Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard's "Nameless Pain"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard (1823-1902) was a poet, fiction writer, and essayist born and raised in Mattapoisset, Massachusetts. The daughter of a shipbuilder, Stoddard was educated at Wheaton Female Seminary.

She married poet Richard Stoddard in 1851 and together they had three children, two of whom died as infants. The Stoddards’ New York City home was a gathering place for local poets, and Elizabeth began to submit her own poetry, fiction, and social commentary to journals. From 1854 to 1858, Stoddard contributed a bimonthly column to the San Francisco newspaper Daily Alta California.Stoddard wrote three novels, including The Morgesons (1862), and many short stories, essays, children’s tales, and poems. Uncommon for her time, her work questions the conventions of gender roles and is rooted in an unsentimental, irreverent realism. Her poetry, gathered in Poems (1895), often examines a fragile domestic realm.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, February 28th, 2004.
0:09.6	Today's poem is by Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard. The 19th century poet, poetess, born 1823, died 1902.
0:23.6	Stoddard wrote poetry, fiction, essays.
0:28.6	She was the wife of the poet Richard Stoddard,
0:34.6	and she received a seminary education from the women's school at Wheaton.
0:44.4	One of the things that makes Stoddard a little bit unusual for her time is that she wrote
0:51.1	very frank poems about the difficulties and anxieties of a woman's life without being a
1:06.1	progressive crusader for something other than her station, which is a tension that's captured well in today's poem, Nameless Pain.
1:21.7	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.
1:28.7	Nameless pain.
1:32.5	I should be happy with my lot.
1:35.6	A wife and mother.
1:37.2	Is it not enough for me to be content?
1:40.2	What other blessing could be sent?
1:42.8	A quiet house and homely ways that make each day like other days.
1:49.1	I only see time's shadow now darken the hair on baby's brow.
1:55.0	No world's work ever comes to me.
1:57.0	No beggar brings his misery.
1:59.4	I have no power, no healing art with a bruised soul or broken
2:03.7	heart. I read the poets of the age, tis lotus eating in a cage. I study art, but art is dead
2:12.4	to one who clamors to be fed with milk from nature's rugged breast, who longs for labor's lusty rest.
2:20.9	Oh, foolish wish,
	...

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