Poems (Mary Coleridge)

Poetry needs no introduction; but with the present volume a few words of explanation seem desirable. As a poetess, Mary Coleridge never came before the public under her own name; her printed verse was always either anonymous or signed with the pseudonym "Ανοδοζ—a name taken from George Macdonald's romance, "Phantastes," where it is evidently intended to bear the meaning of "Wanderer." Probably several reasons or feelings prompted this concealment; the one by which my own arguments were always met was the fear of tarnishing the name which an ancestor had made illustrious in English poetry. ​She would close the discussion with a gay and characteristic inconsistency—"Never, as long as I live! When I am dead, you may do as you like." Now that death has so soon taken her at her word, I cannot help thinking myself justified in acting on that permission, however lightly given; and I believe that no poems are less likely than these to jar upon lovers of "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner."

The poems of "Ανοδοζ have already made friends for themselves, and their re-appearance in a single volume, accessible to all, has long been desired. Those numbered I. to XLVIII. in the present collection were issued in 1896 by Mr. Daniel, from his private press at Oxford: but the edition was limited to one hundred and twenty-five copies, of which about one-third are now, it is believed, in America, and the remainder in this country practically beyond the reach of a purchaser. ​Of the pieces in that volume—"Fancy's Following"—eleven were used, with seven new ones, to make up "Fancy's Guerdon," a little paper book published in the following year by Mr. Elkin Mathews in his "Shilling Garland." The seven new ones are those here given as Nos. XLIX.-LV. They are followed by twelve poems—Nos. LVI.-LXVII.—which appeared in 1898 in a volume by several authors, called "The Garland"; and after these are placed ten others—Nos. LXVIII.-LXXVII.—contributed singly to the Spectator, the Pilot, and other periodicals during the years 1900-1907.

These seventy-seven pieces, then, form the whole o;' the poetical levy of Ανοδοζ: and although they are now, on setting forth under their true colours, to be finally merged in a much greater company, I have thought it best to place them at the head of the column and ​in their original order, so that they may preserve something of their old association and be the more easily greeted by their friends. But it must not be supposed that the hundred and sixty poems which follow them are all later in date of composition, or, in my judgment, inferior to them in beauty.

Mary Coleridge wrote verse from an early age: the present collection is the gleaning of twenty-five years, and every year of the twenty-five has contributed something to the sheaf. She has left, perhaps, three hundred poems; but some of them deal with things of private interest only, some are light verse written by way of correspondence to intimate friends, some remain unfinished or uncorrected; so that the two hundred and thirty-seven now printed must be accepted not as an instalment, but as the sum of her achievement in poetry. Nothing remains over, which could give a new ​pleasure to her admirers, or throw fresh light upon her deeper thoughts, or affect the ultimate verdict.

It might, perhaps, have been possible to date most of the pieces: but this is the less necessary because their order in time does not in any way coincide with their order in merit; and it would have been misleading, because a poem when written was often laid aside for years, and then remodelled or retouched with an almost transforming power. It is possible that some of those which I have included had not yet come to their destined perfection, and one or two might in the end have been rejected by their author, as being intentional experiments in a manner not her own. To this latter class belong the lines "To a Tree" and "From my Window," of which I retain the first on principle, as having been actually published, and the second from preference, because it ​seems to me characteristic not only of one poet, but of two.

It seemed worth while to mention these exceptional poems, because in the general mass of her work Mary Coleridge, though legitimately descended from many poets, was the imitator of none. Her poems were the offspring of character not less than of intellect; they possess, as her friend Mr. Bridges has said in a recent article,^[1] "the delicate harmony of special excellences that makes originality . . . and often exhibit imagination of a very rare kind, conveyed by the identical expression of true feeling and artistic insight. . . . It is their intimacy and spontaneity that give them so great a value. They will be her portrait, an absolutely truthful picture of a wondrously beautiful and gifted spirit, whom "thought could not make melancholy, nor sorrow ​sad: not in conventional attitude, nor with fixed features, nor lightly to be interpreted, nor even always to be understood, but mystical rather and enigmatical; a poetic effigy, the only likeness of worth; a music self-born of her contact with the wisdom and passion of the world, and which all the folly and misery of man could provoke only to gentle and loving strains."

I have quoted this passage at length, because it is, generous as it sounds, a piece of analysis rather than of eulogy: it comes to me, a friend and admirer of even older standing, as a bare and careful statement of truth, fitted, by its exactness, to my present purpose of explanation. To those who do not read it in its context, I must add one word more. It will not be difficult, upon a superficial view, to charge the writer of these poems with inconsistency. Though she always in the end found the power to transmute sorrow into a more ​perfect mode of being, yet there were times when she wrote down in frank words the bitterness of a moment's agony. There were also times when she expressed with complete sincerity a fancy or a mood the opposite of one equally sincere and well recorded. Lastly, there were times when she entered very deep shadows filled with strange shapes, that may move a timid soul or two to ask if it be safe to follow her. It is true that her thought, though clothed in so slender a form, has the courage of the strong, and holds its way through the night like Milton's dreadless angel; but, like him, it is always unsullied, always unscathed, always returning towards the gates of Light.

Nov. 6, 1907.

1. ↑ Cornhill Magazine for November, 1907.