Louise Imogen Guiney

71 Downloads


								
from this emotion and from no other cause, amid your ordinary animal career of desire or anger or ambition, you do, every now and then, at certain places, stop.” Now this, of course, concerns emotion, conduct. But the same sense of just limit concerns also art. Your emotion must be “recollected in tranquillity” lest it drag the hysteric Muse into frenzied measures. We must—stop. Louise Guiney knew this through a flawless intuition, but she went pace by pace with the Greeks while they counselled her anew. It is not merely her choice of Attic subjects, like Simoisius, or the Alexandriana that are, we are told, so faithful in spirit, though she had no Greek. It is that in this book we are renewedly conscious of the oneness of mortal longing and earth loveliness, so tightly are they entwined. Here is a sentience to the throes of that earth which is not solely the earth set to man’s uses, but mysteriously made and mysteriously continued, with its uncomprehended language of light and dark and its ebb and flux eternally in sway. Christian in belief, she was pagan in her listening nerves. And her harp, hung in the window opening on what we call eternity, thrilled to many breezes. Being Christian, she was, as in her life, all devotion, all pure obedience, rapt celebrant of the story of the Birth and the Cross, a vowed Eremite to the belief that counts all things loss, save One. Hands of diverse angels reached out of the sky and touched her harp to song or Litany. There was the spirit of an assured immortality. There was, too, the voice of Erda, the Earth, crooning from the root caverns in abysses of time past. The pagan heart of her, the heart that was still immovably centred in the gentle certainties of Christ, is embedded in The Still of the Year. She knows the earth, because she has entered into the very spirit of created things and her mortal part suffers the pang of awakening which, to the earth, is spring. But what is it to the soul? “Up from the willow-root Subduing agonies leap; The field-mouse and the purple moth Turn over amid their sleep; The icicled rocks aloft Burn saffron and blue alway, And trickling and tinkling The snows of the drift decay. Oh, mine is the head must hang And share the immortal pang! Winter or spring is fair; Thaw’s hard to bear. Heigho! my heart’s sick.” Some of the verse from this middle period is so fragile and austerely tremulous, like bare boughs moved by a not unkindly wind, that you are aware of what has, in another sense, been called “scantness.” Not only does she adventure delicately in her shallop, she is fain of archaic brevity and pauses that do unquestionably halt the accompanying voyager, to his discomfiture. A Ballad of Kenelm was such as they chanted “on a May morning” in other days than ours. It has the consonance of prose trembling into verse. We are too luxurious for it.

Alice Brown

Discuss this Louise Imogen Guiney book with the community:

0 Comments

    Translation

    Translate and read this book in other languages:

    Select another language:

    • - Select -
    • 简体中文 (Chinese - Simplified)
    • 繁體中文 (Chinese - Traditional)
    • Español (Spanish)
    • Esperanto (Esperanto)
    • 日本語 (Japanese)
    • Português (Portuguese)
    • Deutsch (German)
    • العربية (Arabic)
    • Français (French)
    • Русский (Russian)
    • ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)
    • 한국어 (Korean)
    • עברית (Hebrew)
    • Gaeilge (Irish)
    • Українська (Ukrainian)
    • اردو (Urdu)
    • Magyar (Hungarian)
    • मानक हिन्दी (Hindi)
    • Indonesia (Indonesian)
    • Italiano (Italian)
    • தமிழ் (Tamil)
    • Türkçe (Turkish)
    • తెలుగు (Telugu)
    • ภาษาไทย (Thai)
    • Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
    • Čeština (Czech)
    • Polski (Polish)
    • Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
    • Românește (Romanian)
    • Nederlands (Dutch)
    • Ελληνικά (Greek)
    • Latinum (Latin)
    • Svenska (Swedish)
    • Dansk (Danish)
    • Suomi (Finnish)
    • فارسی (Persian)
    • ייִדיש (Yiddish)
    • հայերեն (Armenian)
    • Norsk (Norwegian)
    • English (English)

    Citation

    Use the citation below to add this book to your bibliography:

    Style:MLAChicagoAPA

    "Louise Imogen Guiney Books." Literature.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2025. Web. 7 Feb. 2025. <https://www.literature.com/book/louise_imogen_guiney_51541>.

    We need you!

    Help us build the largest authors community and books collection on the web!

    Winter 2025

    Writing Contest

    Join our short stories contest for an opportunity to win cash prizes and attain global acclaim for your talent.
    0
    months
    21
    days
    14
    hours

    Our favorite collection of

    Famous Authors

    »

    Quiz

    Are you a literary expert?

    »
    Who wrote "Jane Eyre"?
    A Charlotte Brontë
    B Elizabeth Gaskell
    C Emily Brontë
    D Anne Brontë