Maria Gowen Brooks

Maria Gowen Brooks (c. 1794–1845), who wrote as “Maria del Occidente”, was an American poet born at Medford, Massachusetts. She published Judith, Esther, and Other Poems in 1820, lived for some years in Cuba, and finished her long narrative poem Zophiël, or the Bride of Seven, in England with the encouragement of Robert Southey.

The poem here is taken from Edmund Clarence Stedman’s An American Anthology, 1787–1900 (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900).