Meynell / Wong Selected Poems and Essays

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80017-502-0
Verlag: Carcanet Classics
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten

Alice Meynell was a major British author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is the first anthology of her verse and prose to be published for over seventy-five years. Meynell was highly regarded both as a poet and as a writer of essays and was seriously proposed for the laureateship on two occasions. G.K. Chesterton said of her that she 'never wrote a line, or even a word, that does not stand like the rib of a strong intellectual structure; a thing with the bones of thought in it'. The present selection includes the early romantic poems of yearning, full of poignant surprises, and the terser, less personal poems of her maturity. Also included is a broad sample of Meynell's literary essays, in each case a careful work of art. They include reflections on literature, culture and the natural world, nuanced observations on childhood, and moving defences (both specific and general) of women against trespasses on their dignity. This selection is introduced by Alex Wong, who offers a poet's view of Meynell's distinctive artistic achievements and locates her within her literary contexts. It also includes an appreciative preface by the renowned feminist critic and theorist Laura Mulvey, who is the author's great-granddaughter.

Alice Meynell (née Thompson) was born in Barnes, Surrey (now London), in 1847 to a middle-class family of artistic and intellectual inclinations. She and her sister Elizabeth, later Lady Butler, a celebrated historical painter, were brought up in somewhat Bohemian style in various locations, including Liguria and the Isle of Wight. In 1868 Alice converted to Roman Catholicism and at around the same time fell in love with Father Dignam, the priest who received her into the Church. This impossible love informed many of her early poems. Her first volume of verse, Preludes, was published by Henry S. King in 1875 with illustrations by her sister. In the following year she met Wilfrid Meynell, a young journalist and fellow Catholic convert who admired her poems, and they married in 1877. (The name is pronounced to rhyme with 'fennel'.) The Meynells worked both jointly and independently on journalistic work, co-editing and copywriting for several periodicals as well as writing literary and critical essays, signed and unsigned, for others. They became important figures in the London literary world. Approached by the Catholic poet Francis Thompson, a homeless opium-addict seeking publication, they published and promoted his work and supported him financially and morally for the rest of his life. They had eight children, of whom one died in infancy. Several of the Meynell children became involved in literary life. Alice Meynell became established as a prolific and highly respected essayist, especially from the 1890s when her work began to be collected into books. The republication early in that decade of her youthful poems, along with a small number of more recent ones, also raised her reputation, and in later life she returned to more frequent writing in verse. Her books of essays and poems, published at first mainly by John Lane at The Bodley Head and from 1913 by Burns and Oates, were many times reprinted, and she was in high demand as a columnist and reviewer. An outspoken advocate for women's suffrage as well as other political causes, she was President of the Society of Women Journalists and Vice-President of the Women Writers' Suffrage League. On two occasions she was proposed for the role of Poet Laureate. She inspired ardent and devoted friendships, notably in the poet Coventry Patmore (whose passionate love for her necessitated a painful break in their friendship) and in George Meredith during his final years. In 1911 the Meynell family moved to Greatham, Sussex. Alice Meynell died in 1922 at the age of seventy-five.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meynell, Alice

Wong, Alex

Leseproben

Introduction

Alice Meynell (1847–1922) was a major English author of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. The evidence of this is not to be found only in the manifest value of her writing itself, though this ought to be the more important thing. She was admired, celebrated and almost venerated by some of the most serious-minded of her peers, and meanwhile popular enough to attract large and enthusiastic audiences on extended lecture tours in the United States. If Coventry Patmore’s personal devotion to her casts doubt on his impartiality in calling her prose ‘the finest that was ever written’,1 strong praise of both her prose and her verse is easy to find in plenty from other quarters. Her journalistic work, editorial as well as authorial, was energetic, prolific, various and far-reaching, and her essays and criticism maintained the highest literary standards amid the rush, ephemerality and financial imperatives of periodical publishing. She was President of the Society of Women Journalists and Vice-President of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. As a poet, she was a serious contender (not that she herself contended) for the laureateship on two occasions. Passages of even her earliest poetry, which she herself came to deprecate, were called by Ruskin ‘the finest things I’ve seen or felt in modern verse’.2

Meynell is a writer full of surprises, ones that justify themselves by their serious imaginative thoughtfulness: not flights of fancy, though she could respond to these, but imagination dedicated to realities as she saw them. ‘The surprise coming on us’, George Meredith said of her essays, ‘from their combined grace of manner and sanity of thought is like one’s dream of what the recognition of a new truth would be’.3 Within chosen bounds of form and style—bounds she was always ready to acknowledge and emphasise, and which, in her verse especially, belonged to standards already somewhat classical—she found an authentic distinctiveness and an enabling space from which, with acuity, moral courage and wit, she could challenge routine expectations.

In a late poem, ‘The Laws of Verse’, which closes the selection of poems in this anthology, she writes about these bounds that contain, and yet somehow enable, a wildness inside. In poetry, as in other areas of life, that inner wildness could flourish and be turned to good account within the safety of the outer laws, and she submitted to literary laws as well as to the moral doctrine of her religion (she was a Catholic convert) with a conviction that these, in curtailing some freedoms, were conditions of a freedom more worthwhile. The poem invokes the ‘laws’ of verse, of versification, which are to meet around her like embracing arms: she is not only ‘ruled’ by them but also ‘warmed’. Held by these laws, she becomes newly ‘aware’—of her own breath and rhythm, the fundamentals of voice—and can ‘feel her wild heart beat’. I think she believed that an unheld wildness, the wild heart left only to its wildness, could be random, indulgent, destructive, and would lack a creative tension, but that with discipline it could find its creativeness and self-insight. At any rate the wild heart was a human truth to be honoured it its place, and the ‘wild’ was one of the things she sought in poetry. ‘The nearest she could get to defining the poetry she loved best’, Viola Meynell wrote of her mother, ‘was to say that it had the quality of wildness’.4

In the tension between wildness and law, according to the conceit of that late poem, instead of a drifting feather she can be a bird in flight—with the bird’s weight, its will, its orderly wingbeat, and the freedom and propulsion these allow. The bird she chooses in that poem is the skylark, famously free in song as well as in motion.

Out of this constant tension she administered her surprises. Conscience seems to have occupied the place of a muse to her, and often the surprises, paradoxes and second thoughts are those of an active self-examination, while at other times, more generally, the striking phrase or image is licensed and guaranteed by the artistic, moral and intellectual conscientiousness of an unsentimental and painstaking mind. ‘Mrs. Meynell is always to be trusted’, said Vita Sackville-West, who introduced the last anthology of Meynell’s verse and prose—as long ago as 1947.5

(i) Style and Thought

‘November Blue’ begins as a poem lamenting the lack of blue sky in modern London, where metropolitan pollution does away with that ‘heavenly colour’ even in the narrow gaps between buildings where, for the hemmed-in Londoner, the sky is parcelled up into modest slivers. Another poet of the period might have continued in the same vein, ending the poem in dismay, or drawing out a sobering moral or spiritual lesson in the manner of Ruskin. Still another would have made a deliberately ‘decadent’ virtue of the smog, with lurid imagery and an attitude of knowingly morbid or perverse delight in the effects of urban contamination. What Alice Meynell does in the second half of her poem is to tread her own path, offering the reader a sharply focused observation, vividly and imaginatively expressed, and combining the spiritual implication of the one approach (though free from righteous judgement) with the other’s openness to strange modern beauty (though untouched by morbidity). It makes one wish one could see the effect it describes: the blue glow of a damp November evening by gaslight in fin-de-siècle London. This is not the natural blue of the sky but an accident of artificial life. And yet it is blue all the same—the heavenly colour, which ‘comes to earth’ and ‘walks the streets’. For those who will take it, there is a religious suggestion there in addition to the brilliant poetry of description and appreciation, and I think it would be wrong to see one element as merely a vehicle or opportunity for the other. The connection for the poet is not an arbitrary one, a trick of rhetoric, but somehow a real one.

Her habit was a hard one—of resisting habit. ‘November Blue’ offers a good illustration of Meynell’s preference for refreshed thinking and her reluctance to fall in too readily with comfortable grooves of thought.

Similarly characteristic, and likewise declining to come to rest in its first, more predictable thought, is her poem ‘The Threshing-Machine’. Rather late to be quite topical, it is about the replacement of age-old manual threshing—a communal ritual of the harvest, often accompanied by songs in time with its human rhythms—by efficient but unpoetical machines. Behind the theme is all the controversy, unease and political debate of the preceding century over industrialisation and mechanisation, with a recognition of the continuing importance for nature and society of the larger tide of change. ‘No “fan is in his hand” for these / Young villagers beneath the trees, / Watching the wheels’, she begins. The opening reference is to Matthew 3:11-12:

… he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

The poem regrets the loss of the Christian symbolism of the winnowing, the wheat and the chaff: ‘all their symbols evermore / Forgone in England now’. The ‘visible pledge’ of that scriptural metaphor would no longer be visible as a real part of the business of life. For the poet who could make the play of smog and lamplight into a visible pledge or symbol of the Incarnation, this must have been a consideration of some weight, not simply an opportunity for a serviceable poetical thought. Her nostalgic yearning for Italy, which is most likely where she had seen manual winnowers at work in her expatriate childhood, also perhaps makes an element of the general nostalgia here.

But the nostalgia, sincere as it must be, gives way, as in ‘November Blue’, to a surprising new note. She gets there by way of a stanza of arch meditation and deft rhythmic modulation—almost too deft, or too pat, except that this seems to be part of the game (stanza 3). Tonally wrongfooting, these lines nevertheless convey a meaning that is never taken back, although they terminate with a sharp turn: ‘And did our Ruskin speak too soon?’

A resonant voice against the sweep of mechanisation in modern capitalistic enterprises, Ruskin had told audiences of a lecture in 1883: ‘all noble motion is with the limbs God has balanced for you, and all noble strength with the arms He has knit’. Human strength ‘unaided’ by machines was still the only ‘divine strength’, and he called this ‘the strength of Herakles’.6 Meynell’s feelings in front of the threshing-machine send her back to this passage, with which she cannot agree. ‘As the wheels ran’, she...