Poetry of Eli Siegel

Quiet, Tears, Babies

Quiet in the street,

In the street with houses having babies,

Lately born, lately born.

These babies now are growing,

And the street is quiet now,

At half past six in the afternoon.

Quiet is the street, quiet is the street;

But now, later, a growing baby is crying.

O crying soul, hardly heard,

For you cry not so loud,

O growing, crying baby,

In the quiet, quiet street,

With men, with women, quietly slowly passing,

Who were babies once, who cried once, and who now make men and women and babies cry, and who cry, and who cry now, O but they do.

Quiet street, crying babies,

Sun slowly going down,

Men and women quietly going up and down the quiet street;

Tears, God dear, tears.

Eli Siegel’s note to the poem:

Quiet, Tears, Babies. 1926. This poem began with a baby heard crying beyond heavy doors of an old house on North Charles Street, Baltimore, June 1925, 7 p.m or so, and hot. Appeared in Poetry Folio, 1926.

And Ellen Reiss writes:

Throughout this poem there is a drama, a joining and an apartness, of babies and street. And we can say that this is the crucial drama of each of our lives: it is the drama of self and world. We are each like one of those beginning humans: just ourselves, with a world outside of us that seems—like that street—impersonal and different.

….A baby, and we, can cry because the world confuses us; or because there is something we want from it that we don’t understand and can’t express.

—”The Energy of Respect,”The Right of Aesthetic Realism
to Be Known, number 1433, September 20, 2000.

Poetry of Eli Siegel

Quiet, Tears, Babies

Eli Siegel’s note to the poem:

And Ellen Reiss writes:

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