Sibyl Bristowe

“ My Garden, 1918
Such was my garden once, a Springtide hope of flowers,
All rosy pink or violet or blue
Or yellow gold, with sunflecks on the dew.
Now in their place a Summer garden towers
Of green-leaved artichokes and turnip tops,
Of peas and parsnips, sundry useful crops.
—But even vegetables must have little flowers.
[Pg 18]
Over the Top!
Ten more minutes! Say yer prayers,
Read yer Bibles,—pass the rum!
Ten more minutes! Strike me dumb,
'Ow they creeps on unawares
Those blooming minutes. Nine. It's queer,
I'm sorter stunned. It ain't with fear! ”

“ Twisting in spiral devils, raw as rust,
Those lonely crosses leaning on their dead,
Murmuring Africa was never just.
"She knows no pity," shrieked the fierce South wind,
"She steals your youth and stultifies your mind." [Pg 66]
On, on they flew, past Kaffir boom and kraal,
Thorn wacht-een-beetje, fleshy aloe clump,
Through the charred stretches of the high Transvaal,
By meerkat hole, and rounded white-ant hump
Of tunnelled earth. She laughed; the air was wild,
Strong with exhilaration, undefiled. ”

“ Have you tunes for such a sullen little wraith,
Half dream, swooping high, scarcely seen, chiefly faith?
Would you hold a phantom to your breast
As you murmur gently love-notes from the west?
Wind, wind,
Every tree is but a harp for your desire,
Every leaf a mellow string to swell your choir,
Every grass a cooing reed
At your need, for your need,
Drums and clashing cymbals of the sea
Boom a pæan, hurl a flood of melody. ”

“ Tore through the mountain passes, swept the plains,
O'erbrimmed with tears, o'erbrimmed with summer rains,
All wild, all desolate.
Whilst the deep Mother-breast
Of drowsy-lidded Nature, drunk with dreams,
Below Pangani, by Rufigi streams,
Took him to rest.
Beneath the sunlit skies,
Where bright birds wing, and rich luxuriant trees
Sway in the fevered breeze,
My Brother lies.
The bending grasses woo
His hurried grave; a cross of oak to show
The drifting winds, a Soldier sleeps below. ”

“ And the few but fine lines, on a brother fallen in a fight amid wild river that sundered man from man, is a model of the manner in which such mighty events take their place among the impressions of the more sincere and spontaneous type of talent. The topic takes its pre-eminence by intensity and not by space, or even in a sense by design. Indeed it is best expressed in a metaphor used by the writer herself about the topic itself; the metaphor of the colour red in its relation to other colours. Red rivets the eye, not by quantity but by quality ”

“ Lie a mother and child all stark and bare,
Save only a comb in the coal-black hair—
Yet God will remember they lie out there.
Whilst digging up a hitherto uncultivated bit of garden near the Mendips, a gardener came across the mutilated skeletons of a woman and baby. A comb still decorated the woman's coal-black hair. At the inquest afterwards held upon the skeletons, it was suggested that the woman and her baby were probably refugees from the battle of Sedgemoor. ”

“ A Vision of a Day that is Past
The sky hung smooth o'er the line of hill
That shadowed the valley that seemed so still,
And the blackbird whistled his love notes shrill.
The church lay dreaming of God, and when
The bodies should rise from her graveyard pen
Where the high grass covered her poor dead men. ”

“ And he cried, "Oh, that Queen is the devil in sooth.
A fool, Sire, 'twas thought, for she danced so uncouth!
But her bargains are hard as her heart and her hand,
As her dreary dominions, her men and her land!
And never be gulled by her feminine vanity,
'Tis only a pose, all her vacant inanity!
Let us man an armada to crush her and raid her,
To send her to hell to the demons who made her!"
[Pg 54] And they came, as you know:
Heavy ships big and slow
In a lumbering way, in a blundering way
In that Tudor day. ”

“ Miss Sibyl Bristowe's poem conceives the Creator confronted as with a broken spectrum or a gap in coloured glass; feeling the whole range of vision to be dim and impoverished and adding, by the authority of His own mysterious art, the dreadful colour of martyrdom.
Indeed the point of the comparison might very well be conveyed by the two poems about a London garden; that on the garden in peace being comparatively long, and that about the garden in war exceedingly short ”

“ Miss Sibyl Bristowe is perhaps an amateur, in the sense in which this is generally true of one who happens to be an artist in another art; but it is unfortunate that the world has so much missed the notion of that natural ardour that should belong to the word. ”

“ The verses in this volume cover very many and various occasions; and are therefore the very contrary of what is commonly called occasional verse. The term is used with a meaning that is very mutable; or with a meaning that has been greatly distorted and degraded. Occasion should mean opportunity; and in the case of poetry it should rather mean provocation. And the trick of writing upon what are called public occasions, instead of upon what may truly be described as private provocations, has been responsible for much verse which is not only insufficient but insincere. ”

“ The wind crooned softly, starways seemed to shine—
That poem—was divine.
[Pg 51]
Queen Elizabeth
She would dance a Coranto, that the French Ambassador, hidden behind a curtain, might report her sprightliness to his master.—Greene.
So Elizabeth danced
And the guest was entranced
As she tripped the Coranto, and curtseyed and swayed
In a robe of rich stuff,
Jewelled slashings and ruff,
And a stomacher stiff, thick with pearlings and braid. ”

“ They are arresting because the great war really is great, and moves an imaginative spirit to great issues; it is public but it is very far from being official. The war, indeed, is necessarily [Pg 8] more important as a private event even than as a public event. ”

“ The author has to acknowledge the courtesy of the Editors of "The Poetry Review" and "The Johannesburg Star" for permission to include poems that have appeared in their pages.
[Pg 11]
CONTENTS PAGE The Great War 13 My London Garden, 1914 14 My Garden, 1918 17 Over the Top! 18 To His Dear Memory 20 Sorrow 21 Alas! 23 A Sacrament 24 The Love-shed Tear 25 Madonna Granduca and Child 29 A Vision of a Day that is Past 30 Bitterness Casteth out Love 33 The Hour of Happiness 34 Thoughts 35 The Things Unsaid are the Things that Count! ”