Such are her three unfailing sources of inspiration—the visible pagan Nature of the senses, and the search into Nature which means science, and the search concerning Nature which means thought. All three sources prove her a poet rather intellectual than emotional, but tense, sincere and beautifully lucid. None knew better than she that true imagination is never vague, that true vision is more definite than chairs and tables, that memorable poetry is never blurred.
There is another region of her poetic art. It is one in which her intellect yields; in which she is simple and instructive and entirely Irish. When she writes her ballads and tells stories with a swing, a lilt, a sorrowful march-music of her own, she finds, perhaps, her most native self. The ballad of “Fontenoy,” already almost a classic, the still more haunting “Dirge of the Munster Forest” vibrate with real life, move from within, transmit colour. Children can love them as well as critics. And to these will now be added the poem in this volume of verses which the poet herself liked the best of them: “The Third Trumpet,” the tale of the girl who went at the risk of her life to fetch the proscribed priest to come to her dying mother, and of the old priest who came at still greater peril. To this power of not only telling but of implying a story, we also owe others among these new poems—in the “Eighteenth Century Echoes,” less tragic, but swift in their interest and admirable in their compression, full of the same gifts that made their author a novelist of dramatic force and of virile directness.
Form was not Miss Lawless’s strong point, that is when she sought it. When it found her, it was perfect, as in some of these poems in “From the Burren,” verses of intuition. And certain metres that she loved she could master, like that of Meredith’s “Love in the Valley,” most musically followed in “Wide is the Shannon,” and in “A Bog-filled Valley.”
But in the poems of thought the verse is often but the scabbard for the finely tempered blade of the idea, and, as a rule, she needs the high pressure of a story to mould the rhythm for her. When we come to language, it is a different matter. Her words are always strong, melodious, distinguished, sometimes inspired, and the lines in one of her poems sound the unmistakable note of autobiography.
Who can say
On what poor, spent, and quite unhonoured brain
The pearly treasure of one spacious phrase,
Eight matchless words, worthy our dearest Keats,
May now and then alight, glow for a space,
And vanish, scarcely recognised while there,