Emily Lawless

“ Yet the Rock-clan, the Rock-clan is dearest still of all!
Therefore little garden, garden all unheeded,
Watched by no warder save some rash indifferent gull,
Here at your rock-edge a tribute pen I offer,
Vowed long since to you and yours, if rusted now and dull
Rough, very rough, hath been your children’s nurture,
Helped by no shelter, no balmy Zephyrs blest,
Wild, most wild their mistress, wayward, fierce, bewitching,
Queen of moods and shadows, tempest-stirring West! ”

“ These bog-pools flutter ere they sink to rest,
And o’er this surface, level as a floor,
Yon blue reek trails its idle way to west.
It comes from thee, brown shieling, late bereft
Of thy last fledgelings; tenement outworn,
Long marked for desolation, and now left
To two old hearts, submissive, but forlorn.
How like some wintry nest it shows to-night;
While over its bent thatch a young curved moon
Peers through thin clouds scarce greyer than her light
Peers wistfully, as if arrived too soon,
Or doubtful of her welcome. ”

“ Over your dark hollows holds her pallid court;
Scarce an evening flower lighting for her pleasure,
Scarce a silvery ripple dancing for her sport.
Yet, oh little valley, little bog-filled valley,
I, who linger near you, grieving turn to part,
In your bareness finding, in your sadness seeing,
Something very tender, very near my heart.
Turning with reluctance, often I look backwards,
Seeing, feeling, counting what hath been before,
Finding in your bareness, seeing in your sadness,
That which, going elsewhere, I shall find no more. ”

“ Soft with their woes; child of their hopes and fears,
Poet we look for, come; awake! Be born!
Our little life fills out its little round,
Our little pipes play on their puny strains.
We grope, we fumble on the dusky ground,
Still searching, hoping, for some scattered grains.
Stammering weak ditties on an alien strand,
Babbling poor plaintive notes, which sink forlorn,
We sport; we toy. The theme demands thy hand,
Poet we look for, come; awake! Be born! ”

“ She is haunted by the strange bewitching surge of the waves of the Atlantic, of the Western waves “wild with all regret.” For her the rolling brown stretches of bog and of peat-moss, with the blue smoke hanging low over them, and their carpet of faithful little peat-flowers, mean home, the enchanted home we all know, where we have played in childhood and felt the first thrills of youth; the moist silver sky, the solitary, ageless stone crosses, the ruined churches, the hovels, the sad, shining lakes make the country where her spirit dwells. ”

“ Out of it comes freshness, out of it comes gladness,
In it sleep the breezes that set the soul awhirl,
Hope and all enchantments, Love the wily wizard,
Memory with her deep caves, and open gates of pearl.
Therefore idle Shannon, spendthrift amongst rivers,
Pourer forth of treasure to the waste indifferent night,
Love we you, and cherish, bringer to our thresholds
Harsh and bitter weather—melody and light. ”

“ Spreads the golden trefoil, waves the hair-bell tall,
Gentians and saxifrage, pimpernel and eyebright,
That little hollow rift finds room enough for all.
Close along its ledges cluster snowy dryas,
Rose-like are the flowers, yet it clutches hard the rock,
Claw-like its rootlets, roots like claws of sea-gulls,
Scornful of the tempest, and proof ’gainst every shock.
Campions fill the corners, careless little growers,
Loved of the roving moth, which visits them at night ”

“ Clare leans out to meet you, stretches forth an arm,
Infinitely lonely, desolately stony,
Scarce a waving sky-line, scarce a field or farm.
Swift the nimble Fancy leaps that narrow rampart,
Lands upon the further side with blithe and beating breast,
Looks around and onward, clapping hands and hailing
All the light and glory of the living, moving West!
Ho! the living West, with its moving, moving, waters! ”

“ Emily Lawless was, before all else, a poet and a seeker after truth—and in her the two were one. Before all else, also, an Irish poet. There have been few women-poets of creative force in any nation—none in Ireland before her, whose fame has endured. And for Ireland she stands, in verse and in prose. ”

“ There are words, fragments, that run in our heads and make us wonder from which great poet they come, until we remember they are hers. They generally recall the Elizabethans, and the verse of the Elizabethans it was whose poetry most affected and most influenced her.
[Pg ix]
In one way these last poems have an especial distinction. They bear the marks of her struggle with bodily misery and marks of the victory she won. They are scarred, but they prove the final dominance of her mind. ”

“ Shining but to bring to light some fading patch of gorse.
Ancient battered oaks, sere, and bald and sapless,
Through their lichened branches your current twists and heaves,
Mossy green or olive, the sheeny ripples glitter,
Smooth as polished agate betwixt the bristling leaves. [Pg 58]
Little flitting creatures, dragon-fly or day-moth,
Sipping at your waters mount in small alarms,
Start to fly across you, fly and fly for ever,
Beaten back and dying in your bitter, sea-cold arms. ”

“ But in the poems of thought the verse is often but the scabbard for the finely tempered blade of the idea, and, as a rule, she needs the high pressure of a story to mould the rhythm for her. When we come to language, it is a different matter. Her words are always strong, melodious, distinguished, sometimes inspired, and the lines in one of her poems sound the unmistakable note of autobiography. ”

“ Like a star has gathered all that grey and moony light.
Dear to our hearts are the flowers of the spring-time,
Lighters of our bleak months, breakers through the mould,
Scilla and snowdrop, windflower and crocus,
Brave little soldier-lads fearless of the cold! ”

“ And then there was the inward relation to Nature, the wisdom and comfort she drew from it to heal the distressful mystery of life; the evidence she found in it of man’s spirit, of a power, however baffled, which transcends material forces. ”

“ Form was not Miss Lawless’s strong point, that is when she sought it. When it found her, it was perfect, as in some of these poems in [Pg viii] “From the Burren,” verses of intuition. And certain metres that she loved she could master, like that of Meredith’s “Love in the Valley,” most musically followed in “Wide is the Shannon,” and in “A Bog-filled Valley.” ”

“ Children can love them as well as critics. And to these will now be added the poem in this volume of verses which the poet herself liked the best of them: “The Third Trumpet,” the tale of the girl who went at the risk of her life to fetch the proscribed priest to come to her dying mother, and of the old priest who came at still greater peril. ”

“ Yet what they but whisper I’ve guessed aright.
And the birds know it too, each gull and each tern
Sea-swallows skimming the sunset rocks,
Bird after bird in fast following flocks
Homeward wheeling, they pause to learn. ”

“ And Emily Lawless would have been capable of keeping that vow. The sincere love of poetry is a very purifying affection; her devotion to what was big made her big, and she showed a large humility where poetry was concerned—both in the way she accepted criticism from any one who cared, however insignificant, and in the modest place that she assigned to herself among singers. ”

“ To this power of not only telling but of implying a story, we also owe others among these new poems—in the “Eighteenth Century Echoes,” less tragic, but swift in their interest and admirable in their compression, full of the same gifts that made their author a novelist of dramatic force and of virile directness. ”

“ The best of her work will not perish with the “vanished argosies, and all the flotsam of unthrifty Time.” [1] And it is to be hoped that one day her poems will be collected and given to the world together: those from “With the Wild Geese,” and those from “The Point of View,” the little volume printed for the benefit of the Galway fishermen, which contains so much of her intimate thought ”