The collected poems, lyrical and narrative, of A. Mary F. Robinson
THE COLLECTED POEMS
Lryrical and Narrative
Of
A. Mary F. Robinson
(Madame 'Duclaux)
With a Preface
and Portrait
London: T. Fisher Unwin
Paternoster Square Memii [All rights reserved.]
To
the memory
of
JAMES DARMESTETER
Amort et Dolori
Sacrum
PREFACE
I have always thought that one should write poetry only as one dies; that is to say, at the last extremity and when it is impossible to do otherwise. And yet, after some three-and-twenty years of much refraining, I find myself possessed of a considerable volume of Collected Poems, to say nothing of that larger quantity of verse disseminated in the waste-paper baskets of London, Paris, Italy, Touraine, Auvergne. By no means all my published poems are reprinted here; I have retained such as seemed to me the best. In sending them out to affront the world anew, with some fresh companions, I have carefully re-considered them all, revised the greater part, and re-written a good many. I have hesitated under what name to publish them, and, persuaded that no reader will remember two foreign names, in addition to an English one, I have reverted to that which I bore when first I wrote them. Mary James Darmesteter has no longer a right to exist. As regards the English public, Madame Duclaux has given no proof of her existence; she has, she hopes, before her a modest future of French prose, and leaves her English verses to Mary Robinson.
I send forth this little book with scant expectance of immediate success. Entirely lyrical, intellectual, or romantic, these little poems must sound as the merest tootling of Corydon's reed-pipe in ears accustomed to the martial music of our times. Yet, like all poets, I trust these little songs may find an audience to-morrow: they have that saving virtue of sincerity which is the salt of Art. But if I see the necessary grace that they possess, how clearly, alas! do I perceive the magnificent qualities they lack! Here there is nothing of the rush, the sumptuous abundance, the vigour, the splendour of Byron or Hugo; nothing of that sensuous magic and flooding glory which make certain lines of Keats and Swinburne blaze, as it were, in colour on the page. Still I fancy that Wordsworth, Tennyson, Vigny, and even the immortal Goethe—all the meditative poets—might have cared to read some of these sober little songs.
We cannot all be great poets; but the humblest, it they be sincere, may give a genuine pleasure. I have marked in red the days on which I discovered certain poets, most certainly minor, who died centuries ago. With what delight I made acquaintance with Ausonius and Dr. Donne, still more so with Joachim de Bellay, Marie de France, or Shahid the Bactrian: dear, enchanting books, exhumed from the dustiest corner of the library, that never counted on me for an audience. I may have to wait as long till I repay my debt to some other student who perchance, beside a bookstall of Cape Town or Honolulu, may fish my poems from the fourpenny box, or light on them in some anthology. But I count on his appreciation.
Depend upon it, after the very greatest names in poetry (who are to all of us a second religion) the minor poets have the happiest lot. Each of us worships in the temples of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, MoliJre ; but each of us also has some private niche, some inconsiderable intimate shrine, for the poet no one praises, who is all the more our own. How dreary the state and rank of your second-best great poet, enthroned in dismal glory on the less frequented slopes of Parnassus! Who lights a taper or pulls a posy for Dryden or Schiller or Alfieri? We admire them sincerely; in theory, we love them. How often in the year do we take down their works and read them? Take the case of a writer who, in his person, unites one of the greatest of epic writers to the most exquisite of minor poets : which do we read the more often, "Lycidas" or "Paradise Regained"?… I live in a Catholic country where almost every city boasts of its historic cathedral. They are nearly always empty. But turn down the side street, enter yon barn-like chapel topped by a wooden cross : the whitewashed walls of the sanctuary of St. Anthony ot Padua are thronged with worshippers intimate and devout. St. Peter and St. Paul have their incomparable domes; save on highdays and holidays, they have them all to themselves! In the work-a-day hours of life, when you snatch at a prayer in passing, as you pluck a rose over a fence, half furtively—the swift petition, the familiar avowal, are, apparently, for the Lesser Saint. The chapel of the Minor Poet may be too small to admit the crowd; it may be thronged when three or four are gathered together. None the less, it has its use and place. It is, I believe, a mistake, to suppose, as Tolstoy contends, that no Art is legitimate save that which has for its object the happiness of the greatest number. Yet I admit that the poet who consciously addresses a few is, by definition, the Minor Poet, the man of a smaller race, the younger brother, who, whatever his merits, shall not obtain the full inheritance.
"Shall Life be an Ode? Or shall Life be a Drama?" wrote one day James Darmesteter, the friend of all my verses and the occasion of many among them. My life has been an Ode, of which those pages are the scattered fragments. If ever I have escaped from its tranquil sequences, it has been but for an instant and through some partial opening of the gates of Imagination, set in movement by some incident in real life or some episode of my reading. I have never been able to write about what was not known to me and near. Tim Black, the Scapegoat, and most of the personages of the New Arcadia, lived on a common in Surrey near my garden gates. all of them are drawn from human models. The Romantic Ballads were inspired by my historical studies. Some persons of culture have refused me the right to express myself in those simple forms of popular song which I have loved since childhood as sincerely as any peasant. If the critics would only believe it, they have come as naturally to me, if less happily, than they came of old to a Lady Wardlaw, a Lady Linsday, or a Lady Nairn. We women have a privilege in these matters, as M. Gaston Paris has reminded us. We have always been the prime makers of ballads and love songs, of anonymous snatches and screeds of popular song. We meet together no longer on Mayday, as of old, in Provence, to set the fashion in tensos and sonnets. But some old wife or other, crooning over her fire of sticks, in Scotland or the Val d'Aosta, in Roumania or Gascony, is probably at the beginning of most romantic Ballads. Mine, of course, have the fatal defect of having crystallised too soon; they lack the patient polish of succeeding generations. But that it is, most obviously, not in my power to remedy. The only way would be for my readers to learn them by heart, half-forget them, and re-write them, omitting the non-essential. It is a necessary process; but I can only offer them in their unripeness, reminding my readers that the beautiful rispetti of the Tuscan hills, the ballads of Scotland and Piedmont, have all at one moment lacked the admirable patina which age and time alone confer.
MARY DUCLAUX.
Olmet, Cantal.
September, 1901. CONTENTS
AN ITALIAN GARDEN AND OTHER LYRICS
*An asterisk indicates the new poems |
page |
| Florentine May | 3 |
| Remembrance | 5 |
| Venetian Nocturne | 6 |
| Invocations | 7 |
| The Feast of St. John | 8 |
| Treasure Song | 9 |
| Temple Garlands | 10 |
| To a Rose Dead at Morning | 11 |
| Strewings | 12 |
| Pallor | 13 |
| Tuscan Cypress | 14 |
| Love without Wings | 19 |
| Semitones | 22 |
| Elysium | 24 |
| Stornelli and Strambotti | 25 |
| Celia's Home-Coming | 27 |
| Posies | 29 |
| Alternatives | 30 |
| Dryads | 31 |
| Rosa Rosarum | 33 |
| An Oasis | 35 |
| Castello | 36 |
| Torrents | 37 |
| Aubade Triste | 38 |
| Poplar Leaves | 39 |
| Spring under Cypresses | 40 |
| Music | 42 |
| Art and Life | 43 |
| Lyrics. | PAGE |
| a pastoral of parnassus | 41 |
| a search for apollo | 46 |
| an address to the nightingale | 47 |
| wild cherry branches . | 49 |
| tuscan olive .... | 51 |
| APPREHENSION . | 54 |
| FRIENDSHIP | 56 |
| TWO LOVERS | 58 |
| A GREY DAY | 60 |
| A SONG | 61 |
| PARADISE FANCIES | 62 |
| A DIALOGUE | 64 |
| LE ROI EST MORT | 66 |
| LETHE | 66 |
| A RIFIORITA | 67 |
| A PASTORAL | 68 |
| DAWN-ANGELS | 69 |
| TO A DRAGON FLY | 70 |
| SONG OF A STORMY NIGHT | 72 |
| TWO SISTERS | 73 |
| LOVERS | 76 |
| LONDON STUDIES | 77 |
| THANKSGIVING FOR FLOWERS | 79 |
| MAIDEN LOVE | 80 |
| LOVE, DEATH, AND ART | 81 |
| SONNET | 82 |
| FONS VITÆ. | 83 |
| THE CUP OF LIFE | 85 |
| LOVE AND VISION | 86 |
| LOVE AMONG THE SAINTS. | 88 |
| THE SPRINGS OF FONTANA | 91 |
| SERENADE | 91 |
| THE FROZEN RIVER. | 94 |
| NEURASTHENIA . | 95 |
| LYRICS. | PAGE |
| SONG | 96 |
| NIGHT | 97 |
| SONG | 98 |
| SONNET | 99 |
| THE DEPARTURE | 100 |
| GOING SOUTH | 101 |
| LOVE IN THE WORLD | 102 |
| THREE SONGS | 103 |
| THE DEAD FRIEND | 104 |
| AN ORCHARD AT AVIGNON | 106 |
| TWILIGHT | 107 |
| RETROSPECT | 109 |
| FOREIGN SPRING | 111 |
| THE SIBYL | 112 |
| EPTHATHA | 113 |
| SERENA | 114 |
| A FRENCH LILY | 117 |
| SPRING | 118 |
| MAIDENS | 119 |
| ADAM AND EVE | 120 |
| WRITING HISTORY | 121 |
| SOLDIERS PASSING | 122 |
| THE BOOKWORM | 123 |
| MELANCHOLIA | I24 |
| SONG | 125 |
| Old songs | 126 |
| to my muse | 127 |
| michaelmas | 128 |
| Songs of the Inner Life. | |
| foreword | 131 |
| the two lions | 132 |
| religions | 133 |
| the lost sheep | 134 |
| Songs of the Inner Life. | PAGE |
| "THE gate of tears | 135 |
| teste SIBYLLA . | 136 |
| "SEEK, AND YE SHALL FIND" | 137 |
| "BEAUTY | 138 |
| "RHYTHM | 140 |
| THE VALLEY | 141 |
| DARWINISM | 144 |
| THE STARS . | 145 |
| ETRUSCAN TOMBS | 147 |
| FIRE-FLIES . | 150 |
| THE IDEA . | 153 |
| THE WALL . | 154 |
| JUSTICE | 154 |
| GOD IN A HEART | 155 |
| UNDER THE TREES | 156 |
| THE IDEAL . | 158 |
| A CLASSIC LANDSCAPE | 160 |
| VERSAILLES | 161 |
| THE ONE CERTAINTY | 162 |
| PERSONALITY | 163 |
| TUBEROSES . | 165 |
| THE BARRIER | 167 |
| THE ROAD LEADING NOWHERE | 168 |
| SPRING AND AUTUMN | 169 |
| FAIR GHOSTS | 170 |
| SOUVENIR | 171 |
| THE VISION | 172 |
| THE PRESENT AGE | 173 |
| LIBERTY | 174 |
| VERITATEM DILEXI | 175 |
| TAKING POSSESSION | 176 |
| VISIITASPA | 177 |
| ZENO | 179 |
| SACRIFICE | 180 |
| Songs of the Inner Life. | PAGE |
| a jonquil in the pisan campo santo | l8l |
| unum est necessarium | 182 |
| calais beacon | 185 |
| the gospel according to st. peter | i87 |
| a controversy | 188 |
| antiphon to the holy spirit | 189 |
| Poems and Idylls. | |
| THE widow | 193 |
| HELEN IN THE WOOD | 195 |
| loss | 197 |
| THE children's ANGEL | 201 |
| SIR ELDRIC | 203 |
| THE GARDENER OF SINOPE | 205 |
| jutzi SCHULTHEISS | 212 |
| CONSTANCE AND MARTUCCIO | 218 |
| PHILUMENE TO ARISTIDES | 225 |
| THE WIDOWER OF HAIDERABAD | 228 |
| THE DEER AND THE PROPHET | 230 |
| THE SLUMBER OF KING SOLOMON | 234 |
| The New Arcadia. | |
| THE hand-bell RINGERS | 237 |
| THE old couple | 240 |
| the scape-goat | 243 |
| church-going tim | 245 |
| the wise woman | 248 |
| the rothers | 252 |
| men and monkeys | 260 |
| Romantic Ballads. | |
| the tower of st. maur | 265 |
| the duke of gueldres' wedding | 272 |
| rosamunda | 277 |
| Romantic Ballads. | PAGE |
| captain gold and french janet | 279 |
| a ballad of orleans | 281 |
| the death of the count of armanac | 283 |
| captain ortis' booty | 286 |
| sir hugh and the swans | 289 |
| the mower | 292 |
| rudel and the lady of tripoli | 294 |
| the dead mother | 300 |
| the death of prester john. | 303 |