POEMS
By
THEODORE MAYNARD
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
TORONTO
McCLELLAND AND STEWART, Ltd.
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1917, 1918, by Daniel E. Hudson; Copyright, 1917, 1918, by The Sisters of Mercy; Copyright, 1917, 1919, by The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle in the State of New York.
———
Copyright, 1919, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
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All Rights Reserved
Printed in U. S. A.
TO
MY WIFE
We two have seen with our own eyes
God’s multitudinous disguise;
Waylaid Him in His voyaging
Among the buttercups of Spring;
In valleys where the lilies shone
More glorious than Solomon
We met a poet passing by,
And learned his lyric—you and I!
But oh! did kindly Heaven not bless
Our lives with more than loveliness,
When, cast on every sapling-rod,
Was seen the motley of our God;
When having picked our way with craft
Up cliffs to hear Him when He laughed,
We felt, uplifted on the wind,
His folly blown into our mind?
What doubt can touch us? We have heard
The baby laughter of the Word!
We mingle with solemnity
A Catholic note of revelry
In hypostatic union.
From love’s carved choir-stalls we con
The plain-song of the Breviary
Illumined by hilarity.
For as each cleansing sacrament
To our soul’s comforting was sent
(Through water and oil and wheat and wine,
Bringing to human the divine),
So shall we find on lovers’ lips
The splendour of apocalypse,
And through the body’s five gates come
To all the good of Christendom.
We have no fear that we shall lose
This joyous Gospel of good news,
For our symbolic love has stood
By virtue of its fortitude—
Knowing a bitter Lenten fast,
Satan discomforted at last,
A bowed back scalding with great scars,
Gethsemane of tears and stars,
A journey of the cross, and ah,
Its part and lot in Golgotha!
We know—let the marvellous thing be said!—
Love’s resurrection from the dead ...
For as Magdalen came with cinnamon
And aloes to smear Love’s limbs upon,
But met alone on the Easter grass
Life’s Lord, though she wist not Who He was—
So we, till He spoke as He spoke to her,
Mistook Him for the gardener.
April 14th, 1918.
NOTE
This edition of Theodore Maynard’s poems represents the author’s own selection of such of his published verse as he wishes included in a permanent collection. With few omissions, it represents the contents of the three volumes issued in Great Britain under the titles, “Laughs and Whifts of Song,” 1915; “Drums of Defeat,” 1917; “Folly,” 1918, none of which has hitherto been published in this country.
ON THEODORE MAYNARD’S POEMS
In the case of any poet who has caught and held our recollection, there is generally a particular piece of work which remains in our mind, not as the crown, but as the key. And ever since I saw in The New Witness some lines called “A Song of Colours,” by Theodore Maynard, they have remained to me as a sort of simplification, or permanent element, of the rest of the poet’s writings; and I have felt him especially as a poet of colour. They are not by any means the best of his lines. They are direct, as is appropriate to a ballad; and they have none of the fine whimsicality or the frank humour to be found elsewhere in his work. Among these others the choice is hard: but I should say that the finest poetry as such is to be found in the images, and even in the very title, of “The World’s Miser”: and even more in the poem called “Apocalypse.” In this latter the poet imagines a new world which shall be supernatural in the strongest sense of the word; that of being more vivid and positive than the natural; and not (as it is so often imagined) more tenuous and void.
“Or what empurpled blooms to oust the rose
Or what strange grass to glow like angels’ hair!”
The last line has the touch of the true mystic, which changes a thing and yet leaves it familiar. True artistic pugnacity, a thing that generally goes with true artistic pleasure, is well-expressed in the shrewd lines of the poem printed as a sequel to another poem called “To a Good Atheist.” The sequel is called “To a Bad Atheist,” with the charming explanation: “Who wrote what he called a trinity of meek retorts to the preceding poem, which were not meek, but full of pride and abominable heresy.” He describes the bad atheist’s mind as containing nothing but sawdust, sun and sand; which is accurate and exhaustive. And in so far as poetry appeals to particular temperaments, I myself find enjoyment expecially in the part of the collection properly to be called “Laughs”; in the ballads of feasting and fellowship; and especially in that sublime absolution gravely offered to the Duke of Norfolk.
But the sentiment of colour still ran like a thread through the whole texture; and I think there is hardly a poem that does not repeat it. And this is important; because the whole of Mr. Maynard’s inspiration is part of what is the main business of our time: the resurrection of the Middle Ages. The modern movement, with its Guild Socialism and its military reaction against the fatalism of the Barbarian, is as certainly drawing its life from the lost centuries of Catholic Europe, as the movement more commonly called the Renaissance drew its life from the lost languages and sculptures of antiquity. And, by a quaint inconsistency, Hellenists and Neo-Pagans of the school of Mr. Lowes Dickinson will call us antiquated for gathering the flowers which still grow on the graves of our mediæval ancestors, while they themselves will industriously search for the scattered ashes from the more distant pyres of the Pagans.
And the visible clue to the Middle Ages is colour. The mediæval man could paint before he could draw. In the almost startling inspiration which we call stained glass, he discovered something that is almost more coloured than colour; something that bears the same relation to mere colour that golden flame does to golden sand. He did not, like other artists, try in his pictures to paint the sun; he made the sun paint his pictures. He mixed the aboriginal light with the paints upon his palette. And it is this translucent actuality of colour which I feel in the phraseology of this writer, in a way it is not easy to analyse. We can only say that when he says—
“Among the yellow primroses
He holds His summer palaces”
we have an impression, which it is the object of all poetry to produce. It can only be described by saying that a primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose is to him, and it could not possibly be anything more. And this almost torrid directness and distinctness of tint is again connected with another quality of the poet and his poetic tradition: what many would call asceticism alternating with what many would call buffoonery. The colour conventions of the Middle Ages were copied very beautifully by the school of Rossetti and Swinburne. But they lost the exuberance of the Gothic and became a pattern rather than a plan; chiefly because they were not seriously inspired by any of the enthusiasms of the Middle Ages. Its decorative repetitions sometimes became quite dreary and artificial; as in Swinburne’s unfortunate couplet about the lilies and languors of virtue and the raptures and roses of vice. A little healthy gardening would have taught Swinburne that it takes quite as much virtue to grow a rose as to grow a lily. It might also have taught him that virtue is never languid, whatever else it may be: and that even lilies are not really languid so long as they are alive. If such decadents want an image of what it really is that holds up the heads of lilies or any other growing things, I can refer them to a couplet in this little volume, which is more beautiful and more original and means a great deal more—
“What wilful trees of any spring
Than your young body are more fair?”
These lines contain a principle of life and mark the end of a pagan sterility. They contain the secret, not of gathering rosebuds while we may, but of growing them when we choose.
G. K. Chesterton.