The collected poems, lyrical and narrative, of A. Mary F. Robinson

by Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux

THE COLLECTED POEMS

Lryrical and Narrative

Of

A. Mary F. Robinson

(Madame 'Duclaux)

With a Preface

and Portrait

London: T. Fisher Unwin

Paternoster Square Memii

[All rights reserved.]

To
the memory
of

JAMES DARMESTETER

---

Amort et Dolori

Sacrum

PREFACE

I have always thought that one should write poetry only as one dies; that is to say, at the last extremity and when it is impossible to do otherwise. And yet, after some three-and-twenty years of much refraining, I find myself possessed of a considerable volume of Collected Poems, to say nothing of that larger quantity of verse disseminated in the waste-paper baskets of London, Paris, Italy, Touraine, Auvergne. By no means all my published poems are reprinted here; I have retained such as seemed to me the best. In sending them out to affront the world anew, with some fresh companions, I have carefully re-considered them all, revised the greater part, and re-written a good many. I have hesitated under what name to publish them, and, persuaded that no reader will remember two foreign names, in addition to an English one, I have reverted to that which I bore when first I wrote them. Mary James Darmesteter has no longer a right to exist. As regards the English public, Madame Duclaux has given no proof of her existence; she has, she hopes, before her a modest future of French prose, and leaves her English verses to Mary Robinson.

I send forth this little book with scant expectance of immediate success. Entirely lyrical, intellectual, or romantic, these little poems must sound as the merest tootling of Corydon's reed-pipe in ears accustomed to the martial music of our times. Yet, like all poets, I trust these little songs may find an audience to-morrow: they have that saving virtue of sincerity which is the salt of Art. But if I see the necessary grace that they possess, how clearly, alas! do I perceive the magnificent qualities they lack! Here there is nothing of the rush, the sumptuous abundance, the vigour, the splendour of Byron or Hugo; nothing of that sensuous magic and flooding glory which make certain lines of Keats and Swinburne blaze, as it were, in colour on the page. Still I fancy that Wordsworth, Tennyson, Vigny, and even the immortal Goethe—all the meditative poets—might have cared to read some of these sober little songs.

We cannot all be great poets; but the humblest, it they be sincere, may give a genuine pleasure. I have marked in red the days on which I discovered certain poets, most certainly minor, who died centuries ago. With what delight I made acquaintance with Ausonius and Dr. Donne, still more so with Joachim de Bellay, Marie de France, or Shahid the Bactrian: dear, enchanting books, exhumed from the dustiest corner of the library, that never counted on me for an audience. I may have to wait as long till I repay my debt to some other student who perchance, beside a bookstall of Cape Town or Honolulu, may fish my poems from the fourpenny box, or light on them in some anthology. But I count on his appreciation.

Depend upon it, after the very greatest names in poetry (who are to all of us a second religion) the minor poets have the happiest lot. Each of us worships in the temples of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, MoliJre ; but each of us also has some private niche, some inconsiderable intimate shrine, for the poet no one praises, who is all the more our own. How dreary the state and rank of your second-best great poet, enthroned in dismal glory on the less frequented slopes of Parnassus! Who lights a taper or pulls a posy for Dryden or Schiller or Alfieri? We admire them sincerely; in theory, we love them. How often in the year do we take down their works and read them? Take the case of a writer who, in his person, unites one of the greatest of epic writers to the most exquisite of minor poets : which do we read the more often, "Lycidas" or "Paradise Regained"?… I live in a Catholic country where almost every city boasts of its historic cathedral. They are nearly always empty. But turn down the side street, enter yon barn-like chapel topped by a wooden cross : the whitewashed walls of the sanctuary of St. Anthony ot Padua are thronged with worshippers intimate and devout. St. Peter and St. Paul have their incomparable domes; save on highdays and holidays, they have them all to themselves! In the work-a-day hours of life, when you snatch at a prayer in passing, as you pluck a rose over a fence, half furtively—the swift petition, the familiar avowal, are, apparently, for the Lesser Saint. The chapel of the Minor Poet may be too small to admit the crowd; it may be thronged when three or four are gathered together. None the less, it has its use and place. It is, I believe, a mistake, to suppose, as Tolstoy contends, that no Art is legitimate save that which has for its object the happiness of the greatest number. Yet I admit that the poet who consciously addresses a few is, by definition, the Minor Poet, the man of a smaller race, the younger brother, who, whatever his merits, shall not obtain the full inheritance.

"Shall Life be an Ode? Or shall Life be a Drama?" wrote one day James Darmesteter, the friend of all my verses and the occasion of many among them. My life has been an Ode, of which those pages are the scattered fragments. If ever I have escaped from its tranquil sequences, it has been but for an instant and through some partial opening of the gates of Imagination, set in movement by some incident in real life or some episode of my reading. I have never been able to write about what was not known to me and near. Tim Black, the Scapegoat, and most of the personages of the New Arcadia, lived on a common in Surrey near my garden gates. all of them are drawn from human models. The Romantic Ballads were inspired by my historical studies. Some persons of culture have refused me the right to express myself in those simple forms of popular song which I have loved since childhood as sincerely as any peasant. If the critics would only believe it, they have come as naturally to me, if less happily, than they came of old to a Lady Wardlaw, a Lady Linsday, or a Lady Nairn. We women have a privilege in these matters, as M. Gaston Paris has reminded us. We have always been the prime makers of ballads and love songs, of anonymous snatches and screeds of popular song. We meet together no longer on Mayday, as of old, in Provence, to set the fashion in tensos and sonnets. But some old wife or other, crooning over her fire of sticks, in Scotland or the Val d'Aosta, in Roumania or Gascony, is probably at the beginning of most romantic Ballads. Mine, of course, have the fatal defect of having crystallised too soon; they lack the patient polish of succeeding generations. But that it is, most obviously, not in my power to remedy. The only way would be for my readers to learn them by heart, half-forget them, and re-write them, omitting the non-essential. It is a necessary process; but I can only offer them in their unripeness, reminding my readers that the beautiful rispetti of the Tuscan hills, the ballads of Scotland and Piedmont, have all at one moment lacked the admirable patina which age and time alone confer.

MARY DUCLAUX.

Olmet, Cantal.

September, 1901.

CONTENTS

AN ITALIAN GARDEN AND OTHER LYRICS

*An asterisk indicates the new poems	page
Florentine May	3
Remembrance	5
Venetian Nocturne	6
Invocations	7
The Feast of St. John	8
Treasure Song	9
Temple Garlands	10
To a Rose Dead at Morning	11
Strewings	12
Pallor	13
Tuscan Cypress	14
Love without Wings	19
Semitones	22
Elysium	24
Stornelli and Strambotti	25
Celia's Home-Coming	27
Posies	29
Alternatives	30
Dryads	31
Rosa Rosarum	33
An Oasis	35
Castello	36
Torrents	37
Aubade Triste	38
Poplar Leaves	39
Spring under Cypresses	40
Music	42
Art and Life	43

Lyrics.	PAGE
a pastoral of parnassus	41
a search for apollo	46
an address to the nightingale	47
wild cherry branches .	49
tuscan olive ....	51
APPREHENSION .	54
FRIENDSHIP	56
TWO LOVERS	58
A GREY DAY	60
A SONG	61
PARADISE FANCIES	62
A DIALOGUE	64
LE ROI EST MORT	66
LETHE	66
A RIFIORITA	67
A PASTORAL	68
DAWN-ANGELS	69
TO A DRAGON FLY	70
SONG OF A STORMY NIGHT	72
TWO SISTERS	73
LOVERS	76
LONDON STUDIES	77
THANKSGIVING FOR FLOWERS	79
MAIDEN LOVE	80
LOVE, DEATH, AND ART	81
SONNET	82
FONS VITÆ.	83
THE CUP OF LIFE	85
LOVE AND VISION	86
LOVE AMONG THE SAINTS.	88
THE SPRINGS OF FONTANA	91
SERENADE	91
THE FROZEN RIVER.	94
NEURASTHENIA .	95

LYRICS.	PAGE
SONG	96
NIGHT	97
SONG	98
SONNET	99
THE DEPARTURE	100
GOING SOUTH	101
LOVE IN THE WORLD	102
THREE SONGS	103
THE DEAD FRIEND	104
AN ORCHARD AT AVIGNON	106
TWILIGHT	107
RETROSPECT	109
FOREIGN SPRING	111
THE SIBYL	112
EPTHATHA	113
SERENA	114
A FRENCH LILY	117
SPRING	118
MAIDENS	119
ADAM AND EVE	120
WRITING HISTORY	121
SOLDIERS PASSING	122
THE BOOKWORM	123
MELANCHOLIA	I24
SONG	125
Old songs	126
to my muse	127
michaelmas	128
Songs of the Inner Life.
foreword	131
the two lions	132
religions	133
the lost sheep	134

Songs of the Inner Life.	PAGE
"THE gate of tears	135
teste SIBYLLA .	136
"SEEK, AND YE SHALL FIND"	137
"BEAUTY	138
"RHYTHM	140
THE VALLEY	141
DARWINISM	144
THE STARS .	145
ETRUSCAN TOMBS	147
FIRE-FLIES .	150
THE IDEA .	153
THE WALL .	154
JUSTICE	154
GOD IN A HEART	155
UNDER THE TREES	156
THE IDEAL .	158
A CLASSIC LANDSCAPE	160
VERSAILLES	161
THE ONE CERTAINTY	162
PERSONALITY	163
TUBEROSES .	165
THE BARRIER	167
THE ROAD LEADING NOWHERE	168
SPRING AND AUTUMN	169
FAIR GHOSTS	170
SOUVENIR	171
THE VISION	172
THE PRESENT AGE	173
LIBERTY	174
VERITATEM DILEXI	175
TAKING POSSESSION	176
VISIITASPA	177
ZENO	179
SACRIFICE	180

Songs of the Inner Life.	PAGE
a jonquil in the pisan campo santo	l8l
unum est necessarium	182
calais beacon	185
the gospel according to st. peter	i87
a controversy	188
antiphon to the holy spirit	189
Poems and Idylls.
THE widow	193
HELEN IN THE WOOD	195
loss	197
THE children's ANGEL	201
SIR ELDRIC	203
THE GARDENER OF SINOPE	205
jutzi SCHULTHEISS	212
CONSTANCE AND MARTUCCIO	218
PHILUMENE TO ARISTIDES	225
THE WIDOWER OF HAIDERABAD	228
THE DEER AND THE PROPHET	230
THE SLUMBER OF KING SOLOMON	234
The New Arcadia.
THE hand-bell RINGERS	237
THE old couple	240
the scape-goat	243
church-going tim	245
the wise woman	248
the rothers	252
men and monkeys	260
Romantic Ballads.
the tower of st. maur	265
the duke of gueldres' wedding	272
rosamunda	277

Romantic Ballads.	PAGE
captain gold and french janet	279
a ballad of orleans	281
the death of the count of armanac	283
captain ortis' booty	286
sir hugh and the swans	289
the mower	292
rudel and the lady of tripoli	294
the dead mother	300
the death of prester john.	303