Poetry By English Women

by R. E. ; Pritchard

  Speak both one message of one sense to me: –

  ‘Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof, so stand

  Thou too aloof bound with the flawless band

  Of inner solitude; we bind not thee;

  But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?

  What heart shall touch thy heart? What hand thy hand?’

  And I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek,

  And sometimes I remember days of old [10]

  When fellowship seemed not so far to seek

  And all the world and I seemed much less cold,

  And at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold,

  And hope felt strong and life itself not weak.

  II

  Thus am I mine own prison. Everything

  Around me free and sunny and at ease:

  Or if in shadow, in a shade of trees

  Which the sun kisses, where the gay birds sing

  And where all winds make various murmuring;

  Where bees are found, with honey for the bees;

  Where sounds are music, and where silences

  Are music of an unlike fashioning.

  Then gaze I at the merrymaking crew

  And smile a moment and a moment sigh [10]

  Thinking: Why can I not rejoice with you?

  But soon I put the foolish fancy by:

  I am not what I have nor what I do;

  But what I was I am, I am even I.

  III

  Therefore myself is that one only thing

  I hold to use or waste, to keep or give;

  My sole possession every day I live,

  And still mine own despite Time’s winnowing.

  Ever mine own, while moon and seasons bring

  From crudeness ripeness mellow and sanative;

  Ever mine own, when saints break grave and sing.

  And this myself as king unto my King

  I give, to Him who gave Himself for me; [10]

  Who gives Himself to me, and bids me sing

  A sweet new song of His redeemed set free;

  He bids me sing, O Death, where is thy sting?

  And sing, O grave, where is thy victory?

  LOUISA S. BEVINGTON later GUGGENBERGER b.1845

  The eldest of eight children of Alexander Bevington, a Quaker, who encouraged her interest in nature and writing. Embarked on a literary career, writing articles and poems on evolutionism, read by Darwin. In 1883 married a Munich artist, Ignatz Guggenberger, and lived in Meran and then in London; in her later years became an enthusiastic anarchist-communist. Her espousal of energy, lively response to the natural world, strong sense of social indignation and of passion, provide a refreshing note in late Victorian poetry.

  Key-Notes (London, 1876, 1879); Poems, Lyrics and Sonnets (London, 1882); Liberty Lyrics (London, 1895), produced by Liberty: A Journal of Anarchist Communism, ed. James Tochalti, whose contributors included Kropotkin, Shaw and William Morris.

  Morning

  What’s the text today for reading

  Nature and its being by?

  There is effort all the morning

  Thro’ the windy sea and sky.

  All, intent in earnest grapple

  That the All may let it be:

  Force, in unity, at variance

  With its own diversity.

  Force, prevailing unto action,

  Force, persistent to restrain, [10]

  In a twofold, one-souled wrestle

  Forging Being’s freedom-chain.

  Frolic! say you – when the billow

  Tosses back a mane of spray?

  No; but haste of earnest effort;

  Nature works in guise of play.

  Till the balance shall be even

  Swings the to and fro of strife;

  Till an awful equilibrium

  Stills it, beats the Heart of Life. [20]

  What’s the text today for reading

  Nature and its being by?

  Effort, effort all the morning,

  Thro’ the windy sea and sky.

  Afternoon

  Purple headland over yonder,

  Fleecy, sun-extinguished moon,

  I am here alone, and ponder

  On the theme of Afternoon.

  Past has made a groove for Present,

  And what fits it is: no more.

  Waves before the wind are weighty;

  Strongest sea-beats shape the shore.

  Just what is is just what can be,

  And the Possible is free; [10]

  ’Tis by being, not by effort,

  That the firm cliff juts to sea.

  With an uncontentious calmness

  Drifts the Fact before the ‘Law’;

  So we name the ordered sequence

  We, remembering, foresaw.

  And a law is mere procession

  Of the forcible and fit;

  Calm of uncontested Being,

  And our thought that comes of it. [20]

  In the mellow shining daylight

  Lies the Afternoon at ease,

  Little willing ripples answer

  To a drift of casual breeze.

  Purple headland to the westward!

  Ebbing tide, and fleecy moon!

  In the ‘line of least resistance’,

  Flows the life of Afternoon.

  Twilight

  Grey the sky, and growing dimmer,

  And the twilight lulls the sea;

  Half in vagueness, half in glimmer,

  Nature shrouds her mystery.

  What have all the hours been spent for?

  Why the on and on of things?

  Why eternity’s procession

  Of the days and evenings?

  Hours of sunshine, hours of gloaming,

  Wing their unexplaining flight, [10]

  With a measured punctuation

  Of unconsciousness, at night.

  Just at sunset was translucence,

  When the west was all aflame;

  So I asked the sea a question,

  And an answer nearly came.

  Is there nothing but Occurrence?

  Though each detail seem an Act,

  Is that whole we deem so pregnant

  But unemphasized Fact? [20]

  Or, when dusk is in the hollows

  Of the hill-side and the wave,

  Are things so much in earnest

  That they cannot but be grave?

  Nay, the lesson of the Twilight

  Is as simple as ’tis deep;

  Acquiescence, acquiescence,

  And the coming on of sleep.

  Midnight

  There are sea and sky about me,

  And yet nothing sense can mark;

  For a mist fills all the midnight

  Adding blindness to the dark.

  There is not the faintest echo

  From the life of yesterday:

  Not the vaguest stir foretelling

  Of a morrow on the way.

  ’Tis negation’s hour of triumph

  In the absence of the sun; [10]

  ’Tis the hour of endings, ended,

  Of beginnings, unbegun.

  Yet the voice of awful silence

  Bids my waiting spirit hark;

  There is action in the stillness,

  There is progress in the dark.

  In the drift of things and forces

  Comes the better from the worse;

  Swings the whole of Nature upward,

  Wakes, and thinks – a universe. [20]

  There will be more life tomorrow,

  And of life, more life that knows;

  Though the sum of force be constant

  Yet the Living ever grows.

  So we sing of evolution,

  And step strongly on our ways;

  And we live through nights in patience,

  And we learn the worth of days.

  from Two songs

  WITH THE TIDE: A CRY OF WEAKNESS

  Deep, and
silent, and wide,

  The evening shelters are spread;

  And the tears may flow unread

  That the taunt of day would have dried.

  And oh! most dear love of mine, we may float one hour with the tide.

  I see the great river go,

  Fast, where the lamplight gleams

  In streaks: – I see how it streams

  Through a moment’s revealing glow;

  Like a life, from the dark to the dark, that flows because it must flow.

  And the old church-bells divide

  The moments of evening-time;

  As a passion-charged soul they chime,

  As a sob of near bliss outside,

  And the wild vague flow goes on of the tacit, unhindering tide.

  My love! my love! are you there

  In this hour of stealing drift?

  When through every quivering rift

  Of silence there strays an air

  Like a whisper of blessed sanction, answering a hopeless prayer.

  I see with a dreamy sight, –

  I hear with a half-lent ear, –

  How the bells keep showering near,

  How the wild flood hurries tonight;

  And lamps on the farther shore keep lending long gleams of light.

  O reckless of source or end,

  Let the great river go!

  Adrift on its bosom’s flow

  One infinite hour to spend;

  Hark! how the sobbing bells from silence to silence tend.

  There is all day long for the fight

  With the deep perverseness of life;

  We may rest one hour from the strife,

  As the heavens may rest from light.

  O love! with your lips on mine, drift, drift with the tide, tonight.

  Wrestling

  Our oneness is the wrestlers’, fierce and close,

  Thrusting and thrust;

  One life in dual effort for one prize, –

  We fight, and must;

  For soul with soul does battle evermore

  Till love be trust.

  Our distance is love’s severance; sense divides,

  Each is but each;

  Never the very hidden spirit of thee

  My life doth reach; [10]

  Twain! since love athwart the gulf that needs

  Kisses and speech.

  Ah! wrestle closelier! we draw nearer so

  Than any bliss

  Can bring twain souls who would be whole and one,

  Too near to kiss:

  To be one thought, one voice before we die, –

  Wrestle for this.

  ALICE MEYNELL 1847–1922

  Her father, Thomas James Thompson, a writer, and her mother, Christiana (Weller), a talented pianist, were friends of Dickens. While still a girl, entered the Roman Catholic church. Her first volume, Preludes, published 1875, was praised by Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She wrote, ‘Whatever I write will be melancholy and self-conscious, as are all women’s poems’, and complained of ‘the miserable selfishness of men that keeps women from work’. In 1876 married Wilfred Meynell, a Catholic journalist, and began a hectic life, bringing up seven children while co-editing several magazines, and writing twelve volumes of essays and eight of poetry. Her verse was carefully worked, written, ‘one might believe, with an etching pen’, commented Vita Sackville-West, who also reported that ‘she took particular pains in the use of draped garments and high heels to make herself appear as tall as possible’; she expressed liberal political views, was a vigorous feminist and, later, a suffragist and pacifist (her sister, Lady Elizabeth Butler, was a distinguished painter of military life and action).

  Frederick Page (ed.), Poems of Alice Meynell (Oxford: OUP, 1940); June Badeni, The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell (Padstow, 1981).

  Renouncement

  I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,

  I shun the thought that lurks in all delight –

  The thought of thee – and in the blue Heaven’s height,

  And in the sweetest passage of a song.

  Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng

  This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden though bright;

  Yet it must never, never come in sight;

  I must stop short of thee the whole day long.

  But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,

  When night gives pause to the long watch I keep, [10]

  And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,

  Must doff my will as raiment laid away, –

  With the first dream that comes with the first sleep

  I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

  The Shepherdess

  She walks – the lady of my delight –

  A shepherdess of sheep.

  Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;

  She guards them from the steep;

  She feeds them on the fragrant height,

  And folds them in for sleep.

  She roams maternal hills and bright,

  Dark valleys safe and deep.

  Into that tender breast at night

  The chastest stars may peep. [10]

  She walks – the lady of my delight –

  A shepherdess of sheep.

  She holds her little thoughts in sight,

  Though gay they run and leap.

  She is so circumspect and right;

  She has her soul to keep.

  She walks – the lady of my delight –

  The shepherdess of sheep.

  Maternity

  One wept whose only child was dead,

  New-born, ten years ago.

  ‘Weep not; he is in bliss,’ they said.

  She answered, ‘Even so.

  Ten years ago was born in pain

  A child, not now forlorn.

  But oh, ten years ago, in vain

  A mother, a mother was born.’

  Parentage

  ‘When Augustus Caesar legislated against the unmarried citizens of Rome, he declared them to be, in some sort, slayers of the people.’

  Ah no! not these!

  These, who were childless, are not they who gave

  So many dead unto the journeying wave,

  The helpless nurslings of the cradling seas;

  Not they who doomed by infallible decrees

  Unnumbered man to the innumerable grave.

  But those who slay

  Are fathers. Theirs are armies. Death is theirs –

  The death of innocences and despairs;

  The dying of the golden and the grey. [10]

  The sentence, when they speak it, has no Nay.

  And she who slays is she who bears, who bears.

  A Dead Harvest

  In Kensington Gardens

  Along the graceless grass of town

  They rake the rows of red and brown, –

  Dead leaves, unlike the rows of hay

  Delicate, touched with gold and grey,

  Raked long ago and far away.

  A narrow silence in the park,

  Between the lights a narrow dark.

  One street rolls on the north; and one,

  Muffled, upon the south doth run;

  Amid the mist the work is done. [10]

  A futile crop! – for it the fire

  Smoulders, and, for a stack, a pyre.

  So go the town’s lives on the breeze,

  Even as the shedding of the trees;

  Bosom nor barn is filled with these.

  Chimes

  Brief, in a flying night,

  From the shaken tower,

  A flock of bells take flight,

  And go with the hour.

  Like birds from the cote to the gales,

  Abrupt – O hark!

  A fleet of bells set sails,

  And go to the dark.

  Sudden the cold airs swing.

  Alone, aloud, [10]

  A verse of bells tak
es wing

  And flies with the cloud.

  EDITH NESBIT 1858–1924

  Fourth surviving child of Sarah (Alderton) and John Nesbit, head of an agricultural college in Kennington, who died when she was four. In 1880 married Hubert Bland, a small businessman (first child born two months later), who was both unfaithful and unsuccessful, so that she had to turn to writing – very successfully. Produced much children’s fiction, notably The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), and The Railway Children (1906). Socialist, a member of the Fabian society, loved George Bernard Shaw, unavailingly (as usual). Bland died in 1914, and in 1917 she married Thomas Tucker, a retired marine engineer.

  Lays and Legends (London, 1886); Leaves of Life (London, 1888); A Pomander of Verse (London, 1895); Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of Edith Nesbit (London: Hutchinson, 1987).

  Song

  Oh, baby, baby, baby dear,

  We lie alone together here;

  The snowy gown and cap and sheet

  With lavender are fresh and sweet;

  Through half-closed blinds the roses peer

  To see and love you, baby dear.

  We are so tired, we like to lie

  Just doing nothing, you and I