Meynell's Short Lyric On War

I finally tracked down a used copy of The Poems of Alice Meynell, published in a nice clothbound edition in 1955. For a bibliophile, the arrival of a new used-book by post brightens the day. To re-introduce gloom, I'll reprint a short lyric about war from the volume. Meynell decided to use a quotation from Richard Hooker as the title--and to give the attribution in the title, so the poem is indeed called "'Lord, I owe Thee a Death': Richard Hooker," and it includes the epigraph, "In Time of War." The war in question is the Great War, which we know as World War I, the horror of which Europe had not seen before, even though it had seen plenty of wars.



"'Lord, I owe Thee a Death': Richard Hooker"

In Time of War

Man pays that debt with new munificence,

Not piecemeal now, not slowly, by the old:

Not grudgingly, by the effaced thin pence,

But greatly and in gold.

--Alice Meynell

The extreme understatement of this poem works effectively, at least for me. Instead of expressing horror at the scale of life lost in the Great War, Meynell frames the loss of life in terms of a monetary debt, and in so doing she mimicks the heartless, matter-of-fact way in which nations sent soldiers to slaughter in the trenches. Meynell punctures that cold, deliberate, ironic trivializaton of death in the last line, however, because "greatly and in gold" reminds us that, whatever terms by which one chooses to frame the loss of life, one cannot successfully minimize how dear the cost has been. The short lyric seems to imply that even if one chooses to rationalize the loss of life as inevitable (everyone has to die sometime), the rationalization will dissolve because inevitable though the debt may be, God is not the one who decided it should be paid, in effect, all at once--"greatly"--and in gold: a massive percentage of young men from a certain generation in Europe and elsewhere. A similar debt is now being paid by Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans--greatly, and in gold.

One More By Alice Meynell

Here is another poem by Alice Meynell (1847-1922), whom I mentioned in the previous post:

The Poet and his Book by Alice Meynell

Here are my thoughts, alive within this fold, My simple sheep. Their shepherd, I grow wise As dearly, gravely, deeply I behold Their different eyes.

O distant pastures in their blood! O streams From watersheds that fed them for this prison! Lights from aloft, midsummer suns in dreams, Set and arisen.

They wander out, but all return anew, The small ones, to this heart to which they clung; “And those that are with young,” the fruitful few That are with young.

When I began to read the poem for the first time, I almost cringed because I didn't think the extended comparison between sheep and poems was going to work, partly because of the age-old Judeo-Christian comparison between humans/souls and sheep. Ah, but Meynell uses the comparison surprisingly and smartly, in my view anyway. The sheep (poems) were fed by a variety of streams, watersheds, and pastures--ideas for poems, in other words. The implication that the poet likes "the small ones" best rings true; for quirky, private reasons, poets will often like the poems others don't necessarily like. And the final extension of the comparison is to suggest, or at least to hope, that some of the poems will inspire others' poems, will bear literary "young." Through the post-feminist critical lens, we marvel that Meynell felt obligated to write about the poet and "his" book, when rather obviously she was meditating on her own work and her attitude toward it later in life. Surely, the sheep/poem comparison will still seem too cloying to some, but what Meynell actually does with the comparison is pleasant and instructive to observe. I enjoyed watching her work in this poem, a small one.

Poem By Alice Meynell

Below appears a poem by Alice Meynell, who is known as a Victorian poet but lived well into the 20th century. She was born in 1847 and died in the year my mother was born, 1922.

November Blue by Alice Meynell

The golden tint of the electric lights seems to give a complementary colour to the air in the early evening.—Essay on London

O heavenly colour, London town Has blurred it from her skies; And, hooded in an earthly brown, Unheaven’d the city lies. No longer, standard-like, this hue Above the broad road flies; Nor does the narrow street the blue Wear, slender pennon-wise.

But when the gold and silver lamps Colour the London dew, And, misted by the winter damps, The shops shine bright anew— Blue comes to earth, it walks the street, It dyes the wide air through; A mimic sky about their feet, The throng go crowned with blue.