A Poet In Sea Girt

In 1897 William McKinley was inaugurated as the 25th US President. The Boston Marathon was held for the first time. The Yukon gold rush began in the Klondike. Dracula was released by Irish author Bram Stoker. Oscar Wilde was released from jail, after serving time for gross indecency. The author was a provocateur and pushed against Victorian norms.

The New York Rifle Association moved their national invitational shooting contests to the Sea Girt Guard Camp site from Long Island, and shooters from as far away as Savanah Georgia would compete for almost $15,000 in prizes. The training would be utilized a year later when the US entered the Spanish-American War. It also raised the prominence of the camp, as the best shooters were minor celebrities and often brought their wives to stay in the hotels.

Helen Gray Cone stayed at the Tremont in Sea Girt for several seasons in the late 1890s, and she gave lectures and did poetry readings for the guests. Most guests were there for an extended period of time. The proprietors wanted to entertain their guests, but also to impress upon prospective guests their list of prominent hotel guests. The Letchworth house (Grand Victorian) in Spring Lake was the haunt of Princeton professors in the 1880s, the Chateau and the Allaire attracted actors for the Community House theater in the 1930s-1950s. The Beach House was the default hotel for politicians.

There is no evidence Helen was given a discount for her lectures, but it was a regular practice to barter for lower rates.

Helen was born in Harlem and after graduation from college at 17 spent 10 years as a professional poet. In 1882 her satire of Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde caught the attention of magazine and newspaper writers when she was published in Century Magazine at age 23.

From then on, Helen’s name came up when listing the rising writers of American Poetry. Emily Dickinson, a prolific poet of the same period, was left out of those lists. Dickinson’s poems would not be widely known until after her death in 1886, and in the 90s she was just being recognized.

Helen was hired as a professor of English and then the Department Chair at her alma mater. The Normal School (Hunter College). Her vitality and enthusiasm for her students made her one of the most popular lecturers at the school.

Her association with the school lasted over 50 years. From 1885 to 1919, Helen Gray Cone published five volumes of verse which, “established her among minor poets of America and giving her a measure of international fame.”

Mary Dezember, the foremost contemporary scholar on the life of Cone notes:

“Helen Gray Cone was a remarkable poet with an impressive resume, especially for a woman in the nineteenth century. I am struck by the skill and innovation of her first two books and by her accomplished life. She was a respected, prominent American poet and scholar, a pioneer in women's college education, and a suffragist. She was among the first to advocate American women's voices as literary voices. She was the first woman professor at Hunter College in New York City and was English department chair. Dr. Cone merits ever-increasing recognition.”

Her website discusses Helen more: marydezember.com/helen-gray-cone.

In 1891, The Critic wrote:

“The outlook for the future of poetry in this country grows distinctly brighter with the appearance of Miss Helen Gray Cone’s new volume of poems … containing some of the finest and most striking poetic work that has recently been done. These poems show a power of imagination and a strength of expression sufficient to entitle their author to the foremost place among her contemporaries and, at the same time, to a place in the ranks of the best of our older poets: they reveal a quality of poetic talent of the rarest kind, and betray, what modern poetry so seldom betrays—namely, genuine inspiration”

Helen wrote this poem which is a memory of her days at the Shore after returning to the “stony streets” and “fainter air” of Manhattan.

A Memory

Though pent in stony streets, ’tis joy to know,

’Tis joy, although we breathe a fainter air,

The spirit of those places far and fair

That we have loved, abides; and fern-scents flow

Out of the wood’s heart still, and shadows grow

Long on remembered roads as warm days wear;

And still the dark wild water, in its lair,

The narrow chasm, stirs blindly to and fro.

Delight is in the sea-gull’s dancing wings,

And sunshine wakes to rose the ruddy hue

Of rocks; and from her tall wind-slanted stem

A soft bright plume the goldenrod outflings

Along the breeze, above a sea whose blue

Is like the light that kindles through a gem.

This next one was of death, as simple as a butterfly she found at the edge of the water.

Henry Bossett of Chicago Blvd took this iconic photo of a monarch on the beach. Maggie Bossett and Jackie Joule have been advocates for saving the Monarch habitat along the Atlantic flyway. They have become much more rare than in Helen Cone’s time. https://issuu.com/wainscotmedia/docs/springlake_october23_issuu

AN EPITAPH WRITTEN IN THE SAND,

ON A BUTTERFLY DROWNED IN THE SEA.

Poor Psyche, to a Power supernal wed,

How strong a fate on this thy frailness fell!

What strange ironic word shall here be read?

Dead sign of immortality, farewell!

I sigh not that the summer fields have lost

One flying flower: who counts the butterflies?

I sigh not that thy sunny hour was crossed

The self-same Shadow surely waits mine eyes.

Thy piteous terror of the appointed end,

For this I sigh! The billow, poised above,

Fell on thee like the beast that leaps to rend;

Thou couldst not know thy bridegroom Death was Love!

How otherwise thy sister, yea the Soul

Bent brooding o’er these broken wings of thine!—

Through all her house of mystery once she stole

To the inmost room, and found a Face benign.

Now whirl her where ye must, ye waves of Law—

Aye, tear her vans, her painted hopes, apart!

She cannot fear, remembering what she saw:

Dark bridegroom Death, she knows thee Who thou art!

To read more about Helen check out Mary Dezember’s website https://www.marydezember.com/helen-gray-cone

William Trost Richards painted this seascape. A brilliant landscape artist, he likely visited Sea Girt with his son Teddy. Teddy was a Haverford classmate of Marriott Morris and he went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics

Helen Gray Cone died in 1934. She never married. She was celebrated by Hunter College as the most admired and influential teacher of the first half of the century.