The Steadfast Tin Soldier

by Evelyn Hooven (April 2025)

The Artist as St Sebastian (Egon Schiele, 1915)

 

 

I know now—
Hard to mourn
And come to know
At the same time.

My costume was frail
My dance wilder
But the one
Who went up in flames
Was you.

In the legend
She is the one in motion
But for a fragment
Flames devour her
Entirely.

The soldier slowly
Lifts the fragment
Put it inside the coat
Right at his heart,

The steadfast soldier
Continues at his post
Sorrow alters his march
My own dance is lost
How must I move?

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French and Spanish have appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in ReviewART TIMES, ChelseaThe Literary ReviewTHE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry ReviewVallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

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