THE lyrical poetry of Michael Field is much smaller in bulk than her dramatic work; yet there are eight volumes of it. On the other hand, it is more perfect in its kind than her tragedies, and yet its chiselled, small perfection cannot approach their grandeur.
A story is told about one of the books of lyrics which is amusingly characteristic of the poets. Underneath the Bough made its appearance first in the spring of 1893, and was well received. The Athenæum reviewer even went so far in admiration as to suggest, of obvious defects, that Michael Field probably preferred to write in that way! Soon after the book came out, however, the poets went on an Italian journey with some friends who took a different view of the function of criticism, and who dealt with them faithfully about the weakness of some of the pieces. Thereupon, with a gesture that is entirely their own in its grace and emphasis, the poets confessed their repentance for the defective work by immediately cutting the book to the extent of one-half, and reissued it in the autumn of 1893 with the careful legend “Revised and Decreased Edition.” The story, however, does not close on that access of humility which, on a comparison of the two editions, would certainly appear somewhat excessive. But humility was not, at any rate with Michael, a pet virtue. Repenting at leisure of their hasty repentance, they brought out yet another edition, and reinstated many of the poems which they had rejected from number two—;this with a word of defiance to the critics of number one, and a recommendation to them to look for a precedent to Asolando.
The third edition is rare, but a copy of it may be seen at the British Museum. It was published in Portland, Maine, in 1898. It still omits about thirty of the pieces from the first edition, but it introduces a number of new ones and restores, among others, the In Memoriam verses for Robert Browning which appeared first in the Academy for December 21st, 1889, on the occasion of Browning’s death:
Slowly we disarray,
Our leaves grow few,
Few on the bough, and many on the sod.
Round him no ruining autumn tempest blew;
Gathered on genial day,
He fills, fresh as Apollo’s bay,
The Hand of God.
It would appear from the preface, however, that there was an additional motive for publishing a third edition in an invitation from the United States to contribute a volume to the “Old World” series, and the poet adds a note of gratitude to her American readers who, as she says, “have given me that joy of listening denied to me in my own island.”
Considering the lyrical work as a whole, it is seen to cover Michael Field’s poetical career from beginning to end. Not that the lyric impulse was constant (for there were times when the poets’ dramatic work absorbed them almost completely); but it never entirely failed. It was, as one would expect, strongest in their early years: it recurred intermittently through the period of the later tragedies, and returned in force when, toward the end of their life, tragic inspiration gave place to religious ardour. Thus, although this poetry is subjective in a less degree than lyrical verse often is, most of the crucial events of the poets’ lives are reflected there. The lover of a story will not be disappointed, and the student of character will find enough for his purpose in personal revelation both conscious and unconscious. Moreover, a spiritual autobiography might, with a little patience, be outlined from these eight volumes; and it would be a significant document, illuminating much more than the lives of two maiden ladies in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Such a spiritual history would be complete, in extent at least, for it would begin with Michael’s earliest work in The New Minnesinger (that title at once suggesting the German influence in English life and letters at the moment, 1875), with its strenuous ethic of Unitarian tendency based on a creed so wide as to have no perceptible boundary; and it would end only with the devotional poetry of her last written volumes where, with no concern for ethics as such, the poet stands at the gate of the well-fenced garden of the Roman Church with a flaming sword in her hand and a face of impassioned tenderness. But in the interval it would pass through her pagan phase, when she revelled in joyful living—;and in the classics, turning their myths into pleasant narrative verse; when in Long Ago (1889) she daringly rehandled the Sapphic themes; and when in Sight and Song (1892) she tried to convey her intense delight in colour and form by translating into poetry some of the old master-pictures that she loved. More important, however, than those books are in such an autobiography is the human record of joys and loves and sorrows contained in the volume called Underneath the Bough (1893); while Wild Honey (1908), a collection covering about ten years of her life, brings us down to the epoch of religious crisis and reconciliation with the Church of Rome. Then, with tragic inspiration quelled by Christian hope and submission, all her creative energy flowed into the Catholic lyrics contained in Poems of Adoration (1912) and Mystic Trees (1913).
One does not pause long on The New Minnesinger in this survey of the lyrics, because it was published by Katharine Bradley as Arran Leigh, and is not, therefore, strictly a work of Michael Field. Nor shall we deal with the lyrics in Bellerophôn, a volume published by the two poets as Arran and Isla Leigh in 1881. Not that either book is unworthy of study; on the contrary, there are some fine pieces in both. But the poets having elected to leave them in limbo, where one has had to grope for this mere reference to them, there, for my part, they shall remain. Except to note in passing that, following Swift’s Advice to a Young Poet to “make use of a quaint motto,” the poet has inscribed on the front of The New Minnesinger the phrase “Think of Womanhood, and thou to be a woman.” That has a significance which is elaborated in the name-piece, whose theme is of love and of the woman-poet’s special aptitude to sing about it; and where it is insisted that the singer shall be faithful to her own feminine nature and experience. All through the work of the two poets it will be seen that the principle stated thus early and definitely by the elder one ruled their artistic practice; so that we are justified in extracting this, at least, from Michael’s earliest book, and noting it as a conscious motive from the beginning.
I think, too, we are entitled to recover from the shades one small song. For, after all, a great literary interest of the work of the Michael Fields is the amazing oneness of the two voices. The collaboration, indeed, deserves much more space than it is possible to give it here. But it is something to the good if we can glance, in passing, at undoubted examples of each poet’s work, hoping to see hints of the individual qualities which each contributed to the fellowship. We have already told how, after Henry’s death and when Michael knew that she too must soon die, she hastened to gather together certain early pieces by her fellow, and published them, with a poignant closing piece of her own, in the book called Dedicated (1914). That closing poem, Fellowship, closed her artistic life: it is Michael’s last word as a poet. But the point for the moment is that she has given us in Dedicated the means of recognizing Henry, and distinguishing between the two poets in their youthful work. One may take from The New Minnesinger, therefore, as characteristic of the younger Michael, such a piece as The Quiet Light:
After the sunset,
Before the night,
There comes a season
Of quiet light.
After the dying,
Before the death,
There comes a drawing
Of quiet breath.
Hush of the daylight,
O whisper why
That childlike breathing
Before we die!
That is a slight thing which does not, of course, represent Michael at anything like her full power; but it does already suggest the emotional basis of her gift, and her lyrical facility. The piece which follows, Jason, is a luckier choice for Henry, not only in that it gives her greater scope, but in that it is probably a maturer work than the other. The comparison would, therefore, be unfair to Michael if one were judging of relative merits; but we are thinking for the moment only of a difference in kind of poetic equipment. And the poem is given for this further fact—;it was chosen by Michael herself to read to Father Vincent McNabb a few days before she died, in exultation at her fellow’s genius:
“Upon the sea-beach I diffuse my limbs;
My wail athwart the harping sea-plain heaves;
The shards are bitter and the ocean brims
My sorrow from a fount where darkness grieves;
I, Jason, by this vessel of my pride,
Lie, as vain flotsam, ’neath its doughty side.
A wife I had and children—;she is gone
To her own land—;but first she waved my feet
To where my sons, her wrath had fallen upon,
Lay dead together ’neath their cradle sheet.
A bride I had, but ere to bed she came,
Ashes of flame she was, ashes of flame.
And I had comrades in grand years of youth;
They are all slain or care no more for deeds.
A golden aim I followed to its truth;
It is a story now no mortal heeds.
Once I drove oxen of fire-shooting lips,
Once I was ruler of a ship of ships.” ...
The pebbles ground like teeth within a jaw;
A moan of angry timber thundered forth;
And the great poop of Argo rolled its maw,
With a wave’s action, from the south to north;
Earth quaked in fear at glimpse of Jason’s doom,
As slant on him fell Argo as a tomb.
Clearly there are elements here different from those of The Quiet Light. One feels in this poem a dramatic movement and a sense of tragedy which are not simply given in the data of the noble old story; one sees structural skill in the shaping of the narrative, and recognizes in a memorable line or two—;“A golden aim I followed to its truth” and “Ashes of flame she was, ashes of flame”—;the final concentration of thought and feeling where great poetry begins.
Perhaps we are not mistaken, therefore, in distinguishing, even so early as these two poems, the contrasting qualities of the two poets which, met in happy union, made so clear a single voice that Meredith was amazed when he discovered that Michael Field was two people. One may define these qualities as emotional on the one side and intellectual on the other. It is, of course, the old distinction between rhetoric and imagination, matter and form; and clearly shows itself again in the two volumes of devotional poetry at the end of their life, where Henry is seen as kin to Herbert and Michael as kin to Vaughan. And though the whole story of the collaboration cannot be contained within any statement so simple as that, its fundamentals are rooted in this complementary relation between the two minds.
Returning to the lyrics, I choose frankly the pieces which throw some light on the poets’ lives. And although I do this from an unashamed interest in their story, and without immediate reference to the merits of the verse as poetry, there should be a chance that the poetical values of pieces wrought under the stress of intimate feeling will be not lower but higher than those of others. So, indeed, the event proves; for of the lyrics which may be safely attributed to Michael those are the best which can be called her love-poems. Of love-interest, in the attractive common meaning of the term, there is not a great deal in the work of either poet; and in that of Michael it is mainly comprised in half a dozen songs in Underneath the Bough. Sapphic affinities notwithstanding (and imaginary adventures in that region), the two ladies had their measure of Victorian reticence; though that did not decline upon Victorian prudishness. But Michael wrote love-poetry of another kind than the romantic, in a series about her fellow which is probably unique in literature. It will be found in the third book of Underneath the Bough, and is supplemented by pieces scattered through later books, notably a small group at the end of Mystic Trees. Those poems are a record of her devotion to Edith Cooper, and it is doubtful whether Laura or Beatrice or the Dark Lady had a tenderer wooing. They explain, of course, the slightness of a more usual (or, as some would put it, a more normal) love-interest in Michael’s work. But it need not be supposed that there was anything abnormal in this devotion. On the contrary, it was the expression of her mother-instinct, the outflow of the natural feminine impulse to cherish and protect. And this she herself realized perfectly; for there is a passage in one of her letters to Miss Louie Ellis which runs:
I speak as a mother; mothers of some sort we must all become. I have just been watching Henry stripping the garden of all its roses and then piling them in a bowl for me....
But that Michael was ‘normal’ in the mere sense of having had love-affairs there is proof enough without recourse to the vulgarity of spying into every lyric for a record of actual experience. Her dramatic instinct would make that pitfall even more dangerous in her case than in most, so that one would not dare to venture in the direction at all without a warrant. But, armed with the poet’s confession, one may quote from a tiny sequence which has an almost tropical breath. It tells of a passion that blossomed quickly in hot, bright colour, and died with sudden vehemence.
Across a gaudy room
I looked and saw his face,
Beneath the sapless palm-trees, in the gloom
Of the distressing place,
Where everyone sat tired,
Where talk itself grew stale,
Where, as the day began to fail,
No guest had just the power required
To rise and go; I strove with my disgust:
But at the sight of him my eyes were fired
To give one glance, as though they must
Be sociable with what they found of fair
And free and simple in a chamber where
Life was so base.
As when a star is lit
In the dull, evening sky,
Another soon leaps out to answer it,
Even so the bright reply
Came sudden from his eyes,
By all but me unseen.
Since then the distance that between
Our lives unalterably lies
Is but a darkness, intimate and still,
Which messages may traverse, where replies
May sparkle from afar, until
The night becomes a mystery made clear
Between two souls forbidden to draw near:
Creator, why?
* * *
We meet. I cannot look up; I hear
He hopes that the rainy fog will clear:
My cheeks flush him back a hope it may,
And at last I seek his eyes.
Oh, to greet such skies—;
The delicate, violet, thunder-gray,
Behind a spirit at mortal play!
Who cares that the fog should roll away?
* * *
As two fair vessels side by side,
No bond had tied
Our floating peace;
We thought that it would never cease,
But like swan-creatures we should always glide;
And this is love
We sighed.
As two grim vessels side by side,
Through wind and tide
War grappled us,
With bond as strong as death, and thus
We drove on mortally allied:
And this is hate
We cried.
* * *
Go to the grave,
Die, die—;be dead!
If a Judgment-Angel came and said
That I could save
My heart and brain, if I could but will
For a single moment that you should die,
I would clasp my hands, and wish you ill,
And say good-bye.
Go to the grave,
Die, die—;be dead!
If the Judgment-Angel came and said
That I could save
My body and soul, if I could but will
For as long as an hour that you should die,
My hands would drop, and my eyes would fill,
And the angel fly.
If we were concerned with the art of this verse rather than its tale one would be compelled to consider a touch of rhetoric and a violence of gesture which are characteristic of Michael not at her best; but which do correspond with the turbulent youthful emotion out of which the poems were born. Michael’s authentic love-story, however, is that which centres upon Henry; and the poems to Henry express a master-passion. There was an element of her nature as strong and as constant as its poetic impulse, and that was her affection for her fellow. Indeed, she was greater as a lover than as a poet; for her life was her finest poem, and Henry was its inspiration. It follows that she was never so happy as when she was engaged upon this theme; and that the sequence I have mentioned is a joyful record of the fellowship. Here is a piece which describes the sealing of the bond between the poets in those early days when they had not yet embarked on their great quest:
It was deep April, and the morn
Shakspere was born;
The world was on us, pressing sore;
My love and I took hands and swore,
Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore,
To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore,
To sing to Charon in his boat,
Heartening the timid souls afloat;
Of judgment never to take heed,
But to those fast-locked souls to speed,
Who never from Apollo fled,
Who spent no hour among the dead;
Continually
With them to dwell,
Indifferent to heaven or hell.
Next we may take a portrait of Henry in her girlhood when the two began to collaborate, this giving incidentally a description of what was, on the testimony of intimate friends (and, indeed, of the poets themselves), their method of work:
A girl,
Her soul a deep-wave pearl
Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;
A face flowered for heart’s ease,
A brow’s grace soft as seas
Seen thro’ faint forest-trees:
A mouth, the lips apart,
Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze
From her tempestuous heart.
Such: and our souls so knit,
I leave a page half-writ—;
The work begun
Will be to heaven’s conception done
If she come to it.
Exactly in that way the two would often co-operate, working together actually on one piece. When it was a question of a big work—;of a tragedy or a chronicle-play—;there was, of course, a united exploration of the ground and a mapping of it. The two poets would go together to the British Museum or some other great library for the research. The scheme was then fully discussed, ideas were exchanged, conceptions of character formed and tested, and scenes allotted to suit individual taste or aptitude. But the collaboration was even more intimate than that. They would readily interchange their parts; and frequently they would be engaged together upon a page, a speech, or even a single line. It is therefore no poetic licence which declares that the half-written sheet of one would be completed to perfection by the other, but only further proof of the way in which the diverse elements of these two minds were fused in a union so complete that the reader cannot credit a dual authorship, and the poets themselves could hardly distinguish their individual contributions.
There is among the poems to Henry a dainty mock-pastoral in praise of her beauty which might have been written by an Elizabethan songster to his mistress; and a sonnet called Constancy which speaks with graver passion:
I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower: in all kinds
My love is perfect; and in each she finds
Herself the goal; then why, intent to tease
And rob her delicate spirit of its ease,
Hastes she to range me with inconstant minds?
If she should die, if I were left at large
On earth without her—;I, on earth, the same
Quick mortal with a thousand cries, her spell
She fears would break. And I confront the charge,
As sorrowing and as careless of my fame
As Christ intact before the infidel.
There are pieces which reveal Henry, quieter perhaps, but deeply tender toward her fellow:
My lady hath a lovely rite:
When I am gone
No prayer she saith
As one in fear:
For orison,
Pressing her pillow white
With kisses, just the sacred number,
She turns to slumber;
Adding sometimes thereto a tear
And a quick breath.
There is a short poem in which Michael is thinking about the nature of Henry’s genius, and perceives its tragic power as her peculiar gift:
Apollo and the Muses taught thee not
Thy mighty strain, enchantment to the mind,
Thralling the heart by spell of holy fears;
Awful thou sought’st Erinys’ sacred grot,
And the Eternal Goddess, well-inclin’d,
Hath given thee songs, for the dull life of tears.
And in another piece she compares and contrasts her own gift with that of Henry in imagery as brilliant as its criticism is just:
Mine is the eddying foam and the broken current,
Thine the serene-flowing tide, the unshattered rhythm.
Light touches me on the surface with glints of sunshine,
Dives in thy bosom disclosing a mystic river:
Ruffling, the wind takes the crest of my waves resurgent,
Stretches his pinions at poise on thy even ripples:
What is my song but the tumult of chafing forces,
What is thy silence, Beloved, but enchanted music!
It is evident that Michael knew herself and her impulsive and exuberant Muse, which, to quote one of the irreverent faithful among her friends, would sometimes merely “fizz” into expression. That it could be too facile, and was, by comparison with Henry’s depth, superficial, is true. Michael had not the syllogistic mind of her fellow, and arrived at conclusions by an intuitive process rather than by reasoning. She was capable of unintelligent questions and occasional stupid moods that exasperated the critical type of mind which is so much cleverer than that. But she brought a positive contribution to the fellowship, nevertheless, in swift perception, intense ardour, keen sensibility, and above all in the generosity of temper that found its chief expression in devotion to her fellow-poet. Thus the most gracious of her love-lyrics is that in which, after having fostered the younger mind with infinite sympathy, making possible all that it became and achieved, she withdraws herself to cede the higher place to her lover:
Methinks my love to thee doth grow,
And this the sign:
I see the Spirit claim thee,
And do not blame thee,
Nor break intrusive on the Holy Ground
Where thou of God art found.
I watch the fire
Leap up, and do not bring
Fresh water from the spring
To keep it from up-flaming higher
Than my chilled hands require
For cherishing.
I see thy soul turn to her hidden grot,
And follow not;
Content thou shouldst prefer
To be with her,
The heavenly Muse, than ever find in me
Best company.
The love-story of Henry’s life was not so frankly revealed; she was never so forthcoming as Michael. Nevertheless, there was such a story, and in outline it seems to have been one of the convergence of kindred minds, of friendship growing to passion, of love declared and reciprocated, but not fulfilled because of some other tie which bound both lover and beloved.
It is not difficult to see how such a crisis might arise in Henry’s life. Delicate in health and shy of temperament, she was from her childhood sheltered by Michael, and surrounded by a love which she was accustomed to accept as simply as the air she breathed. Just so unconsciously she would receive the homage offered by their friends, drifting into a closer relation with one of them, both of the lovers cheated by the tranquil air which overlay her depth of feeling, until a sudden surprising passion overtook them. That the awakening for Henry meant renunciation sounds a little old-fashioned to a current philosophy which sees no virtue in the verb ‘to renounce,’ and demands fulfilment, not only as the highest good, but as the holiest duty of the human creature. But either that modern doctrine is not so new as it sounds, or these two ladies were in advance of their time, for they held it, and (at least in their art) persuasively commended it. They wrote a charming play, The Cup of Water, deliberately to claim the woman’s right to love, and to demonstrate the cruelty and waste of frustration. And they once said, in a whimsical letter to a friend:
Doing and being good is all very well in its way; but it is not the same thing as doing and being happy. If the Lord had a lion’s mouth (like the one at Venice), how many complaints I should drop into it about his treatment of young women. All the plants have some sunshine: why not some love in each woman’s life?
Nevertheless, when it came to the test of action, theory went to the winds, and Henry renounced her lover for her fellow. She held herself bound by every tie of tenderness and gratitude, and no other course was conceivable save to shut the gates of the fortress and bar them against that clamorous joy.
Speak not, reveal not.... There will be
In the unchallenged dark a mystery,
And golden hair sprung rapid in a tomb.
Human instinct may rebel at the spectacle of life so baffled; and common sense, in its short way with problems, may deny a valid cause for the sacrifice. But a longer vision is compelled to observe that fulfilment was not, after all, withheld. It came on the spiritual plane, however; for it is safe to say that we owe the finest work of Michael Field to the fact that Henry did not marry her lover:
Then let a mourner rise and three times call
Upon our love, and the long echoes fall.
Before leaving the volume called Underneath the Bough it is convenient to take examples of lyrics in a different kind from those we have been considering. Thus we may select two or three pieces which an easy label would describe as nature-poems. There are not a great many which answer fully to that description, for although our poets adored the beauty of the physical world, their Muse was too prepossessed by the movement of human life to surrender itself completely to Nature. Yet by certain aspects of Nature they were deeply stirred—;great spaces, lofty skies measured by masses of moving cloud, trees blown by the wind—;in short, by just those features in which in old Italian painters people have agreed to see the signs of a religious sense:
O Wind, thou hast thy kingdom in the trees,
And all thy royalties
Sweep through the land to-day.
It is mid June,
And thou, with all thine instruments in tune,
Thine orchestra
Of heaving fields, and heavy, swinging fir,
Strikest a lay
That doth rehearse
Her ancient freedom to the universe.
All other sound in awe
Repeals its law;
The bird is mute, the sea
Sucks up its waves, from rain
The burthened clouds refrain,
To listen to thee in thy leafery,
Thou unconfined,
Lavish, large, soothing, refluent summer-wind!
The two pieces which follow are chosen because they illustrate the touch of fantasy which our poets often added to their nature-poetry—;a touch which gives such grace and charm to the lyrics of their earlier plays.
I will sing what happened to-night on high:
In the frank, wide sky
The wind had put the sun to rout,
The tossed west clouds were floating about;
From the wreath above me, staid and prim,
A star looked out,
Preparing to trim
Her lamp, and to shine as she had shined
Worlds out of mind:
When lo! she felt the wind on her face,
And for joy of him
She left the place
Where she had shined
Worlds out of mind,
To run through the frank, wide sky:
She was veiled by the clouds a moment or two,
Then I saw her scouring across the blue,
For joy of the wind.
* * *
Where winds abound,
And fields are hilly,
Shy daffadilly
Looks down on the ground.
Rose cones of larch
Are just beginning;
Though oaks are spinning
No oak-leaves in March.
Spring’s at the core,
The boughs are sappy:
Good to be happy
So long, long before!
The volume called Long Ago was published as early as 1889: that is to say, four years before Underneath the Bough and nineteen years before Wild Honey. It is, however, a more perfect work than either of those two, both of which include poems of very various date, circumstance, and merit. Long Ago possesses a unity which they lack, and which characterizes the spirit as well as the form of the book. The fact of its having been designed as a whole and wrought to a finish without any long interruption may account for its effect of singleness in impulse and style; but its more satisfying inner unity no doubt arises from the harmony that existed between the poets and their theme, Sappho. Critics notwithstanding, it was not so audacious as it seemed for two Victorian ladies to plunge into the task of rendering Sapphic ecstasy. For, first, the leader of the sally was herself a flame of Dionysiac fire; and the inscription on the banner of her life, from its beginning to its end, was love. There would appear to be a real resemblance between Michael’s intensity, her exuberance and quick lyrical impulse, and the legendary Sappho. And this, restrained by Henry’s sense of form and deepened by their classical lore in poetry and philosophy, should surely have armed them for the adventure.
There is an ironic flavour now in tasting the comments on the book at its appearance. One of the faithful held up protesting hands at the poets’ audacity. Another described the book as a “ludicrous and lamentable attempt.” Yet Browning praised it, and marked some of the pieces in the manuscript “Good” and “Good indeed!” Meredith wrote to the poets to express his joy in it. The Academy reviewer, in June 1889, predicted that it would some day be described as “one of the most exquisite lyrical productions of the latter half of the nineteenth century”; while Wharton, in the preface to the third edition of his Sappho, speaks of the “felicitous paraphrases of Michael Field,” and quotes from four of them. The contrast between the two opinions is as amusing as such things are apt to be to those who are not the subject of them; but Michael Field did not see the joke (perhaps her sense of humour was deficient), and the severer judgments pained her. They were probably based on an assumption that the poets were trying to recreate Sappho, a project which might have justified brickbats if it had ever been entertained. But their aim was simply to make short dramatic lyrics out of the scenes suggested to their imagination by the Sapphic fragments. The verdict of those most competent to judge the book is, on balance, that they succeeded remarkably well; while as to the average reader, he will surely find something most attractive in the flashing moods of the verse, in its grace and finish, and in its complete harmony. Truly pagan the work is, whether in its sunny aspects or its dark ones, whether in its philosophy or its art. The pursuit of joy, the adoration of beauty, the ecstasy and the pain of love, the gay light and colour of the physical world, its sweet scents and sounds, its lovely shapes and delicate textures, are all here, their brilliance but the brighter for the shadow that flits about them of death and its finality.
They plaited garlands in their time,
They knew the joy of youth’s sweet prime,
Quick breath and rapture.
Theirs was the violet-weaving bliss,
And theirs the white, wreathed brow to kiss,
Kiss, and recapture.
They plaited garlands, even these,
They learned Love’s golden mysteries
Of young Apollo;
The lyre unloosed their souls; they lay
Under the trembling leaves at play,
Bright dreams to follow.
They plaited garlands—;heavenly twine!
They crowned the cup, they drank the wine
Of youth’s deep pleasure.
Now, lingering for the lyreless god—;
Oh yet, once in their time, they trod
A choric measure.
* * *
Yea, gold is son of Zeus: no rust
Its timeless light can stain;
The worm that brings man’s flesh to dust
Assaults its strength in vain:
More gold than gold the love I sing,
A hard, inviolable thing.
Men say the passions should grow old
With waning years; my heart
Is incorruptible as gold,
’Tis my immortal part:
Nor is there any god can lay
On love the finger of decay.
* * *
Thou burnest us; thy torches’ flashing spires,
Eros, we hail!
Thou burnest us, Immortal, but the fires
Thou kindlest fail:
We die,
And thine effulgent braziers pale.
Ah, Phaon, thou who hast abandoned me,
Thou who dost smile
To think deserted Lesbos rings with thee,
A little while
Gone by
There will be muteness in thine isle.
Even as a god who finds his temple-flame
Sunken, unfed,
Who, loving not the priestess, loves the fame
Bright altars spread,
Wilt sigh
To find thy lyric glory dead?
Or will Damophyla, the lovely-haired,
My music learn,
Singing how Sappho of thy love despaired,
Till thou dost burn,
While I,
Eros! am quenched within my urn?
* * *
I sang to women gathered round;
Forth from my own heart-springs
Welled out the passion; of the pain
I sang if the beloved in vain
Is sighed for—;when
They stood untouched, as at the sound
Of unfamiliar things,
Oh, then my heart turned cold, and then
I dropt my wings.
Trembling I seek thy holy ground,
Apollo, lord of kings;
Thou hast the darts that kill. Oh, free
The senseless world of apathy,
Pierce it! for when
In poet’s strain no joy is found,
His call no answer brings,
Oh, then my heart turns cold, and then
I drop my wings.
When through thy breast wild wrath doth spread
And work thy inmost being harm,
Leave thou the fiery word unsaid,
Guard thee; be calm.
Closed be thy lips: where Love perchance
Lies at the door to be thy guest,
Shall there be noise and dissonance?
Quiet were best.
Apollo, when they do thee wrong,
Speechless thou tak’st the golden dart:
I will refrain my barking tongue,
And strike the heart.
To pass immediately from Long Ago to the poets’ last lyrical works may seem a wilful act, considering the length of time between the books, and their amazing unlikeness. Yet there is a very great interest in the contrast and all that it implies, and a piquancy which one may hope is not too irreverent in the reflection that at the root there is no great difference, after all, between the Lesbian songs and the Christian ones.
The volume called Poems of Adoration was published in 1912, and Mystic Trees in 1913. They were both signed Michael Field, but the first is all Henry’s work with the exception of two pieces, and the second is all by Michael except the poems called Qui Renovat Juventutem Meam and The Homage of Death. The two volumes therefore provide material for a useful study from the point of view of the collaboration; and they are a positive lure to a comparison with the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, notably, of course, with Herbert and Vaughan. One would not go so far as to claim an absolute likeness between Henry and George Herbert, if only because Henry does not spread herself in tedious moralizing nor indulge in concetti. To that extent her work is purer poetry and, one would suppose, purer religion than that of the old poet; and she rises oftener to sublimity. But in essentials the two are close akin—;in sweetness and strength and clarity, in their sense of form, and in terse, vigorous expression. Between Michael and Vaughan the likeness is even closer, and would tempt one far if it were not that our limits prevent straying. But indeed the human and spiritual values of the two books transcend mere literary questions so greatly as to make those look trivial and even impertinent.
For Poems of Adoration was published only a few months before Henry died. Much of the book was composed at dead of night, during great pain, when, as her father confessor has remarked, “most of us would be trying not to blaspheme.” The poems are in fact those of a dying woman, and one who had refused herself any alleviating drug. Two of them, Extreme Unction and After Anointing, were written when she was at the point of death and had received the last offices of the Church. Some bear evidence of acute crises of body or soul; and in some the vision of the mysteries of her faith is so vivid that the poet herself is almost overwhelmed. Once or twice, when she has gone to the limit of spiritual sight, she falters; but never does that fine intelligence stumble into the outer darkness. Perceiving that it is coming near the verge of sanity, it draws back in time to leave the vision distinct and credible.
To the strict eye of criticism these poignant facts may appear irrelevant. I cannot bring myself to think that such splendour of soul has no relation to the art that it produced; but those persons who insist on cleaving the two asunder may be reassured as to the technical accomplishment of this poetry. Often cast into something of the poets’ earlier dramatic form, its music is sweet, its measures are rhythmical, and its language has force and clarity. It has a majesty which proclaims its origin, and one has no need to know the circumstances of its birth. Imagination rises, swift and daring, to heights which are sometimes sublime, as in the first poem quoted below. Here the conception of Christ the wine-treader is treated with magnificent audacity of image and metaphor, while underneath runs a stream of thought which, though it makes great leaps now and then, pouring its strong current into cataract as it goes, yet bears its craft safely up and on.
DESOLATION
Who comes?...
O Beautiful!
Low thunder thrums,
As if a chorus struck its shawms and drums.
The sun runs forth
To stare at Him, who journeys north
From Edom, from the lonely sands, arrayed
In vesture sanguine as at Bosra made.
O beautiful and whole,
In that red stole!
Behold,
O clustered grapes,
His garment rolled,
And wrung about His waist in fold on fold!
See, there is blood
Now on His garment, vest and hood;
For He hath leapt upon a loaded vat,
And round His motion splashes the wine-fat,
Though there is none to play
The Vintage-lay.
The Word
Of God, His name ...
But nothing heard
Save beat of His lone feet forever stirred
To tread the press—;
None with Him in His loneliness;
No treader with Him in the spume, no man.
. . . . .
O task
Of sacrifice,
That we may bask
In clemency and keep an undreamt Pasch!
O Treader lone,
How pitiful Thy shadow thrown
Athwart the lake of wine that Thou hast made!
O Thou, most desolate, with limbs that wade
Among the berries, dark and wet,
Thee we forget!
THE BLESSED SACRAMENT
Lo, from Thy Father’s bosom Thou dost sigh;
Deep to Thy restlessness His ear is bent:—;
“Father, the Paraclete is sent,
Wrapt in a foaming wind He passeth by.
Behold, men’s hearts are shaken—;I must die:
Sure as a star within the firmament
Must be my dying: lo, my wood is rent,
My cross is sunken! Father, I must die!”
Lo, how God loveth us, He looseth hold....
His Son is back among us, with His own,
And craving at our hands an altar-stone.
Thereon, a victim, meek He takes His place;
And while to offer Him His priests make bold,
He looketh upward to His Father’s face.
THE HOMAGE OF DEATH
How willingly
I yield to Thee
This very dust!
My body—;that was not enough!
Fair was it as a silken stuff,
Or as a spice, or gold,
Fair to behold!
Beloved, I give Thee all
This Adam’s Fall,
This my desert—;
Thy Father would not let Thee see
Corruption, but I give it Thee.
Behold me thus abhorred,
My penance, Lord!
A handful in Thy Hand,
As if of fair, white sand,
Thou wroughtest me;
Clean was I for a little while....
This dust is of another style;
Its fumes, most vile of sin
To stink begin.
. . . . .
O Victor King, and when
Thou raisest me again,
For me no fame;
Just white amid the whiter souls,
Efface me ’mid the shining stoles,
Lost in a lovely brood,
And multitude:
My soul even as the Maid
Cophetua arrayed
In samite fine;
And set her by Him on His throne,
O Christ, what homage can atone
For this caprice in Thee
To worship me?
QUI RENOVAT JUVENTUTEM MEAM
Make me grow young again,
Grow young enough to die,
That, in a joy unseared of pain,
I may my Lover, loved, attain,
With that fresh sigh
Eternity
Gives to the young to breathe about the heart,
Until their trust in youth-time shall depart.
Let me be young as when
To die was past my thought:
And earth with straight, immortal men,
And women deathless to my ken,
Cast fear to naught!
Let faith be fraught,
My Bridegroom, with such gallant love, its range
Simply surpasses every halt of change!
Let me come to Thee young,
When Thou dost challenge Come!
With all my marvelling dreams unsung,
Their promise by first passion stung,
Though chary, dumb....
Thou callest Come!
Let me rush to Thee when I pass,
Keen as a child across the grass!
Mystic Trees, the last book which Michael gave to the world, is more strictly theological than Henry’s. Always less the philosopher than her fellow, she took her conversion to Catholicism, in externals at least, more strenuously. She developed, for example, a proselytizing habit which a little tried the patience of her friends, especially those who remembered her as a joyful pagan. That her Christian zeal was as joyful, to her, as her paganism had been did not much console them, or soften the onslaught of her blithe attacks. Indeed, it occasionally led her to acts which she herself afterward repented of. Thus there is a comic touch in the spectacle of Michael, truly English as she was, urging upon Ireland, in the person of a poor old Irishwoman, every benefit but that one which the old woman craved for. For Michael went to great pains to help her, and to get her placed in a home, and she subsequently wrote to a friend, “I am so deeply regretting my part in putting an Irishwoman in a Nazareth house: their love of freedom is so great.” The little parable holds Michael’s character almost in entirety—;impulsive, eager, generous, wilful, rash; and then deeply penitent and rushing to make noble amends.
But that over-zeal had a significance for her artistic life too. She wrote in a letter to another friend, “I will pray for Orzie’s conversion: O Louie, be religious! You cannot ‘laugh deep’ unless you are.” In the phrase I have italicized Michael is surely confessing, though it may be without intent to do so, that her religion is now awaking in her the same ecstasy which had formerly been awakened by the poetic impulse. To herself it seemed that she had suffered an enormous change, and that she was no longer the old Michael. And it is true that for a time the tragic inspiration of her art was suspended. Perhaps that follows of necessity from the nature of the Christian doctrine, its hope, its humility, its vicariousness, and its consolation. Yet the moment one turns to these religious lyrics one finds the same ecstasy with which the earlier Michael had adored the beauty of the world and had sung the love of Sappho. So, too, in the first work which Michael Field had produced, Callirrhoë, the theme is none other than the worship of the god by love and sacrifice. That, in fact, is the meaning implied in nearly all her poetry, as it was the motive force of all her life; and the only change that has occurred when we reach, with Mystic Trees, the end, is that the name of the god is altered. But whichever god possessed her had the power to make Michael “laugh deep” in a rapture which, whether of delight or rage or sorrow, was always an intense spiritual joy—;which is simply to say, to evoke the poet in her. The exaltation of spirit which in Callirrhoë said of Dionysos “He came to bring Life, more abundant life,” and declared “Wert thou lute to love, There were a new song of the heaven and earth,” is the same as that which wrote to a friend in early days, “We are with the nun in her cell as with the pagan at the Dionysos’ feast”; and which affirmed in a letter to another friend that she welcomed inspiration from whatever source, “whether the wind and fire sweep down on us from the mighty realms of the unconscious or from the nostrils of a living God, Jehovah, or Apollo, or Dionysos.”
But, as we said, to herself she seemed a new creature; she had found a treasure and must run to share it, even as she had burned to impart the Bacchic fire thirty years before. Thence came the scheme of Mystic Trees, which, as Father Vincent McNabb suggested to me, seems to be unique in religious poetry. The book contains a cycle of poems, designed to express the mysteries of the Roman Catholic faith as they are celebrated in the seasons of the Church. The “Trees” of the title are the Cedar and the Hyssop, used as an image of the Incarnation: the great Cedar, the Son of God, becoming the little Hyssop, which, in the lovely cover-design by Mr Charles Ricketts, stands on either side of the Cross with bowed head.
The book is divided into three parts, with a small group of poems added at the end, which Michael wrote while Henry was dying. In the first part, called “Hyssop,” the story of the Redemption is unfolded in a series of poems representing the life and death of Christ. It is possible to quote only two or three of the incidents thus treated, but we may take first this one describing the presentation of the infant Christ in the Temple:
THE PRESENTATION
They say it is a King
His Temple entering!
The great veil doth not rock
With gust and earthquake shock:
But all the air is stilled
As at a law fulfilled.
Dreams from their graves rise up—;
Melchizidek with cup;
Abraham most glad of heart,
A little way apart.
Mary, to keep God’s word,
Brings Babe and turtle-bird.
Lo! Simeon draweth in,
And doth his song begin!
Great doom is for her Son,
And Mary’s heart undone.
Oh, Simeon is blest,
Christ in his arms is prest!
Mary’s sweet doves are slain,
She takes her Babe again:
And in her heart she knows
He will be slain as those:
And on her journey home
She feels God’s kingdom come.
Passing some intervening poems, we take from the same sequence these two members of a group of imagined incidents on the evening of the Crucifixion:
SUNDOWN ON CALVARY
Where art Thou, wandering Bird?
Thy sweet voice is not heard
On this wild day,
When the Father mourns the Son,
When the Son no Father hath,
And Thou hast but chaos for Thy path.
The Father keeps the Sepulchre,
The Son lies quiet there.
Where is thy place?
Where rest in a world undone?
Holy Ghost, a multitude
Guards the Cross; there hardly canst Thou brood.
To the dark waters haste,
Spread pinions on the waste;
There breathe, there play;
Forsake the Wood!
There is no resting-place for Thee
On this lovely, noble, blighted Tree.
. . . . .
But lo, it is sundown;
The bodies taken down,
Quiet the hill:
The Tree drips blood on the path:
And, the jolted beams above,
Croons, calls across the evening-winds, a Dove!
A FRIDAY NIGHT
The Questioner
“Lo, you have wounds and you are speeding fast!
The light is gone!
Have you no cloak to screen you from the blast?
It is not well!”
The Answerer
“Show me the way to Hell,
I must pass on.”
The Questioner
“There is indeed hard by a little gate:
But there thou shalt not go.
Thou art too fair;
Golden thy hair doth blow.”
The Answerer
“There I must go:
I have an errand there for those that wait,
Have waited for me long.”
I showed the gate.
Now is He shut within, and I am found
Alone with blood-stains on the ground.
Would I could go down to that dim
Murk of the shades to those that wait for Him!
We may take from the second part of the book, called “Cedar” and dedicated to the Virgin, two short pieces which help to illustrate the sweetness of this poetry, its tenderness, its intimacy of approach to divine things, and its innocence.
CALLED EARLY
It is a morning very bright;
Through all the hours of the long starry night
Mary hath not been sleeping: for delight
She hath kept watch through the starry night.
Joseph comes to her quietly:
“A journey I must take with thee,
Mary, my wife, from Galilee.”
He saw that she had wept,
And all her secret kept.
UNDER THE STAR
Mary is weary and heavy-laden
As a travailing woman may be.
She calleth to Joseph wearily,
“At the inn there is no room for me,
Oh, seek me a little room!”
Joseph returns. “In a cattle-shed
Hard by, I will make for thee thy bed—;
Dost fear to go?
O Mary, look, that star overhead!”
And Mary smiled—;“Where the cattle low
My Son shall be loosed from the womb.”
From the third part, which is called “Sward” and therefore is obviously dedicated to ordinary folk, we need take only the little poem which follows. But we ought to remember the occasion of it, that Michael had been compelled to go alone to Mass because Henry was too ill to accompany her.
Lovingly I turn me down
From this church, St Philip’s crown,
To the leafy street where dwell
The good folk of Arundel.
Lovingly I look between
Roof and roof, to meadows green,
To the cattle by the wall,
To the place where sea-birds call,
Where the sky more closely dips,
And, perchance, there may be ships:
God have pity on us all!
Michael said, in a letter to a friend, “Mystic Trees is for the young”; and one perceives the truth of that. But I do not think that her word ‘young’ means only ‘youthful,’ although children would probably understand the poems readily, and a certain kind of child would delight in them. Nor do I think that they were written with any special audience in mind. But the poet, in reading them afterward, recognized their childlike qualities of simplicity and directness, and their young faith and enthusiasm. Did she realize, one asks oneself, how she had in them recaptured her own youth and its lyrical fervour? She was nearly seventy years old when she wrote them, which is a wonder comparable to Mr Hardy’s spring-songs in winter. And though we may accept, if we like, the dubious dictum of the psycho-analyst that every poet is a case of arrested development, that does not make any less the marvel that in old age, after the lyric fire had subsided and the sufferings of her fellow had destroyed the joy of her life, she should have written such poems. For here it is certainly relevant to remember that at this time Henry was dying, and that Michael herself was suffering, silently, the torture of cancer. “Michael has a secret woe of her own,” was all that she permitted herself to reveal, in a letter to her closest woman friend. But so stoical was her courage, and so composed her manner, that the hint was not taken, and no one guessed that she too was ravaged by the disease. Before her intimates, as before the world, she kept a cheerful face, in terror lest her fellow should come to know of her state. Her doctor knew, of course, and Father Vincent McNabb. But they were under a bond to spare Henry the added anguish of knowing the truth, and the bond was faithfully kept. Not until her fellow was dead, when Michael had, in fact, laid her in her coffin, did she break silence to the friend who was with her in that ordeal. Two days later a hæmorrhage made it impossible to conceal her condition any longer. “God kept her secret,” said Father McNabb, “until the moment when it was no longer necessary”; and without disloyalty to the godhead of the heroic human spirit, we may accept that word from one who brought consolation and devoted friendship to the poets’ last sad days.
It was, then, during the closing weeks of Henry’s life, and while Michael was suffering that sorrow and great bodily pain, that she wrote Mystic Trees. Yet the poems manifestly bear within them a deep creative joy, and breathe sometimes a holy gaiety of spirit; and it is only at the end of the book, in a tiny section containing four short poems, that the poet allows her anguish of body and mind the relief of expression. For that brief space, so rightly named “A Little While,” the inspiration to “laugh deep” failed, and stark tragedy overwhelmed her.
BELOVED, MY GLORY
Beloved, my glory in thee is not ceased,
Whereas, as thou art waning, forests wane:
Unmoved, as by the victim is the priest,
I pass the world’s great altitudes of pain.
But when the stars are gathered for a feast,
Or shadows threaten on a radiant plain,
Or many golden cornfields wave amain,
Oh then, as one from a filled shuttle weaves,
My spirit grieves.
SHE IS SINGING TO THEE, DOMINE!
She is singing to Thee, Domine!
Dost hear her now?
She is singing to Thee from a burning throat,
And melancholy as the owl’s love-note;
She is singing to Thee from the utmost bough
Of the tree of Golgotha where it is bare,
And the fruit torn from it that fruited there;
She is singing.... Canst Thou stop the strain,
The homage of such pain?
Domine, stoop down to her again!
CAPUT TUUM UT CARMELUS
I watch the arch of her head,
As she turns away from me....
I would I were with the dead,
Drowned with the dead at sea,
All the waves rocking over me!
As St Peter turned and fled
From the Lord, because of sin,
I look on that lovely head;
And its majesty doth win
Grief in my heart as for sin.
Oh, what can Death have to do
With a curve that is drawn so fine,
With a curve that is drawn as true
As the mountain’s crescent line?...
Let me be hid where the dust falls fine!