. . . . .
O Victor King, and when
Thou raisest me again,
For me no fame;
Just white amid the whiter souls,
Efface me ’mid the shining stoles,
Lost in a lovely brood,
And multitude:
My soul even as the Maid
Cophetua arrayed
In samite fine;
And set her by Him on His throne,
O Christ, what homage can atone
For this caprice in Thee
To worship me?
QUI RENOVAT JUVENTUTEM MEAM
Make me grow young again,
Grow young enough to die,
That, in a joy unseared of pain,
I may my Lover, loved, attain,
With that fresh sigh
Eternity
Gives to the young to breathe about the heart,
Until their trust in youth-time shall depart.
Let me be young as when
To die was past my thought:
And earth with straight, immortal men,
And women deathless to my ken,
Cast fear to naught!
Let faith be fraught,
My Bridegroom, with such gallant love, its range
Simply surpasses every halt of change!
Let me come to Thee young,
When Thou dost challenge Come!
With all my marvelling dreams unsung,
Their promise by first passion stung,
Though chary, dumb....
Thou callest Come!
Let me rush to Thee when I pass,
Keen as a child across the grass!
Mystic Trees, the last book which Michael gave to the world, is more strictly theological than Henry’s. Always less the philosopher than her fellow, she took her conversion to Catholicism, in externals at least, more strenuously. She developed, for example, a proselytizing habit which a little tried the patience of her friends, especially those who remembered her as a joyful pagan. That her Christian zeal was as joyful, to her, as her paganism had been did not much console them, or soften the onslaught of her blithe attacks. Indeed, it occasionally led her to acts which she herself afterward repented of. Thus there is a comic touch in the spectacle of Michael, truly English as she was, urging upon Ireland, in the person of a poor old Irishwoman, every benefit but that one which the old woman craved for. For Michael went to great pains to help her, and to get her placed in a home, and she subsequently wrote to a friend, “I am so deeply regretting my part in putting an Irishwoman in a Nazareth house: their love of freedom is so great.” The little parable holds Michael’s character almost in entirety—;impulsive, eager, generous, wilful, rash; and then deeply penitent and rushing to make noble amends.
But that over-zeal had a significance for her artistic life too. She wrote in a letter to another friend, “I will pray for Orzie’s conversion: O Louie, be religious! You cannot ‘laugh deep’ unless you are.” In the phrase I have italicized Michael is surely confessing, though it may be without intent to do so, that her religion is now awaking in her the same ecstasy which had formerly been awakened by the poetic impulse. To herself it seemed that she had suffered an enormous change, and that she was no longer the old Michael. And it is true that for a time the tragic inspiration of her art was suspended. Perhaps that follows of necessity from the nature of the Christian doctrine, its hope, its humility, its vicariousness, and its consolation. Yet the moment one turns to these religious lyrics one finds the same ecstasy with which the earlier Michael had adored the beauty of the world and had sung the love of Sappho. So, too, in the first work which Michael Field had produced, Callirrhoë, the theme is none other than the worship of the god by love and sacrifice. That, in fact, is the meaning implied in nearly all her poetry, as it was the motive force of all her life; and the only change that has occurred when we reach, with Mystic Trees, the end, is that the name of the god is altered. But whichever god possessed her had the power to make Michael “laugh deep” in a rapture which, whether of delight or rage or sorrow, was always an intense spiritual joy—;which is simply to say, to evoke the poet in her. The exaltation of spirit which in Callirrhoë said of Dionysos “He came to bring Life, more abundant life,” and declared “Wert thou lute to love, There were a new song of the heaven and earth,” is the same as that which wrote to a friend in early days, “We are with the nun in her cell as with the pagan at the Dionysos’ feast”; and which affirmed in a letter to another friend that she welcomed inspiration from whatever source, “whether the wind and fire sweep down on us from the mighty realms of the unconscious or from the nostrils of a living God, Jehovah, or Apollo, or Dionysos.”
But, as we said, to herself she seemed a new creature; she had found a treasure and must run to share it, even as she had burned to impart the Bacchic fire thirty years before. Thence came the scheme of Mystic Trees, which, as Father Vincent McNabb suggested to me, seems to be unique in religious poetry. The book contains a cycle of poems, designed to express the mysteries of the Roman Catholic faith as they are celebrated in the seasons of the Church. The “Trees” of the title are the Cedar and the Hyssop, used as an image of the Incarnation: the great Cedar, the Son of God, becoming the little Hyssop, which, in the lovely cover-design by Mr Charles Ricketts, stands on either side of the Cross with bowed head.