Slowly we disarray,
Our leaves grow few,
Few on the bough, and many on the sod.
Round him no ruining autumn tempest blew;
Gathered on genial day,
He fills, fresh as Apollo’s bay,
The Hand of God.
It would appear from the preface, however, that there was an additional motive for publishing a third edition in an invitation from the United States to contribute a volume to the “Old World” series, and the poet adds a note of gratitude to her American readers who, as she says, “have given me that joy of listening denied to me in my own island.”
Considering the lyrical work as a whole, it is seen to cover Michael Field’s poetical career from beginning to end. Not that the lyric impulse was constant (for there were times when the poets’ dramatic work absorbed them almost completely); but it never entirely failed. It was, as one would expect, strongest in their early years: it recurred intermittently through the period of the later tragedies, and returned in force when, toward the end of their life, tragic inspiration gave place to religious ardour. Thus, although this poetry is subjective in a less degree than lyrical verse often is, most of the crucial events of the poets’ lives are reflected there. The lover of a story will not be disappointed, and the student of character will find enough for his purpose in personal revelation both conscious and unconscious. Moreover, a spiritual autobiography might, with a little patience, be outlined from these eight volumes; and it would be a significant document, illuminating much more than the lives of two maiden ladies in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Such a spiritual history would be complete, in extent at least, for it would begin with Michael’s earliest work in The New Minnesinger (that title at once suggesting the German influence in English life and letters at the moment, 1875), with its strenuous ethic of Unitarian tendency based on a creed so wide as to have no perceptible boundary; and it would end only with the devotional poetry of her last written volumes where, with no concern for ethics as such, the poet stands at the gate of the well-fenced garden of the Roman Church with a flaming sword in her hand and a face of impassioned tenderness. But in the interval it would pass through her pagan phase, when she revelled in joyful living—;and in the classics, turning their myths into pleasant narrative verse; when in Long Ago (1889) she daringly rehandled the Sapphic themes; and when in Sight and Song (1892) she tried to convey her intense delight in colour and form by translating into poetry some of the old master-pictures that she loved. More important, however, than those books are in such an autobiography is the human record of joys and loves and sorrows contained in the volume called Underneath the Bough (1893); while Wild Honey (1908), a collection covering about ten years of her life, brings us down to the epoch of religious crisis and reconciliation with the Church of Rome. Then, with tragic inspiration quelled by Christian hope and submission, all her creative energy flowed into the Catholic lyrics contained in Poems of Adoration (1912) and Mystic Trees (1913).
One does not pause long on The New Minnesinger in this survey of the lyrics, because it was published by Katharine Bradley as Arran Leigh, and is not, therefore, strictly a work of Michael Field. Nor shall we deal with the lyrics in Bellerophôn, a volume published by the two poets as Arran and Isla Leigh in 1881. Not that either book is unworthy of study; on the contrary, there are some fine pieces in both. But the poets having elected to leave them in limbo, where one has had to grope for this mere reference to them, there, for my part, they shall remain. Except to note in passing that, following Swift’s Advice to a Young Poet to “make use of a quaint motto,” the poet has inscribed on the front of The New Minnesinger the phrase “Think of Womanhood, and thou to be a woman.” That has a significance which is elaborated in the name-piece, whose theme is of love and of the woman-poet’s special aptitude to sing about it; and where it is insisted that the singer shall be faithful to her own feminine nature and experience. All through the work of the two poets it will be seen that the principle stated thus early and definitely by the elder one ruled their artistic practice; so that we are justified in extracting this, at least, from Michael’s earliest book, and noting it as a conscious motive from the beginning.
I think, too, we are entitled to recover from the shades one small song. For, after all, a great literary interest of the work of the Michael Fields is the amazing oneness of the two voices. The collaboration, indeed, deserves much more space than it is possible to give it here. But it is something to the good if we can glance, in passing, at undoubted examples of each poet’s work, hoping to see hints of the individual qualities which each contributed to the fellowship. We have already told how, after Henry’s death and when Michael knew that she too must soon die, she hastened to gather together certain early pieces by her fellow, and published them, with a poignant closing piece of her own, in the book called Dedicated (1914). That closing poem, Fellowship, closed her artistic life: it is Michael’s last word as a poet. But the point for the moment is that she has given us in Dedicated the means of recognizing Henry, and distinguishing between the two poets in their youthful work. One may take from The New Minnesinger, therefore, as characteristic of the younger Michael, such a piece as The Quiet Light:
After the sunset,
Before the night,
There comes a season
Of quiet light.
After the dying,
Before the death,
There comes a drawing
Of quiet breath.
Hush of the daylight,
O whisper why
That childlike breathing
Before we die!
That is a slight thing which does not, of course, represent Michael at anything like her full power; but it does already suggest the emotional basis of her gift, and her lyrical facility. The piece which follows, Jason, is a luckier choice for Henry, not only in that it gives her greater scope, but in that it is probably a maturer work than the other. The comparison would, therefore, be unfair to Michael if one were judging of relative merits; but we are thinking for the moment only of a difference in kind of poetic equipment. And the poem is given for this further fact—;it was chosen by Michael herself to read to Father Vincent McNabb a few days before she died, in exultation at her fellow’s genius: