The sum of unimaginable powers
Did no more than suffice.
A thousand single central daisies they,
A thousand of the one;
For each, the entire monopoly of day;
For each, the whole of the devoted sun.
Even so typically modern a philosopher as Henri Bergson would find one of his leading and rather baffling ideas beautifully realized in one of Mrs. Meynell’s sonnets. Matter, Bergson tells us, in all its manifestations is moulded by a spiritual push from behind it, so that the sensible world is not a mosaic of atoms obeying fixed laws but rather a cosmic compromise between matter and spirit, a modus vivendi the operation of which would seem very different to us were our viewpoint that of pure spirit. Says Mrs. Meynell in To a Daisy:
Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand, a barrier to eternity.