Part 3

To Louise Guiney, there were two transcending realities: poetry and what men call, with varying accent, religion. She believed in poetry as, in the old sense, an ecstasy. She loved archaic phrases and grieved because fit words should perish, mourning them as men would mourn if, believing there were children of immortal lineage among them, they discovered these could die. To her there were archetypes of beauty, the living heavenly substance we have, with an unshaken prescience, learned to call undying. Wandering evanescences, we persuade them down to us or snatch at them and cage them in our heavier atmosphere with the hope, sometimes bewilderingly justified, of their singing on and on. One condition of our even hearing the beat of those wings bending their swallow flight to the responsive mind, is the high vibration in ourselves, the intense activity of what we call imagination. And this vibration is so often the effervescence of youth, the overplus of a richness of physical life—the speed of the blood, a quick sensibility of the brain—that after the pulse slows and the brain responds less eagerly the poet sings no more; or he clouds his verse with moralities and loads it with the stiff embroidery of intellectual conceits. Louise Guiney’s singing life was not long, because, after the impulse, in its first capricious spontaneity, had left her, she did not urge it back again. It would have been impossible for her, at any period, to select desirable subjects for poetry as the landscape painter marks a lovely spot in his mind’s eye, to return with tubes and brush. Once she did own to the tempting exercise of composing a poem in cold blood. It turned out to be compact of beauties appealing to the public mind, and she viewed it thenceforth from a hurt and wistful wonder. You might say she cherished a distaste for it, as being a child of indirect lineage, a mood disloyal to the greater gods. She was ever the acolyte in that temple, never beseeching at the altar, but serving it. For she was of those pilgrims of destiny who are perpetually referring this world to the pattern of worlds existing before time began. To her, poetry is an unspoken allegiance to the very essence of mysticism, magic, glamourie. It is the echo from far hills of space. It is never without the witchery of the unknown, the guessed-at, the adored but never seen. Not all its dances are woven under the sky we scan chiefly for the weather, but in the elusive gleaming where not we but our dreams are denizens. It is perpetually looking from “magic casements.” It brings the twilight feeling. It may not be melancholy, yet it inspires melancholy. It may not be joyous, yet the pleasure it awakens is more exquisite than it has words to celebrate. These are matters far from the market where we buy and sell and measure our worth by cleverness in exploiting it. These are courts where our poet’s “shy foot” dared penetrate with the confidence of a daughter of the house.

From Songs at the Start to Happy Ending (1909) this last bearing her stamp as comprising “the less faulty half of all the author’s published verse,” her work hardly varies in a certain cool, limpid, sometimes austere content. Songs at the Start is distinctly unlike the familiar books of perfervid and unbridled youth. Almost childlike, in some instances, the songs are always restrained within due measure. The gusts of a too tempestuous heart, the revolt of youth against a world ready made for it, are not hers. She might be the child of a pagan ardency of simple joy, singing to the echo in some waking spring. These are the dewy recognitions of a world “not realized.” The faults she showed in this first printing are the ones that plagued her throughout, though she recognized them with a rueful self-dispraise and mock extravagance of remorse. They are the infrequent lapses of a not invariably musical ear. To the end, she would, from stanza to stanza, unconsciously change her cadence. It might be a fault for her to redress; but who among her lovers would complain of it now? It was an individual flaw, the little human imperfection like a mole on beauty’s cheek; the too studied reverse of it might have been something not only “icily regular” but “splendidly null.”

The White Sail, part legend and part lyric, with an academic ballast of sonnets, sang out in fuller tone, though with no less individual a measure. The legends ring curiously scholastic in these days when the industrious versifier celebrates the small beer of his own “home town” in untrained eccentricities all too faithful to his villageous mood. Her legends were the tall pines of the fairy grove she wandered in. There were pillared aisles and porticos, not New England dooryards, tapestries shaken by winds of the past, not leaves, red and gold, blown her from the swamps and hills she knew. Yet her bookish fetters were straining from within, and in Daybreak she sings out with a more individual note, a faint far music, as if some young chorister dared part the antiphonal ranks of ordered service and try the song he heard that morning when he and the lark together saluted the hills of dawn.

“The young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts follow from the sea. Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend a thankful knee: Those glad Auroral eyes shall beam not anywhere henceforth on me.

“Up with the banners on the height, set every matin bell astir! The tree-top choirs carouse in light; the dew’s on phlox and lavender: Ah, mockery! for, worlds away, the heart of morning beats with her.”

This she did not reclaim for the authorized last printing, and none can say whether she would let us snatch it out of its young obscurity. But it is so unmistakably one of the first trial flights of the pure lyric in her, it sings so melodiously, that the mere chronology of her work demands it. In the same book beats the haunting refrain:

“Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away.”

And as you are about to close the door on this virginal chamber of April airs and cloistral moonlight, of ordered books breathing not leather only but the scent of “daffodilean days,” your heart rises up, for here is The Wild Ride, a poem which first beat out its galloping measure in a dream, and continued, with the consent of her own critical mind, to the last book of all. The beginning and the end are like nothing so much as the call of youth and the answer of undaunted age. It was, one may guess, her earliest lyric runaway, the first time she lost herself in the galloping rush of a stanza’s trampling feet.

“I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.

“Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion, With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

“The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses; There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us: What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding.

“Thought’s self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb, And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam: Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing.

“A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle, A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty: We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.

“(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.)

“We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind; We leap to the infinite dark, like sparks from the anvil. Thou leadest, O God! All’s well with Thy troopers that follow.”

In The Roadside Harp (1893) (and this she calls, as late as 1911, “my best book”) she is in full swing of that individual color and form of verse that were hers thenceforth, hall-marked, inimitable, of a delicate yet imperishable fragility of loveliness, unique as the hand they were written in. Here sounds her own true note. Here were more plainly distinguishable the defined colors of the braided strands of destiny that made her so rare a nature and were perhaps—it is well to put it softly, this question—to hinder her in robustness and variety of performance. Irish by birth, she had not to the full, what she finds in Mangan, that “racial luxuriance and fluency.” And, like him, her “genius is happier on Saxon than on Celtic ground.” She was too subject to varied impulses to be the exponent of one. Her love in letters ran passionately to the Anglo-Saxon; the seventeenth century was her home. She was devoutly Catholic, yet living fibres in her knew the earth as it was in its unsymbolized freshness before the Great Deliverer came.

“You are a natural Christian,” she wrote once to a friend poor in the consolations of belief, “with a birthright of gladness and peace, whether you seize it or not; whereas I am the other fellow, a bed-rock pagan, never able to live up to the inestimable spiritual conditions to which I was born.”

This was humility only, no wavering from her transcending faith. Yet the wholesome natural man in her was acutely sensitive to that earth which saw the immortal gods. You find her listening, responsive, to the far heard echoes of Greek harmony. She was ready with her cock to Æsculapius, the tribute of her gentle allegiance to those kingly pagans who loved the light of the sun and shrank from the “dishonor of the grave,” who knew the face of Nemesis and were, above all, disciples of the law of Aidôs, the negation of excess. In the rich exposition of Gilbert Murray:

“Aidôs implies that, from some subtle emotion inside you, some ruth or shame or reflection, some feeling perhaps of the comparative smallness of your own rights and wrongs in the presence of the great things of the world, the gods and men’s souls and the portals of life and death, from this emotion and from no other cause, amid your ordinary animal career of desire or anger or ambition, you do, every now and then, at certain places, stop.”

Now this, of course, concerns emotion, conduct. But the same sense of just limit concerns also art. Your emotion must be “recollected in tranquillity” lest it drag the hysteric Muse into frenzied measures. We must—stop. Louise Guiney knew this through a flawless intuition, but she went pace by pace with the Greeks while they counselled her anew. It is not merely her choice of Attic subjects, like Simoisius, or the Alexandriana that are, we are told, so faithful in spirit, though she had no Greek. It is that in this book we are renewedly conscious of the oneness of mortal longing and earth loveliness, so tightly are they entwined. Here is a sentience to the throes of that earth which is not solely the earth set to man’s uses, but mysteriously made and mysteriously continued, with its uncomprehended language of light and dark and its ebb and flux eternally in sway. Christian in belief, she was pagan in her listening nerves. And her harp, hung in the window opening on what we call eternity, thrilled to many breezes. Being Christian, she was, as in her life, all devotion, all pure obedience, rapt celebrant of the story of the Birth and the Cross, a vowed Eremite to the belief that counts all things loss, save One. Hands of diverse angels reached out of the sky and touched her harp to song or Litany. There was the spirit of an assured immortality. There was, too, the voice of Erda, the Earth, crooning from the root caverns in abysses of time past. The pagan heart of her, the heart that was still immovably centred in the gentle certainties of Christ, is embedded in The Still of the Year. She knows the earth, because she has entered into the very spirit of created things and her mortal part suffers the pang of awakening which, to the earth, is spring. But what is it to the soul?

“Up from the willow-root Subduing agonies leap; The field-mouse and the purple moth Turn over amid their sleep; The icicled rocks aloft Burn saffron and blue alway, And trickling and tinkling The snows of the drift decay. Oh, mine is the head must hang And share the immortal pang! Winter or spring is fair; Thaw’s hard to bear. Heigho! my heart’s sick.”

Some of the verse from this middle period is so fragile and austerely tremulous, like bare boughs moved by a not unkindly wind, that you are aware of what has, in another sense, been called “scantness.” Not only does she adventure delicately in her shallop, she is fain of archaic brevity and pauses that do unquestionably halt the accompanying voyager, to his discomfiture. A Ballad of Kenelm was such as they chanted “on a May morning” in other days than ours. It has the consonance of prose trembling into verse. We are too luxurious for it. We want to be borne along on a lilting wave, we who have not found it possible to accommodate ourselves to the peg-leg-to-market of free verse (what our poet herself once called, in a mischievous snap-shot of judgment, “the rag-tag of _vers libres_”). Even the loving apostrophe to Izaak Walton is more chant than song, justified rather by the spirit than the form. One who knew her unceasing pains with verse and prose, how a stanza could never count itself finished beyond possibility of being smashed into unrecognizable fragments and remade, remembers this as an instance of her ruthlessness to her children even after they had grown up and gone their ways into the ultimate stronghold of the printed page. Here the opening lines run:

“What trout shall coax the rod of yore In Itchen stream to dip?”

Months after printing, the incorrigible dissonance of the two opening words struck her and, having no smallest modicum of professional vanity, she must needs admit a friend immediate to her to the excellent fooling of the discovery, and went about shouting, between gusts of mirth: “What trout! what trout!”

The harsher the discord she could lend the unfortunate twain, the more gustily she laughed, and in Happy Ending the choppy sea subsided into unimpeachable cadence:

“Can trout allure the rod of yore In Itchen stream to dip?”

But in The Roadside Harp, though her metres were sometimes inhospitable to the ear unprepared, she did attain the topmost reaches of the hills of words’ delight. The Two Irish Peasant Songs ran with a light step, and a breath as sweet as the whispers over Ireland’s harp. Here also is an imperishable beauty of a lyric, fit for some ecstatic anthology, so rare in form and color that the listening ear scarce cares for the meaning, so its music may go on and on.

“When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken, And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar, Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken, On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star,

“I think of thee, (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!) Whose great and noonday splendors the many share and see, While sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.”

What is the piper piping when the thin sweet sound comes down the valley like water dripping from stair to rocky stair, or “petals from blown roses on the grass”? You do not need to guess. You know it is in absolute accord with the night breeze and the long shadows and the hylas fluting in the year. It is music only, and all your heart answers is:

“Piper, pipe that song again.”

Here, too, is that poignant lament, To a Dog’s Memory.

“The gusty morns are here, When all the reeds ride low with level spear; And on such nights as lured us far of yore, Down rocky alleys yet, and through the pine, The Hound-star and the pagan Hunter shine; But I and thou, ah, field-fellow of mine, Together roam no more.”

All Matthew Arnold’s musical place names in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gypsy: the “Ilsley Downs”, “the track by Childsworth Farm”, “the Cumner range”, “the stripling Thames at Bablock Hythe”—these are emulated in a not inferior accent in the sombre music of this threnody. Almost, remembering the flowers in Lycidas, you long to strew them on her darling’s grave.

“There is a music fills The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills Southward to Dewing’s little bubbly stream,—— The heavenly weather’s call! Oh, who alive Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive, Having free feet that never felt a gyve Weigh, even in a dream?”

For those who knew her this poem carries a footnote of poignant history. She was in London when letters came from home, and were opened in a quaint restaurant, the Apple Tree Inn, a vegetarian resort where three merry souls were met to be glad over lentils and strange innocences of diet cunningly spiced to resemble the ensanguined viands repudiated and abhorred. She opened her letter and read, and her young—always young and childlike—face trembled into an unbelieving grief. She could not speak. The day was dead for her and those for whom she would have made the constant spark in it and afterward the memory. On the heels of the ill tidings she went with one friend to whom she could not tell the news, but whom she asked not to leave her, to Hampstead Heath, and the two sat all the afternoon in silence on a secluded slope, their feet in English green and her eyes unseeingly on the sky. Her dog was dead.

There are those for whom the conduct of life, either a passion or a malaise, according to individual temperament, transcends even the magic of pure fancy. For them there are trumpet calls in this book, perhaps the most widely known and praised, The Kings, its last stanza the battle-cry of the faint yet brave:

“To fear not possible failure, Nor covet the game at all, But fighting, fighting, fighting, Die, driven against the wall.”

This is metal for sounding clarions. And so too is The Knight Errant: the second stanza an epitome of grand quotable abstractions:

“Let claws of lightning clutch me From summer’s groaning cloud, Or ever malice touch me, And glory make me proud. Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword, Choice of the heart’s desire: A short life in the saddle, Lord! Not long life by the fire.”

You find admonishing whispers from a mind grown expert in counsel:

“Take Temperance to thy breast, While yet is the hour of choosing, As arbitress exquisite Of all that shall thee betide; For better than fortune’s best Is mastery in the using, And sweeter than anything sweet The art to lay it aside.”

Here is the reflective, the scholastic, penetrating the hall of song and hushing more abounding measures to its own consecrating uses. She was in love, not with death as it was the poetic fashion to be in a past era of creative minds, but with gentle withdrawals, fine appreciations of ultimate values, cloistral consecrations. Her steady hand on the reins of her horses of the sun, they took the heavenly track of world-old orbits, not galloping at will, now high, now low, from sunrise to the evening star. And this not because she feared, like Icarus, to fall, but that she was perpetually referring beauty to its archetype; she had, to paraphrase her own words, “eternity in mind.”

“Waiting on Him who knows us and our need, Most need have we to dare not, nor desire, But as He giveth, softly to suspire Against his gift with no inglorious greed, For this is joy, though still our joys recede.”

If she had been more rather than less in love with life, not as a trinket she could relinquish with no ado, but a mysterious ardor it was anguish to dream of losing, if she could have besought her Lord, in moments of a child’s resistless longing, to give even the gifts that are not solely to His glory, her song might have a fuller sweep, a wilder melody. Out of earthly hungers the music of earth is made. As she grew in spiritual aspiration, her verse attuned itself more and more to the echoes of a harmony heavenly if austere. Some of these devout lyrics are so individual her very personality flashes out before you, and you hear her own lips chanting her own song. She is the figure in the stained glass window, saint or warrior, dimming the outer light to woo the eye to the ecclesiastical richness of the surrounding red and gold. Or she is a young knight riding at twilight to service in the chantry you have never sought, and you look up from your table spread with meat and wines and watch him in bewilderment of spirit; and the figures on the arras tremble, as it might be from the wind of his passing. And having once seen the erect slender body riding to his passion of prayer, you turn to the moving figures of the arras with new eyes, wondering if, begot of earthly looms, they are as beautiful as you had thought. Here is no passion but the unfed passion of the soul, the life sustained not through plethora but lack, the everlasting verity of renunciation which is the pale reflex of the face of Christ. Her later work, the greater part of it, is again like the trembling of bare exquisite branches against a sunset sky, the sky of a gold and green limpidity a world away from roseate dawns. She was like a spirit withdrawn from a turmoil she would neither recognize nor enter, sitting in her tower above the world, spinning flowers out of frost.

The Martyr’s Idyl (1899) she wrote with a fervor of devotional conviction, and in the same volume, a fringe upon the hem of its brocaded stateliness, is An Outdoor Litany, a cry full of earth’s blood and tears, and more immediate to earth’s children who also suffer than the high counsels of the abstinent:

“The spur is red upon the briar, The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore; The wind shakes out the colored fire From lamps a-row on the sycamore; The bluebird, with his flitting note, Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat; The mink is busy; herds again Go hillward in the honeyed rain; The midges meet. I cry to Thee Whose heart Remembers each of these: Thou art My God who hast forgotten me!”

Here are beauties dear to the mortal mind to which an anguish of discontent is comprehensible because “it is common.” Here is the sum and circle of nature, tagged with the everlasting paradox: the mindlessness and indifference of the beauty wherewith we are surrounded and our hunger to which it will not, because it cannot, minister. This is great writing: for here the soul walks unabashed, articulate, impassioned, the finite crying to the infinite, the perishing atom appealing to the sky of the universal over him. Perhaps there can be nothing greater in a dramatic sense, in our prison-house under the encircling sky, than the accusatory or challenging voice of the creature, through the unanswering framework of his mortal destiny, to the God Who created both him and it. Lear, in the storm that was unmindful of him, set his breath against its blast. When the cry breaks into hysteria, then the man is mad. The merciful reaction that lies in nature’s anodynes sets in to counteract and dull. But our poet, though she can write:

“Help me endure the Pit, until Thou wilt not have forgotten me,”

never challenges her God with mad interrogation. It is not His justice she assails; she but beseeches the quickening of His will to save. There is an immeasurable distance between entire overthrow and the sanity of the creature who, though sorely wounded, has lost no jot of faith in divine medicaments. Her plea is only that she may share the wholesome life of His birds and trees.

“As to a weed, to me but give Thy sap!”