As when a star is lit
In the dull, evening sky,
Another soon leaps out to answer it,
Even so the bright reply
Came sudden from his eyes,
By all but me unseen.
Since then the distance that between
Our lives unalterably lies
Is but a darkness, intimate and still,
Which messages may traverse, where replies
May sparkle from afar, until
The night becomes a mystery made clear
Between two souls forbidden to draw near:
Creator, why?
* * *
We meet. I cannot look up; I hear
He hopes that the rainy fog will clear:
My cheeks flush him back a hope it may,
And at last I seek his eyes.
Oh, to greet such skies—;
The delicate, violet, thunder-gray,
Behind a spirit at mortal play!
Who cares that the fog should roll away?
* * *
As two fair vessels side by side,
No bond had tied
Our floating peace;
We thought that it would never cease,
But like swan-creatures we should always glide;
And this is love
We sighed.
As two grim vessels side by side,
Through wind and tide
War grappled us,
With bond as strong as death, and thus
We drove on mortally allied:
And this is hate
We cried.
* * *
Go to the grave,
Die, die—;be dead!
If a Judgment-Angel came and said
That I could save
My heart and brain, if I could but will
For a single moment that you should die,
I would clasp my hands, and wish you ill,
And say good-bye.
Go to the grave,
Die, die—;be dead!
If the Judgment-Angel came and said
That I could save
My body and soul, if I could but will
For as long as an hour that you should die,
My hands would drop, and my eyes would fill,
And the angel fly.
If we were concerned with the art of this verse rather than its tale one would be compelled to consider a touch of rhetoric and a violence of gesture which are characteristic of Michael not at her best; but which do correspond with the turbulent youthful emotion out of which the poems were born. Michael’s authentic love-story, however, is that which centres upon Henry; and the poems to Henry express a master-passion. There was an element of her nature as strong and as constant as its poetic impulse, and that was her affection for her fellow. Indeed, she was greater as a lover than as a poet; for her life was her finest poem, and Henry was its inspiration. It follows that she was never so happy as when she was engaged upon this theme; and that the sequence I have mentioned is a joyful record of the fellowship. Here is a piece which describes the sealing of the bond between the poets in those early days when they had not yet embarked on their great quest:
It was deep April, and the morn
Shakspere was born;
The world was on us, pressing sore;
My love and I took hands and swore,
Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore,
To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore,
To sing to Charon in his boat,
Heartening the timid souls afloat;
Of judgment never to take heed,
But to those fast-locked souls to speed,
Who never from Apollo fled,
Who spent no hour among the dead;
Continually
With them to dwell,
Indifferent to heaven or hell.
Next we may take a portrait of Henry in her girlhood when the two began to collaborate, this giving incidentally a description of what was, on the testimony of intimate friends (and, indeed, of the poets themselves), their method of work:
A girl,
Her soul a deep-wave pearl
Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;
A face flowered for heart’s ease,
A brow’s grace soft as seas
Seen thro’ faint forest-trees:
A mouth, the lips apart,
Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze
From her tempestuous heart.
Such: and our souls so knit,
I leave a page half-writ—;
The work begun
Will be to heaven’s conception done
If she come to it.
Exactly in that way the two would often co-operate, working together actually on one piece. When it was a question of a big work—;of a tragedy or a chronicle-play—;there was, of course, a united exploration of the ground and a mapping of it. The two poets would go together to the British Museum or some other great library for the research. The scheme was then fully discussed, ideas were exchanged, conceptions of character formed and tested, and scenes allotted to suit individual taste or aptitude. But the collaboration was even more intimate than that. They would readily interchange their parts; and frequently they would be engaged together upon a page, a speech, or even a single line. It is therefore no poetic licence which declares that the half-written sheet of one would be completed to perfection by the other, but only further proof of the way in which the diverse elements of these two minds were fused in a union so complete that the reader cannot credit a dual authorship, and the poets themselves could hardly distinguish their individual contributions.
There is among the poems to Henry a dainty mock-pastoral in praise of her beauty which might have been written by an Elizabethan songster to his mistress; and a sonnet called Constancy which speaks with graver passion:
I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower: in all kinds
My love is perfect; and in each she finds
Herself the goal; then why, intent to tease
And rob her delicate spirit of its ease,
Hastes she to range me with inconstant minds?
If she should die, if I were left at large
On earth without her—;I, on earth, the same
Quick mortal with a thousand cries, her spell
She fears would break. And I confront the charge,
As sorrowing and as careless of my fame
As Christ intact before the infidel.