“Upon the sea-beach I diffuse my limbs;
My wail athwart the harping sea-plain heaves;
The shards are bitter and the ocean brims
My sorrow from a fount where darkness grieves;
I, Jason, by this vessel of my pride,
Lie, as vain flotsam, ’neath its doughty side.
A wife I had and children—;she is gone
To her own land—;but first she waved my feet
To where my sons, her wrath had fallen upon,
Lay dead together ’neath their cradle sheet.
A bride I had, but ere to bed she came,
Ashes of flame she was, ashes of flame.
And I had comrades in grand years of youth;
They are all slain or care no more for deeds.
A golden aim I followed to its truth;
It is a story now no mortal heeds.
Once I drove oxen of fire-shooting lips,
Once I was ruler of a ship of ships.” ...
The pebbles ground like teeth within a jaw;
A moan of angry timber thundered forth;
And the great poop of Argo rolled its maw,
With a wave’s action, from the south to north;
Earth quaked in fear at glimpse of Jason’s doom,
As slant on him fell Argo as a tomb.
Clearly there are elements here different from those of The Quiet Light. One feels in this poem a dramatic movement and a sense of tragedy which are not simply given in the data of the noble old story; one sees structural skill in the shaping of the narrative, and recognizes in a memorable line or two—;“A golden aim I followed to its truth” and “Ashes of flame she was, ashes of flame”—;the final concentration of thought and feeling where great poetry begins.
Perhaps we are not mistaken, therefore, in distinguishing, even so early as these two poems, the contrasting qualities of the two poets which, met in happy union, made so clear a single voice that Meredith was amazed when he discovered that Michael Field was two people. One may define these qualities as emotional on the one side and intellectual on the other. It is, of course, the old distinction between rhetoric and imagination, matter and form; and clearly shows itself again in the two volumes of devotional poetry at the end of their life, where Henry is seen as kin to Herbert and Michael as kin to Vaughan. And though the whole story of the collaboration cannot be contained within any statement so simple as that, its fundamentals are rooted in this complementary relation between the two minds.
Returning to the lyrics, I choose frankly the pieces which throw some light on the poets’ lives. And although I do this from an unashamed interest in their story, and without immediate reference to the merits of the verse as poetry, there should be a chance that the poetical values of pieces wrought under the stress of intimate feeling will be not lower but higher than those of others. So, indeed, the event proves; for of the lyrics which may be safely attributed to Michael those are the best which can be called her love-poems. Of love-interest, in the attractive common meaning of the term, there is not a great deal in the work of either poet; and in that of Michael it is mainly comprised in half a dozen songs in Underneath the Bough. Sapphic affinities notwithstanding (and imaginary adventures in that region), the two ladies had their measure of Victorian reticence; though that did not decline upon Victorian prudishness. But Michael wrote love-poetry of another kind than the romantic, in a series about her fellow which is probably unique in literature. It will be found in the third book of Underneath the Bough, and is supplemented by pieces scattered through later books, notably a small group at the end of Mystic Trees. Those poems are a record of her devotion to Edith Cooper, and it is doubtful whether Laura or Beatrice or the Dark Lady had a tenderer wooing. They explain, of course, the slightness of a more usual (or, as some would put it, a more normal) love-interest in Michael’s work. But it need not be supposed that there was anything abnormal in this devotion. On the contrary, it was the expression of her mother-instinct, the outflow of the natural feminine impulse to cherish and protect. And this she herself realized perfectly; for there is a passage in one of her letters to Miss Louie Ellis which runs:
I speak as a mother; mothers of some sort we must all become. I have just been watching Henry stripping the garden of all its roses and then piling them in a bowl for me....
But that Michael was ‘normal’ in the mere sense of having had love-affairs there is proof enough without recourse to the vulgarity of spying into every lyric for a record of actual experience. Her dramatic instinct would make that pitfall even more dangerous in her case than in most, so that one would not dare to venture in the direction at all without a warrant. But, armed with the poet’s confession, one may quote from a tiny sequence which has an almost tropical breath. It tells of a passion that blossomed quickly in hot, bright colour, and died with sudden vehemence.
Across a gaudy room
I looked and saw his face,
Beneath the sapless palm-trees, in the gloom
Of the distressing place,
Where everyone sat tired,
Where talk itself grew stale,
Where, as the day began to fail,
No guest had just the power required
To rise and go; I strove with my disgust:
But at the sight of him my eyes were fired
To give one glance, as though they must
Be sociable with what they found of fair
And free and simple in a chamber where
Life was so base.