Amaze by Adelaide Crapsey

Full Text

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

Overview

Dissociation in five lines. The speaker looks at her own hands and doesn't recognize them—"I know not these my hands." Then a strange thought: some other woman "once" had similar hands. Crapsey was watching her body fail from tuberculosis; the poem captures the uncanny experience of the body becoming foreign.

Line-by-Line Analysis

Lines 1-2

"I know / Not these my hands"—inverted syntax emphasizes estrangement. These are my hands but I don't know them.

Lines 3

"And yet I think there was"—reaching for explanation. Memory? Past self? The sentence stretches across lines.

Lines 4-5

"A woman like me once"—she's become separate from her former self. "Had hands / Like these"—not the same hands, just similar. Identity has fractured.

Themes

• Bodily estrangement
• Illness and identity
• The uncanny self
• Time and the body

Literary Devices

Dissociation

"I know / Not these my hands" — The speaker splits from her own body—classic symptom of trauma or illness.

Temporal displacement

"A woman like me once" — Past self becomes a different person entirely.

Cinquain compression

22 syllables total — The tiny form intensifies the vertigo—no room to explain or comfort.

Historical Context

Crapsey spent her final years in a sanatorium watching her body deteriorate. Her cinquains often describe this experience of the body becoming alien. She died at 36, having invented a new poetic form to express what illness felt like.