A voice peals in this end of night
A phrase of notes resembling stars,
Single and spiritual notes of light.
What call they at my window-bars?
The South, the past, the day to be,
An ancient infelicity.
Darkling, deliberate, what sings
This wonderful one, alone, at peace?
What wilder things than song, what things
Sweeter than youth, clearer than Greece,
Dearer than Italy, untold
Delight, and freshness centuries old?
And first first-loves, a multitude,
The exaltation of their pain;
Ancestral childhood long renewed;
And midnights of invisible rain;
And gardens, gardens, night and day,
Gardens and childhood all the way.
What Middle Ages passionate,
O passionless voice! What distant bells
Lodged in the hills, what palace state
Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells,
Without desire, without dismay,
Some morrow and some yesterday.
All-natural things! But more--Whence came
This yet remoter mystery?
How do these starry notes proclaim
A graver still divinity?
This hope, this sanctity of fear?
_O innocent throat! O human ear!_
_Fiona Macleod_
(_William Sharp_)
William Sharp was born at Garthland Place, Scotland, in 1855. He wrote
several volumes of biography and criticism, published a book of plays
greatly influenced by Maeterlinck (_Vistas_) and was editor of "The
Canterbury Poets" series.
His feminine _alter ego_, Fiona Macleod, was a far different
personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of another
spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote several volumes
of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and no little unusual
poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona Macleod, the most
barbaric and vivid are those collected in _The Sin-Eater and Other
Tales_; the longer _Pharais, A Romance of the Isles_, is scarcely less
unique.
In the ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four volumes of
rather undistinguished verse. In 1896 _From the Hills of Dream_
appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod; _The Hour of Beauty_, an
even more distinctive collection, followed shortly. Both poetry and
prose were always the result of two sharply differentiated moods
constantly fluctuating; the emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod,
the intellectual and, it must be admitted the more arresting, was that
of William Sharp.
He died in 1905.