THE POET TO THE BIRDS
Reading edition
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;
54Therefore 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.