Lizette Woodworth Reese spent her career in Baltimore, publishing spare, musical lyrics from the late nineteenth century until her death in 1935. At a time when many poets were breaking apart regular form, she kept returning to the short rhymed lyric, often turning a single natural image into a large emotional question. “Alien” is one of her most quietly eerie works: an elegy for a woman—or perhaps a spirit—who never quite consented to be held by the human world.
The poem opens with the speaker’s defining comparison: “She was a wild plum flower,” fair and “breathless,” as if her blooming were also a wind, “as it were the last spring.” That simile sets the terms: wild, white, brief, and slightly uncanny. The central idea is not simply that she died young or disappeared; it is that she was always elsewhere. The middle stanzas are built of negations. “Not anything to her” were a “spire with stars for fold,” a single perfect rose, or “a sack full of gold.” She could not be made to care for “sheep bells coming home,” for “yarrow in a field,” for “gilded frock or comb.” These objects map out a whole world of ordinary human striving—faith, romance, wealth, domestic peace, pastoral beauty, adornment—and she turns from all of it without visible refusal. Her indifference is not rebellion; it is distance. She is, as the title insists, an alien.
The poem’s construction sharpens that feeling. Five quatrains move in short lines with an ABCB rhyme scheme, a folk-song pattern that usually promises warmth and resolution. Here the simple rhythm feels almost breath-held. Rhymes such as “fold” and “gold,” “night” and “sight,” “out” and “about” are plain but final. The first and fourth stanzas frame the poem with the same image: “a wild plum flower.” At first the flower is her nature; later, “once, like a wild plum flower,” she “strewed her leaves to night.” The repetition turns metaphor into fate. The moment of vanishing is compressed into one breath: “All her white loneliness / In a moment gone from sight.” The phrase “white loneliness” fuses color, feeling, and solitude, tying her again to the plum blossom while also suggesting blankness and pallor.
Reese’s language does much work in a small space. The word “blowing” in “A breathless blowing hers” suggests both a flower opening and a wind moving through it, so her life is inseparable from motion and dispersal. “Last spring” places her at an ending rather than a beginning. The rejected “spire with stars for fold” is the poem’s most compressed image: a church steeple whose flock or congregation might be the stars themselves, a vision of cosmic belonging she does not need. The final stanza turns to paradox. “Timeless she lasts, but where / We have not yet found out”—the speaker does not say she is gone, only that the search continues and ordinary places have failed. The repeated “but” in the closing lines keeps the question open.
What makes “Alien” significant is its refusal to console in the expected ways. Many elegies place the lost person firmly in heaven, in memory, or in the earth. Reese leaves her “not in any town / Or any house about.” She is not domesticated after death, just as she was not domesticatable in life. The old-fashioned song form holds a very modern loneliness: the experience of loving someone who remains but cannot be located. That unlocatable presence gives the poem its strange, lingering power—like a white flower whose petals have scattered into the dark.