Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote forty-six poems during her fourteen years as a professional writer, along with two published novels, nearly a hundred short stories, some periodical pieces, and a diary. Today her fiction is well known in the United States and abroad. Her poetry has been mostly ignored.
Chopin had tried to publish some of her poems, but only three appeared in her lifetime. Ten more were first published in 1932, another ten appeared for the first time in 1969, and the remaining twenty-three were first published in 1979. A volume that included thirty-two of them, all previously published, appeared in 1998. In the English-speaking world there is no book that gathers the forty-six together in one place.
The poems offer us insight into Kate Chopin’s thoughts and emotions during the years when she was writing her famous stories. Chopin was now in her forties, raising her six children by herself after her husband died. She was becoming known through works she was publishing in Vogue, the Youth’s Companion, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines.
In her poems Chopin writes about faith, dreams, friendship, and a yearning for love. Like her stories, her poems embody her determination to look carefully at her world and in simple, clear language tell us the truth about what she sees. Many of the poems focus on powerful emotions—on searching for God, on longing for the touch of another person—but they avoid sentimentality through subtle irony. They place Chopin in her historical context, in the 1890s, yet they explore her feelings in ways that reach out across the years to us.
Some of her poems sound like they were written in the eighteenth century, some like they were written yesterday. Some are playful, surprising, or puzzling. And some, you may conclude, are beautiful.
Seven Representative Poems
The Poems in Chopin’s Era
The Poems in the Twentieth Century
The Poems in Our Times
The Poems and Chopin’s Fiction
Notes
Seven Representative Poems
Kate Chopin wrote mainly lyric poems. They run from two to twenty-four lines. Her shortest poem is a meditation on religious faith:
Chopin describes here an experience becoming more common in Western countries in the late nineteenth century. Born in 1850, she (Catherine O’Flaherty) was raised as a Roman Catholic and in 1870 married Oscar Chopin in a Catholic church. But by the 1890s she had abandoned much of her Catholicism and was seeking a way of life in which religion loses much of its influence, everyday existence becomes increasingly secular, and people strive for autonomy. [If you’re a scholar or advanced student, you may want to click on the red links to track sources.]
This short poem is directed to a lover:
Chopin’s poems show us a passionate woman with intense friendships but a yearning for something more. Her biographers tell us that she truly loved her husband, but by the 1890s, a decade after his death, she is craving intimacy. “I am,” she writes in her diary, “younger today at 43 than I was at 23. What does it matter. Why this mathematical division of life into years! Days are what count—not years.”
In her poem “You and I” Chopin or the speaker in the poem asks an erstwhile lover whether they should rekindle their youthful attraction:
It’s not clear if the “I” Kate Chopin uses in some of her poems always refers to herself. Her biographers say that Chopin valued her privacy. In an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly she begins, “There is somewhere registered in my consciousness a vow that I will never be confidential except for the purpose of misleading.” However, she adds, “consistency is a pompous and wearisome burden, and I seek relief by casting it aside.”
She may have cast aside her burden in this touching little poem:
Then wouldst thou know?
Here and in other poems Chopin uses “thine” and “thou,” words that were obsolete in speech and writing by the 1890s, except in prayer and in the Religious Society of Friends for the most part. But they were words Chopin valued as affectionate in the works she knew by poets from William Shakespeare to Walt Whitman.
Chopin’s earliest poem “If It Might Be” is one in which notes by biographers and scholars can be instructive in describing who Chopin may be referring to in the lines:
If It Might Be
If it might be that thou didst need my life;
Now on the instant would I end this strife
’Twixt hope and fear, and glad the end I’d meet
With wonder only, to find death so sweet.
If it might be that thou didst need my love;
To love thee dear, my life’s fond work would prove.
All time, to tender watchfulness I’d give;
And count it happiness, indeed, to live.
Biographer Per Seyersted thinks this poem is “a possible expression of [Chopin’s] wish to join her dead husband.” Biographer Emily Toth thinks the “thee” is possibly a man named Albert Sampite, with whom Chopin at one time apparently had a close relationship. And scholar Barbara Ewell writes that “the paradoxes of sweet death and ambivalent life create here the faint but characteristic irony by which Chopin usually controls the latent sentimentality of her themes.”
This poem, like several others, was written for a specific person, a good friend:
To “Billy” with a Box of Cigars
These may be, without question,
Rather bad for your digestion.
But the Powers have not sent me
To preach sermons; they’ve but lent me
A keen desire to please you
Now and always without end,
And a little wish to tease you
With the fondness of a friend.
Emily Toth tells us that “William Marion Reedy was the one who—without a hint of romantic interest—was the greatest promoter of Kate Chopin’s writings. As an editor, he was her most loyal colleague. . . . Reedy genuinely appreciated women writers and saw them as colleagues, not as sexual prey.”
Scholars sometimes dismiss poems addressed to a particular person or commemorating a particular event on the logic that they are “occasional,” of little interest to anyone else. But through such poems Chopin introduces us to people around her, including some who influenced the fiction she was writing. “Billy” Reedy, Toth writes, “was handsome, with penetrating dark eyes and unusually white, soft hands for a man—both characteristics that Chopin gave her character Gouvernail in the story ‘Athénaïse’ as well as in ‘A Respectable Woman’ and The Awakening.”
Chopin’s poems have some familiar themes, and, perhaps, some unfamiliar ones:
* An important moment best kept secret (“If the Woods Could Talk,” “Let the Night Go”)
* A lost opportunity (“The Roses,” “By the Meadow Gate”)
* A friendship (“For Mrs. Ferris,” “To Henry One Evening Last Summer”)
* A yearning for affection (“If Some Day,” “One Day”)
* A longed-for retreat (“White Oaks”)
* A hope to rejoin a deceased lover (“Alone”)
*The possibility of a drug-induced hallucinatory experience (“Ah! Magic Bird”)
Chopin wrote the last of her forty-six poems on August 24, 1900. She was now fifty years old and no doubt hurt by damaging newspaper reviews of The Awakening the year before. She would write three or four additional short stories before she died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1904.
Her poem is addressed to Kitty Garesché, her childhood friend who spent her adult life as a Sacred Heart nun and who most likely influenced Chopin’s short story “Two Portraits (The Wanton and the Nun).” August 24 was Kitty’s birthday:
To the Friend of My Youth: To Kitty
It is not all of life
To cling together while the years glide past.
It is not all of love
To walk with clasped hands from first to last.
That mystic garland which the spring did twine
Of scented lilac and the new-blown rose,
Faster than chains will hold my soul to thine
Thro’ joy, and grief, thro’ life—unto its close.
Chopin captures in this poem much of what is clear elsewhere in her poetry: her ardent friendships with people (here with a woman who had a life very different from her own), her partiality to springtime and roses, her fondness for the affectionate “thine,” and her awareness of death, of the passing of time, of growing old.
The Poems in Chopin’s Era
Kate Chopin wrote “The Haunted Chamber” in February 1899 as she was checking her publisher’s proofs for The Awakening and thinking about how critics and readers might react to Edna Pontellier’s sexuality and suicide in the novel.
This is a remarkable poem coming out of the United States in the nineteenth century! Two men joke about a “fair, frail, passionate woman who fell,” a woman neither of them knew, but one whose death later haunts the room they drink their alcohol and smoke their cigars in, prompting one of them to brood about the difficulties women face, even though he thinks he has “nothing to do” with this woman’s “torment.”
Critic Sandra Gilbert cites the poem at the beginning of her widely discussed introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Awakening, writing that “unspoken and unspeakable, the destiny of one lost lady symbolizes the wordless wail of every woman whose passion for self-fulfillment has been forbidden or forgotten.”
In her stories Kate Chopin describes again and again the painful effects of being female in a profoundly patriarchal country. Readers around the world have come to love those stories in part because the words capture what many women have experienced for themselves.
But in her work Chopin shows that she is sensitive to a great deal more. In her era, the country was encountering exceptionally troubled, rapidly changing times. She was ten years old when the Civil War broke out, and as an adult she experienced the effects of Reconstruction, industrialization, and economic depression. She lived through social and cultural anxieties (alcoholism, divorce) along with continuing racism and sexism, although also through improvements in mobility (railroads) and communication (telephones), and the introduction of other life-changing products like cameras, electric lights, and ready-made clothing.
She was fully aware of what was going on around her, and in her novels At Fault and The Awakening and in many of her short stories she explores how her characters’ lives are shaped by the times they live in.
Her poems are different. Except for “Old Natchitoches” they do not focus on Louisiana, where most of her stories are set. They do not shift from English into Creole or Acadian. They do not deal with differences in wealth, race, ethnicity, class, or religion. Yet, like her stories, her poems present life through Chopin’s penetrating consciousness, now looking more inward than outward. She understands and shares the pain she sees at times in the world around her, but she takes comfort and finds hope in what’s ordinary in people’s lives, in what’s individual, everyday, private.
In composing her poems, Chopin turns to themes and techniques she learned from what Emily Toth says was her wide reading of British and American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Alexander Pope, William Collins, Thomas Gray, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was also inspired by Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It’s not clear if she read the handful of Emily Dickinson’s poems published before the 1890s. But her character Gouvernail quotes lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in the short story “A Respectable Woman” and from a sonnet by Algernon Charles Swinburne in The Awakening. There are echoes of these classic and contemporary poets’ work throughout Chopin’s verses.
The Poems in the Twentieth Century
Since only three of her poems were published in her lifetime, magazine and newspaper critics in the 1890s had nothing to say about them. The critics praised her local-color or regional stories collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), but they published largely negative, damaging reviews of The Awakening (1899) because of what for them was Edna Pontellier’s unacceptable behavior, especially her adultery and suicide.
In 1932 Daniel Rankin, who wrote the first book about Chopin’s work, agreed with the 1890s critics about Chopin’s short stories and The Awakening, but he was familiar with some of Chopin’s poems that had not been published, and he included ten in his book. “There is in all of them,” he says, “a note of love, a free expression of feelings, of tenderness, of wonder, sometimes of regret.”
In the 1940s and 1950s French scholar Cyrille Arnavon wrote about Kate Chopin in an article and then in his 464-page Histoire Littéraire des États-Unis (A Literary History of the United States) and in his 1952 translation of The Awakening into French (Edna, he called it), the first published translation of Chopin’s novel into another language.
Cyrille Arnavon rejected what critics in 1899 and Daniel Rankin in 1932 had said about The Awakening. He found Chopin’s novel “astonishing” (étonnant), something new in the Victorian-type fiction published in nineteenth-century America, a novel “describing a world inhabited by beings to whom sexuality is an imperative.” Arnavon did not discuss Chopin’s poetry in his article, his history, or his introduction to Edna. But when he was teaching at Harvard in 1959 he inspired Per Seyersted, a Norwegian graduate student, to gather together everything Kate Chopin had written and in 1969 to publish her Complete Works and a critical biography.
Per Seyersted lifted Chopin’s work from its long-held position as nineteenth-century local-color or regional fiction and placed it in the realm of women’s literature. Feminist and other critics embraced his arguments passionately and set in motion an exceptional literary revival, making The Awakening and Chopin’s short stories widely known and widely loved.
But Seyersted did not think much of Kate Chopin’s poetry. He notes that Chopin wrote “nearly fifty” poems, but in his Complete Works he includes only twenty of them. Chopin’s other poetry, he says, is “mostly occasional.” He is, however, astute in placing the poems in relation to international religious and other cultural developments in Chopin’s time.
Emily Toth, who worked with Seyersted in producing two volumes of some of Chopin’s unpublished writings, gives a good deal of space to the poems in her biographies published in 1990 and 1999. She situates the poems in their time and place and is uniquely positioned to explain what Chopin is saying at places. Thomas Bonner, Jr. lists and identifies all of the poems in his Kate Chopin Companion, and in the 1980s and 1990s a few scholars discuss Chopin’s work. Barbara Ewell is particularly helpful in approaching Chopin’s poetry. “The quantity of her verse,” she writes “and its occasional quality are notable, especially insofar as these pieces sharpen our insight into her mind and art.”
The Poems in Our Times
After the late twentieth century, scholars and others who have been writing about Kate Chopin, with one exception, write about her novels and short stories. They explore Chopin’s international influences, her reception around the world, her treatment of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Unitarianism, modernity, motherhood, childhood, patriarchal culture, environmental issues, the culture of New Orleans, plantation fiction, and other areas of consequence in The Awakening and the short stories.They rarely discuss her poems.
One person, however, expresses an admiration for Chopin’s poetry. In 2009 French poet, scholar, and translator Gérard Gâcon offered readers a book with his translations of Kate Chopin’s forty-six poems, the English originals on left pages of the book and his translations facing them on the right. Sous le ciel de l’été (Under the Summer Sky) it’s called, from the last line of Chopin’s poem “You and I.”
Gérard Gâcon understood that French readers are familiar with Kate Chopin’s fiction. Chopin’s poems, he argues, should be available. In the introduction to his book, he emphasizes that, along with her short stories and The Awakening, Chopin’s poems deserve to be read because “each element is a part of a mosaic, that of a singular voice, whose life and work form a thematic whole.” (Translations into English are by Monique Oyallon.)
Gâcon describes at length themes and ideas Chopin develops in her stories, and he insists that Chopin’s search for intensity and conciseness in her fiction informs the art of her poetry. In her poems, he says, Chopin “seizes very special moments as so many opportunities to chisel and carve the raw material of language, always remaining in her writing direct and simple.” He notes that whether the poems are “circumstantial—are about visits, gifts, or other personal moments in Chopin’s life—or whether they are of a more general nature,” they describe her “spontaneously poetic vision of the relationships of the individual to others and to the universe.” A sunrise, he says, “a drooping flower, a few robins lined up are all occasions where the details, the little things, are invested with universality because for Kate Chopin everything is carrying a message. Everything for this watchful soul is a sign of immanence to be deciphered.”
Love, Gâcon says, for Kate Chopin is a calling, a vocation “that becomes incantation, intoxication . . . a revealing and mystical outpouring in the great tradition of Omar Khayyam, who inspired her on at least one occasion, or by that of the ‘Song of Songs’” in the Bible. Although she has, he continues, “detached herself from the official dogma of Catholicism . . . she intends to remain attentive to the universe in its slightest stirrings, to perceive life on earth as the constantly renewed opportunity for participation, for an intuitive fusion where individual and cosmos become one.”
Gérard Gâcon finds beauty in Kate Chopin’s poetry. His translation and publication of the poems, he concludes, “seeks to fill a void: may it lessen what we can consider to be a form of injustice.”
The Poems and Chopin’s Fiction
Kate Chopin tried to publish some of her poems, to make them available for readers. In 1893 she sent six of them to Vogue, which had published five of her short stories and would eventually publish nineteen of them, including “The Story of an Hour.” Vogue editors, like those at other magazines, were not interested.
Their rejections must have been frustrating for her. She knew that writers, like other artists, live in their art, in their work, in what they share with their public. She was not pleased with the publication of letters written by the celebrated nineteenth-century actor Edwin Booth who had toured the United States and Europe performing in plays by William Shakespeare. In her 1894 newspaper review of those letters she writes:
It is not here that we are to look for the real Edwin Booth, in a puerile collection of letters, expressions wrung from him by the conventional demands of his daily life. The real Edwin Booth gave himself to the public through his art. Those of us who most felt its magnetic power are the ones who knew him best, and as he would have wished to be known. His art was his closest and most precious possession. Through it he was great, he was individual, he was a force that appealed to and acted upon the finer responsive chords of every human intelligence that heard him. It was the medium through which he expressed himself. He possessed no other form of expression by which to make himself known.
Kate Chopin understood that readers would know her through her art, through “The Story of an Hour,” “Désirée’s Baby,” or another short story or through The Awakening. It’s in those works that she is, as she would say, “great,” is “individual.” Her poems, too, are part of her art. It is through them, as well as through her stories about sensitive, courageous women, that she makes herself known to us, that she acts upon our “finer responsive chords.”
Through her candor in “I Wanted God,” her attachment to Kitty in “To the Friend of My Youth,” or her yearning for love in “If Some Day,” Kate Chopin draws us into her life in the 1890s, offers us, as she does in her other poems, intimate insight into the thoughts and emotions that shape her writing.
And in “The Haunted Chamber” Chopin integrates her poetry and her fiction and brings to mind for us what is so powerful in The Awakening, what is so distinctive throughout her writing, a feeling that, as she phrases it in the poem, “Women forever will whine and cry / And men forever must listen—and sigh—.”
Notes to “About Kate Chopin’s Poems”
Ostman, Catholicism, 1–12. These notes refer to items in the Works Cited list below.
Seyersted 49. Toth 107, Ewell 160. Kate Chopin understood the problems with sentimental literature. In her newspaper review of Emile Zola’s Lourdes, she objects to its “rampant sentimentality.” In her short story “A Sentimental Soul” she details Mamzelle Fleurette’s struggle with her priest’s scolding her “for being a fool, for being a sentimentalist.” In her story “Charlie” she pokes gentle fun at Charlotte, the seventeen-year-old title character, who writes poems entitled “Moonlight on the Mississippi” and “Relentless Fate, and thou, relentless Friend!” And she wrote a poem called “A Sentimental Serenade.”
Gilbert, “Introduction,” 8. These notes refer to items in the Works Cited list below.
Toth, Unveiling, 19, 39, 51, 148.
Margo Culley includes fourteen pages of excerpts from those reviews in her Third Norton Critical Edition of The Awakening, 179–92.
Arnavon, “Les débuts du roman réaliste américain,” 29.
Arnavon, “Introduction” to Edna, 2. The translations from Arnavon is by Monique Oyallon.
Seyersted writes that some of Chopin’s poems are “full of the sensuous and the passionate,” and that her “two main poetic themes” are “the awakening of the senses in spring” and “the wish for a reunion with the lost lover.” Nevertheless, he adds, “most of her poetry is undistinguished, when it is not downright awkward or trite. Though she admired Whitman, she seems to have been satisfied to use in her own verse only conventional diction and meter,” and he complains about her use of archaic words, her imagery, and her lack of “freshness or originality.” (Seyersted, Biography, 171.)
Chopin, Complete Works, edited by Seyersted, 18. In a 1971 review of the volume George Arms objects to Seyersted leaving out those twenty-six remaining poems. (See Arms, “Review” 137.) And in a 1975 article William L. Andrews quotes Seyersted saying that the omitted poems cannot “be said to bear on her work” but complains about the absence in the Complete Works of Chopin’s “I Opened All the Portals Wide” (also called “In Spring” or “O Fair, Sweet Spring!”). That poem, he argues, “the only poem Ms Chopin published in a national magazine, a poem, moreover, which appeared in the same year as The Awakening, may certainly be said ‘to bear on her work.’” (See Andrews, “Addition.” 118.)
Peggy Skaggs and Nancy A. Walker touch on the poems in their books.
Koloski, “Kate Chopin,” Oxford Bibliographies.
Gâcon “Introduction,” 39. ” These notes refer to items in the Works Cited list below.
Gâcon “Introduction,” 39.
Gâcon “Introduction,” 40.
Gâcon “Introduction,” 40. Heather Ostman in Kate Chopin and Catholicism finds in Chopin’s fiction what Gérard Gâcon calls in her poetry a “spontaneously poetic vision of the relationships of the individual to others and to the universe.” But Ostman thinks of such vision as coming not from the inspiration of Omar Khayyam or the “Song of Songs” but from Chopin’s background studying among Roman Catholic nuns. She writes of a “contemplative Chopin who probes the possibilities of mystical experience beyond the dogma, ritual, and materiality of Catholic practice—a quality of her writing that is nearly entirely ignored by critics.” (See Ostman, Chopin and Catholicism 6.)
Chopin, Complete Works, edited by Seyersted, 695–96.
Works Cited
Andrews, William L. “An Addition to Kate Chopin’s Poetry.” American Notes and Queries 13 (1975): 117–18.
Arms, George. “Review of Per Seyersted’s Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography and The Complete Works of Kate Chopin.” American Literature 43 (1971): 136–37.
Arnavon, Cyrille. “Introduction” to Edna by Kate Chopin. Club Bibliophile de France, 1952.
Arnavon, Cyrille. “Les débuts du roman réaliste américain et l’influence française.” Cahiers des Langues Modernes:Romanciers Américains Contemporains, no. 1. Librairie Didier, 1946.
Arnavon, Cyrille. Histoire Littéraire des États-Unis. Librairie Hachette,1953.
Beer, Janet, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Cambridge UP, 2008.
Bonner, Thomas, Jr. The Kate Chopin Companion: With Chopin’s Translations from French Fiction. Greenwood, 1988.
Chopin, Kate. A Kate Chopin Miscellany. Edited by Per Seyersted and Emily Toth. Northwestern [Louisiana] State UP, 1979.
Chopin, Kate. Kate Chopin’s Private Papers. Edited by Emily Toth, Per Seyersted, and Cheyenne Bonnell. Indiana UP, 1998.
Chopin, Kate. Sous le ciel de l’été. Translated with an introduction by Gérard Gâcon. Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2009.
Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Edited by Per Seyersted. Louisiana State UP, 1969.
Ewell, Barbara C. Kate Chopin. Ungar, 1986.
Gâcon, Gérard. “Introduction,” Sous le ciel de l’été by Kate Chopin. Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2009.
KateChopin.org, The Kate Chopin International Society. https://www.katechopin.org
Koloski, Bernard. “From the Beginning: Kate Chopin’s Works in France, with Translations by Monique Oyallon.” In Kate Chopin Around the World: Global Perspectives, edited by Heather Ostman, 13–29. Lexington, 2025.
Koloski, Bernard. “Kate Chopin.” In Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, edited by Jackson Bryer. Oxford UP, 2024.
Koloski, Bernard. “The Awakening: The First Hundred Years.” In The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin, edited by Janet Beer, 161–73. Cambridge UP, 2008.
Koloski, Bernard. ed. Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival. Louisiana State UP, 2009.
Leary, Lewis. “Kate Chopin, Liberationist?” Southern Literary Journal 3 (1970): 138-44.
Ostman, Heather. Kate Chopin and Catholicism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Rankin, Daniel S. Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories. U of Pennsylvania P, 1932.
Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Louisiana State UP, 1969.
Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin. Twayne, 1985.
Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin: A Life of the Author of The Awakening. Morrow, 1990.
Toth, Emily. Unveiling Kate Chopin. UP of Mississippi, 1999.
Walker, Nancy A. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life. Palgrave, 2001.
