Lizette Woodworth Reese, a Baltimore schoolteacher who lived from 1856 to 1935, wrote in an era when American poetry was beginning to turn away from the parlor and the village lane toward harder, more modernist subjects. Yet her short poem “Possessions” shows why her quiet, old-fashioned materials still feel alive. Its subject—what a person truly owns—becomes less a lesson than a gradual act of listening and remembering.
The poem is an inventory made precise by sensory detail. An old house sits “a windy field or two from town,” close enough to village life but separate from it. Around that house are small, pungent things: a lavender clump alive with “cross, small bees,” larkspur described as “hot-blue as with a sting,” and mint that is “so brief and sharp a thing.” Inside are “tall, well-thumbed books” and a “green, white-flowered jug of delf.” Each object is ordinary, domestic, and handled by time. The central idea emerges in the poem’s movement from these physical objects toward less tangible ones: old friends who walk over on Sunday afternoons, the dusk that comes “like music blown from out a star,” and finally “Those Others” who drift across the dew. The speaker’s real possessions are not only the house and garden but the life they hold, including the absent and the dead. The closing line—“My early love — and you — and you!”—turns the list into an intimate address, as if memory itself is the final room of the house.
Reese builds this idea through pairing. The poem unfolds in rhyming couplets, mostly steady iambic tetrameter, and each couplet functions like a small, framed possession. The rhymes are sometimes exact, as in “down” and “town” or “shelf” and “delf,” and sometimes looser, as in “lavender” and “astir.” That slight roughness keeps the inventory from feeling too neat. The rhythm also shifts gently. The opening line is calm and balanced; later lines such as “Larkspur, hot-blue as with a sting” sharpen the beat with monosyllables and a comma that acts like a quick breath. The couplets allow the poem to move with the speaker’s attention from field to garden to shelf to parlor to evening air.
The imagery is deliberately small and vivid. “Hot-blue,” “cross, small bees,” and “brief and sharp” invite smell, touch, and temperature as much as sight. The books are not new but “well-thumbed,” a word that carries the warmth of repeated use. The word “old” recurs—old house, old friends—but it does not feel worn out; it suggests intimacy and endurance. The only item given a decorative name, “delf,” is still humble, a glazed jug rather than fine porcelain. Even the friends’ conversation is part of the inventory: they talk not of large events but of “the new shop” and “the wind that blew the apples down.” The poem treats such small talk as worthy, because it belongs to a shared world.
The final movement matters most. After the friends go, the dusk arrives “from afar, / Like music blown from out a star.” The simile lifts the poem beyond the village, yet it does not strain for grandeur; the music is “blown,” not orchestrated. Then the tone turns hushed. “Those Others drift across the dew”—people who are not named and not present, perhaps dead loves or earlier selves, made eerie but gentle by the word “drift.” The phrase “My early love — and you — and you!” gathers them in without sentimentality. The dashes hold the line open, as if more names could always follow. This is what gives “Possessions” its significance: it defines wealth not by accumulation but by attachment, and it understands that attachment includes loss. Reese’s formal modesty makes the ending fragile rather than melodramatic. The poem earns its title because the speaker possesses what cannot be taken away—not the house, but the texture of lavender, the voices on Sunday, the dusk, and the returning dead. In a period of growing speed and urban noise, this little lyric insisted that such remembered things were enough.