The Poems of Alice Meynell

								

A Wind of Clear Weather in England
In Sleep
The Divine Privilege
Free Will
The Two Questions
The Lord's Prayer

  LAST POEMS


The Poet and His Book
Intimations of Mortality
The Wind is Blind
Time's Reversals
The Threshing Machine
Winter Trees on the Horizon
To Sleep
The Marriage of True Minds
In Honour of America, 1917
Lord, I owe Thee a Death
Reflexions
To Conscripts
The Voice of a Bird
The Question
The Laws of Verse
"The Return to Nature"
To Silence
The English Metres
"Rivers Unknown to Song"
To the Mother of Christ the Son of Man
A Comparison
Surmise
To Antiquity
Christmas Night
The October Redbreast
To "a Certain Rich Man"
"Everlasting Farewells"
The Poet to the Birds

  At Night (to W. M.)

  Early Poems

  IN EARLY SPRING


O Spring, I know thee!  Seek for sweet surprise

        In the young children's eyes.
But I have learnt the years, and know the yet

        Leaf-folded violet.
Mine ear, awake to silence, can foretell

        The cuckoo's fitful bell.
I wander in a grey time that encloses

        June and the wild hedge-roses.
A year's procession of the flowers doth pass

        My feet, along the grass.
And all you wild birds silent yet, I know

        The notes that stir you so,
Your songs yet half devised in the dim dear

        Beginnings of the year.
In these young days you meditate your part;

        I have it all by heart.


I know the secrets of the seeds of flowers

        Hidden and warm with showers,
And how, in kindling Spring, the cuckoo shall

        Alter his interval.
But not a flower or song I ponder is

        My own, but memory's.
I shall be silent in those days desired

        Before world inspired.
O all brown birds, compose your old song-phrases,

        Earth, thy familiar daisies!


A poet mused upon the dusky height,

        Between two stars towards night,
His purpose in his heart.  I watched, a space,

        The meaning of his face:
There was the secret, fled from earth and skies,

        Hid in his grey young eyes.
My heart and all the Summer wait his choice,

        And wonder for his voice.
Who shall foretell his songs, and who aspire

        But to divine his lyre?
Sweet earth, we know thy dimmest mysteries,

        But he is lord of his.

  TO THE BELOVED


Oh, not more subtly silence strays

    Amongst the winds, between the voices,
Mingling alike with pensive lays,

    And with the music that rejoices,
Than thou art present in my days.


My silence, life returns to thee

    In all the pauses of her breath.
Hush back to rest the melody

    That out of thee awakeneth;
And thou, wake ever, wake for me!


Thou art like silence all unvexed,

    Though wild words part my soul from thee.
Thou art like silence unperplexed,

    A secret and a mystery
Between one footfall and the next.