Second Old Man. The e'th do lie
Yonder, so wide as Heaven a'most,
And God as made un
Made room, I warr'nt, for all Christian souls.
It is, however, through the medium of tragedy that the genius of Mrs Woods has found most powerful expression. Not her charming lyrics, not even the contemplative beauty of her elegiac poems, can stand beside the creative energy of the two plays to which we must come directly. But the best of the lyrics are notable, nevertheless; and two or three have already passed into the common store of great English poetry. Of such is the splendid hymn, "To the Forgotten Dead," with its exulting pride of race chastened by the thought of death.
To the forgotten dead,
Come, let us drink in silence ere we part.
To every fervent yet resolved heart
That brought its tameless passion and its tears,
Renunciation and laborious years,
To lay the deep foundations of our race,
To rear its mighty ramparts overhead
And light its pinnacles with golden grace.
To the unhonoured dead.
To the forgotten dead,
Whose dauntless hands were stretched to grasp the rein
Of Fate and hurl into the void again
Her thunder-hoofed horses, rushing blind
Earthward along the courses of the wind.
Among the stars along the wind in vain
Their souls were scattered and their blood was shed,
And nothing, nothing of them doth remain.
To the thrice-perished dead.
It will be seen that the lyric gift of the poet moves at the prompting of an imaginative passion. It is nearly always so in this poetry. Very seldom does the impulse appear to come from intimate personal emotion or individual experience; and the volume may therefore help to refute the dogma that the poetry of a woman is bound to be subjective, from the laws of her own nature. Occasionally, of course, a direct cry will seem to make itself heard—the most reticent human creature will pay so much toll to its humanity. And it is true that in such a spontaneous utterance the voice will be distinctively feminine—life as the woman knows it will find its interpreter. Thus we see austerity breaking down in the poem "On the Death of an Infant," mournfully sweet with a mother's sorrow. Hence, too, in "Under the Lamp" comes the loathing for "the vile hidden commerce of the city"; and equally there comes a touch of that feminine bias (yielding in these late days perhaps to fuller knowledge and consequent sympathy) which inclines to regard the evil from the point of view of the degradation of the man rather than that of the hideous wrong to the woman. Or again, there is "The Changeling," perhaps the tenderest of the few poems which may perhaps, in some sense, be called subjective. Through the thin veil of allegory one catches a glimpse of the enduring mystery of maternal love. The mother is brooding over the change in her child: she has not been watchful enough, she thinks; and while she was unheeding, some evil thing had entered into her baby and driven out the fair soul with which he began.
Perhaps he called me and I was dumb.
Unconcerned I sat and heard
Little things,
Ivy tendrils, a bird's wings,
A frightened bird—
Or faint hands at the window-pane?
And now he will never come again,
The little soul. He is quite lost.
She tries to woo him back, with prayer and incantations; but he will not come; and when at last she is worn out with waiting, she seeks an old wizard and begs him to give her forgetfulness. But it is a hard thing that she is asking: it needs a mighty spell to make a woman forget her son; and the mother has to go without the boon. She has not wealth enough in the world to pay the Wise Man's fee. But afterwards she is glad that she was too poor to pay the price:
Because if I did not remember him,
My little child—Ah! what should we have,
He and I? Not even a grave
With a name of his own by the river's brim.
Because if among the poppies gay
On the hill-side, now my eyes are dim,
I could not fancy a child at play,
And if I should pass by the pool in the quarry
And never see him, a darling ghost,
Sailing a boat there, I should be sorry—
If in the firelit, lone December
I never heard him come scampering post
Haste down the stair—if the soul that is lost
Came back, and I did not remember.
Such poetry reveals the woman in the poet, and is precious for that reason: it brings its own new light to the book of humanity. But it is not especially characteristic of Mrs Woods' work, for much more often it is the poet in the woman who is revealed there. Powers which are independent of sex—of imagination, of sensibility, and of thought, have gone to the making of that which is finest in her verse; and surely these are gifts which, in varying degree, distinguish the poetic soul under any guise. They are not equally present here, of course. Imagination overtops them, darting with the lightness of a bird, or soaring majestically, or sweeping, strong and rapid, through a storm-cloud, or putting a swift girdle round the earth. Thought is a degree less powerful, perhaps. It is brooding, museful, tinged with a melancholy that may be wistful or passionate; and though it commonly revolves the larger issues of life within the canons of authority, it is keen and clear enough to see beyond them, and even, upon occasion, to pierce a way through. But it is not always sufficiently strong to control completely so fertile an imagination; and there is no acute sense of fact to reinforce it with truth of detail. Instead of watching, recording, analyzing, after the method of so many contemporary poets, this is a mentality which contemplates and reflects. It leans lovingly toward the past, and has a sense, partly instinctive and partly scholarly, of historic values: while, for its artistic method, it passes all the treasure that fancy has gathered, and even passion itself, through the alembic of memory. So is created a softer grace, a serener atmosphere, and a richer dignity than the realist can achieve—and we will not be churlish enough to complain if, at the same time, the salt of reality is missing.