Transcriber’s Note:

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

# TEN POEMS
BY ALICE MEYNELL
1913–1915

WESTMINSTER
THE ROMNEY STREET PRESS
1915
TO M. H. D.
these first pages from
the Romney Street Press
3

## ¶THE THRUSH BEFORE DAWN

A voice peals in this end of night
A phrase of notes resembling stars,
Single and spiritual notes or 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.
4All-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!
5

## ¶TO THE EARLY DEAD IN BATTLE

There is no length of days
But yours, boys who were children! How,
The past beset you in your childish ways,
With sense of Time untold!
What have you then forgone?
A history? This you had. Or memories?
These, too, you had of your far-distant dawn.
No further dawn seems his,
The old man who shares with you,
But has no more, no more. Time’s mystery
Did once for him the most that it can do:
He has had infancy.
And all his dreams, and all
His loves for mighty Nature, sweet & few,
Are but the dwindling past he can recall
Of what his childhood knew.
He counts not any more
His brief, his present years. But, Oh, he knows
How far apart the summers were of yore,
How far apart the snows.
Therefore be satisfied;
Long life is in your treasury ere you fall;
Yes, & first love, like Dante’s. Oh, a bride
For ever mystical!
6Irrevocable good,
You dead, & now about, so young, to die,
Your childhood was; there Space, there Multitude,
There dwelt Antiquity.
7

## ¶SUMMER IN ENGLAND 1914

On London fell a clearer light;
Caressing pencils of the sun
Defined the distances, the white
Houses, transfigured one by one,
The “long, unlovely street” impearled.
O what a sky has walked the world!
Most happy year! And out of town
The hay was prosperous, and the wheat;
The silken harvest climbed the down;
Moon after moon was heavenly-sweet,
Stroking the bread within the sheaves,
Looking twixt apples and their leaves.
And while this rose made round her cup,
The armies died convulsed; and when
This chaste young silver sun went up
Softly, a thousand shattered men,
One wet corruption, heaped the plain,
After a league-long throb of pain.
Flower following tender flower; and birds,
And berries; and benignant skies
Made thrive the serried flocks and herds—
Yonder are men shot through the eyes,
And children crushed. Love, hide thy face
From man’s unpardonable race.
8A REPLY
Who said “No man hath greater love than this,
To die to serve his friend”?
So these have loved us all unto the end.
Chide thou no more, O thou unsacrificed!
The soldier dying dies upon a kiss,
The very kiss of Christ.
9

## ¶A DAY OF, CLEAR WEATHER IN ENGLAND

Oh what a miracle wind is this
Has crossed the English land to-day
With an unprecedented kiss,
And wonderfully found a way!
Unsmirched incredibly and clean,
Between the towns and factories,
Avoiding, has his long flight been,
Bringing a sky like Sicily’s.
Oh fine escape, horizon pure
As Rome’s! Black chimneys left and right,
But not for him, the straight, the sure,
His luminous day, his spacious night.
How keen his choice, how swift his feet!
Narrow the way and hard to find!
This delicate stepper and discreet
Walked not like any worldly wind.
Most like a man in man’s own day,
One of the few, a perfect one:
His open earth—the single way;
The narrow road—the open sun.
10

## ¶TO OLIVIA OF HER DARK EYES

Across what calm of tropic seas,
‘Neath alien clusters of the nights,
Looked, in the past, such eyes as these?
Long-quenched, relumed, ancestral lights!
The generations fostered them;
And steadfast Nature, secretwise—
Thou seedling child of that old stem—
Kindled anew thy darkling eyes.
Was it a century or two
This lovely darkness rose and set,
Occulted by grey eyes and blue,
And Nature feigning to forget?
Some grandam gave a hint of it—
So cherished was it in thy race,
So fine a treasure to transmit
In its perfection to thy face.
Some father to some mother’s breast
Entrusted it, unknowing; Time
Implied, or made it manifest,
Bequest of a forgotten clime.
Hereditary eyes! But this
Is single, singular, apart:—
New-made thy love, new-made thy kiss,
New-made thy errand to my heart.
11

## ¶FREE WILL

Dear are some hidden things
My soul has sealed in silence; past delights,
Hopes unconfessed; desires with hampered wings,
Remembered in the nights.
But my best treasures are
Ignoble, undelightful, abject, cold;
Yet Oh! profounder hoards oracular
No reliquaries hold.
There lie my trespasses,
Abjured but not disowned. I’ll not accuse
Determinism, nor as the Master[1] says,
Charge even “the poor Deuce.”
Under my hand they lie,
My very own, my proved iniquities;
And though the glory of my life go by
I hold and garner these.
How else, how otherwhere,
How otherwise, shall I discern and grope
For lowliness? How hate, how love, how dare,
How weep, how hope?

1. George Meredith.

12

## ¶IN SLEEP

I dreamt (no “dream” awake; a dream indeed)
A wrathful man was talking in the park:
“Where are the Higher Powers, who know our need
And leave us in the dark?
“There are no Higher Powers; there is no heart
In God, no love”—his oratory here,
Taking the paupers’ and the cripples’ part,
Was broken by a tear.
And then it seemed that One who did invent
Compassion, who alone created pity,
Walked, as though called, and hastened as He went
Out of the muttering city;
Threaded the little crowd, trod the brown grass,
Bent o’er the speaker close, saw the tear rise,
And saw Himself, as one looks in a glass,
In those impassioned eyes.
13

## ¶EASTER NIGHT

All night had shout of men, & cry
Of woeful women filled His way;
Until that noon of sombre sky
On Friday, clamour and display
Smote Him; no solitude had He,
No silence, since Gethsemane.
Public was Death; but power, but might,
But Life again, but victory,
Were hushed within the dead of night,
The piteous dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone
He rose again behind the stone.
14

## ¶THE LORD’S PRAYER

“Audemus dicere ‘Pater Noster.’” Canon of the Mass.
There is a bolder way,
There is a wilder enterprise than this
All-human iteration day by day.
Courage, mankind! Restore Him what is His.
Out of His mouth were given
These phrases. Oh replace them whence they came—
The noun, the verb: the inconceivable “Heaven,”
The incomprehensible “Father,” & the “Name”;
The “trespasses,” the “bread,”
The inexorable “will” and yet implored;
The miracle-words that are and are not said,
Charged with the unknown purpose of their Lord.
“Forgive,” “give,” “lead us not”—
Speak them in Him, O man the unaware,
Speak by that dear tongue, though thou know not what,
Shuddering through the paradox of prayer.
15

## ¶THE DIVINE PREROGATIVE

Lord, where are Thy prerogatives?
Why, men have more than Thou hast kept,
The king rewards, remits, forgives,
The poet to a throne has stept.
And Thou, despoiled, hast given away
Worship to men, success to strife,
Thy glory to the heavenly day,
And made Thy sun the lord of life.
Is one too precious to impart,
One property reserved to Christ?
One, cherished, grappled to that heart?
—To be alone the sacrificed?
O Thou who lovest to redeem,
One whom I know lies sore oppressed.
Thou wilt not suffer me to deem
That I can bargain for her rest.
Seven hours I swiftly sleep, while she
Measures the leagues of dark, awake.
Oh that my dewy eyes might be
Parched by a vigil for her sake!
But Oh rejected! Oh in vain!
I cannot give who would not keep.
I cannot buy, I cannot gain,
I cannot give her half my sleep.
16 Of these Poems fifty copies have
been printed by Francis Meynell
and others in the Fell Type
September 1915
Rubricated by Edward
Johnston, December, 1915

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.