Out of the purple drifts,
      From the shadow sea of night,
  On tides of musk a moth uplifts
      Its weary wings of white.
  Is it a dream or ghost
      Of a dream that comes to me,
  Here in the twilight on the coast,
      Blue cinctured by the sea?
  Fashioned of foam and froth --
      And the dream is ended soon,
  And lo, whence came the moon-white moth
      Comes now the moth-white moon!

cinctured: girdled, encircled

A slightly weak poem, but nonetheless pleasant. The ‘foam and froth’ imagery that permeates the poem is well done, and the bit of wordplay at the end is nicely unexpected, but on the whole it’s one of those poems that are more enjoyable than ‘good’. Doesn’t really need anything more said about it.

Biography-of-sorts-dept:

While I couldn’t find a proper biography of Sherman, snippets abound.

Frank Dempster Sherman (1860 - 1916): American Architect

says the Poet’s Corner; as good an opening line as any.

“He did more work on the genealogy of the Sherman Family from England than any other person.”

says the genealogy page at http://www.cybercomm.net/~hsherman/photos.html (there’s a picture of him there too). So if you want to know about his ancestors, you can go take a look.

[GENEALOGY, n.

An account of one’s descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

]

He collaborated on an American Verse project with one Clinton Scollard; see it at http://hti.umich.edu/bin/amv-idx.pl?type=header&id=ScollSouth

And finally, the Bibliomania site has this to say:

Some of the poets, identified with this generation both by date of birth and the spirit of their verse, continue well into the twentieth century. Samuel Minturn Peck (born 1854) and Frank Lebby Stanton (born 1857) are poets of the South; the first a native of Alabama, the second, of South Carolina.

Peck’s first volume, Cap and Bells, appeared in 1886. Stanton, on the staff of the Atlanta Constitution, published Songs of the Soil in 1894. Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1916) published a first volume, Madrigals and Catches, in 1887. A Southern Flight (1906) was published in association with Clinton Scollard (1860-1932), whose earliest volume, Pictures in Song, had appeared in 1884. Both poets were natives of New York. Scollard was professor of English literature at Hamilton College (1889-1896) and Sherman was in the Faculty of Columbia University (1904-1916).

– http://www.bibliomania.com/Reference/Simonds/SHAL/p5-chap6.html

— Martin