The last poems of Alice Meynell
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Title: The last poems of Alice Meynell

Author: Alice Meynell

Release date: September 18, 2026 [eBook #79606]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1923

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79606

Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST POEMS OF ALICE MEYNELL ***

Transcriber’s Note:

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THE LAST POEMS OF ALICE MEYNELL

BURNS, OATES AND WASHBOURNE LTD.

28 ORCHARD STREET, W.1

8–10 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.4

LONDON

1923

THE CONTENTS

- The Poet and his Book: P. 7
- Intimations of Mortality: P. 8
- The Wind is Blind: P. 10
- Time’s Reversals: P. 12
- The Threshing Machine: P. 14
- Winter Trees on the Horizon: P. 16
- To Sleep: P. 18
- “The Marriage of True Minds”: P. 20
- In Honour of America (1917): P. 22
- “Lord, I owe Thee a Death”: P. 23
- Reflexions (I) In Ireland, 1920: P. 24
- Reflexions (II) In “Othello”: P. 25
- Reflexions (III) In Two Poets: P. 26
- To Conscripts: P. 27
- The Voice of a Bird: P. 28
- The Laws of Verse: P. 30
- The Question: P. 31

- “The Return to Nature” (I) Prometheus: P. 32

- “The Return to Nature” (II) Thetis: P. 33
- To Silence: P. 34
- The English Metres: P. 36
- “Rivers Unknown to Song”: P. 38

- To the Mother of Christ the Son of Man: P. 40

- A Comparison in a Seaside Field: P. 42
- Surmise: P. 44
- To Antiquity: P. 46
- Christmas Night: P. 48
- The October Redbreast: P. 50
- To “A Certain Rich Man”: P. 51

- “Everlasting Farewells! And again, and yet again ... everlasting farewells!”: P. 52

- The Poet to the Birds: P. 53

THE POET AND HIS BOOK

Here are my thoughts, alive within this fold,

My simple sheep. Their shepherd, I grow wise

As dearly, gravely, deeply I behold

Their different eyes.

O distant pastures in their blood! O streams

From watersheds that fed them for this prison!

Lights from aloft, midsummer suns in dreams,

Set and arisen.

They wander out, but all return anew,

The small ones, to this heart to which they clung;

“And those that are with young,” the fruitful few

That are with young.

INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

A simple child....

That lightly draws its breath

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

Wordsworth

It knows but will not tell.

Awake, alone, it counts its father’s years—

How few are left—its mother’s. Ah, how well

It knows of death, in tears.

If any of the three—

Parents and child—believe they have prevailed

To keep the secret of mortality,

I know that two have failed.

The third, the lonely, keeps

One secret—a child’s knowledge. When they come

At night to ask wherefore the sweet one weeps,

Those hidden lips are dumb.

THE WIND IS BLIND

“EYELESS, IN GAZA, AT THE MILL, WITH SLAVES”

Milton

The wind is blind.

The earth sees sun and moon; the height

Is watch-tower to the dawn; the plain

Shines to the summer; visible light

Is scattered in the drops of rain.

The wind is blind.

The flashing billows are aware;

With open eyes the cities see;

Light leaves the ether, everywhere

Known to the homing bird and bee,

The wind is blind,

Is blind alone. How has he hurled

His ignorant lash, his aimless dart,

His eyeless rush upon the world,

Unseeing, to break his unknown heart!

The wind is blind,

And the sail traps him, and the mill

Captures him; and he cannot save

His swiftness and his desperate will

From those blind uses of the slave.

TIME’S REVERSALS

A DAUGHTER’S PARADOX

To his devoted heart[1]

Who, young, had loved his ageing mate for life,

In late lone years Time gave the elder’s part,

Time gave the bridegroom’s boast, Time gave a younger wife.

A wilder prank and plot

Time soon will promise, threaten, offering me

Impossible things that Nature suffers not—

A daughter’s riper mind, a child’s seniority.

Oh, by my filial tears

Mourned all too young, Father! On this my head

Time yet will force at last the longer years,

Claiming some strange respect for me from you, the dead.

Nay, nay! Too new to know

Time’s conjuring is, too great to understand.

Memory has not died; it leaves me so—

Leaning a fading brow on your unfaded hand.

1. Dr. Johnson outlived by 30 years his wife, who was 20 years his senior.

THE THRESHING MACHINE

No “fan is in his hand” for these

Young villagers beneath the trees,

Watching the wheels. But I recall

The rhythm of rods that rise and fall,

Purging the harvest, over-seas.

No fan, no flail, no threshing-floor!

And all their symbols evermore

Forgone in England now—the sign,

The visible pledge, the threat divine,

The chaff dispersed, the wheat in store.

The unbreathing engine marks no tune,

Steady at sunrise, steady at noon,

Inhuman, perfect, saving time,

And saving measure, and saving rhyme—

And did our Ruskin speak too soon?

“No noble strength on earth” he sees

“Save Hercules’ arm”; his grave decrees

Curse wheel and steam. As the wheels ran

I saw the other strength of man,

I knew the brain of Hercules.

WINTER TREES ON THE HORIZON

O delicate! Even in wooded lands

They show the margin of my world,

My own horizon; little bands

Of twigs unveil that edge impearled.

And what is more mine own than this,

My limit, level with mine eyes?

For me precisely do they kiss—

The rounded earth, the rounding skies.

It has my stature, that keen line

(Let mathematics vouch for it).

The lark’s horizon is not mine,

No, nor his nestlings’ where they sit;

No, nor the child’s. And, when I gain

The hills, I lift it as I rise

Erect; anon, back to the plain

I soothe it with mine equal eyes.

TO SLEEP

Dear fool, be true to me!

I know the poets speak thee fair, and I

Hail thee uncivilly.

O, but I call with a more urgent cry!

I do not prize thee less,

I need thee more, that thou dost love to teach—

Father of foolishness—

The imbecile dreams clear out of wisdom’s reach.

Come and release me; bring

My irresponsible mind; come in thy hours.

Draw from my soul the sting

Of wit that trembles, consciousness that cowers.

For if night comes without thee

She is more cruel than day. But thou, fulfil

Thy work, thy gifts about thee—

Liberty, liberty, from this weight of will.

My day-mind can endure

Upright, in hope, all it must undergo.

But O, afraid, unsure,

My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.

Dear fool, be true to me!

The night is thine, man yields it, it beseems

Thy ironic dignity.

Make me all night the innocent fool that dreams.

“THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS”

(IN THE BACH-GOUNOD “AVE MARIA”)

That seeking Prelude found its unforetold

Unguessed intention, trend;

Though needing no fulfilment, did enfold

This exquisite end.

Bach led his notes up through their delicate slope

Aspiring—so they sound,

And so they were—in some strange ignorant hope

Thus to be crowned.

What deep soft seas beneath this buoyant barque!

What winds to speed this bird!

What impulses to toss this heavenward lark!

Thought—then the word.

Lovely the tune, lovely the unconsciousness

Of him who promised it.

Lovely the years that joined in blessedness

The two, the fit.

Bach was Precursor. But no Baptist’s cry

Was his; he, who began

For one who was to end, did prophesy,

By Nature’s generous act, the lesser man.

IN HONOUR OF AMERICA (1917)

IN ANTITHESIS TO ROSSETTI’S “ON THE REFUSAL OF AID BETWEEN NATIONS”

Not that the earth is changing, O my God!

Not that her brave democracies take heart

To share, to rule her treasure, to impart

The wine to those who long the wine-press trod;

Not therefore trust we that beneath Thy nod,

Thy silent benediction, even now

In gratitude so many nations bow,

So many poor: not therefore, O my God!

But because living men for dying man

Go to a million deaths, to deal one blow;

And justice speaks one great compassionate tongue;

And nation unto nation calls “One clan

We succourers are, one tribe!” By this we know

Our earth holds confident, steadfast, being young.

“LORD, I OWE THEE A DEATH”

Richard Hooker

(IN TIME OF WAR)

Man pays that debt with new munificence,

Not piecemeal now, not slowly, by the old:

Not grudgingly, by the effaced thin pence,

But greatly and in gold.

REFLEXIONS

(I) IN IRELAND, 1920

A mirror faced a mirror: ire and hate

Opposite ire and hate; the multiplied,

The complex charge rejected, intricate,

From side to sullen side;

One plot, one crime, one treachery, nay, one name,

Assumed, denounced, in echoes of replies.

The doubt, exchanged, lit thousands of one flame

Within those mutual eyes.

REFLEXIONS

(II) IN “OTHELLO”

A mirror faced a mirror: in sweet pain

His dangers with her pity did she track,

Received her pity with his love again,

And these she wafted back.

That masculine passion in her little breast

She bandied with him; her compassion he

Bandied with her. What tender sport! No rest

Had love’s infinity.

REFLEXIONS

(III) IN TWO POETS

A mirror faced a mirror: O, thy word,

Thou lord of images, did lodge in me,

Locked to my heart, homing from home, a bird,

A carrier, bound for thee.

Thy migratory greatness, greater far

For that return, returns; now grow divine

By endlessness my visiting thoughts, that are

Those visiting thoughts of thine.

TO CONSCRIPTS

“COMPEL THEM TO COME IN”

St. Luke’s Gospel

You “made a virtue of necessity”

By divine sanction; you, the loth, the grey,

The random, gentle, unconvinced; O, be

The crowned!—you may, you may.

You, the compelled, be feasted! You, the caught,

Be freemen of the gates that word unlocks!

Accept your victory from that unsought,

That heavenly paradox.

THE VOICE OF A BIRD

“HE SHALL RISE UP AT THE VOICE OF A BIRD”

Ecclesiastes

Who then is “he”?

Dante, Keats, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley; all

Rose in their greatness at the shrill decree,

The little rousing inarticulate call.

For they stood up

At the bird-voice, of lark, of nightingale,

Drank poems from that throat as from a cup.

Over the great world’s notes did these prevail.

And not alone

The signal poets woke. In listening man,

Woman, and child a poet stirs unknown,

Throughout the Mays of birds since Mays began.

He rose, he heard—

Our father, our St. Peter, in his tears—

The crowing, twice, of the prophetic bird,

The saddest cock-crow of our human years.

THE LAWS OF VERSE

Dear laws, come to my breast!

Take all my frame, and make your close arms meet

Around me; and so ruled, so warmed, so pressed,

I breathe, aware; I feel my wild heart beat.

Dear laws, be wings to me!

The feather merely floats. O, be it heard

Through weight of life—the skylark’s gravity—

That I am not a feather, but a bird.

THE QUESTION

IL POETA MI DISSE, “CHE PENSI?”

Virgil stayed Dante with a wayside word;

But long, and low, and loud and urgently

The poets of my passion have I heard

Summoning me.

It is their closest whisper and their call.

Their greatness to this lowliness hath spoken,

Their voices rest upon that interval,

Their sign, their token.

Man at his little prayer tells Heaven his thought,

To man entrusts his thought—“Friend, this is mine.”

The immortal poets within my breast have sought,

Saying, “What is thine?”

“THE RETURN TO NATURE”

Histories of Modern Poetry

(I) PROMETHEUS

It was the south: mid-everything,

Mid-land, mid-summer, noon.

And deep within a limpid spring

The mirrored sun of June.

Splendour in freshness! Ah, who stole

This sun, this fire, from heaven?

He holds it shining in his soul,

Prometheus the forgiven.

(II) THETIS

In her bright title poets dare

What the wild eye of fancy sees—

Similitude—the clear, the fair

Light mystery of images.

Round the blue sea I love the best

The argent foam played, slender, fleet;

I saw—past Wordsworth and the rest—

Her natural, Greek, and silver feet.

TO SILENCE

“SPACE, THE BOUND OF A SOLID”: SILENCE, THEN, THE FORM OF A MELODY

Not, Silence, for thine idleness I raise

My silence-bounded singing in thy praise,

But for thy moulding of my Mozart’s tune,

Thy hold upon the bird that sings the moon,

Thy magisterial ways.

Man’s lovely definite melody-shapes are thine,

Outlined, controlled, compressed, complete, divine.

Also thy fine intrusions do I trace,

Thy afterthoughts, thy wandering, thy grace,

Within the poet’s line.

Thy secret is the song that is to be.

Music had never stature but for thee,

Sculptor! Strong as the sculptor Space whose hand

Urged the Discobolus and bade him stand.

·       ·       ·       ·       ·

Man, on his way to Silence, stops to hear and see.

THE ENGLISH METRES

The rooted liberty of flowers in breeze

Is theirs, by national luck impulsive, terse,

Tethered, uncaptured, rules obeyed “at ease,”

Time-strengthened laws of verse.

Or they are like our seasons that admit

Inflexion, not infraction: Autumn hoar,

Winter more tender than our thoughts of it,

But a year’s steadfast four;

Redundant syllables of Summer rain,

And displaced accents of authentic Spring;

Spondiac clouds above a gusty plain

With dactyls on the wing.

Not Common Law, but Equity, is theirs—

Our metres; play and agile foot askance,

And distant, beckoning, blithely rhyming pairs,

Unknown to classic France;

Unknown to Italy. Ay, count, collate,

Latins! with eye foreseeing on the time,

And numbered fingers, and approaching fate

On the appropriate rhyme.

Nay, nobly our grave measures are decreed:

Heroic, Alexandrine with the stay,

Deliberate; or else like him whose speed

Did outrun Peter, urgent in the break of day.

“RIVERS UNKNOWN TO SONG”

James Thomson

Wide waters in the waste; or, out of reach,

Rough Alpine falls where late a glacier hung;

Or rivers groping for the alien beach,

Through continents, unsung.

Nay, not these nameless, these remote, alone;

But all the streams from all the watersheds—

Peneus, Danube, Nile—are the unknown,

Young in their ancient beds.

Man has no tale for them. O travellers swift

From secrets to oblivion! Waters wild

That pass in act to bend a flower or lift

The bright limbs of a child!

For they are new, they are fresh; there’s no surprise

Like theirs on earth. O strange for evermore!

This moment’s Tiber with his shining eyes

Never saw Rome before.

Man has no word for their eternity—

Rhine, Avon, Arno, younglings, youth uncrowned:

Ignorant, innocent, instantaneous, free,

Unwelcomed, unrenowned.

TO THE MOTHER OF CHRIST THE SON OF MAN

We too (one cried), we too,

We the unready, the perplexed, the cold,

Must shape the Eternal in our thoughts anew,

Cherish, possess, enfold.

Thou sweetly, we in strife.

It is our passion to conceive Him thus

In mind, in sense, within our house of life;

That seed is locked in us.

We must affirm our Son

From the ambiguous Nature’s difficult speech,

Gather in darkness that resplendent One,

Close as our grasp can reach.

Nor shall we ever rest

From this our task. An hour sufficed for thee,

Thou innocent! He lingers in the breast

Of our humanity.

A COMPARISON IN A SEASIDE FIELD

’Tis royal and authentic June

Over this poor soil blossoming;

Here lies, beneath an upright noon,

Thin nation for so wild a king.

Far off, the noble Summer rules,

Violent in the ardent rose,

His sun alight in mirroring pools,

Braggart on Alps of vanquished snows;

Away, aloft, true to his hour,

Announced, his colour, his fire, his jest.

But here, in negligible flower,

Summer is not proclaimed:—confessed.

A woman I marked; for her no state,

Small joy, no song. She had her boon,

Her only youth, true to its date,

Faintly perceptible, her June.

SURMISE

THE TRACK OF A HUMAN MOOD

Not wish, nor fear, nor quite expectancy

Is that vague spirit Surmise,

That wanderer, that wonderer whom we see

Within each other’s eyes;

And yet not often. For she flits away,

Fitful as infant thought,

Visitant at a venture, hope at play,

Unversed in facts, untaught.

In “the wide fields of possibility”

Surmise, conjecturing,

Makes little trials, incredulous, that flee

Abroad on random wing.

One day this inarticulate shall find speech,

This hoverer seize our breath.

Surmise shall close with man—with all, with each—

In her own sovereign hour, the moments of our death.

TO ANTIQUITY

“... REVERENCE FOR OUR FATHERS, WITH THEIR STORES OF EXPERIENCES”

An author whose name I did not note

O our young ancestor,

Our boy in Letters, how we trudge oppressed

With our “experiences,” and you of yore

Flew light, and blessed!

Youngling, in your new town,

Tight, like a box of toys—the town that is

Our shattered, open ruin, with its crown

Of histories;

You with your morning words

Fresh from the night, your yet un-sonneted moon,

Your passion undismayed, cool as a bird’s

Ignorant tune;

O youngling! how is this?

Your poems are not wearied yet, not dead.

Must I bow low? or, with an envious kiss,

Put you to bed?

CHRISTMAS NIGHT

“IF I CANNOT SEE THEE PRESENT I WILL MOURN THEE ABSENT, FOR THIS ALSO IS A PROOF OF LOVE”

Thomas à Kempis

We do not find Him on the difficult earth,

In surging human-kind,

In wayside death or accidental birth,

Or in the “march of mind.”

Nature, her nests, her prey, the fed, the caught,

Hide Him so well, so well,

His steadfast secret there seems to our thought

Life’s saddest miracle.

He’s but conjectured in man’s happiness,

Suspected in man’s tears,

Or lurks beyond the long, discouraged guess,

Grown fainter through the years.

·       ·       ·       ·       ·

But absent, absent now? Ah, what is this,

Near as in child-birth bed,

Laid on our sorrowful hearts, close to a kiss?

A homeless childish head.

THE OCTOBER REDBREAST

Autumn is weary, halt, and old;

Ah, but she owns the song of joy!

Her colours fade, her woods are cold.

Her singing-bird’s a boy, a boy.

In lovely Spring the birds were bent

On nests, on use, on love forsooth!

Grown-up were they. This boy’s content,

For his is liberty, his is youth.

The musical stripling sings for play

Taking no thought, and virgin-glad.

For duty sang those mates in May.

This singing-bird’s a lad, a lad.

TO “A CERTAIN RICH MAN”

“I HAVE FIVE BRETHREN ... FATHER, I BESEECH THEE ... LEST THEY COME TO THIS PLACE”

St. Luke’s Gospel

Thou wouldst not part thy spoil

Gained from the beggar’s want, the weakling’s toil,

Nor spare a jot of sumptuousness or state

For Lazarus at the gate.

And in the appalling night

Of expiation, as in day’s delight,

Thou heldst thy niggard hand; it would not share

One hour of thy despair.

Those five—thy prayer for them!

O generous! who, condemned, wouldst not condemn,

Whose ultimate human greatness proved thee so

A miser of thy woe.

“EVERLASTING FAREWELLS! AND AGAIN, AND YET AGAIN ... EVERLASTING FAREWELLS!”

De Quincey

“Farewells!” O, what a word!

Denying this agony, denying the affrights,

Denying all De Quincey spoke or heard

In the infernal sadness of his nights.

How mend these strange “farewells”?

“Vale”? “Addio”? “Leb’wohl”? Not one but seems

A tranquil refutation; tolling bells

That yet withhold the terror of his dreams.

THE POET TO THE BIRDS

You bid me hold my peace,

Or so I think, you birds; you’ll not forgive

My kill-joy song that makes the wild song cease,

Silent or fugitive.

Yon thrush stopt in mid-phrase

At my mere footfall; and a longer note

Took wing and fled afield, and went its ways

Within the blackbird’s throat.

Hereditary song,

Illyrian lark and Paduan nightingale,

Is yours, unchangeable the ages long;

Assyria heard your tale;

Therefore you do not die.

But single, local, lonely, mortal, new,

Unlike, and thus like all my race, am I,

Preluding my adieu.

My human song must be

My human thought. Be patient till ’tis done.

I shall not hold my little peace; for me

There is no peace but one.

THE POEMS OF ALICE MEYNELL

COMPLETE EDITION IN ONE VOLUME, 1923

INCLUDING THE “LAST POEMS.”

PRICE 6s. NET.

In its class, I know of no nobler or more beautiful sonnet than “Renouncement”; and I have so considered ever since the day I first heard it, when Rossetti (who knew it by heart), repeating it to me, added that it was one of the three finest sonnets ever written by women.—WILLIAM SHARP.

The last verse of that perfectly heavenly “Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age,” the whole of “San Lorenzo’s Mother,” and the end of the sonnet “To a Daisy” are the finest things I have yet seen or felt in modern verse.—JOHN RUSKIN.

The footfalls of her muse waken not sounds, but silences. We lift a feather from the marsh and say: “This way went a heron.”... It is poetry, the spiritual voice of which will become audible when the “high noises” of to-day have followed the feet that made them.—FRANCIS THOMPSON.

With an exquisite singleness of genius she stands apart, and escapes the categories. The more you live with these pages the more will you be persuaded that they contain in unusual proportion the stuff of immortality.—J. L. GARVIN.

She was the saint of our poetry. Therefore, she has no counterpart among English poets.... She etherealised love and spiritualised passion and humanised theology.—JAMES DOUGLAS.

It is the peculiar characteristic of Mrs. Meynell’s poetry that it is itself creative. Its grace and beauty are the flower, not only of her life, but of her contemplation of life. Her very daydreams are lit with the light of day. Her feelings spring from her mind, her thoughts from her heart. There is room in them for a wit that is the weapon of the rarest tenderness.—The Times.

BURNS, OATES AND WASHBOURNE LTD.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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

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Table of Contents

THE LAST POEMS OF ALICE MEYNELL

THE CONTENTS

THE POET AND HIS BOOK

INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

THE WIND IS BLIND

TIME’S REVERSALS A DAUGHTER’S PARADOX

THE THRESHING MACHINE

WINTER TREES ON THE HORIZON

TO SLEEP

“THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS” (IN THE BACH-GOUNOD “AVE MARIA”)

IN HONOUR OF AMERICA (1917) IN ANTITHESIS TO ROSSETTI’S “ON THE REFUSAL OF AID BETWEEN NATIONS”

“LORD, I OWE THEE A DEATH”

REFLEXIONS (I) IN IRELAND, 1920

REFLEXIONS (II) IN “OTHELLO”

REFLEXIONS (III) IN TWO POETS

TO CONSCRIPTS “COMPEL THEM TO COME IN”

THE VOICE OF A BIRD “HE SHALL RISE UP AT THE VOICE OF A BIRD”

THE LAWS OF VERSE

THE QUESTION IL POETA MI DISSE, “CHE PENSI?”

“THE RETURN TO NATURE”

(I) PROMETHEUS

(II) THETIS

TO SILENCE “SPACE, THE BOUND OF A SOLID”: SILENCE, THEN, THE FORM OF A MELODY

THE ENGLISH METRES

“RIVERS UNKNOWN TO SONG”

TO THE MOTHER OF CHRIST THE SON OF MAN

A COMPARISON IN A SEASIDE FIELD

SURMISE THE TRACK OF A HUMAN MOOD

TO ANTIQUITY “... REVERENCE FOR OUR FATHERS, WITH THEIR STORES OF EXPERIENCES”

CHRISTMAS NIGHT “IF I CANNOT SEE THEE PRESENT I WILL MOURN THEE ABSENT, FOR THIS ALSO IS A PROOF OF LOVE”

THE OCTOBER REDBREAST

TO “A CERTAIN RICH MAN” “I HAVE FIVE BRETHREN ... FATHER, I BESEECH THEE ... LEST THEY COME TO THIS PLACE”

“EVERLASTING FAREWELLS! AND AGAIN, AND YET AGAIN ... EVERLASTING FAREWELLS!”

THE POET TO THE BIRDS

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE