Rose Hartwick Thorpe — Collected Poems

Rose Hartwick Thorpe wrote one of the nineteenth century’s great recitation poems before she was twenty, then spent half a century proving she was more than its author. “Curfew Must Not Ring To-night” traveled through classrooms, public halls, translations, and popular memory, while Thorpe kept writing ballads, hymns, children’s rhymes, reform verse, and poems of California. After moving to San Diego in 1888, she found new subjects in La Jolla, Mission Bay, poppies, Pacific light, and the city’s climate and civic promise. This edition resets her author-compiled 1912 Poetical Works, preserving its ballads, shorter poems, children’s verse, subdivisions, stanza patterns, and deliberate indentations.