Fiona Macleod (William Sharp)
Reading edition
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 grass, I heard feet pass 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.