Poems (Scudder)/A Provincetown Summer

by Antoinette Quinby Scudder

A PROVINCETOWN SUMMER

FOR M.A.R.

One summer I spent on old Cape Cod
 In a town where the "Portygees"
Were at strife with the lean New England folk
 For the spoil of the cold North seas.

I rented a room in a big white house—
 How the artists loved to paint
The sulphur roses and hollyhocks
 That grew in its garden quaint.

I would wake at dawn in the high white bed
 And gaze up the narrow street
To the wee churchyard where the tall headstones
 Stood orderly, grave and sweet

Though so few were straight and the most part leaned
 To each other in friendly way
Like the sober greeting of Quaker dames
 In their russet and gentle grey.

And all through the leaves of chestnut and elm
 The sun made a cool green glow
As it shone through smaragd tinted water
 Round the weedy piers below.

And then I'd dress and go hurrying down
 To the rickety barn that we
Called "our studio." I was often late,
 But the coffee kept hot for me.

We were always sketching a red-roofed pier
 Where the seagulls whirled all day,
Or a boat that turned on its helpless side
 Like an empty mussel lay.

Or a rusty can that the shrinking tide
 Left glittering in our view
With such tints of copper, garnet and rose
 That Titian would love it too.

—One day I went to the upland moor
 And a thunder-shower came;
But I braved the wet for I yearned to paint
 How the fireweed's rippling flame

Went scorching through heather dust-brown and dead
 Till it quenched at last might be
In a small round pool that stared at the sky
 Dead-blue as chalcedony.

Well, the pictures we toiled so hard to make—
 They were crude affairs enough
With the paint laid on in "daring" strokes,
 All ragged and thick and rough.

—But oh, for the fearless eyes of my youth
 That were never afraid to see,
And oh, for the glamour of summer days
 In an artists' colony.