Marya Zaturensky's "The Girl Takes Her Place Among the Mothers"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem goes out to all the mothers–we wouldn’t be here without you! Happy reading.

Marya Zaturensky, Russian-born American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born on September 12, 1902, in Kiev, Russia (now Ukraine). She emigrated to the United States with her family in 1909 and was educated in New York public schools; attended Valparaiso University, 1922–23; graduated from University of Wisconsin, 1925. The same year she married Horace Gregory (a poet and critic), and had two children: Joanna and Patrick.

Zaturensky won the John Reed Memorial Award from Poetry magazine (1922), the Shelley Memorial Award (1935), the Guarantors Award from Poetry magazine (1937), and finally the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.4	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, May 12, 2025.
0:13.5	Yesterday was Mother's Day.
0:15.5	So today's poem is dedicated to all the mothers out there.
0:19.2	It's by Maria Zatarensky, a Kiev-born Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S.,
0:24.7	who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938, and it's called The Girl Takes Her Place
0:31.5	Among the Mothers. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.
0:37.7	The Girl Takes Her Place it one more time. The girl takes her place among the mothers.
0:41.5	There's an epigraph from Alfred Lord Tennyson to link the generations each to each.
0:49.9	I wake in the night with such uncertain gladness, fearing the little pain beneath my heart,
0:56.8	the little pains that cease again and start,
0:59.9	delicious fear that aches with a strange madness.
1:03.9	And is this eye, I say,
1:05.8	seeing my shadowed face in the old mirror
1:08.1	where I laughing saw,
1:10.2	so long ago, beautiful, without flaw, its delicate
1:14.4	young lines and careless grace. This pain, these happy pains that seem to blend in my young
1:22.7	blood with old forgotten mothers, daughters of my race and unremembered others, the pain that foretells
1:29.7	life's beginning and end. And is this eye, I say, beholding my body's line, fragile and young,
1:38.3	but not the body I knew. Now I am drunken with the ancient wine child as it was with others so with you
1:47.9	this is to risk upon a very pregnant poem that develops or gives birth to an idea gradually over
2:00.6	the course of these four stanzas.
	...

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