The Poems of Alice Meynell

								


    To song?  What words of yours be sent

    Through man's soul, and with earth be blent?
These worlds of nature and the heart

    Await you like an instrument.


Who knows what musical flocks of words

    Upon these pine-tree tops will light,

    And crown these towers in circling flight,
And cross these seas like summer birds,

    And give a voice to the day and night?


Something of you already is ours;

    Some mystic part of you belongs

    To us whose dreams your future throngs,
Who look on hills, and trees, and flowers,

    Which will mean so much in your songs.


I wonder, like the maid who found,

    And knelt to lift, the lyre supreme

    Of Orpheus from the Thracian stream.
She dreams on its sealed past profound;

    On a deep future sealed I dream.


She bears it in her wanderings

    Within her arms, and has not pressed

    Her unskilled fingers but her breast
Upon those silent sacred strings;

    I, too, clasp mystic strings at rest.


For I, i' the world of lands and seas,

    The sky of wind and rain and fire,

    And in man's world of long desire--
In all that is yet dumb in these--

    Have found a more mysterious lyre.

  X


UNLINKED


If I should quit thee, sacrifice, forswear,

    To what, my art, shall I give thee in keeping?

    To the long winds of heaven?  Shall these come sweeping
My songs forgone against my face and hair?


Or shall the mountain streams my lost joys bear,

    My past poetic in rain be weeping?

    No, I shall live a poet waking, sleeping,
And I shall die a poet unaware.


From me, my art, thou canst not pass away;

    And I, a singer though I cease to sing,

      Shall own thee without joy in thee or woe.


Through my indifferent words of every day,

    Scattered and all unlinked the rhymes shall ring,

      And make my poem; and I shall not know.

  Later Poems

  THE SHEPHERDESS


She walks--the lady of my delight--

    A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts.  She keeps them white;

    She guards them from the steep;
She feeds them on the fragrant height,

    And folds them in for sleep.


She roams maternal hills and bright,

    Dark valleys safe and deep.
Into that tender breast at night

    The chastest stars may peep.
She walks--the lady of my delight--

    A shepherdess of sheep.


She holds her little thoughts in sight,

    Though gay they run and leap.
She is so circumspect and right;

    She has her soul to keep.
She walks--the lady of my delight--

    A shepherdess of sheep.

  THE TWO POETS



      Whose is the speech
That moves the voices of this lonely beech?
Out of the long west did this wild wind come--
O strong and silent!  And the tree was dumb,

      Ready and dumb, until
The dumb gale struck it on the darkened hill.



        Two memories,
Two powers, two promises, two silences
Closed in this cry, closed in these thousand leaves