Marjorie Gaunt, 88, whose World War II letters to her husband are part of the text of a choral piece being performed today at Carnegie Hall. Her letters have been published in a book and featured in Yankee magazine.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

When I am finally able to reach Marjorie Gaunt, she is very excited. She has just ended a conversation with the president of the New York Oratorio Society, which is bringing this 88-year-old North Kingstown poet to today’s Carnegie Hall performance of Paul Morevec’s Songs of Love and War.

As Channing Gray reported in yesterday’s Journal, Marjorie’s love letters to her husband, mailed to him during World War II while he was a navigator in the Army Air Forces, were used in the composition. Her beloved Rowland was shot down over the North Sea and reported missing, and letters Marjorie had sent him were returned to her unopened, stamped “missing in action.”

As I read her e-mail, the words of joy and sorrow tumble out: “who would believe that my words would be sung at Carnegie Hall!! Not me … it has to be magic. I’m to be exposed to the world … timid me. (I guess its Rowland’s doing wherever and however.)”

But there is so much more to her story.

Marjorie was born in Providence, and moved to Cranston when she was 6, into a new home built by her father, a carpenter named Carl Dalquist. Upon graduating from Cranston High School, she went to work for a lawyer, Henry M. Boss, and stayed with his firm until she met Rowland. The young couple moved to Texas for his basic training.

Boss had given her a book of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets, a book she still treasures. Perhaps that is where her love for sonnets began. She has always written, mostly poetry and prose, but found the structure called “a crown of sonnets” to be magical.

This is a group of seven sonnets that complete a circle — the last line of the first becomes the first line of the second, the last line of the second becomes the first line of the third, and so on until it completes the full crown. Throw in rhyming sequences, she says, and “Oh my! You have created something beautifully complex.”

After Rowland’s death, Marjorie moved back to Rhode Island. She remarried at 27 and she and her husband, Arthur, started a family in Cranston. Marjorie worked as a secretary to the principal at Cranston High School.

Arthur died of a heart attack at age 42 and Marjorie found herself, once again, facing sorrow and grief. She wrote about it recently in a poetry class taught by state poet laureate Lisa Starr:

Yesterday, when the morning sun came

shining through the rising mists

I felt a yearning to shout — come look!

Knowing in my heart no one was there

to share the moment, I held it close within

and almost burst apart.

At 62, she retired from her full-time job and found her poetry guru, Ottone Riccio, at a College Poet’s Workshop, where she attended his class and worked with him for 10 years. She also teaches one poetry workshop and takes part in another at the Wickford Library, and considers the class with Starr “the frosting on the cake.”

Besides Yankee Magazine, her works have been published in The Crone’s Nest, The Newport Review, Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, and What A Difference A Bay Makes.

Her life has been one long continuous poem of love, a sonnet set forth to the universe. Her kind, gentle spirit can be heard in all of her beautiful poetry. So feast your eyes, open your heart … turn for a second and walk the beach down to where the Narrow River meets the sea.

Poetry Corner is a twice-monthly column featuring South County poets — people who live here, work here or are from here. The column is curated by Lynnie Gobeille, a Wakefield poet who can be reached at lynnieg@live.com.

Poets whose work is selected will need to sign a release giving The Journal permission to print their work. We are not able to pay for the poems.