Cleghorn, Sarah Norcliffe

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CLEGHORN, Sarah Norcliffe

Born 4 February 1876, Norfolk, Virginia; died 4 April 1959, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Daughter of John D. and Sarah Hawley Cleghorn

After the death of her sister and mother, Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was sent to Vermont where she was raised by two unmarried aunts. Even in adolescence, Cleghorn was deeply disturbed by human cruelty and became a quiet opponent of vivisection and of atrocities against blacks. In 1912 she began to write protest poetry and essays, coauthoring two collections of essays with her close friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher. She organized an unsuccessful campaign against capital punishment in Vermont, and became involved in prison reform. Cleghorn's strong religious faith was the basis for all of her political action.

After the war, unable to sell her writing because of its strong pacifist bias, Cleghorn (in her mid-forties) began teaching at Manumit Farm, an experimental school with socialist backing primarily for workers' children. Here an interracial and international group of children were taught according to the Dalton method and shared farm chores and housework with the staff. Cleghorn retired because of ill health, and, at the age of sixty, published her autobiography. This was followed, before her death at eighty-three, by a collection of poetry and a volume of inspirational essays.

Cleghorn's early poetry and her first novel, The Turnpike Lady (1907), avoid political themes, concentrating instead on the charm of the rural past and the natural world, particularly Vermont. In her autobiography Cleghorn explains the nonpolitical nature of her early work, telling us that at this time she could not write coherently on a subject about which she felt powerfully. While it was popular at the time, the contemporary reader finds Cleghorn's work of this period soft, vague, and sentimental.

But with her increasing commitment to socialism and pacifism Cleghorn's poetic themes change, and the 1917 collection of her poetry, Portraits and Protests, contains many political poems written between 1912 and 1916. Cleghorn's protest poetry is far more direct in style, avoiding the artificial diction of the early poetry. This quatrain, written in 1914, became her most famous poem: "The golf links lie so near the mill /That almost every day /The laboring children can look out /And see the men at play." Cleghorn's most explosive poem, "The Poltroon," was published during the war in the Tribune, causing threats upon the publisher and hundreds of irate letters.

Cleghorn's later poetry, collected in Poems of Peace and Freedom (1945), includes ballads, written for her students, about Harriet Tubman, Eugene Debs, and other lesser known figures, and a series of sonnets with a strong sense of personal mysticism. Cleghorn's second novel, The Spinster (1916), has strong autobiographical overtones. But far more successful is the actual autobiography, published in 1936. Threescore successfully conveys the cheerful, generous, and sensitive disposition of its author. Presented with a disarming honesty and humility, this autobiography shows the quiet courage of a gentle reformer who lacks the bitter shrillness which so often accompanies political protest. In the introduction to Threescore, Robert Frost calls Cleghorn "a saint, a poet and a reformer."