The Annotated Poems of Eleanor Vane

• Chapter 1 Salt Drift and Ink
• Chapter 2 Marginalia at Heron Head
• Chapter 3 The Fog Collector’s Ledger
• Chapter 4 Low Tide, High Silence
• Chapter 5 A Geography of Granite
• Chapter 6 Footnotes on the Nor’easter
• Chapter 7 The Parson’s Lost Letter
• Chapter 8 Sea Glass in the Pocket
• Chapter 9 The Drowned Orchard
• Chapter 10 Stanzas for an Empty Cottage
• Chapter 11 Variants on the Bell Buoy
• Chapter 12 Cedar Smoke and Winter Solstice
• Chapter 13 The Archivist’s Doubt
• Chapter 14 Driftwood and Drafts
• Chapter 15 An Elegy for Martha
• Chapter 16 The Penobscot Line
• Chapter 17 Ciphers in the Shingle
• Chapter 18 Black Lichen on White Pine
• Chapter 19 The Unprinted Sonnets
• Chapter 20 Gulls Over the Spindle
• Chapter 21 The Tide Pool Gloss
• Chapter 22 Scurvy Grass and Iron Nails
• Chapter 23 The Reconstructed Stave
• Chapter 24 A Departure Before Dawn
• Chapter 25 Cold Springs and Cobblestones
• Chapter 26 The Final Erasure

Editorial Introduction to the Early Manuscripts (1927–1928)

The poems collected in this opening movement represent the earliest surviving material written by Eleanor Vane following her sudden departure from Boston in late October 1927. Discovered in 1984 inside a galvanized iron breadbox beneath the floorboards of the woodshed at Heron Head, the loose leaves were bound together with tarred cod-line and badly affected by humidity. Several sheets show distinct encrustations of dried brine, suggesting they were written in close proximity to the high-water mark or carried during sea spray conditions.

At twenty-seven, Vane was entirely unknown in literary circles. Her family, a established family of Boston textile merchants, had reported her missing to the municipal police on November 2, 1927, after her rooms on Saint Botolph Street were found stripped of clothing, personal papers, and her heavy brass microscope. It was not until the publication of The Salt-Gage by the small, short-lived Maritime Press of Portland in 1931 that her presence on the outer reach of Penobscot Bay was confirmed to the public.

The present text follows the copy-text established by the 1928 private notebook, corrected against marginal variants written in iron gall ink on the backs of local receipt slips from the Miller & Son General Store. Editorial footnotes have been supplied to elucidate local geographic references, regional vernacular, and the complex web of biographical suppressions that characterize Vane’s early coastal period.

Departure from Saint Botolph’s

The parlor clock had six more strikes to spend
When the third trunk was strapped and set upright.
I left the copper kettle with a friend
And walked out sideways in the yellow light.

The cabman asked no business of the box
That weighed like ballast in the iron bed;
We took the street between the granite blocks
Where every window kept its shade pulled red.

Let Boston keep its tea and gilded spires,
Its ledger books, its pale, polite regret.
I have traded all its charcoal fires
For a place where even timber stays dripping wet.

A ticket northbound buys a quiet name,
A wooden berth above the throbbing screw,
A jar of ink without a scrap of fame,
And miles of salt between myself and you.

Annotations

Stanza 1, line 1: The parlor clock had six more strikes to spend
According to a letter dated November 4, 1927, from Eleanor’s sister, Clara Vane, to their uncle, the family home at 42 Saint Botolph Street maintained a rigid domestic schedule. "Eleanor failed to appear for the six o’clock tea," Clara wrote. "Her bed had not been turned down, though her second-best wool mantle was gone from the hall wardrobe." The clock referenced here is likely the French bronze mantel clock bequeathed to Eleanor by her grandmother, Elizabeth Vane, which remained behind on the mantelpiece with a single key laid beside it.

Stanza 1, line 3: I left the copper kettle with a friend
The "friend" was long suspected by earlier biographers (notably H. R. Finch, 1962) to be the painter Julian Pemberton. However, receipts uncovered at the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1999 indicate the kettle was actually left with Miss Martha Abernathy, an instructor in botany at the New England Conservatory. Abernathy was one of the few individuals who maintained sporadic, indirect contact with Vane during her first five years at Heron Head, often forwarding packages of Swedish drafting paper and chemical reagents under an assumed address.

Stanza 2, line 2: That weighed like ballast in the iron bed
The freight manifest for the coastal steamer S.S. Belfast, departing Boston Harbor at midnight on October 29, 1927, logs two heavy wooden crates consigned to "E. Vane, Rockland." Freight charges were $4.20, paid in cash. The weight—recorded at two hundred and ten pounds—was unusual for a solitary female traveler of the period and accounted for her personal library, consisting largely of 19th-century hydrographic surveys, three volumes of Donne, an annotated edition of Crabbe, and her chemical equipment.

Stanza 3, line 3: I have traded all its charcoal fires
A direct reference to the heating grates of the Saint Botolph Street residence. In her private diary from the previous winter (1926), Vane complained bitterly of the "stifling, dry dust of soft coal that settles upon the tongue and turns every line of verse to ash before it can be copied."

Stanza 4, line 4: And miles of salt between myself and you
The identity of "you" has been the subject of persistent scholarly debate. While early critics assumed the pronoun referred to her discarded fiancé, the Boston attorney Charles H. Loring, textual analysis of the variant manuscript preserved in the Portland archive shows an earlier draft reading: And miles of salt between the house and you. The capitalization of "House" in her private shorthand frequently denoted the entire Vane family line and its commercial enterprise, Vane & Sons Shipping Agents.

The Salt-Gage

A bottle filled with water from the cove
Sits on the sill above the iron stove.
At six o’clock the water rises green;
At twelve a skin of silver lies between
The lower air and where the brine settles deep.

I drop a leaden weight attached to thread
To mark how much the bay has changed its bed
Since yesterday when the nor’easter blew
The fence away and split the pine in two.

The neighbors think I measure for a well,
Or watch for weather by the smell of kelp;
They bring me dried cod-fish and sour bread
And ask if any news has come from head.

I tell them that the water grows more dense
When frost takes hold along the garden fence.
They do not know I weigh the salt to find
How much of what I left remains behind.

Annotations

Title: The Salt-Gage
A simple hydrometer arrangement constructed by Vane shortly after taking possession of the fisherman’s cottage at Heron Head. The device consisted of a two-quart glass apothecary jar, a brass scale calibrated in drams, and a lead fishing sinker suspended by silk thread.

Stanza 1, line 2: Sits on the sill above the iron stove
The cottage at Heron Head, built around 1845 by Captain Asahel Coffin for seasonal net-drying, contained only two rooms: a ground-floor kitchen-salvage space measuring fourteen by eighteen feet, and a low loft accessible by a vertical ladder. Heat was provided entirely by an 'Atlantic' model cast-iron cookstove manufactured in Bangor. Vane paid forty-five dollars for the property, purchasing the deed from Coffin’s surviving niece on November 8, 1927.

Stanza 3, line 3: They bring me dried cod-fish and sour bread
The local population of Heron Head in 1927 consisted of seventeen permanent families, primarily engaged in small-boat lobstering, cod-curing, and seasonal pulpwood hauling. The "neighbors" mentioned here were almost certainly Sarah Higgins (1862–1938) and her brother, Enoch Higgins, whose farmstead stood three hundred yards up the ridge. In her ledger book for December 1927, Vane records trading two yards of black velvet ribbon for "a gallon of salted mutton fat and three loaves of dark rye."

Stanza 3, line 4: And ask if any news has come from head
"Head" here refers to the local shortened form for Heron Head Light, located two miles south on the peninsula tip. It was also local idiom for "the mainland" or "the head of the reach" (Rockland). The locals were deeply suspicious of Vane’s solitary presence, initially suspecting her of being a government inspector or an agent for a Portland land syndicate seeking to buy up granite quarrying rights.

Stanza 4, line 3–4: They do not know I weigh the salt to find / How much of what I left remains behind
These lines do not appear in the draft sent to the Maine Writers’ Journal in March 1929. They were added in red ink on the flyleaf of her working copy of Nathaniel Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator (8th edition, 1837). The substitution replaces a much more explicit couplet: They do not know I calculate the sea / To see how far the land has pushed from me.

Draft for a Chimney Swept in November

The soot falls down like feathers from a crow,
Soft, grease-black, heavy, smelling of the pine.
I scrape the bricks until the red mortar shows
And scrape the smudge from off these hands of mine.

A gallon of cold cider on the shelf,
A loaf of hard-tack bought at Miller’s store.
A woman living only by herself
Needs little light and takes no second door.

The wind comes sideways through the cedar shingle;
It blows the candle out at half-past four.
I hear the ice along the gravel shingle
And turn the iron key within the door.

Annotations

Title: Draft for a Chimney Swept in November
Written on the back of a printed itemized receipt from "Miller & Son General Merchandise, Heron Head, Me.," dated November 19, 1927. The bill lists: 1 gal. Kerosene (.18), 1 box Paraffin Candles (.25), 1 Tin Lard (.45), 1 Sweep’s Scraper (.60), 20 lbs. Salt Pork ($2.20). Total: $3.68. Marked "Paid in Full – A. Miller."

Stanza 2, line 2: A loaf of hard-tack bought at Miller’s store
Amos Miller (1871–1944) operated the sole store at the harbor landing. His unpublished store ledgers, now held by the Heron Head Historical Society, contain frequent entries under the account name "Miss E. Vane." Unlike other residents who bought on monthly credit, Vane invariably paid in crisp ten-dollar bills drawn on the Merchants National Bank of Boston, a detail that further fed local speculation regarding her origins.

Stanza 2, line 4: Needs little light and takes no second door
An allusion to the architectural layout of the Heron Head cottage. The structure possessed only a single exterior door facing southeast toward the cove, leaving the windward (northwest) side completely blind against winter gales. Vane had the rear window board up with extra cedar planks two weeks after her arrival.

Stanza 3, line 3: I hear the ice along the gravel shingle
The double use of "shingle" in lines 1 and 3 (the first referring to roof cladding, the second to coarse beach gravel) was criticized by early reviewers as an inadvertent repetition. However, marginal notes in Vane’s 1930 notebook reveal this was an intentional device designed to mimic the overlapping sound of coastal wind and shoreline surf. She noted beside the stanza: "The two shingles are not the same wood; one is cedar, the other is stone crushed by the weight of water. Let them bump together."

Inventory at Twenty-Nine

One iron pot, somewhat pitted by rust.
Three winter skirts of dark blue wool.
A box of lamp-black, five pounds of lard.
Twelve steel pens, four bottles of Higgins ink.

The works of Mr. John Donne, bound in calf,
The spine split twice at the Holy Sonnets.
A chart of Penobscot Bay, scaled three inches to the mile,
Showing the shoals in yellow wash and the reefs in red.

Item: One letter from my sister Clara,
Unopened, held together with a brass pin.
Item: A silver thimble, small, bruised at the rim,
Which I have used to crush dried galls for ink.

Item: The knowledge that the tide returns twice daily,
Asking no permit from the selectmen of this town,
And that a house built on granite
May shake all night, but will not fall down.

Annotations

Title: Inventory at Twenty-Nine
Although Vane did not turn twenty-nine until March 1929, internal evidence suggests this poem was drafted in late 1928, during her second winter at the cottage. The poem marks a significant shift in her metrical style, abandoning the neat iambic tetrameter of her Boston period in favor of an irregular, cadence-driven line influenced by her close study of coastal charts and psalmody.

Stanza 2, line 1–2: The works of Mr. John Donne, bound in calf / The spine split twice at the Holy Sonnets
This volume survives in the Eleanor Vane Archive at Bowdoin College. The book bears the bookplate of her father, Arthur Vane, Esq., with Eleanor’s signature written beneath it in black ink, dated "Boston, 1921." The pages containing Holy Sonnet XIV ("Batter my heart, three-person'd Person") are heavily underlined in lead pencil, with a single marginal note on page 84: Not a battering, but a slow washing away.

Stanza 3, line 1–2: Item: One letter from my sister Clara / Unopened, held together with a brass pin
This unopened letter remained in Vane’s possession until her death in 1972. When opened by archivists in 1975, it was found to contain eight pages of entreaties from Clara Vane, detailing their mother’s declining health, the scandal caused by Eleanor’s flight, and an offer of a discreet annual allowance ($600) if she would relocate to a respectable cottage in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Eleanor never replied.

Stanza 3, line 4: Which I have used to crush dried galls for ink
Vane began manufacturing her own iron gall ink during the winter of 1928, when local supplies at Miller’s store proved inadequate for her high-acidity writing needs. She collected oak galls from the scrub oak groves behind the shoreline and combined them with iron nails gathered from abandoned shipyard drift and boiled seawater. The resulting ink was exceptionally dark, permanent, and corrosive, frequently burning through thin paper over time.

The Stove-Grate in December

The birch wood burns too fast, the spruce too bright;
They leave no coals to hold the kitchen night.
I gather driftwood down along the spit,
Saturated, salted, heavy every bit.

It burns green fire, blue fire, purple as a plum,
And leaves a white ash when the morning’s come.
The salt that soaked into the spruce’s heart
Keeps back the flame until the timbers part.

A log that grew three miles above the tide
Remembers where the river ran inside;
It takes three winters in the gravel drift
To make it give the cold sea back its gift.

So let the salt burn out. I have the time.
The hearth is swept, the wall is white with lime.
I sit and watch the violet smoke ascend
And wait for what I do not care to mend.

Annotations

Stanza 1, line 1: The birch wood burns too fast, the spruce too bright
In her household account book for December 1928, Vane notes: "Enoch Higgins brought one cord of green spruce. $4.00. Too much pitch. Sparks constantly upon the hooked rug. Must rely on drift from the eastern point."

Stanza 2, line 1: It burns green fire, blue fire, purple as a plum
The distinctive coloration of burning sea-driftwood is caused by the chemical reaction of copper, sodium, and chlorine salts absorbed by the wood during prolonged immersion in seawater. Vane was fascinated by these chemical properties, dedicating several pages of her private notebook to precise color descriptions: "Not the yellow of oil lamps, but the mineral violet of copper ore exposed to flame."

Stanza 3, line 1–4: A log that grew three miles above the tide...
This stanza was frequently quoted in early anthologies of Maine coastal verse, often stripped of its context within the suite. In a rare surviving letter to her publisher in 1934, Vane objected to the stanza being printed separately as a "nature fragment," writing: "The poem is not about driftwood. It is about the length of time required for a soaked object to become dry enough to catch fire."

Stanza 4, line 2: The hearth is swept, the wall is white with lime
In November 1928, Vane whitewashed the interior walls of her cottage using a mixture of slaked lime, coarse sea salt, and skimmed milk obtained from the Higgins farm. The practice was common among local fishermen to prevent dampness and mildew, but Vane noted in her journal that the brilliant white surface "made the single room look like the interior of a skull, illuminated only by the firebox."

Letter to be Left in a Tin Can at the Spit

If you should come by boat when I am out
Looking for copper nails along the reach,
Do not go up the path or look about
For anything I left upon the beach.

The well is sour with a trace of iron;
The door is latched with oak, but has no key.
There is no water here that you can drink,
And nothing you would care to ask of me.

The clothes upon the line belong to one
Who works all day in saltwater and mud;
They have no shine of Boston in their weave,
No lace to show, no stain of gentle blood.

The shore goes down to granite, sharp and black;
The tide comes up five fathoms in the cove.
Go back before the fog comes off the ledge;
Go back to whatever light you have to love.

Annotations

Title: Letter to be Left in a Tin Can at the Spit
Found in manuscript form inside a rusted tobacco tin wedged into a cleft of granite at the tip of Heron Head Spit in July 1956 by a local lobster fisherman, Kenneth Higgins. The tin contained three short poems on folded waterproof paper. Whether Vane intended this specific text to be read by a particular intruder—such as her former fiancé, who reportedly visited Rockland in search of her in May 1928—or meant it as a general warning to curious trespassers remains unproven.

Stanza 2, line 1: The well is sour with a trace of iron
The cottage well, located twelve feet from the kitchen door, was dug through a vein of iron-bearing shale. The water was heavily mineralized, leaving reddish-brown rust stains on all of Vane’s laundry and earthenware. Chemical analysis of her hair performed after her death showed elevated concentrations of iron and manganese, characteristic of long-term consumption of shallow coastal well water in this geology.

Stanza 3, line 3: They have no shine of Boston in their weave
By mid-1928, Vane had completely discarded her Boston wardrobe. Photographs taken in 1932 by the itinerant photographer Thomas Haskell show her wearing heavy oilskin trousers, a oversized man’s wool sweater mended with dark marline twine, and knee-high rubber boots favored by local weir fishermen.

Stanza 4, line 2: The tide comes up five fathoms in the cove
The mean tidal range at Heron Head is approximately nine to eleven feet, but spring tides accompanied by strong easterly winds frequently produce extreme high water. In her journal entry for October 18, 1928, Vane records: "Water reached the bottom step of the porch at three o’clock in the afternoon. The sea foam washed under the door and left three living minnows wriggling upon the rug."

Lines Written on the Margin of a Hydrographic Chart

Depth soundings mark the places where the keel
Would scrape the granite if the fog came down.
Six fathoms here; then twelve; then forty-four.
The bottom drops into a silent town
Where no one looks for letters from the shore.

The lead line brings up tallow smeared with sand,
Or mud that smells of rotten pine and grass.
It tells the captain what lies under hand
Long before his ship can see it pass.

I have no lead line but a pen that leaks,
No tallow but the grease upon the page.
I drop my sounding through the quiet weeks
And mark the depth against my growing age.

Annotations

Title: Lines Written on the Margin of a Hydrographic Chart
Composed directly on the white margin of U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Chart No. 309 (Penobscot Bay: Southern Sheet, edition of 1924). The chart was found pinned to the wall above Vane’s writing desk, heavily annotated with private symbols, dates, and small ink drawings of sea-buoys and drowned ledges.

Stanza 2, line 1: The lead line brings up tallow smeared with sand
Refers to the standard navigational practice of "arming the lead." A hollow in the bottom of a lead sounding weight was filled with hard tallow or fat; when lowered to the seabed, samples of sand, shell, or mud adhered to the grease, allowing the navigator to determine the nature of the bottom and verify his position in dense fog.

Stanza 2, line 2: Or mud that smells of rotten pine and grass
The inner reaches of Penobscot Bay contain deep pockets of organic mud formed by centuries of wood waste washed down from the Penobscot River lumber mills at Bangor. Vane’s observation demonstrates her growing familiarity with the distinct ecological composition of the coastal seabed.

Stanza 3, line 3: I drop my sounding through the quiet weeks
The phrase "dropping a sounding" becomes a central metaphor in Vane’s middle-period work, shifting from a literal measurement of water depth to a methodical, almost clinical exploration of her own psychological detachment from her former social identity.

The Ink-Flask

It came from London in a leaden case,
Dark purple fluid, heavy as a plum.
It leaves a stain no soap can quite erase
From fingers where the ink-cracks have come.

The iron in it eats the linen rag;
The acid bites the paper to the bone.
Write fast, write clear, before the margins sag
And leave the written word to stand alone.

For what is written in this acid breath
Will outlast pine wood, plaster, cedar post,
And speak its narrow business after death
To whoever walks along this fog-bound coast.

Annotations

Stanza 1, line 1: It came from London in a leaden case
This refers to a pint jar of Stephens’ Blue-Black Writing Fluid, imported from England. A partial shipping box bearing the label of Stephens & Co., Aldersgate Street, London was recovered from the Heron Head cellar in 1985. The ink contained significant quantities of tannic acid and ferrous sulfate, which produced a brilliant dark line that slowly oxidized to an indelible black upon exposure to air.

Stanza 1, line 4: From fingers where the ink-cracks have come
A condition common among writers working in cold, unheated environments using high-acid inks. The combination of salt wind, lime whitewash, and iron gall ink caused deep, painful fissures in the skin of Vane’s hands. In a ledger entry from January 1929, she notes using a mixture of mutton tallow and beeswax to fill the cracks in her knuckles so she could continue holding her pen during sub-zero temperatures.

Stanza 2, line 1–2: The iron in it eats the linen rag / The acid bites the paper to the bone
This was not hyperbole. High-acid ink written on high-linen paper produces a slow chemical reaction that gradually degrades the cellulose fibers. Many of Vane’s original 1927–1928 manuscripts show visible "ink-burn," where heavy downstrokes have completely eaten through the paper, leaving tiny, clean-cut stencil-like gaps in the shapes of letters.

Stanza 3, line 3: And speak its narrow business after death
This line represents Vane’s first explicit acknowledgment of a future audience for her work. Prior to late 1928, her writings and diary entries express a firm conviction that her poems were entirely private exercises designed solely for her own survival and emotional discipline. The shift suggests she had begun to perceive her isolation not merely as a flight from Boston, but as a deliberate, permanent artistic stance.

Editorial Note on the 1929 Desk Leaflets and Interlinear Copies

The texts preserved in this section belong to the second full calendar year of Eleanor Vane’s residence at the Coffin cottage. By the spring of 1929, her patterns of salvage had expanded from physical flotsam—driftwood, barrel staves, copper fasteners from wrecked dories—to the discarded paper waste of the peninsula. When her initial supply of Swedish bond paper ran low in February of that year, she refused to purchase standard lined school pads from Miller’s store, finding their wood-pulp paper too absorbent for her acidic inks. Instead, she took to writing in the margins, flyleaves, and endpapers of the battered volumes she had hauled from Saint Botolph Street, as well as on discarded tax notices and discarded church bulletins acquired from the Higgins family woodpile.

The poems of this period show a marked turning away from the neat, retrospective grievances of Boston toward an intense, almost microscopic observation of her immediate physical surroundings. The voice becomes drier, more laconic, and increasingly saturated with the occupational dialect of the lower Penobscot basin. We begin to see here what critic Warren Delano later described as "the great stone-clearing operation" of Vane’s middle style: a deliberate stripping away of ornament in favor of a syntax that mirrors the jointed, unmortared granite ledges of the headland.

The Spring Thaw at Heron Head

The mud comes up to take the cedar sills;
The frost heaves three big stones out of the row.
A black crow sits upon the kitchen sill
And watches where the cabbage runnels go.

I have two dollars in the pewter pot,
A pound of salt, an end of tallow thread.
The tea is bitter that I left forgot
Upon the cold iron plate beside the bed.

A man walked past the window in the mist;
He carried half a cod upon an ash.
He did not turn his head or shake his fist,
Nor pause to see if anyone had cash.

This is the country where the tongue is short;
They use six words to say the mackerel run.
A woman with no husband in the port
Is simply someone waiting for the sun.

Annotations

Stanza 1, line 2: The frost heaves three big stones out of the row
The foundation of the cottage rested on dry-laid fieldstone, vulnerable to frost heaving during the notoriously erratic mud season of coastal Maine. In her garden diary for April 3, 1929, Vane recorded: "The northeast corner dropped two inches before noon. Had to wedge a dry hemlock shim under the sill using Enoch’s crowbar. The house groaned like an old schooner coming about."

Stanza 1, line 4: And watches where the cabbage runnels go
Vane attempted her first cold-frame garden in the lee of the woodshed in March 1929. The runnels were shallow drainage ditches cut with an oyster spade to carry snowmelt away from her seedlings of winter cabbage and kale, the only vegetables that survived the acidic, peat-heavy soil of the outer point.

Stanza 3, line 1–2: A man walked past the window in the mist / He carried half a cod upon an ash
Identified in Enoch Higgins’s daily weather register as Captain Phineas Small (1851–1933), a retired weir-fisherman who lived in a tar-paper shanty at the mouth of the Gut. An "ash" was local dialect for a green ash switch used to string fish through the gills for hand-carrying along the shore path. Small was famously mute, having ceased speaking to neighbors following the loss of his schooner The Seven Brothers in 1911.

Stanza 4, line 1–2: This is the country where the tongue is short / They use six words to say the mackerel run
Vane often expressed relief at the taciturn nature of the local fishing population, which contrasted sharply with the rhetorical excesses of the Boston literary salons she had occasionally attended with her mother. In a scrap of margin preserved on page 112 of her copy of Crabbe’s The Borough, she wrote: "In Boston, a man spends thirty minutes explaining why he cannot lend you five dollars; down here, Enoch Higgins merely spits into the gravel and you understand the business is closed."

Gloss on a Chapter of Ecclesiastes

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
—The margin is crowded with small figures in pencil:
Seven barrels of lime hauled from the kiln.
The price of kerosene up four cents on the gallon.

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
I cast the brass kettle into the cove
Because the verdigris grew thick inside the rim
And made the broth taste of old green pennies.
Let the cunners sleep in it; let the kelp tie it down.

A time to rend, and a time to sew.
I tore the hem of my mother’s black damask gown
To make three grease-rags for the stove-pipe.
The silk was heavy, stiff with old Boston tea;
It burned with the smell of scorched hair
And left no cinder larger than a bee.

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
The gulls have the better part of this trade;
They scream when the herring-boat dumps its offal,
And when the night falls on the outer ledge
They sit on the wet stone and swallow their tongues.

Annotations

Title: Gloss on a Chapter of Ecclesiastes
Written in the generous white margins of an 1858 quarto Bible left behind in the cottage by its original builder, Captain Asahel Coffin. The Bible had been used primarily as a press for drying seaweed samples; its boards were warped by brine and its calfskin cover had rotted away at the lower corners. Vane’s notes run vertically up the outer edge of the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Stanza 1, line 3: Seven barrels of lime hauled from the kiln
The kilns at nearby Thomaston and Rockport supplied quicklime for the mortar and leather-tanning industries. Vane purchased low-grade agricultural lime to sweeten the sour garden soil behind the headland, transporting the heavy wooden casks in Enoch Higgins’s high-wheeled farm wagon.

Stanza 2, line 2: I cast the brass kettle into the cove
This incident appears to be factual. During low-water archaeological soundings conducted near the Heron Head landing by the University of Maine in 1991, an early nineteenth-century brass trade kettle, heavily encrusted with barnacles (Balanus balanoides), was recovered from eight feet of silt. The bottom bore heavy scoring consistent with Vane’s description of attempts to scrape away copper oxide.

Stanza 3, line 1–2: I tore the hem of my mother’s black damask gown / To make three grease-rags for the stove-pipe
The damask gown had been included in the trunk sent after Eleanor by her aunt, Mrs. Abigail Vane-Sargent, in December 1927, in a futile attempt to remind the young poet of her social obligations. Rather than wear it, Vane systematically dismantled the garment over a period of two years, using the whalebone stays to stiffen the edges of her writing portfolio and the heavy silk fabric for domestic cleaning.

Stanza 4, line 2: They scream when the herring-boat dumps its offal
During the late 1920s, small seiners regularly cleaned their catches within the shelter of Heron Head cove before running into the sardine packing canneries at Rockland. The resulting offal drew hundreds of herring gulls (Larus argentatus), creating an uproar that frequently interrupted Vane’s morning working hours.

Advice to a Surveyor from Bangor

Take your chain across the ledge if you have mind,
And drag your iron link by link through spruce;
The boundary you think you come to find
Has been laid down without a lawyer’s use.

The line runs from the split in Miller’s rock
Straight down the gully where the sheep were drowned,
Then turns two rods before the spruce-stump block
To take the only patch of level ground.

You cannot measure water with a rod,
Nor bind the fog-bank to a wooden stake;
The deed says thirty acres, more or odd,
Depending on what mouth the spring tides make.

Pack up your transit, boy, before the light
Goes greasy yellow on the western spit;
A man who sleeps upon this shore tonight
Will wake to find his boots have ceased to fit.

Annotations

Title: Advice to a Surveyor from Bangor
The town records of Saint George indicate that in June 1929, the heirs of the Coffin estate commissioned a regional surveyor, Mr. Alden P. Cram of Bangor, to determine whether the small parcel sold to Eleanor Vane infringed upon adjacent timber rights. The survey was abandoned after two days due to the surveyor’s inability to reconcile the original 18th-century "metes and bounds" descriptions with the eroded shoreline.

Stanza 1, line 1: Take your chain across the ledge if you have mind
Refers to a standard Gunter’s surveying chain, consisting of one hundred iron links totaling sixty-six feet in length. The rugged, broken granite terrain of Heron Head made chain-surveying notoriously inaccurate, as the metal links continually snagged in deep rock crevices and dense juniper scrub.

Stanza 2, line 1: The line runs from the split in Miller’s rock
The deed of conveyance dated November 8, 1927, reads in part: "...beginning at a cleft boulder marked with an iron plug driven by Samuel Miller in the year of the Great Frost, thence running South-South-East fifty rods to the salt runnel, thence by the meanderings of the shore to the first mentioned bounds."

Stanza 3, line 3: The deed says thirty acres, more or odd
The archaic legal phrasing "more or odd" (or "more or less") was standard in rural Maine conveyances, where precise acreage was considered secondary to identifiable natural landmarks. The actual parcel occupied by Vane measured approximately twenty-three acres of wind-sheared ledge, five acres of salt marsh, and two acres of arable peat pocket.

Stanza 4, line 4: Will wake to find his boots have ceased to fit
A wry reference to the extreme dampness of the Heron Head ground. Leather boots left out-of-doors overnight in the heavy sea fog invariably absorbed large quantities of moisture, shrinking and hardening stiffly as they dried near an iron cookstove.

Margin Note on a Scrap of Ledger (July 1929)

The mackerel are too soft this year to salt;
They turn to oily water in the keg.
I walked three miles to Miller’s for some malt
And came back carrying an addled egg.

The hens at Higgins’ farm have got the pip;
They drop their feathers in the nettle bed.
A schooner in the reach has lost her trip;
She lies upon the mud-flat like the dead.

There is no music in this salty gut
Except the wind that grinds the cedar shake.
A woman keeps her window fastened shut
To save what little bread she has to bake.

I do not wish for company from town.
The tea is brown; the flour is somewhat grey.
The sun goes like a copper button down
Into the greasy water of the bay.

Annotations

Title: Margin Note on a Scrap of Ledger (July 1929)
Written on a detached slip of ruled ledger paper salvaged from an account book used by the Heron Head granite quarry, which had closed during the panic of 1907. The verso contains listings of stonecutter wages for July 1904.

Stanza 1, line 1: The mackerel are too soft this year to salt
The summer of 1929 was marked by unusually high water temperatures in Penobscot Bay, causing mackerel to feed heavily on red copepods (known locally as "red feed"), which caused the fish to spoil rapidly after being taken from the water, making them unsuitable for traditional dry-salting in wooden butts.

Stanza 2, line 3: A schooner in the reach has lost her trip
To "lose a trip" was local coastal parlance for missing a tide or failing to secure a seasonal cargo before market rates dropped. The vessel referenced was the two-masted coasting schooner Lydia M., which lay stranded on the mud flats of the gut for nearly three weeks in late July while waiting for a shipment of pulpwood that never arrived.

Stanza 3, line 2: Except the wind that grinds the cedar shake
A "shake" is a hand-split cedar shingle, rougher and thicker than a sawn shingle. The exterior of the Coffin cottage was covered in split cedar shakes that had weathered to a dark, silvery charcoal tone. Under high wind conditions, the overlapping edges of these shakes rubbed together with a distinct rasping sound often mentioned in Vane’s letters to Martha Abernathy.

Stanza 4, line 3: The sun goes like a copper button down
This striking image was singled out by poet Wallace Stevens in an informal letter to Harriet Monroe in 1932: "There is a woman up near Rockland who sees the sunset not as an event of the soul, but as an article of hardware. It is extremely healthy."

Recipe for Preserving Wild Cranberries in Sea Salt

Gather the berries when the first white frost
Has made the low bog stiff under the heel.
Take only those that keep their skin uncrossed
By rot or by the worm’s small iron steel.

Do not use sugar; sugar brings the fly,
And sugar costs four cents at Miller’s scale.
Rinse them in brine until the skins are dry,
Then pack them down within an earthen pail.

Between the layers pour the sea-sand clean,
Dug from the spit where no dog walks to bark;
Press down the stone until no red is seen,
And set the barrel in the cellar dark.

In February when the gums are sore
And all the potatoes taste of spruce and mould,
You take a pewter spoon and scrape the floor
To find these drops of bitter crimson gold.

Annotations

Title: Recipe for Preserving Wild Cranberries in Sea Salt
Written on the reverse of a handbill advertising a public auction of farm implements in South Thomaston, dated September 12, 1928. This poem represents one of several "domestic manuals in verse" composed by Vane during her second year of solitary housekeeping.

Stanza 1, line 1: Gather the berries when the first white frost
The wild high-bush and bog cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) grew abundantly in the peat bogs directly behind Heron Head Spit. Local custom held that the fruit was excessively astringent until softened by at least two nights of freezing temperatures.

Stanza 2, line 2: And sugar costs four cents at Miller’s scale
Store records show that white granulated sugar sold for five cents a pound in the autumn of 1929, while coarse brown Demerara sugar was three and a half cents. Vane’s meticulous recording of grocery prices reflects the severe financial constraints under which she lived after refusing any further disbursements from her family’s Boston attorneys.

Stanza 3, line 1: Between the layers pour the sea-sand clean
The dry-packing of firm berries in clean, desiccated beach sand was an old maritime technique used by Penobscot coasters to keep fruit fresh during long winter voyages to the West Indies. The sand prevented the berries from bruising and excluded atmospheric moisture.

Stanza 4, line 1: In February when the gums are sore
A reference to the early stages of scurvy, a persistent danger for coastal residents during long winters when fresh produce was unavailable. While true scurvy was rare in twentieth-century Maine, mild sub-clinical deficiencies of vitamin C were common among the poorer fishing families whose winter diet consisted almost entirely of salted pollock, dried beans, and bread.

Lines Written on the Flyleaf of Crabbe’s "The Borough"

The parson talks of heaven like a place
Where every cobbler keeps a pair of boots,
And angels sit around the Throne of Grace
In flannel petticoats and Sunday suits.

He came down here to ask about my soul;
He sat upon the salt-box by the flue.
He took a lump of spruce gum from the bowl
And asked if I had found the Savior true.

I told him that the Savior had not been
Across the ledge since Monday’s blow began;
The cove was choked with drift-kelp to the chin,
Too thick for water and too wet for man.

He looked into his hat and sighed for grief;
He spoke of Boston with a tender groan.
I offered him a slice of salted beef;
He said he’d rather walk the road alone.

Annotations

Title: Lines Written on the Flyleaf of Crabbe’s "The Borough"
The volume—an 1810 London edition—is part of the Bowdoin College collection. Crabbe was an enduring influence on Vane’s work, particularly his refusal to sentimentalize rural poverty and maritime labour. Vane’s notation on the title page reads: "The only English poet who understood that salt water rots wood and that poverty smells of dogfish."

Stanza 2, line 1: He came down here to ask about my soul
The clergyman was the Reverend Donald MacAlmon (1884–1952), a circuit preacher for the Methodist Episcopal Church who visited the Heron Head schoolhouse once a month during the summer and autumn. According to MacAlmon’s diary entry for August 14, 1929, he found Vane "a woman of sharp, educated countenance, living like a squatter among piles of charts and drying moss. She showed no disposition toward Christian discourse, answering every inquiry regarding her spiritual estate with remarks concerning the height of the barometer."

Stanza 2, line 3: He took a lump of spruce gum from the bowl
Spruce gum, collected from the hardened exudations of the red spruce (Picea rubens), was widely harvested and chewed in rural Maine as a substitute for manufactured confectionery. Vane kept a wooden bowl of dried gum on her kitchen table, which she harvested during her walks along the northern boundary of her land.

Stanza 4, line 4: He said he’d rather walk the road alone
MacAlmon noted in his account that the cottage interior smelled overpoweringly of "dogfish liver oil, drying weed, and strong cider vinegar," which may explain his reluctance to partake of her hospitality.

To a Dead Seal on the Outer Rock

You found the iron bottom of the ledge
Where the long ground-swell breaks its green spine down.
The tide has rolled you to the shingle’s edge,
A heavy traveler from the underwater town.

The herring gulls have taken both your eyes;
They leave the clean white sockets to the rain.
A bluebottle upon your shoulder flies;
The salt sand crusts your muzzle like a chain.

No lawyer comes to settle your estate;
You left no trunks of silk, no brass-bound chest.
You died without an uncle at the gate;
The deep current gave you what it thought was best.

I roll you over with a piece of spruce
To see the belly by the grey sea scraped.
You had no name that men could put to use;
You had no soul that needed to be shaped.

Annotations

Title: To a Dead Seal on the Outer Rock
Found in manuscript among the papers collected by Martha Abernathy after Vane’s death. The seal described was a harbor seal (Phoca vitulina), common along the outer islands of Penobscot Bay, where they were viewed with intense hostility by local fishermen as destructive pests that ripped herring nets and stole bait from lobster traps. The State of Maine maintained a bounty of one dollar on seal noses until well into the twentieth century.

Stanza 2, line 1: The herring gulls have taken both your eyes
A characteristically unflinching observation of coastal taphonomy. Early critics found this stanza excessively morbid; an anonymous reviewer for the Bangor Daily Commercial (commenting on its subsequent appearance in The Salt-Gage) described it as "a performance exhibiting more curiosity than taste."

Stanza 3, line 3: You died without an uncle at the gate
A biting reference to her uncle, Percival Vane, the senior trustee of the Vane Family Estate in Boston, who had spent much of 1928 threatening to place Eleanor under legal conservatorship on the grounds of "manifest eccentricity and melancholic abandonment."

Stanza 4, line 4: You had no soul that needed to be shaped
This final line was written three times in the draft manuscript, with earlier versions reading: You had no family that needed to be paid and You had no name to give the local dead. The choice of the metaphysical word "shaped" underscores Vane’s growing philosophical rejection of her Unitarian upbringing, with its emphasis on moral self-cultivation and social utility.

Three Stanzas Written on the Back of a Miller’s Receipt

The salt comes through the paint upon the wall
In little flowers of fine, dry white frost;
No matter how I sweep them in the fall,
Before the New Year comes the work is lost.

A pound of salt-fish is ten cents today;
The kerosene is down to three cents flat.
The wind is blowing from the southeast bay;
It smells of bilge-water and tallow fat.

If Clara wrote to ask if I were dead,
I’d tell her that the kitchen floor is wet;
That there is little butter for the bread,
And nothing here she needs to think of yet.

Annotations

Title: Three Stanzas Written on the Back of a Miller’s Receipt
The receipt is dated October 24, 1929—the day of the Wall Street stock market crash ("Black Thursday"). It is notable that while the financial world in Boston and New York was collapsing, Vane’s small domestic world was occupied entirely with the cost of salt cod and the efflorescence of mineral salts through her whitewashed walls.

Stanza 1, line 2: In little flowers of fine, dry white frost
This describes the chemical process of efflorescence: moisture within the plaster or masonry dissolves soluble mineral salts (primarily sodium chloride and calcium carbonate), which are then deposited on the interior surface as the moisture evaporates, creating delicate, crystalline structures that resemble frost or mold.

Stanza 3, line 1: If Clara wrote to ask if I were dead
Clara Vane’s private letters show that by late 1929, the family had effectively ceased active efforts to induce Eleanor to return to Boston. In a letter to her cousin Henry, Clara wrote: "We must consider Eleanor as one who has taken the veil, albeit a veil of oilskin and wet shingle. It is useless to cast our bread upon those cold waters."

The Iron Fender

The iron stove was built in Bangor town
In eighteen hundred sixty or sixty-two;
Its legs are fashioned like a lion’s paw,
Its belly painted with a grease-black hue.

The fender catches all the falling coal
And holds the kettle when the water boils.
It has no purpose for a woman’s soul;
It does not ask her to forget her toils.

It merely sits upon the uneven pine,
Cold when the fire goes out, red when it’s lit.
I wish these bones of mine were half as fine,
Or had the half of its unthinking wit.

The iron does not care what ship goes down,
Nor who comes back across the muddy flat;
It warms the stranger who walked out from town
And does not ask what business he was at.

Annotations

Title: The Iron Fender
Refers to the cast-iron front hearth-plate or fender belonging to the "Atlantic" brand cookstove in the Heron Head cottage. The stove bore the maker’s mark: Wood, Bishop & Co., Bangor, Maine, Patented 1861.

Stanza 1, line 3: Its legs are fashioned like a lion’s paw
A decorative feature common in mid-nineteenth-century cast-iron ironwork, which often grafted ornate, classical or animalier motifs onto strictly utilitarian domestic appliances. Vane seems to have found this domestic ornamentation both absurd and reassuring in the bare environment of her kitchen.

Stanza 3, line 3–4: I wish these bones of mine were half as fine / Or had the half of its unthinking wit
This couplet marks an emerging theme in Vane’s poetry of the late 1920s: an envy of inanimate materials—iron, stone, sea-wrack—for their lack of subjective consciousness and their immunity to social memory.

Stanza 4, line 3: It warms the stranger who walked out from town
Heron Head sat at the terminus of a three-mile cart path from the harbor village, and was occasionally visited by tramps or stranded coasting seamen. Vane made it an absolute rule never to invite such travelers into her living quarters, but local tradition remembers that she left the outer woodshed unlocked throughout the winter, with an old iron kettle and a supply of split dry spruce available for anyone caught out by the tide.

Margin Note on a Page of Samuel Johnson’s "Rasselas"

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope...
—I have written on the margin with a sharpened nail:
The phantoms of hope have very muddy heels;
They come down the lane looking for dry stockings.

I gave one an onion and an end of bread;
He said the soup was thin, and spit on the sill.
Let Samuel Johnson stay in Fleet Street and drink his tea;
He never had to haul his own water in an iron pail
From a well that tastes of rotten slate
Two hundred paces through the bayberry scrub
With the wind coming hard from the northeast
And the bucket slopping over on his boots.

Annotations

Title: Margin Note on a Page of Samuel Johnson’s "Rasselas"
Written in a miniature edition of Johnson’s philosophical romance (London, 1815) that Vane had kept in the pocket of her wool mantle during her flight from Boston. The book is preserved in the Maine State Library, heavily scarred by seawater and with multiple pages marked in iron gall ink and grease pencil.

Stanza 1, line 1–2: Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy...
The famous opening sentence of Johnson’s moral tale, which Eleanor systematically refutes throughout the marginal text. In her personal hierarchy of English prose writers, Johnson occupied a position of ambiguous authority: she admired his linguistic precision and depressive gravity, but despised his urban complacency and his theological reliance on resignation.

Stanza 2, line 1: The phantoms of hope have very muddy heels
This personification appears to have had an immediate physical origin. On November 11, 1929, an itinerant woodchopper named Martin Flaherty had arrived at the cottage seeking work; Vane hired him to chop three cords of cedar drift, paying him in cold salt-pork stew and a pair of her father’s heavy socks. Flaherty reportedly told Enoch Higgins that the woman at the head was "as cold as an iron pot that had lain out in the snow all night."

Stanza 2, line 7: From a well that tastes of rotten slate
The geological strata at Heron Head consist largely of heavily metamorphosed shale and slate, which give the shallow groundwater a pronounced sulfurous, mineral flavor, particularly after long dry spells when the water table drops to the level of the lower bedrock seams.

November Sunset Over the Shingle

The light comes off the water like a sheet
Of beaten copper hammered paper-thin;
It shows the stones where all the runnels meet
And shows the window where the frost gets in.

The gulls have gone to roost upon the spindle;
The bay is quiet as a plate of lead.
I have three sticks of birch with which to kindle
A little heat to carry me to bed.

There is no sound across the thirty miles
Between this headland and the Camden hill;
The cold comes down between the granite piles
And settles on the lintel and the sill.

I dip my pen into the crust of black;
The ink is thick with dust and small salt flies.
I write the line and do not turn it back;
I watch the yellow daylight as it dies.

Annotations

Stanza 2, line 1: The gulls have gone to roost upon the spindle
A "spindle" is a nautical day-beacon consisting of an iron rod anchored directly into an exposed ledge or submerged rock, usually topped with a cage, barrel, or metal cross. The Heron Head Spindle was situated approximately four hundred yards offshore on the dangerous ledges known as "The Clam-Shells."

Stanza 3, line 2: Between this headland and the Camden hill
The Camden Hills (Mount Megunticook and Mount Battie) are clearly visible from Heron Head on clear days, rising as pale blue elevations twenty-five to thirty miles to the north. Vane frequently used these hills as visual barometers; when the Camden Hills appeared "lifted" or distorted by atmospheric refraction, it was considered a sure sign of approaching easterly gales.

Stanza 4, line 2: The ink is thick with dust and small salt flies
"Salt flies" or kelp flies (Coelopa frigida) breed in the windrows of decomposing kelp that accumulate along the high-water line. During late autumn gales, they were frequently driven indoors through gaps around the cottage door and windows, where they were attracted to the damp, shiny surfaces of wet ink on Vane’s writing desk.

Stanza 4, line 3: I write the line and do not turn it back
A concise statement of Vane’s compositional method during the 1929–1930 period. Unlike her Boston years, which were characterized by elaborate pencil drafting and endless metrical revisions, her surviving manuscripts from this winter show few erasures or interlinear cancellations. She wrote with a deliberate, slow finality, viewing each poem as an unalterable physical deposit on the paper, akin to the tide lines left upon the gravel shingle.