Family Portrait

No one wanted poor Clarissa;
No one ever seemed to miss her.
All her sisters and her brothers
Duly grew to fathers, mothers;
But she had a shrillness for a voice
That scared away the neighbors’ boys,
A quirky pride hot in her brain —
And no beau ever called again.

Aunt Clarissa was not wanted.
She knew it well, but still undaunted
Rode up to Boston, and brought back
(With shocking evidence of her lack
Of what the family called taste)
A portrait of her, powdered, laced
Firm in her most expensive dress,
And not one hint of loveliness!
— Unless perhaps you did not mind her,
But looked away, and saw behind her
A purple curtain (decorated
With arms not quite authenticated)
Looped back upon a marble column
To show an ocean dim and solemn.
But the painter had no painter’s tact:
He was, unfortunately, exact;
Her mouth was shrill and proud and vexed
You knew just what she would say next. And when Great-Aunt Clarissa died.
They buried her, for all her pride;
Were sorry she had been erratic,
And moved the portrait to the attic.

To-day, the rest of them are known
To genealogy alone:
Three words a name, three dates a life,
So many children by each wife.
Drained off to various family lots,
Politely private, each one rots
Too deep to fertilize the grass,
With stones to tell who each one was.
Fathers, mothers, daughters, sons —
No dreams cling round those skeletons.

At last the tables arc quite turned.
Of all so quietly inurned,
Their silhouettes look commonplace
Next Great-Great-Aunt Clarissa’s face.
Above the mantelpiece they frame her,
But their flat smiles can never shame her
Out of her glaring, old resplendence.
Meanwhile collateral descendants
Take pride in her stern piteousness,
Feel romance in the wooden dress.
She triumphs — sterile, overweening —
Our only ancestor with meaning.