Theodore Maynard

“ The knight his sword, his cap and bells the clown,
The poet all his verse’s pomp and pride—
The eloquent, the beautiful, the brave
Descend reluctant to the straight, cold grave.
No more shall shine for them the glorious rose,
Or sunsets stain with red and awful gold,
Night shall no more for them her stars disclose,
Or day the grandeur of the Downs unfold,
Or those eyes dull in death watch solemnly
The regal splendour of the Sussex sea.
For them the ringing surges are in vain;
They wake not at the cry of waking bird ”

“ Among the buttercups of Spring;
In valleys where the lilies shone
More glorious than Solomon
We met a poet passing by,
And learned his lyric—you and I!
But oh! did kindly Heaven not bless
Our lives with more than loveliness,
When, cast on every sapling-rod,
Was seen the motley of our God;
When having picked our way with craft
Up cliffs to hear Him when He laughed,
We felt, uplifted on the wind,
His folly blown into our mind?
What doubt can touch us? We have heard
The baby laughter of the Word! ”

“ Tenderly guide my wayward feet to peace,
And show me love the likeness of a Man,
The Slave obedient unto death, the Lamb
Slain from the first foundations of the world,
The Word made flesh, the tender new-born Child
That is the end of all my heart’s desire.{74}
Then shall my spirit, naked of its hopes,
Stripped of its love unto the very bone,
Sink simply into Love’s embrace and be
Made consummate of all its burning bliss. ”

“ TO A BAD ATHEIST
who wrote what he called a trinity of meek retorts to the preceding
poem, which were not meek, but full of pride and
abominable heresy
YOU do not love the shadows on the wall,
Or mists that flee before a blowing wind,
Or Gothic forests, or light aspen leaves,
Or skies that melt into a dreamy sea.
In the hot, glaring noontide of your mind
(I have your word for it) there is no room
For anything save sawdust, sun and sand.
No monkish flourishes will do for you;
Your life must be set down in black and white. ”

“ Lowes Dickinson will call us antiquated for gathering the flowers which still grow on the graves of our mediæval ancestors, while they themselves will industriously search for the scattered ashes from the more distant pyres of the Pagans.{xi}
And the visible clue to the Middle Ages is colour. The mediæval man could paint before he could draw. In the almost startling inspiration which we call stained glass, he discovered something that is almost more coloured than colour; something that bears the same relation to mere colour that golden flame does to golden sand. ”

“ Lilies and mystic roses bloom.
Grown in the hush of hidden hours
Thoughts fairer than the summer flowers
Lift up their sweet and living heads,
Crystalline whites and sanguine reds!{141}
Who keep in lowly pageantry
Silence a lovely ceremony; [B]
Who set a seal upon their eyes
Responsive only to the skies;
Who in a quick obedience move
Along the hallowed paths of love,
Win at last to that secret place
Adorned with the glory of God’s face. ”

“ The sweep of the archangel’s pinions—the humble accord—
The song—the dim stable—the night—and the birth of the Lord!
For your joy do the long grasses rustle, the tree-tops stir
Where the wind moves eagerly through the pine and the fir;
Alert for your coming the woods and the meadows all wait;
The buttercups grow and the turtle calls to his mate. ”

“ Your broken hopes, the hopes that shall not cease,
Endure in dreams as terrible as peace;
Your naked folly nailed upon the cross
Has given us more than bread unto our dearth
And more than water to our aching drouth;
Though death has been as wormwood in your mouth
Your blood shall fructify the barren earth. ”

“ And ever since I saw in The New Witness some lines called “A Song of Colours,” by Theodore Maynard, they have remained to me as a sort of simplification, or permanent element, of the rest of the poet’s writings; and I have felt him especially as a poet of colour. They are not by any means the best of his lines. They are direct, as is appropriate to a ballad; and they have none of the fine whimsicality or the frank humour to be found elsewhere in his work. ”

“ A dream of beauty and of bliss—
The loveliness of God.
May 1917.{97}
VIATICUM
DEAR God, not only do Thou come at last
When death hath filled my heart with dread affright,
But when in gathered dark I meet aghast
The mimic death that falls on me at night.
The daily dying, when alone I tread
The valley of the shadow, breast the Styx,
With shrouded soul and body stiff in bed ... ”

“ Among these others the choice is hard: but I should say that the finest poetry as such is to be found in the images, and even in the very title, of “The World’s Miser”: and even more in the poem called “Apocalypse.” In this latter the poet imagines a new world which shall be supernatural in the strongest sense of the word; that of being more vivid and positive than the natural; and not (as it is so often imagined) more tenuous and void. ”

“ THE air is valiant with drums
And honourable the skies,
When he rides singing as he comes
With solemn, dreamy eyes—
Of swinging of the splendid swords,
And crashing of the nether lords,
When Hell makes onslaught with its hordes
In desperate emprise. ”

“ He holds His summer palaces”
we have an impression, which it is the object of all poetry to produce. It can only be described by saying that a primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose is to him, and it could not possibly be anything more. And this almost torrid directness and distinctness of tint is again connected with another quality of the poet and his poetic tradition: what many would call asceticism alternating with what many would call buffoonery. The colour conventions of the Middle Ages were copied very beautifully by the school of Rossetti and Swinburne. ”

“ ON THEODORE MAYNARD’S POEMS In the case of any poet who has caught and held our recollection, there is generally a particular piece of work which remains in our mind, not as the crown, but as the key. ”

“ And binds their hearts and nerves their hands.{123}
That they who only thought to know
This valley in the moonlight furled,
Have heard immortal trumpets blow,
And shake the pillars of the world!
{124}
BALLADE OF ORCHARDS
THOUGH Jeshurun kicks and grows fatter and fatter,
And chinks in his pockets the gold of his gain,
Yet up in the gables the young sparrows chatter,
The corn-fields are rich with the promise of grain,
The hedges are yellow, and (balm to the brain!) ”

“ Maynard’s inspiration is part of what is the main business of our time: the resurrection of the Middle Ages. The modern movement, with its Guild Socialism and its military reaction against the fatalism of the Barbarian, is as certainly drawing its life from the lost centuries of Catholic Europe, as the movement more commonly called the Renaissance drew its life from the lost languages and sculptures of antiquity. And, by a quaint inconsistency, Hellenists and Neo-Pagans of the school of Mr. ”

“ But they lost the exuberance of the Gothic and became a pattern rather than a plan; chiefly because they were not seriously inspired by any of the enthusiasms of the Middle Ages. Its{xii} decorative repetitions sometimes became quite dreary and artificial; as in Swinburne’s unfortunate couplet about the lilies and languors of virtue and the raptures and roses of vice. ”

“ And heard the barbarians’ guns across the morn.
December 24th and 26th, 1917.{108}
LYRIC LOVE
WHEN kindly years have given me grace
To read your spirit through;
To see the starlight on your face,
Upon your hair the dew;
To touch the fingers of your hands,
The shining wealth they hold ”

“ Doh-ray-me-fah-sol-la-fah-me-ray-doh—
I-tiddly-iddly-i-ti-iddly-ay.
It made a gathering of Fabians start
And put their fingers in their outraged ears.
They did not understand my subtle art,
But though they only gave me scoffs and jeers,{145}
I sang my ditty high, I sang it low,
I sang it every known (and unknown) way—
Crescendo, forte, pianissimo—
I-tiddly-iddly-i-ti-iddly-ay. ”