Poetry month:

Alice Meynell

The Poet to the Birds

You bid me hold my peace,

Or so I think, you birds; you’ll not forgive

My kill-joy song that makes the wild song cease,

Silent or fugitive.

Yon thrush stopt in mid-phrase

At my mere footfall; and a longer note

Took wing and fled afield, and went its ways

Within the blackbird’s throat.

Hereditary song,

Illyrian lark and Paduan nightingale,

Is yours, unchangeable the ages long;

Assyria heard your tale;

Therefore you do not die.

But single, local, lonely, mortal, new,

Unlike, and thus like all my race, am I,

Preluding my adieu.

My human song must be

My human thought. Be patient till ’tis done.

I shall not hold my little peace; for me

There is no peace but one.

Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

Despite lifelong bouts of migraine and other illnesses, Alice Thompson Meynell enjoyed a successful and high-profile career as magazine editor, essayist, and poet. She and her husband, publisher and editor Wilfrid Meynell, were both Catholic and progressive; she in particular was an outspoken suffragist and critic of imperialist policies. Meynell's austere intellect and equally austere beauty dazzled two generations of London's literary men: she counted Tennyson, George Meredith, Francis Thompson, and Walter de la Mare among her admirers. She had an easy, enviable command of the formal style, and was one of the finest late practitioners of verse prior to the triumph of Modernism. This lyric, one of her late compositions, demonstrates her quietly innovative approach; the last two stanzas, as apt a summary of the poet's predicament as ever stated in English, linger and resonate in the mind.

Meynell at about 30 in an engraving by Tristram Ellis after an original watercolor by Adrian Scott Stokes. This would have been an unusual excursion for both artists: Stokes was known for domestic landscapes, and Ellis for paintings of his travels in the Middle East.