interwoven in Le Sueur’s work. She is perpetually concerned with how “the body
repeats the landscape” (“The Ancient People and the Newly Come” (1976)) and
how, in recognizing the imperatives of the body, it is possible to resist and triumph
over a “society built upon a huge hypocrisy, a cut-throat competition which sets one
man against another” (“I Was Marching” (1934)). That recognition, Le Sueur
intimates, is easier for women, since “they don’t read the news,” she says, “they very
often make it. They pick up at its source, in the human body, in the making of the
body, and the feeding and nurturing of it day in and day out” (“Women Know a Lot
of Things” (1937)). Their history has very often been “suppressed within the history
of man,” she believes, which is why the recognition of renewal, continuity and
communality, is hidden from American society and one reason why she has chosenGGray_c04.indd 460ray_c 04 .indd 460 8 8/1/2011 7:54:01 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 01 AM