The Poems of Alice Meynell

								

Articulate.  This sudden hour retrieves

        The purpose of the past,
Separate, apart--embraced, embraced at last.



          "Whose is the word?
Is it I that spake?  Is it thou?  Is it I that heard?"
"Thine earth was solitary, yet I found thee!"
"Thy sky was pathless, but I caught, I bound thee,

          Thou visitant divine."
"O thou my Voice, the word was thine."  "Was thine."

  THE LADY POVERTY


The Lady Poverty was fair:
But she lost her looks of late,
With change of times and change of air.
Ah slattern! she neglects her hair,
Her gown; her shoes; she keeps no state
As once when her pure feet were bare.


Or--almost worse, if worse can be--
She scolds in parlours, dusts and trims,
Watches and counts.  O is this she
Whom Francis met, whose step was free,
Who with Obedience carolled hymns,
In Umbria walked with Chastity?


Where is her ladyhood?  Not here,
Not among modern kinds of men;
But in the stony fields, where clear
Through the thin trees the skies appear,
In delicate spare soil and fen,
And slender landscape and austere.

  NOVEMBER BLUE
The golden tints of the electric lights seems to give a
complementary colour to the air in the early evening.--ESSAY ON
LONDON.

  O heavenly colour, London town

    Has blurred it from her skies;
And, hooded in an earthly brown,

    Unheaven'd the city lies.
No longer, standard-like, this hue

    Above the broad road flies;
Nor does the narrow street the blue

    Wear, slender pennon-wise.


But when the gold and silver lamps

    Colour the London dew,
And, misted by the winter damps,

    The shops shine bright anew--
Blue comes to earth, it walks the street,

    It dyes the wide air through;
A mimic sky about their feet,

    The throng go crowned with blue.

  A DEAD HARVEST


IN KENSINGTON GARDENS.


Along the graceless grass of town
They rake the rows of red and brown,--
Dead leaves, unlike the rows of hay
Delicate, touched with gold and grey,
Raked long ago and far away.


A narrow silence in the park,
Between the lights a narrow dark,
One street rolls on the north; and one,
Muffled, upon the south doth run;
Amid the mist the work is done.


A futile crop!--for it the fire
Smoulders, and, for a stack, a pyre.
So go the town's lives on the breeze,
Even as the sheddings of the trees;
Bosom nor barn is filled with these.

  THE WATERSHED


Lines written between Munich and Verona

  Black mountains pricked with pointed pine

    A melancholy sky.
Out-distanced was the German vine,

    The sterile fields lay high.
From swarthy Alps I travelled forth
Aloft; it was the north, the north;

    Bound for the Noon was I.


I seemed to breast the streams that day;

    I met, opposed, withstood
The northward rivers on their way,

    My heart against the flood--