Poetry By English Women
Page 20
Come up Jetty, rise and follow,
Jetty, to the milking shed.’
If it be long, ay, long ago,
When I begin to think how long,
Again I hear the Lindis flow,
Swift as an arrow, sharp and strong;
And all the air, it seemeth me,
Is full of floating bells (saith she),
That ring the tune of Enderby.
All fresh the level pasture lay, [50]
And not a shadow might be seen,
Save where full five good miles away
The steeple towered from out the green;
And lo! the great bell far and wide
Was heard in all the country side
That Saturday at eventide.
The swanherds where their sedges are
Moved on in sunset’s golden breath,
The shepherd lads I heard afar,
And my son’s wife, Elizabeth; [60]
Till floating o’er the grassy sea
Came down that kindly message free,
The ‘Brides of Mavis Enderby’.
Then some looked up into the sky,
And all along where Lindis flows
To where the goodly vessels lie,
And where the lordly steeple shows.
They said, ‘And why should this thing be?
What danger lowers by land or sea?
They ring the tune of Enderby! [70]
‘For evil news from Mablethorpe,
Of pirate galleys warping down;
For ships ashore beyond the scorpe,
They have not spared to wake the town;
But while the west is red to see,
And storms be none, and pirates flee,
Why ring “The Brides of Enderby”?’
I looked without, and lo! my son
Came riding down with might and main:
He raised a shout as he drew on, [80]
Till all the welkin rang again,
‘Elizabeth! Elizabeth!’
(A sweeter woman ne’er drew breath
Than my son’s wife, Elizabeth.)
‘The old sea wall (he cried) is down,
The rising tide comes on apace,
And boats adrift in yonder town
Go sailing up the market-place.’
He shook as one that looks on death:
‘God save you, mother,’ straight he saith; [90]
‘Where is my wife, Elizabeth?’
‘Good son, where Lindis winds away,
With her two bairns I marked her long;
And ere yon bells began to play
Afar I heard her milking song.’
He looked across the grassy lea,
To right, to left, ‘Ho Enderby!’
They rang ‘The Brides of Enderby!’
With that he cried and beat his breast;
For, lo! along the river’s bed [100]
A mighty eygre reared his crest,
And up the Lindis raging sped.
It swept with thunderous noises loud;
Shaped like a curling snow-white cloud,
Or like a demon in a shroud.
And rearing Lindis backward pressed
Shook all her trembling banks amain;
Then madly at the eygre’s breast
Flung up her weltering walls again.
Then banks came down with ruin and rout – [110]
Then beaten foam flew round about –
Then all the mighty floods were out.
So far, so fast the eygre drave,
The heart had hardly time to beat,
Before a shallow seething wave
Sobbed in the grasses at our feet:
The feet had hardly time to flee
Before it brake against the knee,
And all the world was in the sea.
Upon the roof we sat that night, [120]
The noise of bells went sweeping by;
I marked the lofty beacon light
Stream from the church, red and high –
A lurid mark and dread to see;
And awesome bells they were to me,
That in the dark rang ‘Enderby’.
They rang the sailor lads to guide
From roof to roof who fearless rowed;
And I – my son was at my side,
And yet the ruddy beacon glowed; [130]
And yet he moaned beneath his breath,
‘O come in life, or come in death!
O lost! my love, Elizabeth.’
* * *
I shall never see her more
Where the reeds and rushes quiver,
Shiver, quiver;
Stand beside the sobbing river,
Sobbing, throbbing, in its falling
To the sandy lonesome shore;
I shall never hear her calling, [140]
Leave your meadow grasses mellow,
Mellow, mellow;
Quit your cowslips, cowslips yellow;
Come up Whitefoot, come up Lightfoot;
Quit your pipes of parsley hollow,
Hollow, hollow;
Come up Lightfoot, rise and follow;
Lightfoot, Whitefoot,
From your clovers lift the head;
Come up Jetty, follow, follow,
Jetty, to the milking shed.
DORA GREENWELL 1821–1882
Only daughter of five children of Dorothy (Smales) and William Greenwell, a squire of County Durham. First volume, Poems, 1848; others in 1861 and 1867; religious verse, Carmina Crucis, 1869. Had strong Evangelical sympathies, wrote on religious matters and social problems (child labour, the cotton famine, for example). Lived mostly in the north, with her parents, and later with her brother.
Constance L. Maynard (ed. and intro.), Selected Poems of Dora Greenwell (London, 1906); H. Bett, Dora Greenwell (London: Epworth, 1950).
A Scherzo A Shy Person’s Wishes
With the wasp at the innermost heart of a peach,
On a sunny wall out of tip-toe reach,
With the trout in the darkest summer pool,
With the fern-seed clinging behind its cool
Smooth frond, in the chink of an aged tree,
In the woodbine’s horn with the drunken bee,
With the mouse in its nest in a furrow old,
With the chrysalis wrapped in its gauzy fold;
With things that are hidden, and safe, and bold,
With things that are timid, and shy, and free, [10]
Wishing to be;
With the nut in its shell, with the seed in its pod,
With the corn as it sprouts in the kindly clod,
Far down where the secret of beauty shows
In the bulb of the tulip, before it blows;
With things that are rooted, and firm, and deep,
Quiet to lie, and dreamless to sleep;
With things that are chainless, and tameless, and proud,
With the fire in the jagged thunder-cloud,
With the wind in its sleep, with the wind in its waking, [20]
With the drops that go to the rainbow’s making,
Wishing to be with the light leaves shaking,
Or stones in some desolate highway breaking;
Far up on the hills, where no foot surprises
The dew as it falls, or the dust as it rises;
To be couched with the beast in its torrid lair,
Or drifting on ice with the polar bear,
With the weaver at work at his quiet loom;
Anywhere, anywhere, out of this room!
The Sunflower
Till the slow daylight pale,
A willing slave, fast bound to one above,
I wait; he seems to speed, and change, and fail;
I know he will not move.
I lift my golden orb
To his, unsmitten when the roses die,
And in my broad and burning disk absorb
The splendours of his eye.
His eye is like a c
lear
Keen flame that searches through me: I must droop [10]
Upon my stalk, I cannot reach his sphere;
To mine he cannot stoop.
I win not my desire,
And yet I fail not of my guerdon; lo!
A thousand flickering darts and tongues of fire
Around me spread and glow.
All rayed and crowned, I miss
No queenly state until the summer wane,
The hours flit by; none knoweth of my bliss,
And none has guessed my pain. [20]
I follow one above,
I track the shadow of his steps, I grow
Most like to him I love
Of all that shines below.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 1830–1893
The fourth child of an English mother, Frances (Polidori), and Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian political exile, later Professor of Italian at London University; he lapsed from Catholicism, but his wife and daughters became devout Anglo-Catholics. Educated at home; first Waves published 1847; incorrect diagnosis of tuberculosis. An early romance with James Collinson, a member of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; in 1847 met William Bell Scott, suggested as the secret ‘love of her life’. Undertook charitable work at Home for Fallen Women, 1860–70. Goblin Market volume (1862), praised by Gosse as ‘brilliant, fantastic, and profoundly original’ (unfortunately, her great poem is far too long for inclusion here); in that year met another wooer, the scholar Charles Bagot Cayley. In 1866 gave up hopes of Scott, but rejected Cayley, possibly on religious grounds. In 1870 diagnosed as suffering from thyroidic illness, that left her with a swollen throat, brown skin, hair loss and headaches, though she partially recovered. Collected Poems published 1875. Her later years seem to have been retired, devout and not happy. For all her insistent melancholy, self-repression, self-deferral and religious anxiety, her poetry has a passion and intensity matched by few in that century: denial was what she felt, and sought; deprivation produced an obstinate identity.
W.M. Rossetti (ed.), The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904); Kathleen Blake, Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature (Brighton: Harvester; New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1983); A.H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Brighton: Harvester, 1989).
Remember
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late then to counsel or to pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve: [10]
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
The World
By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair:
But all night as the moon so changeth she;
Loathsome and foul as hidden leprosy
And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.
By day she woos me to the outer air,
Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:
But through the night, a beast she grins at me,
A very monster void of love and prayer.
By day she stands a lie: by night she stands
In all the naked horror of the truth, [10]
With pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands.
Is this a friend indeed, that I should sell
My soul to her, give her my life and youth,
Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell?
From the Antique
It’s a weary life, it is, she said: –
Doubly blank in a woman’s lot:
I wish and wish I were a man:
Or, better than any being, were not:
Were nothing at all in all the world,
Not a body and not a soul:
Not so much as a grain of dust
Or drop of water from pole to pole.
Still the world would wag on the same,
Still the seasons go and come: [10]
Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.
None would miss me in all the world,
How much less would care or weep:
I should be nothing, while all the rest
Would wake and weary and fall asleep.
Echo
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes [10]
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
In An Artist’s Studio*
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel – every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, [10]
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, nor with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
A Birthday
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickest fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes; [10]
Carve it in doves, and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves, and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
Up-Hill
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before. [10]
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
/>
Yea, beds for all who come.
Amor Mundi
‘Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing,
On the west wind blowing along this valley track?’
‘The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.’
So they two went together in glowing August weather,
The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;
And dear she was to dote on, her swift feet seemed to float on
The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight.
‘Oh, what is that in heaven where grey cloud-flakes are seven,
Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?’ [10]
‘Oh, that’s a meteor sent us, the message dumb, portentous, –
An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt.’
‘Oh, what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly,
Their scent comes rich and sickly?’ – ‘A scaled and hooded worm.’
‘Oh, what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?’
‘Oh, that’s a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.’
‘Turn again, O my sweetest, – turn again, false and fleetest:
This way whereof thou weetest I fear is hell’s own track.’
‘Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost counting:
This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.’ [20]
The Thread of Life
I
The irresponsive silence of the land,
The irresponsive sounding of the sea,