The Poems of Alice Meynell

								


        Who locks thee to her breast.

  MESSINA, 1908


Lord, Thou hast crushed Thy tender ones, o'erthrown

    Thy strong, Thy fair; Thy man thou hast unmanned,
Thy elaborate works unwrought, Thy deeds undone,

    Thy lovely sentiment human plan unplanned;
Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own

    Immediate, unintelligible hand.


Lord, thou hast hastened to retrieve, to heal,

    To feed, to bind, to clothe, to quench the brand,
To prop the ruin, to bless, and to anneal;

    Hast sped Thy ships by sea, Thy trains by land,
Shed pity and tears:--our shattered fingers feel

    Thy mediate and intelligible hand.

  THE UNKNOWN GOD


One of the crowd went up,
And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,
Received the Lord, returned in peace, and prayed
Close to my side.  Then in my heart I said:


"O Christ, in this man's life!--
This stranger who is Thine--in all his strife,
All his felicity, his good and ill,
In the assaulted stronghold of his will,


"I do confess Thee here,
Alive within this life; I know Thee near
Within this lonely conscience, closed away
Within this brother's solitary day.


"Christ in his unknown heart,
His intellect unknown--this love, this art,
This battle and this peace, this destiny
That I shall never know, look upon me!


"Christ in his numbered breath,
Christ in his beating heart and in his death,
Christ in his mystery!  From that secret place
And from that separate dwelling, give me grace!"

  A GENERAL COMMUNION


I saw the throng, so deeply separate,

    Fed at one only board--
The devout people, moved, intent, elate,

    And the devoted Lord.


O struck apart! not side from human side,

    But soul from human soul,
As each asunder absorbed the multiplied,

    The ever unparted, whole.


I saw this people as a field of flowers,

    Each grown at such a price
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.

  THE FUGITIVE


"Nous avons chassé ce Jésus Christ."--FRENCH PUBLICIST.

  Yes, from the ingrate heart, the street
Of garrulous tongue, the warm retreat

    Within the village and the town;

    Not from the lands where ripen brown
A thousand thousand hills of wheat;


Not from the long Burgundian line,
The Southward, sunward range of vine.

    Hunted, He never will escape

    The flesh, the blood, the sheaf, the grape,
That feed His man--the bread, the wine.

  IN PORTUGAL, 1912


And will they cast the altars down,

    Scatter the chalice, crush the bread?
In field, in village, and in town

    He hides an unregarded head;


Waits in the corn-lands far and near,

    Bright in His sun, dark in His frost,
Sweet in the vine, ripe in the ear--