Transcribed from the 1917 Burns & Oates Ltd edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                            A FATHER OF WOMEN
                             AND OTHER POEMS


                                    by
                              Alice Meynell

                                * * * * *

                            BURNS & OATES Ltd
                            28 Orchard Street
                                 London W
                                   1917

                                   _To_
                                 _V. L._

                       THE CONTENTS
A Father of Women                                    Page 7
Length of Days: To the Early Dead in Battle               9
Nurse Edith Cavell                                       11
Summer in England, 1914                                  12
To Tintoretto in Venice                                  14
A Thrush Before Dawn                                     16
The Two Shakespeare Tercentenaries                       18
To O—, of her Dark Eyes                                  19
The Treasure                                             20
A Wind of Clear Weather in England                       22
In Sleep                                                 23
The Divine Privilege                                     24
Free Will                                                26
The Two Questions                                        27
The Lord’s Prayer                                        29
Easter Night                                             30

A FATHER OF WOMEN


                             AD SOROREM E. B.

    “_Thy father was transfused into thy blood_.”

                                   _Dryden_: _Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew_.

         Our father works in us,
   The daughters of his manhood.  Not undone
   Is he, not wasted, though transmuted thus,
         And though he left no son.

         Therefore on him I cry
   To arm me: “For my delicate mind a casque,
   A breastplate for my heart, courage to die,
         Of thee, captain, I ask.

         “Nor strengthen only; press
   A finger on this violent blood and pale,
   Over this rash will let thy tenderness
         A while pause, and prevail.

         “And shepherd-father, thou
   Whose staff folded my thoughts before my birth,
   Control them now I am of earth, and now
         Thou art no more of earth.

         “O liberal, constant, dear!
   Crush in my nature the ungenerous art
   Of the inferior; set me high, and here,
         Here garner up thy heart.”

         Like to him now are they,
   The million living fathers of the War—
   Mourning the crippled world, the bitter day—
         Whose striplings are no more.

         The crippled world!  Come then,
   Fathers of women with your honour in trust;
   Approve, accept, know them daughters of men,
         Now that your sons are dust.




LENGTH OF DAYS
TO THE EARLY DEAD IN BATTLE


         There is no length of days
   But yours, boys who were children once.  Of old
   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 and 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 O 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, and first love, like Dante’s.  O a bride
         For ever mystical!

         Irrevocable good,—
   You dead, and now about, so young, to die,—
   Your childhood was; there Space, there Multitude,
         There dwelt Antiquity.




NURSE EDITH CAVELL


Two o’clock, the morning of October 12th, 1915.

         To her accustomed eyes
   The midnight-morning brought not such a dread
   As thrills the chance-awakened head that lies
   In trivial sleep on the habitual bed.

         ’Twas yet some hours ere light;
   And many, many, many a break of day
   Had she outwatched the dying; but this night
   Shortened her vigil was, briefer the way.

         By dial of the clock
   ’Twas day in the dark above her lonely head.
   “This day thou shalt be with Me.”  Ere the cock
   Announced that day she met the Immortal Dead.




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.
               Love, hide thy face
   From man’s unpardonable race.

                                  * * * * *

   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.




TO TINTORETTO IN VENICE


_The Art of Painting had in the Primitive years looked with the light_,
_not towards it_.  _Before Tintoretto’s date_, _however_, _many painters
practised shadows and lights_, _and turned more or less sunwards_; _but
he set the figure between himself and a full sun_.  _His work is to be
known in Venice by the splendid trick of an occluded sun and a shadow
thrown straight at the spectator_.

_Tintoretto’s thronged_ “_Procession to Calvary_” _and his_
“_Crucifixion_,” _incidentally named_, _are two of the greatest of his
multitude of works in Venice_.

         Master, thy enterprise,
   Magnificent, magnanimous, was well done,
   Which seized, the head of Art, and turned her eyes—
   The simpleton—and made her front the sun.

         Long had she sat content,
   Her young unlessoned back to a morning gay,
   To a solemn noon, to a cloudy firmament,
   And looked upon a world in gentle day.

         But thy imperial call
   Bade her to stand with thee and breast the light,
   And therefore face the shadows, mystical,
   Sombre, translucent, vestiges of night,

         Yet glories of the day.
   Eagle! we know thee by thy undaunted eyes
   Sky-ward, and by thy glooms; we blow thy way
   Ambiguous, and those halo-misted dyes.

         Thou Cloud, the bridegroom’s friend
   (The bridegroom sun)!  Master, we know thy sign:
   A mystery of hues world-without-end;
   And hide-and-seek of gamesome and divine;

         Shade of the noble head
   Cast hitherward upon the noble breast;
   Human solemnities thrice hallowèd;
   The haste to Calvary, the Cross at rest.

         Look sunward, Angel, then!
   Carry the fortress-heavens by that hand;
   Still be the interpreter of suns to men;
   And shadow us, O thou Tower! for thou shalt stand.




A THRUSH BEFORE DAWN


   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_!




THE TWO SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARIES:
OF BIRTH, 1864: OF DEATH, 1916.


                              TO SHAKESPEARE

         Longer than thine, than thine,
   Is now my time of life; and thus thy years
   Seem to be clasped and harboured within mine.
   O how ignoble this my clasp appears!

         Thy unprophetic birth,
   Thy darkling death: living I might have seen
   That cradle, marked those labours, closed that earth.
   O first, O last, O infinite between!

         Now that my life has shared
   Thy dedicated date, O mortal, twice,
   To what all-vain embrace shall be compared
   My lean enclosure of thy paradise?

         To ignorant arms that fold
   A poet to a foolish breast?  The Line,
   That is not, with the world within its hold?
   So, days with days, my days encompass thine.

         Child, Stripling, Man—the sod.
   Might I talk little language to thee, pore
   On thy last silence?  O thou city of God,
   My waste lies after thee, and lies before.




TO O—, 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 dark-bright eyes.

   Was it a century or two
      This lovely darkness rose and set,
   Occluded 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.




THE TREASURE


         Three times have I beheld
   Fear leap in a babe’s face, and take his breath,
         Fear, like the fear of eld
   That knows the price of life, the name of death.

         What is it justifies
   This thing, this dread, this fright that has no tongue,
         The terror in those eyes
   When only eyes can speak—they are so young?

         Not yet those eyes had wept.
   What does fear cherish that it locks so well?
         What fortress is thus kept?
   Of what is ignorant terror sentinel?

         And pain in the poor child,
   Monstrously disproportionate, and dumb
         In the poor beast, and wild
   In the old decorous man, caught, overcome?

         Of what the outposts these?
   Of what the fighting guardians?  What demands
         That sense of menaces,
   And then such flying feet, imploring hands?

         Life: There’s nought else to seek;
   Life only, little prized; but by design
         Of Nature prized.  How weak,
   How sad, how brief!  O how divine, divine!




A WIND OF CLEAR WEATHER IN ENGLAND


   O 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.

   O 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;
      His narrow road—the open sun.




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 create
   Compassion, who alone invented pity,
   Walked, as though called, in at that north-east gate,
            Out from 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.




THE DIVINE PRIVILEGE


   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 dream
      That I can bargain for her rest.

   Seven hours I swiftly sleep, while she
      Measures the leagues of dark, awake.
   O that my dewy eyes might be
      Parched by a vigil for her sake!

   But O rejected!  O in vain!
      I cannot give who would not keep.
   I cannot buy, I cannot gain,
      I cannot give her half my sleep.




FREE WILL


   Dear are some hidden things
      My soul has sealed in silence; past delights,
   Hope unconfessed; desires with hampered wings,
      Remembered in the nights.

   But my best treasures are
      Ignoble, undelightful, abject, cold;
   Yet O! profounder hoards oracular
      No reliquaries hold.

   There lie my trespasses,
      Abjured but not disowned.  I’ll not accuse
   Determinism, nor, as the Master {26} 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?




THE TWO QUESTIONS


         “A riddling world!” one cried.
   “If pangs must be, would God that they were sent
   To the impure, the cruel, and passed aside
         The holy innocent!”

         But I, “Ah no, no, no!
   Not the clean heart transpierced; not tears that fall
   For a child’s agony; not a martyr’s woe;
         Not these, not these appal.

         “Not docile motherhood,
   Dutiful, frequent, closed in all distress;
   Not shedding of the unoffending blood;
         Not little joy grown less;

         “Not all-benign old age
   With dotage mocked; not gallantry that faints
   And still pursues; not the vile heritage
         Of sin’s disease in saints;

         “Not these defeat the mind.
   For great is that abjection, and august
   That irony.  Submissive we shall find
         A splendour in that dust.

         “Not these puzzle the will;
   Not these the yet unanswered question urge.
   But the unjust stricken; but the hands that kill
         Lopped; but the merited scourge;

         “The sensualist at fast;
   The merciless felled; the liar in his snares.
   The cowardice of my judgment sees, aghast,
         The flail, the chaff, the tares.”




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.  O replace them whence they came.
   He, only, knows our inconceivable “Heaven,”
   Our hidden “Father,” and the unspoken “Name”;

         Our “trespasses,” our “bread,”
   The “will” inexorable 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 by Him, O man the unaware,
   Speak by that dear tongue, though thou know not what,
   Shuddering through the paradox of prayer.




EASTER NIGHT


   All night had shout of men and 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 shutter’d dark, the secrecy.
   And all alone, alone, alone
   He rose again behind the stone.

                            PRINTED IN ENGLAND
                           BY W. H. SMITH & SON
                             THE ARDEN PRESS
                           STAMFORD STREET S.E.




Footnotes:


{26}  George Meredith.