A father of women, and other poems/End matter
A FATHER OF WOMEN AND OTHER POEMS
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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 loveliest poem is lovely for its own sake only. Its own life is all that one need ask of it. But still the question may arise for what sake else it is precious, what of true wisdom, of vision, of the life within? And Mrs. Meynell's books have taken their chosen, quiet, unfaltering way—too lofty a way for ease or weariness or absent-mindedness to follow. She is sure; and now, however the winds of the world may blow, the vane, lit with a westering sun, points always to the East.—Times.
Mrs. Meynell found herself long ago, and was found by all English-speaking lovers of poetry. That her work should undergo transformation was out of the question; but it would not be hers if its recluse and esoteric inspiration had made no response to the appeal of topics that make the staple of England's daily thought. Yet the great national issues are often divined rather than seen as we traverse the subtle avenues of intimate soul-life in which her mystic genius is peculiarly at home. Thus the title-poem, addressed to her sister, Lady Butler, has the air at the outset, of a purely personal commemoration of their father. The spiritual bond between father and daughter could not be more exquisitely touched. But the larger background of her thought presently emerges. This father of women left no son. And now, when the world is crippled of its sons, its women are called to remember that they are "daughters of men," to rise to the need and fill the empty place.—Manchester Guardian.
She writes on the Shakspere Tercentenaries. So did ten thousand other poets. They boxed the compass of the obvious as to the manner born—which indeed most of them were. Only two writers, Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mrs. Meynell, broke silence because they had something to say. And Mrs. Meynell's reflections on the fact that she had lived through the Tercentenaries of Shakspere's birth and death, and might, with such length of days, have seen him in his cradle and closed the earth on him, the image of that magnificence and fullness thus enclosed as it were within her own comparative waste (as she sees it) are very characteristic of her inability to write like a hack. She has a poem on the Early Dead in Battle. Her mind travels its own road, and she discovers to us, surprisingly but convincingly, that he who dies in early manhood has actually the longest part of life behind him, and that time is never so long and joy never so deep as in childhood, and that, as we grow old, the later years seem more fleeting and less full. A thinker so conscientious is never in danger of polishing nothings. All her work is of one piece; and, at its finest, it is of its kind perfect.—J. C. Squire in Land and Water.
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THE POEMS OF ALICE MEYNELL
One Volume, finely printed, and bound in Buckram, with the Portrait by Sargent in photogravure. 6s. net. Postage 4d.
"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. By her best, Mrs. Meynell is much our greatest poet. The Collected 'Poems' herald the coming into her kingdom of a sovereign of song."—J. L. Garvin in the Pall Mall Gazette.
THE ESSAYS OF ALICE MEYNELL
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This collection is taken from the author's five previously published volumes of Essays. In his essay on her work, George Meredith wrote: "Mrs. Meynell's papers are little sermons, ideal sermons. Let no one uninstructed take fright at the title, they are not preachments. They leave a sense of stilled singing in the mind they fill. The writing is limpid in its depths."
BURNS & OATES, 28 Orchard Street, London, W.