Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907), who had Samuel Taylor Coleridge among her forebears, published in her lifetime but little poetry, and that under the pseudonym of 'Anodos'. In 1896 Robert Bridges persuaded her to issue a private and limited edition of poems, Fancy's Following, and a modified form of this collection appeared in 1897 as Fancy's Guerdon in one of Elkin Mathews's Shilling Garland Series. The main collection of her verses was made in 1907, after her death, by Sir Henry Newbolt.

Poetry occupied but a small part of her life; she wrote prose romances, some of which, like The King with Two Faces, brought her a wide popularity, and she had many charitable and social activities. There comes through the scanty biographical records and there reappears in the poems an impression of a vibrant, keenly living personality. Her Letters and Diaries show her arising from a religious atmosphere, and poised in deep interest, before the problems of the modern world. Her contrasting interests are symbolized in her diary entry in 1891; 'Ghosts, and a sermon fifty-six minutes long, all in the course of one week.' She seems, in her earlier poems and in the letters, to seek the sensuous pageantry of colour and form in the living world:

Pour me red wine from out the Venice flask,
   Pour faster, faster yet!
  The joy of ruby thought I do not ask,
   Bid me forget!

Gradually an inwardness of thought develops, a hesitancy and distrust of experience, and an increased preoccupation with religion:

Bid me remember, O my gracious Lord,
  The flattering words of love are merely breath!
  O not in roses wreathe the shining sword,
  Bid me remember, O my gracious Lord,
   The bitter taste of death!

All her poems are short lyrics, arising frequently from some suggestion of personal experience. It is difficult without biographical material to trace these moods separately to their sources. Her development has some parallel with that of Christina Rossetti, and the resultant verse is at times similar, though Mary Coleridge's range is much more confined. Both sought within the world, for warmth, colour, and love; both withdrew hesitantly towards religion. The progress is less definitely marked in Mary Coleridge, and one feels that William Johnson Cory, who was her friend and tutor, may have helped her towards the final resolution of this conflict.

Technically her work is secure, and here again Cory's influence may be traced. Of direct reminiscence there is little in her work; Robert Bridges compared her poetry to that of Heine, but this was merely to suggest her concentration of a mood into a short poem with an apparently effortless movement. Certain recurring idées génératrices can be traced throughout. The most remarkable is the mood which gains dramatic expression in a story of magic, the pieces such as 'Master and Guest,' 'The Witch,' 'Wilderspin,' which have led a critic to speak of her as 'the tail of the comet, S. T. C These poems, apart from the Pre-Raphaelite influence in 'Wilderspin,' seem all compact of originality. Allied to them are a number of lyrics, fashioning out a mood in a more personal manner; they include the powerful sonnet 'Imagination' ('I called you, fiery spirits, and ye came'), and 'The Other Side of a Mirror,' a poem suggestive of the Metaphysicals, and expressed with great verbal cunning. Many of the lyrics have a less definite background, though their movement and expression are often skilfully contrived. Such a piece is 'A Moment':

The clouds had made a crimson crown
   Above the mountains high,
  The stormy sun was going down
   In a stormy sky.

Why did you let your eyes so rest on me,
   And hold your breath between?
  In all the ages this can never be
   As if it had not been.

Along with these poems of mood she writes on mystical and religious themes, and these become more prevalent in the later years. Frequently the religious theme is given brief poignant expression as a simple experience, as in 'Depart from me, I know thee not,' and 'Thee have I sought, divine Humility'.

Mary Coleridge was able to reveal only a part of her personality in verse; her letters, and her prose work show that there was a quiet ironic laughter in her spirit which never comes through into her poetry. Like many other women of her time, and among them Christina Rossetti, she had narrow opportunities for experience. Such of her life as she could convert into poetry she rendered with precision and beauty. One wonders whether if she had been more deeply distressed, with wider clashes of happiness and despair, the resultant yield in poetry would have been richer. Contact with Canon Dixon may have helped to develop her melancholia, though she combated it with a variety of mood to which Dixon never attained. All that she wrote leads one to wish that she had written more. There developed in her work poems such as 'Mother to a Baby,' simple, like Blake's early verse, and yet powerful. She could, more perhaps than any woman poet of the century, concentrate her meaning with epigrammatic precision. The following poem is a single thrust unerring and yet controlled:

Forgive? O yes! how lightly, lightly said!
Forget? No, never, while the ages roll,
Till God slay o'er again the undying dead,
And quite unmake my soul!