It is a morning very bright;
Through all the hours of the long starry night
Mary hath not been sleeping: for delight
She hath kept watch through the starry night.
Joseph comes to her quietly:
“A journey I must take with thee,
Mary, my wife, from Galilee.”
He saw that she had wept,
And all her secret kept.
UNDER THE STAR
Mary is weary and heavy-laden
As a travailing woman may be.
She calleth to Joseph wearily,
“At the inn there is no room for me,
Oh, seek me a little room!”
Joseph returns. “In a cattle-shed
Hard by, I will make for thee thy bed—;
Dost fear to go?
O Mary, look, that star overhead!”
And Mary smiled—;“Where the cattle low
My Son shall be loosed from the womb.”
From the third part, which is called “Sward” and therefore is obviously dedicated to ordinary folk, we need take only the little poem which follows. But we ought to remember the occasion of it, that Michael had been compelled to go alone to Mass because Henry was too ill to accompany her.
Lovingly I turn me down
From this church, St Philip’s crown,
To the leafy street where dwell
The good folk of Arundel.
Lovingly I look between
Roof and roof, to meadows green,
To the cattle by the wall,
To the place where sea-birds call,
Where the sky more closely dips,
And, perchance, there may be ships:
God have pity on us all!
Michael said, in a letter to a friend, “Mystic Trees is for the young”; and one perceives the truth of that. But I do not think that her word ‘young’ means only ‘youthful,’ although children would probably understand the poems readily, and a certain kind of child would delight in them. Nor do I think that they were written with any special audience in mind. But the poet, in reading them afterward, recognized their childlike qualities of simplicity and directness, and their young faith and enthusiasm. Did she realize, one asks oneself, how she had in them recaptured her own youth and its lyrical fervour? She was nearly seventy years old when she wrote them, which is a wonder comparable to Mr Hardy’s spring-songs in winter. And though we may accept, if we like, the dubious dictum of the psycho-analyst that every poet is a case of arrested development, that does not make any less the marvel that in old age, after the lyric fire had subsided and the sufferings of her fellow had destroyed the joy of her life, she should have written such poems. For here it is certainly relevant to remember that at this time Henry was dying, and that Michael herself was suffering, silently, the torture of cancer. “Michael has a secret woe of her own,” was all that she permitted herself to reveal, in a letter to her closest woman friend. But so stoical was her courage, and so composed her manner, that the hint was not taken, and no one guessed that she too was ravaged by the disease. Before her intimates, as before the world, she kept a cheerful face, in terror lest her fellow should come to know of her state. Her doctor knew, of course, and Father Vincent McNabb. But they were under a bond to spare Henry the added anguish of knowing the truth, and the bond was faithfully kept. Not until her fellow was dead, when Michael had, in fact, laid her in her coffin, did she break silence to the friend who was with her in that ordeal. Two days later a hæmorrhage made it impossible to conceal her condition any longer. “God kept her secret,” said Father McNabb, “until the moment when it was no longer necessary”; and without disloyalty to the godhead of the heroic human spirit, we may accept that word from one who brought consolation and devoted friendship to the poets’ last sad days.