Poems

“The poet’s secret I must know”: Elizabeth Stoddard begins with a restless speaker who questions flowers, trees, and women’s eyes—and still cannot find the light that fills a poet’s soul.

In this late-nineteenth-century collection, Stoddard’s poems turn from the seasons and their changing landscapes to the private weather of memory, grief, and longing. A ruined house by the sea, a woman searching its darkened windows, and ghosts summoned at Christmas give her reflections an eerie edge; elsewhere, a primrose lifts its head against the March wind. Her speakers look for peace in nature and in the past, yet neither offers easy answers. What might the vanished house, the returning ghosts, and the poet’s elusive secret reveal about the lives that linger within these poems?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.