poets dare

What the wild eye of fancy sees –

Similitude – the clear, the fair

Light mystery of images

—Alice Meynell, “The Return to Nature”

Alice Meynell (1847–1922) was born a Victorian, or into a world marked “Victorian,” and so has her poetry been read. One of many women poets recently recovered by feminist scholars, Meynell has enjoyed a small revival, yet even when a reading aims to reshape her reputation, critics still read her poetry within that Victorian frame.¹

Even simple historical surmise would find this analysis hard to sustain. The poet died in 1922, with five volumes of poetry published in the new century. Preludes, her first collection, had appeared in 1875. It would seem odd that a poet deeply committed to poetry and vitally engaged in the literary world should be writing the same poetry in 1922 as she had nearly fifty years before. Meynell's long poetic career calls us to reexamine her work, just as her complex personality makes us reassess our conceptions of late-nineteenth-century women. A devout Catholic and a feminist, a fin-de-siècle icon of the feminine and career-driven journalist, a mother of eight who eschewed sentimentality about children, “Meynell the woman” stands on the cusp between Victorian and twentieth-century worlds. “Meynell the poet” also bridges this divide, turning away from her earlier verse, beginning in the 1890s, when she adopted an intellectually complex poetic with its roots in the seventeenth century and its flowering in the twentieth. Poems, published in 1893, signaled this change from the more Romantic mode of Preludes to the metaphysical mode of her later work; the transformation places Meynell not amidst the pantheon of Victorian “poetesses,” but at the forefront of fin-de-siècle literary innovation. As a critic, Meynell also promoted the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, in her column for the Pall Mall Gazette as well as in critical introductions to collections and anthologies.² Writing more prolifically of their merits than any other fin-de-siècle critic, Meynell celebrated the “wildness” and intellectual ecstasy of the metaphysicals – Crashaw, Campion, Marvell, and the rest – and as a poet, modelled her work on theirs. To date, few critics have read her poetry in this context.³ This essay traces Meynell's metaphysical turn and limns her critical reception to explain why her changing poetic and place in literary history have long been misrepresented or unseen. The trouble began in 1875 with the terrible problem of success.

Preludes enjoyed the kind of attention a young poet could only dream about, attention earned in no small part by her more famous sister Elizabeth's illustrations. Yet its poetic reputation long overshadowed Meynell's later work and obscured her poetic evolution. She herself came to regret the volume, but could not shake off the lingering aura of its success. That aura emanated only slightly from the poetry, and more powerfully from the gendered nature of critics’ acclaim. While Robert Browning was “struck by [the poems’] beauty even beyond what the indifference of the reviewer should have prepared me for,” and Ruskin singled out parts of three poems as “the finest things I have yet seen or felt in modern verse” (while privately calling her early work “very pretty”) (qtd. in Badeni 34), most reviews described Meynell as quintessentially feminine: the “poetess of poets,” her “little book,” in Rossetti's words, “all deep-hearted speech” (qtd. in Noble 316). While a certain delicacy, reticence, and preciosity of diction do distinguish many poems, much of it is apprentice work and should be valued as such. In addition, the volume also attests to an intellectual ambition and hardness of thought which critics couldn't acknowledge or didn't see. Instead, the diminutive “little,” the patronizing “poetess” and the praise for deep-heartedness, all suggest that when critics read Meynell, they found what they were looking for and overlooked the rest.

Ironically, Meynell resisted the very things that critics commended, even in this early work. As a young poet, Meynell feared, yet saw no way out of, writing “melancholy and self-conscious [poems] as are all women's poems” (MS diary). Here, Meynell fingers the knot which bound her work, what Angela Leighton calls the “highly moralised celebration of women's sensibility” among the Victorians: an overvaluation of sentiment and women's separation from the world (3). Feeling these expectations as both restriction and obligation, yet fearing them as destiny, Meynell's admiration for the Romantics further complicated her poetic dilemma. She clearly viewed them as her predecessors and models (MS diary), and Romantic traces appear throughout Preludes: nature as trope and source of inspiration, nostalgia for the unmediated sensual pleasures of childhood, poetry as divine vocation. The volume's very title bespeaks homage and imitation, as do many poems’ titles: “In Early Spring,” “To a Daisy,” “A Shattered Lute,” and so on. Yet the Romantic sensibility, in its dependence on deep feeling and contemplative withdrawal, also closely replicates the Victorian model of the poetess. Critics Sharon Smulders and Shelley Crisp have argued in reading “The Shepherdess” (Other Poems 1896) and “The Return to Nature” (Last Poems 1923), respectively, that in those later poems, Meynell strove both with and against her precursors, adopting Romantic tropes while rejecting Romantic self-consciousness.⁴

But already in Preludes, many poems exemplify Meynell's resistance to not only the “melancholy self-consciousness” she lamented in women's poetry, but the Romantic faith in the absolute transcendence of imagination. This she found incompatible with Christian humility. “To Any Poet,” “To a Daisy,” and “The Love of Narcissus,” for example, articulate these points of resistance and correction. In “To Any Poet,” the speaker argues that the poet's imagination can penetrate nature's secrets only so far: That “something” turns out to be a higher truth than the poet’s, one he or she cannot know until after death. Only then, Earth “will bring forth her rue and pansies / Unto more divine / Thoughts than any thoughts of thine” (38–40). Finally, in that state of death, a greater power than even nature will take the poet into itself: Rather than the poet's voice outlasting death by speaking through nature, death brings sweet silence and the higher Truth of God. Similarly, Meyell's sonnet “To a Daisy,” which borrows Wordsworth's title, also argues that not through the limited power of human imagination, but only through death, will the poet know Truth. The speaker asks the “slight” daisy, “thou little veil for so great a mystery,” when she, the poet, might “penetrate all things and thee” (1, 6, 7). The speaker, not expecting nature to answer, surmises that she “must abide, / Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled / Literally between me and the world” (9–10). Like Keats, the speaker foresees the flowers “growing over” her after death.⁶ Still, the speaker anticipates more than a human view of nature from the grave. In the poems’ last lines, she asks, “O daisy mine, what will it be to look / From God's side even of such a simple thing?” (13–14). The transcendence which Romantic poets sought in nature, for Meynell could only come in the context of a Christian death and union with God; the human imagination cannot achieve that on its own. In yet another sonnet, “The Love of Narcissus,” Meynell describes the Romantic projection of emotions onto nature as the self-involved torments of that self-adoring mythical figure: Meynell, in short, loved the Romantics, but was wary of both the self-consciousness she likened to mirror gazing, and the faith in imagination which did not bow before God's greater transcendence and knowledge. In ways, of course, the poem's resistance to Romantic hubris would have played into stereotypes of feminine piety, modesty, and reticence. As a result, her contemporaries missed her ambivalence toward her Romantic models, fastening on to and admiring Preludes’ deep feeling and mournful delicacy, the very things she lamented in women's poems.

Even as she worked on Preludes’ poems, Meynell sought a way out of these boxes, a way to write “past Wordsworth and the rest” (Smulders 35). By the 1890s, she had found it. Turning to the seventeenth century, Meynell adopted a new poetic idiom, one which freed her from the traits that had earned her accolades and restricted her poetic voice. It also placed her amidst a burgeoning metaphysical revival which she helped catalyze, and which in turn provided new energy and directions for her poetry.

Fin-de-siècle adulation of the metaphysical poets crowned a growing revival which had begun as early as 1810 when new editions of seventeenth-century poets began to appear.⁷

As Joseph E. Duncan points out, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1843 essays in the Atheneum⁸ (later collected in Book of the Poets) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing on Donne in his Notes were widely known by the end of the century, as was the Grosart series of metaphysical poetry, published from 1872–74, which Kathleen Tillotson credits with launching the fin-de-siècle revival (passim). Robert Browning's admiration for Donne was widely known; Grosart dedicated his two-volume edition to Browning, “knowing how much [Donne’s] poetry…is valued and assimilated by him.” The metaphysical conceit and epigrammatic wit of the seventeenth century proved warmly congenial to fin-de-siècle poets, and by the 1880s, their own essays on both the metaphysicals and the Sons of Ben began to appear. For example, Saintsbury wrote in 1887 that Donne's work “should be regarded with a respect only ‘this side idolatry’” (qtd. in Haskin 873); Swinburne wrote “Ben Jonson” in 1888; his preface to Herrick's The Hesperides and Noble Numbers followed in 1891. Lionel Johnson's “The Soul of the Sacred in Poetry,” appeared in 1896, along with his “Henry Vaughan, Silurist”; in 1897, Meynell launched her series of columns about the metaphysicals; and Arthur Symons published his “John Donne” in 1899 and as Duncan argues, owes much of his own poetic to Donne.

For those who claimed decadence as their cultural coordinate, as Symons did, Donne easily became an honorary decadent poet.⁹

Symons first takes in the paradoxical personality, the “fascinating and puzzling creature” who explored, in turn, and with equal passion and spirit of adventure, “the flesh,” “the curiosity of woman,” and religion – the last of which passes with Donne's other intellectual interests “into passionate reality” (“John Donne” 84). Donne, Symons concludes, “had the passions and the passionate adventures, in body and mind, which make the material for poetry” (104). Edmund Gosse fuelled the flames of decadent admiration with his Life and Letters, which read the poems as biographical clues to Donne's sexual life. As Dayton Haskin argues, the decadents embraced Donne in reaction against the Victorians’ prudish rejection and prurient interest in Donne's both poetic and (alleged) personal sensuality (passim). In 1823, a critic had admired Donne's poems’ “beauty” but lamented their “deformity” (qtd. in Haskin 877), and what the Victorians rejected, the decadents embraced. “Beauty and deformity” reads like a fin-de-siècle motto. Yet beyond the cult of personality, Symons's paean to Donne echoed many of Coleridge's judgments of the poems. In lauding “The Flea,” “The Good Morrow,” and other poems, Coleridge had especially underscored their “fine, vigorous exultation, both soul and body in full puissance!” (252). Coleridge also points to the intellectual power of Donne's work, which proved that “active fancy without a substrate of profound…thinking” (253) is insufficient for poetry. Symons, too, admired Donne's intellect and far-reaching curiosity, an intelligence that nevertheless adhered to the world of the body; he had “the mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer,” while it is also “the flesh which speaks in his verse” (“John Donne” 84). Decadents and aesthetes like Symons and Wilde believed in the same coherence of body and soul, intellect and emotion; and in Donne, Symons also found what he admired in the French symbolists. For him, in symbolism as in metaphysical poetry, “the personal or human reality and the imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused” (105).

Meynell never devoted an entire essay to Donne, perhaps distancing herself from the more sexualized conversation about him, or perhaps because of his defection from the Catholic Church. Like others amidst the Catholic intelligentsia, Meynell looked to Crashaw, a Catholic convert like herself, as her poetic hero.¹⁰

Meynell would acclaim him most highly and emulate him the soonest, yet hers was never an exclusive regard. She owed clear if less easily traced debts to others, including Cowley and Herbert;¹¹ and published encomia on virtually all the metaphysical poets, her ideas consonant with many of Symons's on Donne (and predating his essay by two years). She shared the aesthetes’ insistence on the same confluence of the sensual, intellectual, and spiritual that informs metaphysical poetry – in Donne, Crashaw, and others – and that unity also shapes Meynell's changing lyric. In their paradoxes, wild conceits, and arguments, the metaphysicals provided a model of poetry that conjoined flesh and spirit, passion and mind – a rich antidote to the Victorian paradigm that allowed women only spirit and emotion. They also gave Meynell a way to make the transcendent spirituality she loved in Shelley more than intuitive or emotive, but also cerebral. The seventeenth century, in short, gave this fin-de-siècle poet a way beyond a conventionally feminine sensibility and the limits of Romanticism.

Unfortunately, Meynell's 1893 Poems, which heralded her turn toward this new poetic, arrived in such a form and context that virtually no one noticed the signs. Preludes haunted its contents and reception, and Meynell's fin-de-siècle persona did nothing to help. By the 90s, Meynell had long laid poetry aside, devoting herself to an ambitious journalistic career as both writer and editor, including a long stint as weekly columnist for the Pall Mall Gazette, while raising eight children.¹²

After Preludes, then, she had left no standard visible trace of an evolving poetic, as she might have had she continued as a poet in the public eye. Instead, she now reigned as fin-de-siècle essayist and critic whose exquisite aperçus and weekly column made her the envy of even Beerbohm and Wilde. Beerbohm worried that Meynell might “become a substitute for the English Sabbath” (qtd. in Tuell 41); and Wilde, in prison, felt pained to hear that “Mrs. Meynell had been pronounced…the new Sibyl of style” (De Profundis 33).

The center of her own salon and doyenne of the Catholic intelligentsia, co-worker with her husband Wilfrid on a variety of journals, Meynell was a woman on the scene.¹³

Her essay collection The Rhythm of Life, published in 1893 under the entrepreneurial imprimatur of John Lane, propelled her to stardom. Always one to seize the main chance, Lane hoped to capitalize on The Rhythm of Life by reintroducing Meynell's poetry to the market. Meynell, too, who valued her poetry more than her prose, must have eagerly welcomed this new spotlight on her verse. Thus was Poems born. Lane reissued thirty-one poems from Preludes under the new title, adding only seven previously uncollected poems. Only two had been written since 1890.

The 1893 Poems, then, reintroduced Meynell the poet to the literary world, but her 90s audience met the Victorian Meynell, her few new poems swallowed up by the far more numerous poems of Preludes. Meynell herself bears some responsibility for the new book's arrangement, since she always helped orchestrate her publications. Still, she had revised many of Preludes’ poems, and excluded those she felt too immature. Critics paid no mind. For them, the book reconfirmed Meynell's early repute. While an occasional review mentions the “thought” behind the verse, critical blurbs on the extensive endpapers of Meynell's The Spirit of Place repeat the telling words: “delicate,” “refined,” “beautiful,” “deep, moving…, simple,” “charm,” “intensely feminine,” “a chaste and exalted…loveliness of idea,” “a chaste and delicate fancy.” In the same Lane adverts, Graham Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson) in the Academy notes in Poems the “charm…of the intellect, of the spiritual emotions”; the poems, she writes, are “melancholy, with never the echo of a whine; sweet with an almost exultant nobility of sorrow” (Spirit).

For many, Meynell's more recent fame for aesthetic prose only underscored the point. For Wilde, at least, exquisite prose, that hallmark of the aesthetes, seemed perfectly consonant with the label “poetess.” In “English Poetesses,” he had argued that Meynell, like most poetesses, “had done really good work in poetry,” but not good enough. Poetry, he writes, “is for our highest moods, when we wish to be with the gods.” The ladies, he suggests, should turn their hands to prose, since “prose is for our daily bread…. [and the poetesses’] light touch and exquisite ear, and delicate sense of balance and proportion, would be of no small service to us” in this lesser, “more secular art” (63–64). So Meynell's prose, suitable for the aesthetes, only reconfirmed her reputation as a feminine poet, and thus by definition, a second-rate one. Most unfortunately for Meynell's place in the 90s, her sonnet “Renouncement,” which she had written at age twenty-one, appeared for the first time – she was now forty-six – and perpetuated the myth that haunted her poetic reception even well beyond her death.

“Renouncement” addresses an unnamed beloved whom the poet must foreswear: “I must not think of thee… / I shun the thought that lurks in all delight – / The thought of thee” (1–3). Written when the young Catholic convert had fallen in love with a priest, the sonnet sanctifies self-denial to the point of keeping at bay even thoughts of the beloved. Only sleep brings relief from the “long watch I keep” against such thoughts: “With the first dream…, / I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart” (13–14). Technically accomplished, the poem's sentiment and theme of self-denial nevertheless played into the hands of critics who would mold Meynell into an angelic Victorian poetess. Rossetti's view of the sonnet as one of the best ever written by a woman appears in the blurbs at the back of virtually every one of her subsequent volumes. And while Coventry Patmore recognized an intellectual quality in Meynell's early verse, his notice took some convoluted turns. An ardent Meynell fan, Patmore rhapsodized over this “phenomenon of a woman whose qualities of mind and heart seem to demand a revision of its conception of womanhood” (“Mrs. Meynell” 199), suggesting that Meynell possessed that rare quality in a woman, masculinity of mind. As intriguing as Patmore's call to revision may be, the left hand takes away what the right has given. By virtue of that admirable masculine intellect, he finds her without “sufficient force of that ultimate womanhood, the expressional body.” The feminine factor in the truly great poetic mind, he argues, belongs to Keats and Shelley, and in them “is a greater thing than woman” (202). Meynell's work, in other words, might seem to demand a revised conception of womanhood, but the seeming turns out to be a mirage, and critics, including Patmore, continued to respond to Meynell in conventional, stereotypical terms. The intellectual bent of her poetry usually went unheralded except in remarks of wonderment that it proved the rule about women's verse.

It would be hard to overestimate the role “Renouncement” played in fixing Meynell's poetic place, leaving her outside the story of the poetic 90s, and thus eliminating her from accounts of poetry's evolution toward modernism. In one 1923 eulogy, an anonymous Dublin Review critic chose this “most perfect” sonnet to represent Meynell's achievement; it is, he writes, “the best example of the poet's art as the exact representation of a woman's character; here we have ardour restrained by discipline, impetuosity held in check by a sense of proportion, austere obedience to the laws of duty and art…” (“Mrs. Meynell: An Appreciation” 304). By then, the poem was sixty-five years old. Not even a lifetime's work, most of it far different from “Renouncement,” could dislodge this icon. Unfortunately for Meynell's reputation, we would have to agree with the unintentionally ironic Professor Dowden, whose prophetic Academy review was excerpted for the endpapers of the 1893 Poems: “‘Renouncement’ is a sonnet which I think the world will not easily let die.” Indeed, it didn’t. Nor did the world relinquish its vision of Meynell as essentially feminine, angelic, and Victorian.

As is becoming well-known, poets like Tennyson, Coventry Patmore, and George Meredith helped perpetuate a vision of the angelic Meynell even while they championed her work. In Patmore's and Meredith's case, and to a lesser extent, Francis Thompson’s, aesthetic admiration merged with what could only be called fixations with Meynell's ethereal loveliness. Meredith named an iris after her; Patmore wrote a paean to her feet; and Thompson penned Love in Dian's Lap, a poem cycle in homage to her maternal, physical, and heavenly beauty. In “A Carrier Song” from that group, for example, the speaker pledges, “Whereso your angel is, / My angel goeth” (Collected Works 85). As Talia Schaffer has argued, Meynell, even while working assiduously amidst the aesthetes of the fin de siècle and promoting feminist views in her work, herself helped cultivate this image (Forgotten 159–96). Unfortunately, the angelic persona made it easy to oversimplify or altogether miss the qualities of her poetry; this remained true even after her death, as writers like Richard Le Gallienne published fin-de-siècle memoirs. In 1926, Le Gallienne described Meynell as “a veritable Egeria in the London literary world” and waxed euphorically over “the flower of her gentle humane sanctity,” “exquisite aestheticism,” and the “charm of a beautiful abbess” which hovered about her (129, 130). She was remembered more as a figure, an aesthetes’ version of a woman, than as a poet.

Small wonder, then, that no one noticed that an extraordinary change had begun in Meynell's poetry, visible in only two of Poems’ inclusions: “Veni Creator” and the “The Moon to the Sun (The Poet speaks to her Poet).” These poems – however buried under Preludes, critical blindness to revisions in the earlier poems, the manifold prejudice of the term “poetess,” and Meynell's delicate aesthetic persona – announced that she had begun to write less “feminine,” more intellectually rigorous poetry. Poems, in fact, opened new creative gates for Meynell. After a poetic silence of more than fifteen years, new volumes appeared in 1896, 1902, 1913, and 1917; two posthumous volumes appeared in 1923.

One of the new poems, “Veni Creator,” had debuted first in the Scots Observer in 1890 and bears the unmistakable stamp of Crashaw's “Divine Epigrams.” Written after the death of her infant, Meynell's poem exemplifies the compressed argument and paradox characteristic of her model, asking Christ to bear one last human burden, the humility of pardon:

Here, Meynell pushes the paradox of divine humility as far as it will go. The poem at once recognizes and honors Christ's humility in suffering to save mankind, but also finds that God has not humbled himself enough. “The time has come” the speaker declares, to remedy the lack, to experience the “undreamed humility” of begging human pardon. The paradox at the heart of the poem, God's both greatness and humility, is central to Meynell's Catholic belief. Yet in that orthodoxy, she finds room to invert the relation of exalted God and humble penitent, blaming the “Lord of Heaven” for the death of her child. In a poetic argument bordering on heresy, God becomes not only human, but also a sinner. While Meynell's (scant) religious verse in Preludes is often far from the simple, orthodox sweetness one might expect from reading her reviews, nothing in Preludes remotely approaches the argument of “Veni Creator.” Its compression and play with Christian paradox link Meynell clearly to the epigram and paradox wielded by Wilde and others in the 1890s,¹⁴ as well as to poets like Crashaw. From Crashaw, too, she seems to have learned that the intellectual rigor of metaphysical conceits could transform religious verse into something far greater than conventional devotional poetry. This was no small discovery for a woman poet seeking a new poetic.

While Meynell's metaphysical turn belongs to the larger framework of the 1890s revival, she also turned toward Crashaw in the context of her mutually influential relationship with Francis Thompson. The Meynells had famously rescued Thompson from starvation, opium addiction, and sleeping in the gutter after he submitted an article to Merry England, the Meynells’ Catholic periodical, and from then on, he worked closely with the Meynells as friend, writer, and sometime dependent. The Meynells published his first essay on Crashaw in Merry England in 1889, one year before Meynell's “Veni Creator” saw print. In 1897, he published a second Crashaw essay in the Academy. The differences between these two essays, in 1888 and 1897, suggest that in the early 90s, Thompson, like Meynell, and alongside her, had become a convert to the metaphysical poets.

Thompson's earlier essay half-heartedly tried to rescue the poet from his alleged flaws, flaws Thompson felt compelled to lay before his readers. He describes a “secular genius” (“Crashaw” [1889] 131) nonetheless marred by the “perverted ardor of his devotion to the false fashion” of conceits (135). Only Crashaw's gifts for diction and meter offset this unfortunate “devotion.” How different his 1897 assessment would be. In the later essay, Thompson praises a number of features he had previously lambasted. Crashaw was the first lyric poet, Thompson writes, to exhibit “ardourous abandonment” in his odes, and evinced “real fervour, such as makes metre and diction plastic to its own shaping spirit of inevitable rightness” (“Crashaw” [1897] 176). Crashaw's “marvel of diction” and passionate abandon, which Meynell also admired, are clearly consonant with the aesthetes’ affinity for the bon mot and “impulsive, frolic” living. So, too, is his “brilliant imagery, rapturous ethereality!” (176), which for Thompson, works best in none other than those features he had previously attributed to “perverted ardour” and “false fashion,” the conceits of his sacred poetry. Thompson's “The Hound of Heaven” may employ the period's most outrageous religious conceit, a sign that in his encounters with Crashaw, he changed not only his mind as a critic, but also his practice as a poet. Meynell had preceded Thompson in both arenas, which suggests her role in helping steer his new course. Her privately printed 1896 Other Poems contains “The Shepherdess,” “The Fold,” and “The Roaring Frost,” all of which play with the conceit of thoughts as flocks and the poet or lover as sheepfold. “Parentage” and “Cradle Song at Twilight” employ ingenious and unsentimental poetic argument to explore maternity.¹⁵

And her critical essay on Crashaw, “‘Fair and Flagrant Things,’” appeared in 1897 in the Pall Mall Gazette, seven months before Thompson's second essay was published. That column unconditionally celebrates her subject. Meynell takes the poet's own paradoxical phrase as apt description of his work, defending Crashaw's “extravagance” from his eighteenth-century detractors (and, perhaps, from Thompson). Unlike the “dreary art…in the age, so-called of reason and of moderate mind,” Meynell argues, Crashaw's “flagrant things” are “fair.” He was “Just, buoyant, balanced, zephyr-gentle, spring fresh, impulsive, frolic and free in his radiant poetry” (26). This view of Crashaw coincides with changes in her poetry, as well as with alterations in Thompson's views. It also suggests a far different sensibility than the one critics had found in either Preludes or her 1893 Poems.

It is worth looking at the poems Thompson admires in his second Crashaw essay, since the changes in both his and Meynell's work seem borne out of contact with the poet and one another. These include Crashaw's “Hymn to Sainte Teresa,” its sequel “The Flaming Heart,” and “A Hymne of the Nativity, sung by the Shepheards.” In these poems from Crashaw's sacred works, the poet's humanizing of the sacred and the fusion of sacred and sensual offered Meynell a range of new possibilities. The nativity hymn presents shepherds singing of the infant's cradle:

Thompson argues that here was “the human and lover-like tenderness which informs [Crashaw’s] sacred poems, differentiating them from the conventional style of English sacred poetry, with its solemn aloofness from celestial things” (177). Meynell sympathizes with such a view in her nativity and crucifixion poems even in Preludes. Her poem “Advent Meditation,” for example, celebrates Christ's birth as a natural event from a maternal point of view: “No sudden thing of glory and fear / Was the Lord's coming; but the dear / Slow Nature's days followed each other / To form the Saviour from His Mother / – One of the children of the year” (1–4). Meynell writes with similar sensibility in Later Poems (1902). There, for example, “Unto Us a Son is Given” presents the Christ child in a tone indistinguishable from poems about her own children: “New every year, / New born and newly dear, / He comes with tidings and a song” (5–7). Similarly, in “Christmas Night,” which appeared in Last Poems (1923), the speaker adores the Christ child's “homeless childish head.”

Meynell's emphasis on the human side of the divine incarnation is more than an inflection of orthodoxy. It also places her amidst a fin-de-siècle insistence on body and spirit as necessarily entwined. Lionel Johnson, one of the leading proponents of this unity, expressed such a view in July of 1896 in his “The Soul of Sacred Poetry.” Like Thompson in his essays and Meynell in her poetry, he argued for sensuality in devotional poetry: “this poetry abhors generalities: it will not be afraid to face the details of divine history. Take the Nativity. Here is an hour-old baby, lying, perhaps crying, upon stable litter…this wretched baby could abolish time and space, for it is God” (114). For Johnson, too many devotional poets fail to master this paradox; “their piety paralyses their poetic wits; a dry formality of phrase besets them, a kind of consecrated commonplace…. It is as though originality in the poetry of faith were a dangerous thing, and sensuous beauty of expression in dwelling upon things celestial and supersensuous to be condemned” (118). Johnson had poetry like Meynell's in mind when he defended such human imagery: “If any man…thinks it ‘indecent’ to write intimately of the Divine Infancy, he is one who, had he been a contemporary of the Divine Infant, would have shrunk from acknowledging its divinity” (115).

Importantly for Meynell, writing both humanly and sensually of the sacred evades the sweet disembodied sanctity that she eschewed, that critics seemed to find in her early verse and which does, in fact, mark poems like “Renouncement.” Now, she went far beyond writing of the sacred in sensual terms. Drawing on Crashaw's religious lyrics, as well as on other seventeenth-century poets, Meynell also began to reformulate what it meant to be a poet. In her post-90s poetry, religiosity and sensuality are not mutually exclusive but necessarily conjoined: one with the other, and both with beauty – and thus with poetry – a view being explored by the decadent Catholic converts all over England.¹⁶

Thompson's second essay on Crashaw's “Hymns to St. Teresa” (1897) suggests that these poems, which unabashedly mix soul and sense in the compressed logic of the hymns’ conceits, gave Meynell even further license to enter that decadent terrain.

In the first hymn, Crashaw describes Teresa's martyrdom not as self-abnegation, but as surrender to a lover's embrace: “How kindly will thy gentle Heart / Kisse the sweetly-killing Dart! / And close in his embraces keep / Those delicious Wounds…” (105–08). The phallic dart and sexual “wounds” are a far cry from the “chaste and delicate fancy”¹⁷

praised in Meynell's poetry. So too, the sensual teaching that follows in Crashaw's hymn, with the lips, not mind or heart, learning heaven's ways: “O what delight, when reveal’d LIFE shall stand / And teach thy lipps heav’n with his hand” (129–30). The conceit concludes with Teresa surrounded by “Thousands of crown’d Soules” who are “Sons of thy vows, / The virgin-births with which thy soveraign spouse / Made fruitfull thy fair soul” (166–69). Of this first hymn to Teresa, Thompson extols “the most beautiful delicacies of language and metre,” not mentioning the extraordinary sensuality of its imagery (“Crashaw” [1897] 179). But of the third hymn, “The Flaming Heart,” he claims it “has all the ardour and brave-soaring transport of the highest lyrical inspiration” (180). That wonderful word “ardour,” which Thompson also uses in his general assessment of Crashaw (“ardourous abandonment”), bespeaks the burning intensity of both sensual and spiritual desire. The poem's most famous lines leave no mistake about the potential for linking physical ardour and spiritual transport. To Teresa, “thou undaunted daughter of desires,” the poet presents a litany of things by which he prays for martyrdom: Meynell would have known this poem through her conversations with Thompson while he worked on his essay. Whether or not it was she who showed him the possibilities of the poems, which his earlier essay had mentioned only briefly for their skillful meter; or he had come around to her views through a different path, for Meynell, Crashaw's hymns would suggest that sacred self-annihilation could be both poetically energizing and erotically charged.¹⁸ Her work already bears the stamp of that lesson in a second poem from the 1893 volume, “The Moon to the Sun (the Poet sings to her Poet).”

“The Moon to the Sun” suggests the metaphysical poets’ influence in its melding of body, mind, and spirit; and in its elaborately argued conceit:

In this poem, Meynell employs such metaphysical elements as the sensuality of the divine and the erotics of inspiration. The initial and seemingly conventional conceit establishes the poet as reflective moon to the brighter sun, her muse. The figure of the sun as the “secret glory-giver” suggests both a human poet-muse and God, and as the creator of the poet herself, the poet's poet. By echoing the Song of Solomon, the end of the first stanza suggests that the lover is both human and divine: “O my light, I am dark but fair, / Black but fair” (5–6); the King James version reads “I am black but comely” (5:1). Nineteenth-century Biblical exegesis often read an analogy of Christ's love for the church in these love songs, eager to transpose the erotic content into a more spiritual key. But Meynell simultaneously exploits both spiritual and sensual dimensions as the poem's argument develops, alluding to the Song of Solomon's next line, “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.” The poet-lover, having been “looked upon” by the sun, then acts as medium between the earth and her divine muse not as a passive reflective agent, but through the power of thought, which is more than intellectual, but also sensual: the sun radiates “secrets that I treasure/I translate them at my pleasure” (9–10). “At my pleasure” also suggests “at my will,” which starts the first turn in the argument as the feminine moon-poet takes on agency and power. Through her mediation, the earth loves the sun not directly, but “through thoughts of mine” (8). Paradoxically, this act of reflected and thus muted glory empowers the moon-poet: through her willed translation, she is “crowned with glory of thine,/Thine, not thine” (11–12). The last line's contradiction, “Thine, not thine” – in which the moon-poet wrests glory away from the sun – is elaborated in the final stanza. Here, the reflective, passive moon becomes the creator, making possible the sun's continued shining at night: “…to earth which thou forsakest/I have made thee fair all night,/Day all night” (16–18). Sensual pleasure and thought thus fuse in the pensiveness of delight as the moon simultaneously usurps the sun's radiating power. This sun becomes the weaker partner, as well, because of his fickleness; at night, he forsakes the earth to which the moon faithfully sends the sun's light. Beverly Schlack has pointed out that this poem reverses the ordinary gendered powers associated with the sun and moon (119); Meynell achieves this reversal through the argument of her conceit. How different from the moon in Wilde's Sâlomé, figure for both the virginal and devouring sensuality of the heroine.

To appreciate the change that this poem represents in Meynell's work, one need only read an early, exemplary sonnet commemorating her initiation into both poetry and the Church. “The Young Neophyte,” written in the same year as “Renouncement” and published in Preludes, begins by asking what future her present commitment will bring: “Who knows what days I answer for to-day?/Giving the bud I give the flower” (1–2). The speaker then sees her imagined but unknown future self kneeling beside her, the two praying together: “I bow/This yet unfaded and a faded brow” (2–3). In the face of the future's mystery, the convert makes a vow: “I dedicate my fields when Spring is grey” (8). In the sestet, her vow then extends to poetry, her “love to be, my folded art,” an art whose destiny is also uncertain. She wonders at the future, her “[h]ands trembling with what toils?” (11), though she pledges, too, this unknown toil, her “thoughts unripe,” her “hidden wheat” (5–9). The figuration of self and future self kneeling together, and the enfolding of two vocations in one set of prayerful hands, suggests Meynell's early inclination toward the complexity inherent in metaphysical poetry. Not so the poem's sentiment. In a closing move of complete abjection, the speaker imagines the end of a devout and poetic life entailed in this present moment: “I light the tapers at my head and feet,/And lay the crucifix on this silent heart” (13–14). In taking on her religious and poetic vocations as one, she has become the funerary monument on her own tomb. A greater act of self-abnegation would be hard to imagine.

Meynell's yoking of spiritual and poetic vocations had come by way of the Romantics, first through Wordsworth and later Shelley, as she attests in her diary. In fact, she had claimed that Shelley had led her to Catholic conversion, and the holiness of her conjoined destinies resonates with his influence. It also resonates with the troubling expectations of feminine self-denial. Beginning with “The Moon to the Sun,” however, and in many later poems, Meynell links the sacred with her poetic vocation without the stone-cold self-effacement seemingly demanded by her earlier models. Instead, she could revel in the transcendence of poetry while remaining rooted in the intellectual and spiritual delights of the material world.

After the 1893 volume, Meynell began to thrive under the influence of her seventeenth-century predecessors. She brought out a new volume in 1896 (Other Poems) and a year later, took her passion to the Pall Mall Gazette, publishing essays on not only Crashaw, but Lovelace, Campion, Vaughan, Marvell, Waller, and Jonson. Wonderfully, the columns devoted to seventeenth-century poetry appeared among a miscellany of other topics. The year began with her observations on the cruelty of women's fashions, and “Dowers for Poor Brides” in March preceded “My Lovelace,” her first essay on the metaphysicals. Then the Crashaw essay, “‘Fair and Flagrant Things,’” followed a week of observations about speaking to beggars in the London streets. In May, a column devoted to train travel in Italy interrupted a series of poetic topics (“Elegy,” “Abraham Cowley,” and “The Hand,” devoted to Carew, Campion, and Cowley), and “Campion” in June preceded “London Trees.” “Andrew Marvell” had the honor of following “The Smouldering City” in July, and “Go, Lovely Rose,” on Waller, preceded a series of miscellaneous topics before Meynell returned to seventeenth-century topics with “Ben Jonson” in August and “Henry Vaughan” on September 8. Mingling essays on poetry with observations about everyday life, Meynell also brings together the period's tightly woven, and closely related strands: the aesthete's delight in the beauty of life's minutiae; and the metaphysicals’ capacity for ecstatic transport through contact with the physical world.

In her Pall Mall Gazette columns, Meynell echoed other adherents of the metaphysicals, notably Lionel Johnson, and promoted her own version of the seventeenth-century's virtues: rapture, flight, and ecstasy. In her introduction to Cowper's poems, she would argue approvingly of the seventeenth-century poets that “It was not good sense they desired, it was delirium. They aimed at ecstasy” (iii). Cowper, too late for such delirium, fell prey to his own century, which tolerated “no passion” (iii). In Lovelace's conceits, as well, Meynell finds a “living symbolism…[which] is, in truth, a rapture” (“My Lovelace” 21). She celebrates the audacity of his figures, the “flight” of his poetry to rapturous heights and his “light and spirit” of freedom (“My Lovelace”). She found the same intensity, passion, and spirituality in Vaughan, which bound him to the Romantics, as did his regret for childhood innocence and his unsentimental relationship to nature. Vaughan, she says, writes of “Nature herself, alone, the very nature, swept of fairies, clear of nymphs and sylvans,…woods left to the birds, hills left to sunrise, streams left to their own voices…– over these ranged that luminous imagination…” (“Henry Vaughan” 66). And while Meynell reserved her greatest acclaim for Crashaw, she also honored Marvell's version of Crashaw's paradoxical “fair and flagrant” things, his “wild civility” (“Andrew Marvell” 48).

Throughout the essays, wildness, rapture, flight, and ecstasy become Meynell's watchwords, qualities deserving honor and emulation. These, together with paradox, complex poetic argument, and conceits, distinguish Meynell's poetry throughout the 90s and beyond and place her squarely amidst the poets of her age. She shares her contemporaries’ belief in the sensual as gateway to the divine, as articulated for example, by Johnson's “The Soul of Sacred Poetry” or Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature. And as much as she was a Catholic poet, her sense of the sacred in poetry was bound more to poetic ecstasy than to any narrow religious sensibility. We see this not only in poetry like “The Moon to the Sun,” but also in her criticism, exemplified by her 1910 “The Mystical Lyric.” In this introduction to The Mount of Vision, Meynell begins by recognizing the rich tradition in English of the religious lyric. But she uses the word “religious” only because the word “mystical” has been used too easily, without recognizing the “fifty years of self-conquest and self-abandonment” necessary for true mystical vision. One recent (unnamed) novel in particular, she writes, presents visions and revelations as “easy to come by,” “incidents of well-read aspiration” (x). Yet what Meynell means by religious here has little to do with religion and everything to do with poets as mystics. They, unlike true Saints, can dispense with the fifty years of self-denial by virtue of their gifts. Poets “become mystics by their genius and the divinity of their imagination” (xi). Her catalogue of these “religious,” genuinely mystical poets lists none other than the seventeenth-century poets. In Crashaw, Cowley, Donne, Vaughan, Traherne, Marvell, and Lovelace, the century “breathes its fragrant breath and shows its visionary lights” (xi). And while most of these poets wrote on religious topics, Meynell means something else by calling them mystical poets; for while she includes Herbert in the list, she makes a crucial distinction: he is “rather exclusively religious than inclusively mystical.” And Marvell, she writes, is “a mystic of natural rather than preternatural things” (xi). Mystical lyrics, then, require no specific religious devotion or content. In fact, the “slight delirium in the visionary mind” which her own contemporaries sometimes notice in the metaphysicals, she writes, is “strangely evident in the very commonplaces of their poems” (xiv, my emphasis). These commonplaces include inconstant mistresses, falling in love, Nature, or the “austerity of morning” in Crashaw's “Satisfaction for Sleep” (xv).

For Meynell, the beginning and end of mystical poetry remains the ordinary material world, embodied in the poetic image. She articulates this view in an essay on Charlotte and Emily Brontë, in which she describes a poet's maturation. The description echoes her own development from a Romantically inspired to a metaphysical poet, and rests quietly, at the last, on the image of earthly things. She argues that

In the figure of the “hypaethral temple” as the end of poetry, Meynell echoes other fin-de-siècle celebrations of poetry's spiritual power. Her ideas about poetry also make clear that our notion of fin-de-siècle symbolism is too narrow, restricted to those poets associated with Symons and the Symbolist Movement. In its broadest sense, as Murray G. Pittock has argued, symbolism stood as the poetic corollary of anti-materialism at the fin-de-siècle, an attempt, as Arthur Symons writes, “to spiritualise literature,” the poetic symbol leading “through beautiful things to eternal beauty” (Symbolist 7). In the passage above, we see that Meynell's aesthetic is itself a symbolist one. The “complex decoration” of poetry links “simple earth and a space of sky” to “hypaethral temple,” the ineffable place beyond poetry, almost beyond knowing. And yet, within that temple, the simple image remains. Meynell's symbolist view of the image becomes itself the subject of several poems, among them “The Courts. A Figure of the Epiphany,” which first appeared in her 1913 Collected Poems. The central conceit equates poetic figuration and the three kings’ approach to Bethlehem after the birth of Christ; here, poetic image mediates between human seeker and divine god, leading the way to the boundary past which poetic achievement rarely goes: Images, similes, Crashaw's “fair and flagrant things,” lead the way for pilgrim kings; but as she would often write, Meynell also recognizes in the poem the limits of imagery. Not an end in itself, it leads the way to the divine, with the ultimate revelation somehow beyond it: “Ultimate poetry,” like the Christ child, is the goal, and only some poets (those poets “loaded,” perhaps, with extraordinary gifts) reach it; those who do are like the kings, achieving in one moment and one image the transcendence of both spiritual and poetic epiphany. But it all begins, and ultimately ends, in the simple, sensual image: the earth and sky, a Child.

Meynell created her most ambitious metaphysical conceits in her last years, with a three-part poem “Reflexions” (Last Poems 1923). Each part begins with an identical image – “A mirror faced a mirror” – and explores the metaphysics of figuration, the similitude of disparate objects (or persons) linked through metaphor. In Section I, “In Ireland,” the mirrors set “ire and hate/Opposite ire and hate” (1–2); this double image leads to an infinitely reflected and mutual recrimination. As each side's image reflects its opposite, the distinction between them collapses until they become one:

Through what she calls the “light mystery of images” (“The Return to Nature”), Meynell here explores the power of similitude almost to dizzying heights, collapsing political difference into the conjoined energies of a mutually destructive hatred. She continues the exercise in the poem's second section, “In Othello,” building on the mutual attraction of Othello and Desdemona.¹⁹ The mirrors reflect “His dangers with her pity” in a play of infinite and flirtatious exchange: “His dangers with her pity did she track,/Received her pity with his love again,/And these she wafted back” (10–12). Again, as in the first section, the reflected opposites begin to meld as each takes on the other's attributes, until their differences dissolve. “His dangers” merge with “her pity” until “That masculine passion in her little breast/She bandied with him; her compassion he/Bandied with her” (13–15). The section closes ironically: “What tender sport! No rest/Had love's infinity.” Desdemona's violent end, like the violence in “Ireland,” has its origin in the mutual dependency and entanglement of similitude.

A more divine infinity informs the poem's final section, “In Two Poets.” Here, the mirrors set the “lord of images” opposite the poet-speaker in a dynamic of reflection that melds creative and spiritual power and achieves some infinite end:

The already-complex double-mirror image has been augmented by that of the homing bird, both Holy Spirit and more earthly carrier pigeon, which on leaving its source, is already bound for home. “The word,” thus, returns to its source even as it simultaneously “locks” to the poet's heart. It is both image and reflected image, “word” and returning word; and in the process of return, word and origin are magnified and again rebound to the poet: “Thy migratory greatness, greater far/For that return, returns” (21–22). Ultimately, in the play of migratory inspiration and magnification, thoughts of the poet and her “lord of images” merge: “now grow divine/by endlessness my visiting thoughts, that are/Those visiting thoughts of thine” (21–24). In this union, divine thoughts and poet's thoughts meld until both are “visiting thoughts,” and the poet's thoughts divine. Through the power of the conceit, the two unlike parts of this metaphor evolve toward such similitude that the earthly poet takes on sacred power.

Meynell wrote of this poem that “it has succeeded in singing the highest thought of intellectual passion and emotion of which I am capable,” though she lamented that “no one cares for it” (Viola Meynell 317). Surely an exaggeration, this assessment nonetheless suggests an implicit awareness that few understood or appreciated the turn she had taken in the 90s. At her death, the Dublin Review writer F. P., who had waxed rapturous over “Renouncement,” tried to reconcile the “sweet singer of Preludes” with her more modern work. Adhering to the Victorian paradigm of the female poet, he remarks that “[it] has been regretted that her poetry…lacked spontaneity, unconscious rapture” (303–04). Meynell herself never regretted that those feminine traits had given way to metaphysical logic and wit, and to conscious, intellectual passion.

The literary history of the 1890s began to take shape while the period's ink still flowed, beginning with Symons's 1893 “The Decadent Movement in Literature.” Symons's celebration of the French symbolists, as well as of Pater and W. E. Henley, established the official view of the period's paradigm shift and became the template underlying later accounts of the literary scene. By no small coincidence, Symons's version of this literary revolution appeared the same year as Meynell's The Rhythm of Life and Poems, and the literary qualities Symons admired in his contemporaries also characterize Meynell. Her prose, in fact, exemplified the virtues that Symons found in Pater; his “minute elaboration” and “delicacy,” the fact that he “found a large part of mastery in reticence,” were all phrases used at one time or another to describe Meynell's prose. And her new poetry, via the metaphysical conceit, exploited the symbol to bridge material and immaterial in complex and powerful ways, ways that Symons admired in the French. Yet his essay left writers like Meynell out of the story he told.

The prospect of writing Meynell into literary history of the 90s became even less likely with Yeats's 1897 “Mr. Symons's New Book” in the Bookman. Yeats's version of the contemporary poetry scene relied on Symons's and further solidified an exclusionary view of fin-de-siècle poetry, a story that would become definitive through Yeats’ many retellings and again through Symons's 1899 preface to The Symbolist Movement in Literature. In the Bookman, Yeats applauds Symons as “a writer who has carried further than most of his contemporaries that revolt against the manifold, the impersonal, the luxuriant, and the external, which is perhaps the great movement of our time, and of more even than literary importance” (qtd. in Thornton 25). In this revolt, according to Yeats, Symons's allies were the Rhymers’ club and its satellite members – all male – a story Yeats would repeat in “The Tragic Generation” (Autobiographies 277–350) and again in his 1937 introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (v–xlii). Tellingly, Yeats includes three of Meynell's poems in that landmark anthology: two short religious verses and the much-lauded albatross, “Renouncement.”

Through Yeats's intervention and by virtue of his stature, the Symons-French Symbolism-Rhymers’ Club story became, in essence, the twentieth-century's story of the poetic 90s. Relegated to a footnote until Eliot renewed it in the 1920s was the 90s metaphysical revival, which had inspired a number of poetic careers, including Meynell’s. Eliot recognized the relationship between the metaphysical poets and the fin-de-siècle poets whose names – Symons, Johnson, Thompson, Symbolists, Rhymers – endured well past the end of the nineteenth century, and Meynell's name deserves to be remembered in this company.²⁰

As he considered the poets of his own time, the modernists, Eliot argued that like the metaphysicals, they “comprehend great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results…. Hence we get something which looks very much like a conceit” (“Metaphysical” 248). Meynell's complexity, her conceits, the argument of her verse, all make her a forerunner of what, in Eliot's estimation, is poetry that counts. Here, she deserves to be remembered, too.

At the time of her death, critics who did recognize the intellectual rigor of her work struggled to free her from the critics who still saw only the “ladylike” quality of Preludes. G. K. Chesterton, perhaps Meynell's best-known and most insightful contemporary critic, chafed against the

Chesterton's percipient defense is offset by his emphasis on her Catholicism as the Idea that fixed her focus and eliminated her from a place amidst the new century's skeptics. In part, Chesterton is right, and Meynell's lack of skepticism does keep her work from the harder edges of modernism. In emphasizing her faith so exclusively, however, Chesterton has also skewed our understanding of the degree to which she also belonged in a larger sense to her times.²¹ Too-narrow accounts of modernism also keep her from consideration. As Celeste M. Schenck argues, poets like Meynell have been disqualified by a monolithic view of modernism as belonging only to “the experimenters, the form-breakers, and the vers-librists – that is, the men” (225). So excluded from literary history by narrow views of fin-de-siècle poetry and of modernism, misread through the lens of Victorian gender paradigms, and haunted by the reputation of her youth, Meynell has not yet been given her rightful place in literary history.

In a 1909 essay on Swinburne, Meynell complains that

Meynell suggests that such confining definitions result from, perhaps, a “liking for symmetry” or even worse, “the fear of human mystery” (172). The curious possibility that inexact or incomprehensive accounts might better describe a poet's spirit seems instructive here. Meynell feared neither the asymmetry of paradox nor the mystery of incarnation, either poetic or divine, and she escapes from her captors, the makers of “epigrams” and “phrases,” through a number of interesting doors. Alice Meynell deserves to be read as a complex poetic and critical voice who slipped out of the Victorian world and into the twentieth century, by the way of the metaphysical poets and through the mystery of images, alongside her fin-de-siècle peers.