Triad by Adelaide Crapsey

Full Text

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow... the hour
Before the dawn... the mouth of one
Just dead.

Overview

Three silences ranked by intensity: snow, pre-dawn, death. The poem builds toward its devastating final image—"the mouth of one / Just dead." Crapsey wrote this while dying; the poem knows what it's talking about. The ellipses create pauses that enact the silence described.

Line-by-Line Analysis

Lines 1-2

"These be / Three silent things"—archaic "be" adds gravity, like a proverb or riddle. We're promised a list.

Lines 3

"The falling snow..."—soft, natural silence. Beautiful, not threatening. The ellipsis holds the pause.

Lines 4

"The hour before the dawn..."—deeper silence. The world holding its breath. Still natural but weighted with anticipation.

Lines 5

"The mouth of one / Just dead."—the silence that matters. "Just" is crucial: not long dead, but freshly. The mouth that just stopped speaking.

Themes

• Silence gradations
• Death as ultimate quiet
• Natural and human stillness
• The weight of ending

Literary Devices

Tricolon

Snow, dawn, death — Three items building in intensity—the rhetorical rule of three, weaponized.

Ellipsis

Three sets of "..." — Visual silence on the page. The punctuation performs its content.

Enjambment

"the mouth of one / Just dead" — Breaking across lines delays "dead," making us wait for the final word.

Historical Context

Crapsey was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1911 and spent her final years in a sanatorium. Her cinquains often circle death, but with precision rather than self-pity. She died in 1914 at 36.