Background
She was born in New York City to Charlotte Augusta Burrough and clergyman, abolitionist, and newspaper publisher Charles B. Ray, and named for his first wife, Henrietta Ray.
She was born in New York City to Charlotte Augusta Burrough and clergyman, abolitionist, and newspaper publisher Charles B. Ray, and named for his first wife, Henrietta Ray.
In 1891 Cordelia graduated from the University of the City of New York with a master"s in pedagogy. She also studied French, German, Greek and Latin at the Saveneur School of Languages.
She was the sister of Charlotte East. She became a schoolteacher, but stopped teaching in order to write. Ray"s ode "Lincoln" was read at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, Doctorate.C in April 1876. Her were printed, also by Little, in 1893, and her Poems were published in 1910.
Ray died in 1916.
Ray"s was a short book of 12 sonnets on Milton, Shakespeare, Raphael, and Beethoven, among other subjects. Her sonnet on the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L"Overture is notable for its belated engagement in black politics (absent from her earlier verse) and for its allusions to William Wordsworth"s famous sonnet, "To Touissaint L"Overture": To those fair isles where crimson sunsets burn, We send a backward glance to gaze on thee, Brave Toussaint! thou was surely born to be A hero. Thy proud spirit could but spurn Each outrage on the race.
Couldst thou unlearn The lessons taught by instinct? Nay! and we Who share the zeal that would make all men free, Must e’en with pride unto thy life-work turn.
Soul-dignity was thine and purest aim. And ah! how sad that thou wast left to mourn In chains ’neath alien skies.
On him, shame! shame! That mighty conqueror who dared to claim The right to bind thee. Him we heap with scorn, And noble patriot! guard with love thy name.
Ray"s reputation rests on her 1912 volume, from which poems were republished widely in anthologies in the early twentieth century.
Her work has been rediscovered in twenty-first-century scholarship.