Modern British Poetry Part 3

Close by the jolly fire I sit To warm my frozen bones a bit; Or with a reindeer-sled, explore The colder countries round the door.

When to go out, my nurse doth wrap Me in my comforter and cap; The cold wind burns my face, and blows Its frosty pepper up my nose.

Black are my steps on silver sod; Thick blows my frosty breath abroad; And tree and house, and hill and lake, Are frosted like a wedding-cake.

ROMANCE

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.

I will make a palace fit for you and me, Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom, And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.

And this shall be for music when no one else is near, The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!

That only I remember, that only you admire, Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.

REQUIEM

Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie: Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me: _Here he lies where he long'd to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill._

_Alice Meynell_

Alice Meynell was born in London in 1850. She was educated at home and spent a great part of her childhood in Italy. She has written little, but that little is on an extremely high plane; her verses are simple, pensive and always distinguished. The best of her work is in _Poems_ (1903).

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 mult.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sionate, O pa.s.sionless 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 sanct.i.ty of fear?

_O innocent throat! O human ear!_

_Fiona Macleod_

(_William Sharp_)

William Sharp was born at Garthland Place, Scotland, in 1855. He wrote several volumes of biography and criticism, published a book of plays greatly influenced by Maeterlinck (_Vistas_) and was editor of "The Canterbury Poets" series.

His feminine _alter ego_, Fiona Macleod, was a far different personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of another spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote several volumes of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and no little unusual poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona Macleod, the most barbaric and vivid are those collected in _The Sin-Eater and Other Tales_; the longer _Pharais, A Romance of the Isles_, is scarcely less unique.

In the ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four volumes of rather undistinguished verse. In 1896 _From the Hills of Dream_ appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod; _The Hour of Beauty_, an even more distinctive collection, followed shortly. Both poetry and prose were always the result of two sharply differentiated moods constantly fluctuating; the emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod, the intellectual and, it must be admitted the more arresting, was that of William Sharp.

He died in 1905.

THE VALLEY OF SILENCE

In the secret Valley of Silence No breath doth fall; No wind stirs in the branches; No bird doth call: As on a white wall A breathless lizard is still, So silence lies on the valley Breathlessly still.

In the dusk-grown heart of the valley An altar rises white: No rapt priest bends in awe Before its silent light: But sometimes a flight Of breathless words of prayer White-wing'd enclose the altar, Eddies of prayer.

THE VISION

In a fair place Of whin and gra.s.s, I heard feet pa.s.s Where no one was.

I saw a face Bloom like a flower-- Nay, as the rainbow-shower Of a tempestuous hour.

It was not man, or woman: It was not human: But, beautiful and wild, Terribly undefiled, I knew an unborn child.

_Oscar Wilde_

Oscar Wilde was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1856, and even as an undergraduate at Oxford he was marked for a brilliant career. When he was a trifle over 21 years of age, he won the Newdigate Prize with his poem _Ravenna_.

Giving himself almost entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as _An Ideal Husband_ and _The Importance of Being Earnest_. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpa.s.sed by his notoriety as an aesthete.

(See Preface.)

Most of his poems in prose (such as _The Happy Prince_, _The Birthday of the Infanta_ and _The Fisherman and His Soul_) are more imaginative and richly colored than his verse; but in one long poem, _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ (1898), he sounded his deepest, simplest and most enduring note. Prison was, in many ways, a regeneration for Wilde. It not only produced _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ but made possible his most poignant piece of writing, _De Profundis_, only a small part of which has been published. _Salome_, which has made the author's name a household word, was originally written in French in 1892 and later translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas, accompanied by the famous ill.u.s.trations by Aubrey Beardsley. More recently this heated drama, based on the story of Herod and Herodias, was made into an opera by Richard Strauss.

Wilde's society plays, flashing and cynical, were the forerunners of Bernard Shaw's audacious and far more searching ironies. One sees the origin of a whole school of drama in such epigrams as "The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts." Or "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

Wilde died at Paris, November 30, 1900.