Poetry By English Women
Page 22
Within the darkened quiet room.
The sun sends dusk rays through the gloom, [10]
Which is no gloom since you are here,
My little life, my baby dear.
Soft sleepy mouth so vaguely pressed
Against your new-made mother’s breast,
Soft little hands in mine I fold,
Soft little feet I kiss and hold,
Round soft smooth head and tiny ear,
All mine, my own, my baby dear.
And he we love is far away!
But he will come some happy day, [20]
You need but me, and I can rest
At peace with you beside me pressed.
There are no questions, longings vain,
No murmurings, nor doubt, nor pain,
Only content and we are here,
My baby dear.
Among His Books*
A silent room – grey with a dusty blight
Of loneliness;
A room with not enough of light
Its form to dress.
Books enough though! The groaning sofa bears
A goodly store –
Books on the window-seat, and on the chairs,
And on the floor.
Books of all sorts of soul, all sorts of age,
All sorts of face – [10]
Black-letter, vellum, and the flimsy page
Of commonplace.
All bindings, from the cloth whose hue distracts
One’s weary nerves,
To yellow parchment, binding rare old tracts
It serves – deserves.
Books on the shelves, and in the cupboard books,
Worthless and rare –
Books on the mantelpiece – wheree’er one looks
Books everywhere! [20]
Books! books! the only things in life I find
Not wholly vain.
Books in my hands – books in my heart enshrined –
Books in my brain.
My friends are they: for children and for wife
They serve me too;
For these alone, of all dear things in life,
Have I found true.
They do not flatter, change, deny, deceive –
Ah no – not they! [30]
The same editions which one night you leave
You find next day.
You don’t find railway novels where you left
Your Elzevirs!
Your Aldines don’t betray you – leave bereft
Your lonely years!
And yet this common book of Common Prayer
My heart prefers,
Because the names upon the fly-leaf there
Are mine and hers. [40]
It’s a dead flower that makes it open so –
Forget-me-not –
The Marriage Service … well, my dear, you know
Who first forgot.
Those were the days when in the choir we two
Sat – used to sing –
When I believed in God, in love, in you –
In everything.
Through quiet lanes to church we used to come,
Happy and good, [50]
Clasp hands through sermon, and go slowly home
Down through the wood.
Kisses? A certain yellow rose no doubt
That porch still shows,
Whenever I hear kisses talked about
I smell that rose!
No – I don’t blame you – since you only proved
My choice unwise,
And taught me books should trusted be and loved,
Not lips and eyes! [60]
And so I keep your book – your flower – to show
How much I care
For the dear memory of what, you know,
You never were.
The Gray Folk
The house, with blind unhappy face,
Stands lonely in the last year’s corn,
And in the grayness of the morn
The gray folk come about the place.
By many pathways, gliding gray
They come past meadow, wood, and wold,
Come by the farm and by the fold
From the green fields of yesterday.
Past lock and chain and bolt and bar
They press, to stand about my bed, [10]
And like the faces of the dead
I know their hidden faces are.
They will not leave me in the day
And when night falls they will not go,
Because I silenced, long ago,
The only voice they will obey.
Villeggiature
My window, framed in pear-tree bloom,
White-curtained shone, and softly lighted:
So, by the pear-tree to my room
Your ghost last night climbed uninvited.
Your solid self, long leagues away,
Deep in dull books, had hardly missed me;
And yet you found this Romeo’s way,
And through the blossom climbed and kissed me.
I watched the still and dewy lawn,
The pear-tree boughs hung white above you; [10]
I listened to you till the dawn,
And half forgot I did not love you.
Oh, dear! what pretty things you said,
What pearls of song you threaded for me!
I did not – till your ghost had fled –
Remember how you always bore me!
AMY LEVY 1861–1889
Parents Isabelle (Levin) and Lewis Levy; first Jewish woman to enter Newnham College, Cambridge, where published first volume of verse. Friend of Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner and Richard Garnett; travelled on the Continent, writing on Jewish affairs; novel, Reuben Sachs, published 1888; melancholic, feminist, radical, she committed suicide.
Xantippe and Other Verse (London, 1881); A Minor Poet and Other Verse (London, 1884); A London Plane Tree and Other Verse (London, 1889).
London Poets
They trod the streets and squares where now I tread,
With weary hearts, a little while ago;
When, thin and grey, the melancholy snow
Clung to the leafless branches overhead;
Or when the smoke-veiled sky grew stormy-red
In autumn; with a re-arisen woe
Wrestled, what time the passionate spring winds blow.
And paced scorched stones in summer: – they are dead.
The sorrow of their souls to them did seem
As real as mine to me, as permanent. [10]
Today, it is the shadow of a dream,
The half-forgotten breath of breezes spent.
So shall another soothe his woe supreme –
‘No more he comes, who this way came and went.’
Epitaph
(On a commonplace person who died in bed)
This is the end of him, here he lies:
The dust in his throat, the worm in his eyes,
The mould in his mouth, the turf on his breast;
This is the end of him, this is best.
He will never lie on his couch awake,
Wide-eyed, tearless, till dim daybreak.
Never again will he smile and smile
When his heart is breaking all the while.
He will never stretch out his hands in vain
Groping and groping – never again. [10]
Never ask for bread, get a stone instead,
Never pretend that the stone is bread.
Never sway and sway ’twixt the false and true,
Weighing and noting the long hours through.
Never ache and ache with the chok’d-up sighs;
This is the end of him, here he lies.
A London Plane-Tree
Green is the plane-tree in the square,
The other trees are brown;
They droop and pine for country air;
The plane-tree loves the town.
Here from my garret-pane, I
mark
The plane-tree bud and blow,
Shed her recuperative bark,
And spread her shade below.
Among her branches, in and out,
The city breezes play; [10]
The dim fog wraps her round about;
Above, the smoke curls grey.
Others the country take for choice,
And hold the town in scorn;
But she has listened to the voice
On city breezes borne.
In the Mile End Road
How like her! But ’tis she herself,
Comes up the crowded street,
How little did I think, the morn,
My only love to meet?
Whose else that motion and that mien?
Whose else that airy tread?
For one strange moment I forgot
My only love was dead.
The Old House
In through the porch and up the silent stair;
Little is changed, I know so well the ways; –
Here, the dead came to meet me; it was there
The dream was dreamed in unforgotten days.
But who is this that hurries on before,
A flitting shade the brooding shades among? –
She turned, – I saw her face, – O God, it wore
The face I used to wear when I was young!
I thought my spirit and my heart were tamed
To deadness; dead the pains that agonise. [10]
The old griefs spring to choke me, – I am shamed
Before that little ghost with eager eyes.
O turn away, let her not see, not know!
How should she bear it, how should understand?
O hasten down the stairway, haste and go,
And leave her dreaming in the silent land.
MARY COLERIDGE 1861–1907
‘Poetry,’ she wrote, ‘is, by its very derivation, making, not feeling. But the odd thing is, I think, that what is most carefully made often sounds as if it had been felt straight off, whereas what has been felt carelessly sounds as if it were made.’ Her father, Arthur Coleridge, great-nephew of S.T. Coleridge, was a lawyer and skilful amateur musician; her mother, Mary Ann Jameson. Privately highly educated; lived with her parents, travelled on the Continent, published essays and five novels. Friends spoke of her sensitivity and animation, a mind ‘as sudden as the flight of a moth by candlelight’. Robert Bridges encouraged her to publish two volumes, but the rest of her verse was published posthumously by Sir Henry Newbolt, husband of her friend Margaret Duckworth. During the last twelve years of her life taught at the Working Women’s College in London.
Theresa Whistler (ed. and intro.), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954); Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge, With a Memoir by Edith Sichel (London: Constable, 1910).
The Other Side of a Mirror
I sat before my glass one day,
And conjured up a vision bare,
Unlike the aspects glad and gay,
That erst were found reflected there –
The vision of a woman, wild
With more than womanly despair.
Her hair stood back on either side
A face bereft of loveliness.
It had no envy now to hide
What once no man on earth could guess. [10]
It formed the thorny aureole
Of hard unsanctified distress.
Her lips were open – not a sound
Came through the parted lines of red.
Whate’er it was, the hideous wound
In silence and in secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
She had no voice to speak her dread.
And in her lurid eyes there shone
The dying flames of life’s desire [20]
Made mad because its hope was gone,
And kindled at the leaping fire
Of jealousy, and fierce revenge,
And strength that could not change nor tire.
Shade of a shadow in the glass,
O set the crystal surface free!
Pass – as the fairer visions pass –
Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper, ‘I am she!’ [30]
A Moment
The clouds had made a crimson crown
Above the mountains high.
The stormy sun was going down
In a stormy sky.
Why did you let your eyes so rest on me,
And hold your breath between?
In all the ages this can never be
As if it had not been.
In Dispraise of the Moon
I would not be the Moon, the sickly thing,
To summon owls and bats upon the wing;
For when the noble Sun is gone away,
She turns his night into a pallid day.
She hath no air, no radiance of her own,
That world unmusical of earth and stone.
She wakes her dim, uncoloured, voiceless hosts,
Ghost of the Sun, herself the sun of ghosts.
The mortal eyes that gaze too long on her
Of Reason’s piercing ray defrauded are. [10]
Light in itself doth feed the living brain;
That light, reflected, but makes darkness plain.
The Poison Flower
The poison flower that in my garden grew
Killed all the other flowers beside.
They withered off and died,
Because their fiery foe sucked up the dew.
When the sun shone, the poison flower breathed cold
And spread a chilly mist of dull disgrace.
They could not see his face,
Roses and lilies languished and grew old.
Wherefore I tore that flower up by the root,
And flung it on the rubbish heap to fade [10]
Amid the havoc that itself had made.
I did not leave one shoot.
Fair is my garden as it once was fair.
Lilies and roses reign.
They drink the dew, they see the sun again;
But I rejoice no longer, walking there.
An Insincere Wish Addressed to a Beggar
We are not near enough to love,
I can but pity all your woe;
For wealth has lifted me above,
And falsehood set you down below.
If you were true, we still might be
Brothers in something more than name;
And were I poor, your love to me
Would make our differing bonds the same.
But golden gates between us stretch,
Truth opens her forbidding eyes; [10]
You can’t forget that I am rich,
Nor I that you are telling lies.
Love never comes but at love’s call,
And pity asks for him in vain;
Because I cannot give you all,
You give me nothing back again.
And you are right with all your wrong,
For less than all is nothing too;
May Heaven beggar me ere long,
And Truth reveal herself to you! [20]
Marriage
No more alone sleeping, no more alone waking,
Thy dreams divided, thy prayers in twain;
Thy merry sisters tonight forsaking,
Never shall we see, maiden, again.
Never shall we see thee, thine eyes glancing,
Flashing with laughter and wild in glee,
Under the mistletoe kissing and dancing,
Wantonly free.
There shall come a matron walking sedately,
Low-voiced, gentle, wise in reply. [10]
Tell me, O tell me, can I love her greatly?
All for her sake must the maiden die!
The White Women
(‘From a legend of Malay, told by Hugh Clifford’)
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Where dwell the lovely, wild white women folk,
Mortal to man?
They never bowed their necks beneath the yoke,
They dwelt alone when the first morning broke
And Time began.
Taller are they than man, and very fair,
Their cheeks are pale,
At sight of them the tiger in his lair,
The falcon hanging in the azure air,
The eagles quail. [10]
The deadly shafts their nervous hands let fly
Are stronger than our strongest – in their form
Larger, more beauteous, carved amazingly,
And when they fight, the wild white women cry
The war-cry of the storm.
Their words are not as ours. If man might go
Among the waves of Ocean when they break
And hear them – hear the language of the snow
Falling on torrents – he might also know
The tongue they speak. [20]
Pure are they as the light; they never sinned,
But when the rays of the eternal fire
Kindle the West, their tresses they unbind
And fling their girdles to the Western wind,