Singers to Come

NEW delights to our desire

The singers of the past can yield.

I lift mine eyes to hill and field,

And see in them your yet dumb lyre,

poets unborn and unrevealed.

Singers to come, what thoughts will start

To song? What words of yours be sent

Through man's soul, and with earth be blent?

These words of nature and the heart

Await you like an instrument.

Who knows what musical flocks of words

Upon these pine-tree tops will light,

And crown these towers in circling flight,

And cross these seas like summer birds,

And give a voice to the day and night?

Something of you already is ours;

Some mystic part of you belongs

To us whose dream of your future throngs,

Who look on hills, and trees, and flowers,

Which will mean so much in your songs.

I wonder, like the maid who found,

And knelt to lift, the lyre supreme

Of Orpheus from the Thracian stream.

She dreams on its sealed past profound;

On a deep future sealed I dream.

She bears it in her wanderings

Within her arms, and has not pressed

Her unskilled fingers but her breast

Upon those silent sacred strings;

I, too, clasp mystic strings at rest.

For I, i' the world of lands and seas,

The sky of wind and rain and fire,

And in man's world of long desire--

In all that is yet dumb in these--

Have found a mysterious lyre.

Alice Meynell

After a Parting

FAREWELL has long been said; I have forgone thee;

I never name thee even.

But how shall I learn virtues and yet shun thee?

For thou art so near Heaven

That Heavenward meditations pause upon thee.

Thou dost beset the path to every shrine;

My trembling thoughts discern

Thy goodness in the good for which I pine;

And, if I turn from but one sin, I turn

Unto a smile of thine.

How shall I thrust thee apart

Since all my growth tends to thee night and day--

To thee faith, hope, and art?

Swift are the currents setting all one way;

They draw my life, my life, out of my heart.

Alice Meynell

The Fold

B E H O L D,

The time is now! Bring back, bring back

Thy flocks of fancies, wild of whim.

O lead them from the mountain-track,

Thy frolic thoughts untold.

O bring them in--the fields grow dim--

And let me be the fold.

Behold,

The time is now! Call in, O call

Thy pasturing kisses gone astray

For scattered sweets; gather them all

To shelter from the cold.

Throng them together, close and gay,

And let me be the fold!

Alice Meynell

The Lady Poverty

THE Lady Poverty was fair:

But she has lost her looks of late,

With change of times and change of air.

Ah slattern! She neglects her hair,

Her gown, her shoes; she keeps no state

As once when her pure feet were bare.

Or--almost worse, if worse can be--

She scolds in parlours, dusts and trims,

Watches and counts. O is this she

Whom Francis met, whose step was free,

Who with Obedience carolled hymns,

In Umbria walked with Chastity?

Where is her ladyhood? Not here,

Not among modern kinds of men;

But in the stony fields, where clear

Through the thin trees the skies appear,

In delicate spare soil and fen,

And slender landscape and austere.

Alice Meynell

Cradle-Song at Twilight

THE child not yet is lulled to rest.

Too young a nurse, the slender Night

So laxly holds him to her breast

That throbs with flight.

He plays with her, and will not sleep.

For other playfellows she sighs;

An unmaternal fondness keep

Her alien eyes.

Alice Meynell

A Dead Harvest

ALONG the graceless grass of town

They rake the rows of red and brown--

Dead leaves, unlike the rows of hay

Delicate, touched with gold and grey,

Raked long ago and far away.

A narrow silence in the park,

Between the lights a narrow dark.

One street rolls on the north; and one,

Muffled, upon the south doth run;

Anid the mist the work is done.

A futile crop!--for it the fire

Smoulders, and, for a stack, a pyre.

So go the town's lives on the breeze,

Even as the sheddings of the trees;

Bosom nor barn is filled with these.

Alice Meynell

Free Will

DEAR are some hidden things

My soul has sealed in silence; past delights;

Hope unconfessed; desires with hampered wings,

Remembered in the nights.

But my best treasures are

Ignoble, undelightful, abject, cold;

Yet O! profounder hoards oracular

No reliquaries hold.

There lie my trespasses,

Abjured but not disowned. I'll not accuse

Determinism, nor, as the Master says,

Charge even 'the poor Deuce'.

Under my hand they lie,

My very own, my proved iniquities;

And though the glory of my life go by

I hold and garner these.

How else, how otherwhere,

How otherwise, shall I discern and grope

For lowliness? How hate, how love, how dare,

How weep, how hope?

Alice Meynell

A Thrush Before Dawn

A VOICE peals in this end of night

A phrase of notes resembling stars,

Single and spiritual notes of light.

What call they at my window-bars?

      The South, the past, the day to be,

      An ancient infelicity.

Darkling, deliberate, what sings

This wonderful one, alone, at peace?

What wilder things than song, what things

Sweeter than youth, clearer than Greece?

      Drearer than Italy, untold

      Delight, and freshness centuries old?

And first first-loves, a multitude,

The exhultation of their pain;

Ancestral childhood long renewed;

And midnights of invisible rain;

      And gardens, gardens, night and day,

      Gardens and childhood all the way.

What Middle Ages passionate,

O passionless voice! What distant bells

Lodged in the hills, what palace state

Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells,

      Without desire, without dismay,

      Some marrow and some yesterday.

All-natural things! But more--Whence came

This yet remoter mystery?

How do these starry notes proclaim

A graver still divinity?

      This hope, this sanctity of fear?

      O innocent throat! O human ear!

Alice Meynell