The inalienable heritage, and other poems

THE INALIENABLE HERITAGE AND OTHER POEMS
BY EMILY LAWLESS, Litt.D. AUTHOR OF “WITH THE WILD GEESE,” ETC.
WITH A PREFACE BY EDITH SICHEL
PRIVATELY PRINTED 1914
Copies of this book are being sold by Truslove and Hanson, Sloane Street, and at 153, Oxford Street, and by Messrs. Bumpus, 350, Oxford Street.
Emily Lawless was, before all else, a poet and a seeker after truth—and in her the two were one. Before all else, also, an Irish poet. There have been few women-poets of creative force in any nation—none in Ireland before her, whose fame has endured. And for Ireland she stands, in verse and in prose. In history, in romance, in “Hurrish” and in “Grania,” in “Essex in Ireland” and “With the Wild Geese,” she is part of Ireland’s past and of its present. She is haunted by the strange bewitching surge of the waves of the Atlantic, of the Western waves “wild with all regret.” For her the rolling brown stretches of bog and of peat-moss, with the blue smoke hanging low over them, and their carpet of faithful little peat-flowers, mean home, the enchanted home we all know, where we have played in childhood and felt the first thrills of youth; the moist silver sky, the solitary, ageless stone crosses, the ruined churches, the hovels, the sad, shining lakes make the country where her spirit dwells. It was to Irish Nature that her memory kept returning in the last years of pain and illness when her body could no longer revisit the shores for which she longed. Pictures of the well-known landscapes were always passing before her vision, clear and consoling to the end. Irish Nature was the Nature she knew best, and it inspired the last songs she gave us so gallantly, on the brink of death.
And Irish Nature was to her the symbol of all Nature, that Nature through which alone she faced mystery and found the Highest. She had in her poetry, as in herself, a twofold relation to Nature. There was the external aspect; the physical tie by which she became part of the earth and its teeming life; which made her in younger years adore movement—the rush through the air on a horse, the cleaving of the waves as she swam; which made her also a passionate naturalist, a moth-hunter who knew under which tree-root the grey moths lived, or where to stop the boat upon the sea and dredge for creatures unknown even to the fishermen, or again, and more intimately, where there grew some humble lichen or rock-bloom, the search for which took days of patient adventure.