[239] Witchery

Out of the purple drifts,
    From the shadow sea of night,
On tides of musk a moth uplifts
    Its weary wings of white.
Is it a dream or ghost
    Of a dream that comes to me,
Here in the twilight on the coast,
    Blue cinctured by the sea?
Fashioned of foam and froth --
    And the dream is ended soon,
And lo, whence came the moon-white moth
    Comes now the moth-white moon!

       -- Frank Dempster Sherman

cinctured: girdled, encircled

A slightly weak poem, but nonetheless pleasant. The 'foam and froth' imagery
that permeates the poem is well done, and the bit of wordplay at the end is
nicely unexpected, but on the whole it's one of those poems that are more
enjoyable than 'good'. Doesn't really need anything more said about it.

Biography-of-sorts-dept:

While I couldn't find a proper biography of Sherman, snippets abound.

  Frank Dempster Sherman (1860 - 1916): American Architect

says the Poet's Corner; as good an opening line as any.

  "He did more work on the genealogy of the Sherman Family from England than
  any other person."

says the genealogy page at <http://www.cybercomm.net/~hsherman/photos.html>
(there's a picture of him there too). So if you want to know about his
ancestors, you can go take a look.

[GENEALOGY, n.
   An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly
   care to trace his own. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
]

He collaborated on an American Verse project with one Clinton Scollard; see
it at <http://hti.umich.edu/bin/amv-idx.pl?type=header&id=ScollSouth>

And finally, the Bibliomania site has this to say:

  Some of the poets, identified with this generation both by date of birth
  and the spirit of their verse, continue well into the twentieth century.
  Samuel Minturn Peck (born 1854) and Frank Lebby Stanton (born 1857) are
  poets of the South; the first a native of Alabama, the second, of South
  Carolina.

  Peck's first volume, Cap and Bells, appeared in 1886. Stanton, on the
  staff of the Atlanta Constitution, published Songs of the Soil in 1894.
  Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1916) published a first volume, Madrigals and
  Catches, in 1887. A Southern Flight (1906) was published in association
  with Clinton Scollard (1860-1932), whose earliest volume, Pictures in
  Song, had appeared in 1884. Both poets were natives of New York. Scollard
  was professor of English literature at Hamilton College (1889-1896) and
  Sherman was in the Faculty of Columbia University (1904-1916).

    -- <http://www.bibliomania.com/Reference/Simonds/SHAL/p5-chap6.html>

m.