Hazel Hall knew stillness from the inside. Born in 1886, she spent much of her adult life in a wheelchair after a childhood illness, earning her living as a seamstress in Portland, Oregon, while the world went on outside her window. In that quiet room she wrote poems that turned apparent passivity into sharp observation. Her short lyric “My Song,” first published in her 1921 collection Curtains, takes up one of her recurring subjects: what it means to speak, or to choose not to. The title Curtains is telling: curtains divide the private room from the public street, just as a scabbard divides a blade from the world.
The poem’s situation is compact and strange. The speaker announces in the first line that her song “was a sword” and now “is still.” That little word “still” does double work: the song is motionless, but it has not vanished. She has not simply lost that weapon; she has built “a covering with my will / To sheathe its blade.” The song is personified as a dangerous instrument, something with its own life. In the second quatrain she remembers what it could do: its “flashing tongue of steel” startled “old shadows” and would not allow “the darkness” to close around her heart. That image is deliberately unsettling. A tongue is an organ of speech, but here it is made of steel, cutting and quick. The darkness that might “heal” suggests a wound or a protective numbness; the song kept slicing it open, refusing to let the speaker settle into silence. So the decision to make a scabbard is an act of self-defense, yet it is also a kind of mourning for a power now contained.
The poem’s shape echoes that containment. Two tight quatrains compress the entire drama into eight lines, and the first stanza gradually shortens from eight syllables to four, as if the poem is visibly shrinking into its covering. The alternating rhymes—still and will, made and blade, steel and heal, start and heart—make the language lock into place almost mechanically, as if the verse itself were a scabbard fitted to the blade. The meter is mostly iambic, but the lines shorten and lengthen unpredictably, creating a slight tension between the poem’s neat rhyme and its restless syntax. The near rhyme of “still” and “will” stands out: the will’s covering is just slightly off, not quite perfect, so the song’s sharp edge peeks through. The image of the sword and scabbard carries old associations with knights and battles, yet Hall turns the conflict inward. The “flashing tongue” does not attack an enemy outside; it startles “old shadows” within, keeping the speaker’s own darkness from becoming a settled, healing cover. Even the punctuation holds things back, with the period after “still” acting like a small gate closing.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to treat song as purely liberating. Hall does not celebrate expression; she admits that a voice can wound, keep old pain alive, and make peace impossible. At the same time, the poem is itself a song, written in carefully measured words. That paradox—a poem about silence that speaks—is at the heart of its power. The scabbard is made “with my will,” not by force, so the silence is chosen. Yet the speaker cannot fully vanish, because she is still writing. Hall’s biography sharpens this tension. A person who was often treated as passive found in poetry a way to move through language; yet here she imagines that movement as dangerous enough to need sheathing. For a woman whose body and social world were tightly bounded, the poem turns restraint into a creative act, but it leaves the reader wondering whether the sheathed song is safer or simply lost. That unresolved question makes “My Song” linger long after its eight lines end.