her stamp as comprising “the less faulty half of all the author’s
published verse,” her work hardly varies in a certain cool, limpid,
sometimes austere content. Songs at the Start is distinctly unlike the
familiar books of perfervid and unbridled youth. Almost childlike, in
some instances, the songs are always restrained within due measure.
The gusts of a too tempestuous heart, the revolt of youth against
a world ready made for it, are not hers. She might be the child of
a pagan ardency of simple joy, singing to the echo in some waking
spring. These are the dewy recognitions of a world “not realized.” The
faults she showed in this first printing are the ones that plagued her
throughout, though she recognized them with a rueful self-dispraise and
mock extravagance of remorse. They are the infrequent lapses of a not
invariably musical ear. To the end, she would, from stanza to stanza,
unconsciously change her cadence. It might be a fault for her to
redress; but who among her lovers would complain of it now? It was an
individual flaw, the little human imperfection like a mole on beauty’s
cheek; the too studied reverse of it might have been something not
only “icily regular” but “splendidly null.”
The White Sail, part legend and part lyric, with an academic ballast
of sonnets, sang out in fuller tone, though with no less individual a
measure. The legends ring curiously scholastic in these days when the
industrious versifier celebrates the small beer of his own “home town”
in untrained eccentricities all too faithful to his villageous mood.
Her legends were the tall pines of the fairy grove she wandered in.
There were pillared aisles and porticos, not New England dooryards,
tapestries shaken by winds of the past, not leaves, red and gold,
blown her from the swamps and hills she knew. Yet her bookish fetters
were straining from within, and in Daybreak she sings out with a more
individual note, a faint far music, as if some young chorister dared
part the antiphonal ranks of ordered service and try the song he heard
that morning when he and the lark together saluted the hills of dawn.
“The young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts follow from the sea.
Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend a thankful knee:
Those glad Auroral eyes shall beam not anywhere henceforth on me.
“Up with the banners on the height, set every matin bell astir!
The tree-top choirs carouse in light; the dew’s on phlox and lavender:
Ah, mockery! for, worlds away, the heart of morning beats with her.”
This she did not reclaim for the authorized last printing, and none can
say whether she would let us snatch it out of its young obscurity. But
it is so unmistakably one of the first trial flights of the pure lyric
in her, it sings so melodiously, that the mere chronology of her work
demands it. In the same book beats the haunting refrain:
“Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away.”
And as you are about to close the door on this virginal chamber of
April airs and cloistral moonlight, of ordered books breathing not
leather only but the scent of “daffodilean days,” your heart rises up,
for here is The Wild Ride, a poem which first beat out its galloping
measure in a dream, and continued, with the consent of her own critical
mind, to the last book of all. The beginning and the end are like
nothing so much as the call of youth and the answer of undaunted age.
It was, one may guess, her earliest lyric runaway, the first time she
lost herself in the galloping rush of a stanza’s trampling feet.
“I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.
“Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle
Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion,
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.
“The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses;
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:
What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding.
“Thought’s self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb,
And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam:
Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing.
“A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle,
A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty:
We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.
“(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.)
“We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind;
We leap to the infinite dark, like sparks from the anvil.
Thou leadest, O God! All’s well with Thy troopers that follow.”
In The Roadside Harp (1893) (and this she calls, as late as 1911, “my
best book”) she is in full swing of that individual color and form
of verse that were hers thenceforth, hall-marked, inimitable, of a
delicate yet imperishable fragility of loveliness, unique as the hand
they were written in. Here sounds her own true note. Here were more
plainly distinguishable the defined colors of the braided strands of
destiny that made her so rare a nature and were perhaps—it is well to
put it softly, this question—to hinder her in robustness and variety of
performance. Irish by birth, she had not to the full, what she finds
in Mangan, that “racial luxuriance and fluency.” And, like him, her
“genius is happier on Saxon than on Celtic ground.” She was too subject
to varied impulses to be the exponent of one. Her love in letters ran
passionately to the Anglo-Saxon; the seventeenth century was her home.
She was devoutly Catholic, yet living fibres in her knew the earth as
it was in its unsymbolized freshness before the Great Deliverer came.
“You are a natural Christian,” she wrote once to a friend poor in the
consolations of belief, “with a birthright of gladness and peace,
whether you seize it or not; whereas I am the other fellow, a bed-rock
pagan, never able to live up to the inestimable spiritual conditions to
which I was born.”
This was humility only, no wavering from her transcending faith. Yet
the wholesome natural man in her was acutely sensitive to that earth
which saw the immortal gods. You find her listening, responsive, to
the far heard echoes of Greek harmony. She was ready with her cock to
Æsculapius, the tribute of her gentle allegiance to those kingly pagans
who loved the light of the sun and shrank from the “dishonor of the
grave,” who knew the face of Nemesis and were, above all, disciples of
the law of Aidôs, the negation of excess. In the rich exposition of
Gilbert Murray:
“Aidôs implies that, from some subtle emotion inside you, some ruth or
shame or reflection, some feeling perhaps of the comparative smallness
of your own rights and wrongs in the presence of the great things of
the world, the gods and men’s souls and the portals of life and death,
from this emotion and from no other cause, amid your ordinary animal
career of desire or anger or ambition, you do, every now and then, at
certain places, stop.”
Now this, of course, concerns emotion, conduct. But the same sense of
just limit concerns also art. Your emotion must be “recollected in
tranquillity” lest it drag the hysteric Muse into frenzied measures. We
must—stop. Louise Guiney knew this through a flawless intuition, but
she went pace by pace with the Greeks while they counselled her anew.
It is not merely her choice of Attic subjects, like Simoisius, or
the Alexandriana that are, we are told, so faithful in spirit, though
she had no Greek. It is that in this book we are renewedly conscious
of the oneness of mortal longing and earth loveliness, so tightly are
they entwined. Here is a sentience to the throes of that earth which
is not solely the earth set to man’s uses, but mysteriously made and
mysteriously continued, with its uncomprehended language of light and
dark and its ebb and flux eternally in sway. Christian in belief, she
was pagan in her listening nerves. And her harp, hung in the window
opening on what we call eternity, thrilled to many breezes. Being
Christian, she was, as in her life, all devotion, all pure obedience,
rapt celebrant of the story of the Birth and the Cross, a vowed Eremite
to the belief that counts all things loss, save One. Hands of diverse
angels reached out of the sky and touched her harp to song or Litany.
There was the spirit of an assured immortality. There was, too, the
voice of Erda, the Earth, crooning from the root caverns in abysses of
time past. The pagan heart of her, the heart that was still immovably
centred in the gentle certainties of Christ, is embedded in The Still
of the Year. She knows the earth, because she has entered into the
very spirit of created things and her mortal part suffers the pang of
awakening which, to the earth, is spring. But what is it to the soul?
“Up from the willow-root
Subduing agonies leap;
The field-mouse and the purple moth
Turn over amid their sleep;
The icicled rocks aloft
Burn saffron and blue alway,
And trickling and tinkling
The snows of the drift decay.
Oh, mine is the head must hang
And share the immortal pang!
Winter or spring is fair;
Thaw’s hard to bear.
Heigho! my heart’s sick.”
Some of the verse from this middle period is so fragile and austerely
tremulous, like bare boughs moved by a not unkindly wind, that you
are aware of what has, in another sense, been called “scantness.”
Not only does she adventure delicately in her shallop, she is fain
of archaic brevity and pauses that do unquestionably halt the
accompanying voyager, to his discomfiture. A Ballad of Kenelm was such
as they chanted “on a May morning” in other days than ours. It has the
consonance of prose trembling into verse. We are too luxurious for it.
We want to be borne along on a lilting wave, we who have not found it
possible to accommodate ourselves to the peg-leg-to-market of free
verse (what our poet herself once called, in a mischievous snap-shot of
judgment, “the rag-tag of _vers libres_”). Even the loving apostrophe
to Izaak Walton is more chant than song, justified rather by the spirit
than the form. One who knew her unceasing pains with verse and prose,
how a stanza could never count itself finished beyond possibility of
being smashed into unrecognizable fragments and remade, remembers this
as an instance of her ruthlessness to her children even after they
had grown up and gone their ways into the ultimate stronghold of the
printed page. Here the opening lines run:
“What trout shall coax the rod of yore
In Itchen stream to dip?”
Months after printing, the incorrigible dissonance of the two opening
words struck her and, having no smallest modicum of professional
vanity, she must needs admit a friend immediate to her to the excellent
fooling of the discovery, and went about shouting, between gusts of
mirth: “What trout! what trout!”
The harsher the discord she could lend the unfortunate twain, the more
gustily she laughed, and in Happy Ending the choppy sea subsided into
unimpeachable cadence:
“Can trout allure the rod of yore
In Itchen stream to dip?”
But in The Roadside Harp, though her metres were sometimes inhospitable
to the ear unprepared, she did attain the topmost reaches of the hills
of words’ delight. The Two Irish Peasant Songs ran with a light step,
and a breath as sweet as the whispers over Ireland’s harp. Here also
is an imperishable beauty of a lyric, fit for some ecstatic anthology,
so rare in form and color that the listening ear scarce cares for the
meaning, so its music may go on and on.
“When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,
And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar,
Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken,
On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star,
“I think of thee, (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!)
Whose great and noonday splendors the many share and see,
While sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping
The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.”
What is the piper piping when the thin sweet sound comes down the
valley like water dripping from stair to rocky stair, or “petals from
blown roses on the grass”? You do not need to guess. You know it is
in absolute accord with the night breeze and the long shadows and the
hylas fluting in the year. It is music only, and all your heart answers
is:
“Piper, pipe that song again.”
Here, too, is that poignant lament, To a Dog’s Memory.
“The gusty morns are here,
When all the reeds ride low with level spear;
And on such nights as lured us far of yore,
Down rocky alleys yet, and through the pine,
The Hound-star and the pagan Hunter shine;
But I and thou, ah, field-fellow of mine,
Together roam no more.”
All Matthew Arnold’s musical place names in Thyrsis and The Scholar
Gypsy: the “Ilsley Downs”, “the track by Childsworth Farm”, “the Cumner
range”, “the stripling Thames at Bablock Hythe”—these are emulated in
a not inferior accent in the sombre music of this threnody. Almost,
remembering the flowers in Lycidas, you long to strew them on her
darling’s grave.
“There is a music fills
The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills
Southward to Dewing’s little bubbly stream,——
The heavenly weather’s call! Oh, who alive
Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive,
Having free feet that never felt a gyve
Weigh, even in a dream?”
For those who knew her this poem carries a footnote of poignant
history. She was in London when letters came from home, and were
opened in a quaint restaurant, the Apple Tree Inn, a vegetarian
resort where three merry souls were met to be glad over lentils and
strange innocences of diet cunningly spiced to resemble the ensanguined
viands repudiated and abhorred. She opened her letter and read, and
her young—always young and childlike—face trembled into an unbelieving
grief. She could not speak. The day was dead for her and those for
whom she would have made the constant spark in it and afterward the
memory. On the heels of the ill tidings she went with one friend to
whom she could not tell the news, but whom she asked not to leave her,
to Hampstead Heath, and the two sat all the afternoon in silence on a
secluded slope, their feet in English green and her eyes unseeingly on
the sky. Her dog was dead.
There are those for whom the conduct of life, either a passion or a
malaise, according to individual temperament, transcends even the magic
of pure fancy. For them there are trumpet calls in this book, perhaps
the most widely known and praised, The Kings, its last stanza the
battle-cry of the faint yet brave:
“To fear not possible failure,
Nor covet the game at all,
But fighting, fighting, fighting,
Die, driven against the wall.”
This is metal for sounding clarions. And so too is The Knight Errant:
the second stanza an epitome of grand quotable abstractions:
“Let claws of lightning clutch me
From summer’s groaning cloud,
Or ever malice touch me,
And glory make me proud.
Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword,
Choice of the heart’s desire:
A short life in the saddle, Lord!
Not long life by the fire.”
You find admonishing whispers from a mind grown expert in counsel:
“Take Temperance to thy breast,
While yet is the hour of choosing,
As arbitress exquisite
Of all that shall thee betide;
For better than fortune’s best
Is mastery in the using,
And sweeter than anything sweet
The art to lay it aside.”
Here is the reflective, the scholastic, penetrating the hall of song
and hushing more abounding measures to its own consecrating uses.
She was in love, not with death as it was the poetic fashion to be
in a past era of creative minds, but with gentle withdrawals, fine
appreciations of ultimate values, cloistral consecrations. Her steady
hand on the reins of her horses of the sun, they took the heavenly
track of world-old orbits, not galloping at will, now high, now low,
from sunrise to the evening star. And this not because she feared, like
Icarus, to fall, but that she was perpetually referring beauty to its
archetype; she had, to paraphrase her own words, “eternity in mind.”
“Waiting on Him who knows us and our need,
Most need have we to dare not, nor desire,
But as He giveth, softly to suspire
Against his gift with no inglorious greed,
For this is joy, though still our joys recede.”
If she had been more rather than less in love with life, not as a
trinket she could relinquish with no ado, but a mysterious ardor it
was anguish to dream of losing, if she could have besought her Lord,
in moments of a child’s resistless longing, to give even the gifts
that are not solely to His glory, her song might have a fuller sweep,
a wilder melody. Out of earthly hungers the music of earth is made. As
she grew in spiritual aspiration, her verse attuned itself more and
more to the echoes of a harmony heavenly if austere. Some of these
devout lyrics are so individual her very personality flashes out before
you, and you hear her own lips chanting her own song. She is the figure
in the stained glass window, saint or warrior, dimming the outer light
to woo the eye to the ecclesiastical richness of the surrounding red
and gold. Or she is a young knight riding at twilight to service in
the chantry you have never sought, and you look up from your table
spread with meat and wines and watch him in bewilderment of spirit;
and the figures on the arras tremble, as it might be from the wind of
his passing. And having once seen the erect slender body riding to his
passion of prayer, you turn to the moving figures of the arras with
new eyes, wondering if, begot of earthly looms, they are as beautiful
as you had thought. Here is no passion but the unfed passion of the
soul, the life sustained not through plethora but lack, the everlasting
verity of renunciation which is the pale reflex of the face of Christ.
Her later work, the greater part of it, is again like the trembling of
bare exquisite branches against a sunset sky, the sky of a gold and
green limpidity a world away from roseate dawns. She was like a spirit
withdrawn from a turmoil she would neither recognize nor enter, sitting
in her tower above the world, spinning flowers out of frost.
The Martyr’s Idyl (1899) she wrote with a fervor of devotional
conviction, and in the same volume, a fringe upon the hem of its
brocaded stateliness, is An Outdoor Litany, a cry full of earth’s blood
and tears, and more immediate to earth’s children who also suffer than
the high counsels of the abstinent:
“The spur is red upon the briar,
The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;
The wind shakes out the colored fire
From lamps a-row on the sycamore;
The bluebird, with his flitting note,
Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;
The mink is busy; herds again
Go hillward in the honeyed rain;
The midges meet. I cry to Thee
Whose heart
Remembers each of these: Thou art
My God who hast forgotten me!”
Here are beauties dear to the mortal mind to which an anguish of
discontent is comprehensible because “it is common.” Here is the
sum and circle of nature, tagged with the everlasting paradox: the
mindlessness and indifference of the beauty wherewith we are surrounded
and our hunger to which it will not, because it cannot, minister.
This is great writing: for here the soul walks unabashed, articulate,
impassioned, the finite crying to the infinite, the perishing atom
appealing to the sky of the universal over him. Perhaps there can
be nothing greater in a dramatic sense, in our prison-house under
the encircling sky, than the accusatory or challenging voice of the
creature, through the unanswering framework of his mortal destiny,
to the God Who created both him and it. Lear, in the storm that was
unmindful of him, set his breath against its blast. When the cry breaks
into hysteria, then the man is mad. The merciful reaction that lies in
nature’s anodynes sets in to counteract and dull. But our poet, though
she can write:
“Help me endure the Pit, until
Thou wilt not have forgotten me,”
never challenges her God with mad interrogation. It is not His justice
she assails; she but beseeches the quickening of His will to save.
There is an immeasurable distance between entire overthrow and the
sanity of the creature who, though sorely wounded, has lost no jot of
faith in divine medicaments. Her plea is only that she may share the
wholesome life of His birds and trees.
“As to a weed, to me but give
Thy sap!”
The poem may have been written in the period she calls “my calendar of
imprisonments,” perhaps in the two years given over to “nerves.” This
includes the eight years from 1894, when she entered the Auburndale
post-office, through 1902. They were weighted with the routine work she
desperately essayed at post-office and library. The summer of 1895,
given to a walking trip in England, she illuminates by a rapt “_annus
beatus_,” and two years were eaten into by the illness and death of
the aunt she dearly loved, “the only being,” she writes, “who was all
mine from my birth.” It was a cruelly large gulp for the dragon of
time to make at the precious substance of her later youth. There was
some fugitive versifying, but little of the steady routine of pen and
book to make her life as she loved it. Some of her most significant
verse did come in here, bright splashes of sunset red on the flat marsh
lands of her way. Especially in the _annus beatus_ there was exquisite
writing and some immediately after in that surge of remembered passion
risen over and over again in those who love England and have said
good-bye to her, only to return in homesick thought. Of this period
Arboricide stands alone and stately, like the tree of her lament.
“A word of grief to me erewhile:
_We have cut the oak down, in our isle_.
“And I said: ‘Ye have bereaven
The song-thrush and the bee,
And the fisher-boy at sea
Of his sea-mark in the even;
And gourds of cooling shade, to lie
Within the sickle’s sound;
And the old sheep-dog’s loyal eye
Of sleep on duty’s ground;
And poets of their tent
And quiet tenement.
Ah, impious! who so paid
Such fatherhood, and made
Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade.’
“For the hewn oak, a century fair,
A wound in earth, an ache in air.”
But the actual crown of the book is in the two stanzas called
Borderlands. Within the small circle of recurrent rhythm this poem
holds the ineffable. It is a softly drawn and haunting melody on the
night wind of our thoughts, it hints at the nameless ecstasies that may
be of the rhythm of the body or the soul—but we know not!—it is of the
texture of the veil between sense and the unapprehended spirit.
“Through all the evening,
All the virginal long evening,
Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone;
For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during;
And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring,
Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?
“Yet in the valley,
At a turn of the orchard alley,
When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,
Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,
Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,
O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!”
The line:
“Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown,”
is one of those pervasive beauties which, though in a perfect
simplicity, invoke the universal that is beauty’s self. You see in
it—or you fancy, for it falls on the sensitive plate of emotion that
far outranks your intellect—all the faces of all the dead from the
shepherd slain outside Eden past the Pharaohs and queens that “died
young and fair” to him “that died o’ Wednesday.”
Happy Ending is her renewed hail and her farewell. Here are some of
the old beauties and, gathered up with them, the later buds of a more
sparsely blossoming fancy, snowed under time and yesterday. It is a sad
book, for all its nobility; it breathes the accent of farewells. To a
friend who challenged the appositeness of the title she said, smiling,
it was, on the contrary, exact, for her life of verse was done. In
1917, she wrote:
“The Muse, base baggage that she is, fled long ago. (I knew what I was
up to when I called it Happy Ending.)”
The additions of this later period are slightly more involved, much
more austere. The world does not call to her now in the manifold
voices of that vernal time when she and her dog went field-faring. It
is a spot, though still dearly loved, to leave. In Beati Mortui she
celebrates the “dead in spirit” who, having renounced the trappings of
a delusive day, are henceforth like angel visitants in a world where
they hold no foot of vain desire. The sonnet “Astræa,” her actual
farewell, has the poignant sestette: