A contemporary woman critic is on record as lamenting the paucity of women poets in literary history and asserting that those who have achieved fame are inferior to their brother lyrists even in the writing of cradle songs. My concern is not with the fact alleged or with possible explanations of it, but with the danger of overlooking real poetry because its author was a woman who, being dead, can depend on no clique to press her claims. Specifically I am interested in an Englishwoman who died in 1907 at the age of 46 after writing some two hundred poems, mostly lyrics, all brief, amazingly free from inequalities, and at their finest worthy of inclusion in any anthology of English lyrical verse which pretends to adequacy.

In blood no less than in certain aspects of her poetic talent Mary Coleridge was related to the author of "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient Mariner." Born in 1861, the year of Mrs. Browning's death, she was thirty-one years younger than Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. Her poems, published in various periodicals, were either anonymous or signed with the pseudonym άνοδος ("Wanderer"), and against the urging of her friends that she abandon this concealment she urged her "fear of tarnishing the name which an ancestor had made illustrious in English poetry." A limited edition containing forty-eight lyrics published in 1896 is now a collector's prize; a complete collection numbering two hundred and thirty-seven lyrics appeared with her name in December, 1907, a few months after her death, and three more editions were issued in rapid succession. Mary Coleridge's admirers numbered such discriminating critics as the poets Henry Newbolt, Robert Bridges, and Maurice Baring; in the ordinary sense her work was not popular, as Mrs. Browning's was but as Emily Dickinson's and Christina Rossetti's was not.

What Mary Coleridge's friends knew was a keen-minded woman, widely read, a wise and sincere thinker who had the tender sympathies of a woman, the self-dependence of a man, and a humor all her own. They saw her devotion to a great cause, for she devoted much time to teaching working-women in her own home and gave lessons in English literature at the Working Women's College. What the public knew was that her novel, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, won praise from Stevenson and that another, The King With Two Faces, brought her fame. What her intimates sensed and the careful readers of her poems cannot miss is that she looked on life with the eyes of a sensitive, tender, passionate, and profoundly spiritual soul and recorded in intimate and spontaneous poetry the thoughts it evoked.

True to her heritage she loved nature not as something merely decorative but as something endowed with power to transform gloom to light long afterward; or to give joy to the dreams of grieving men; or, in its darker aspects, to presage some unguessed fatality, or to commemorate in some withered tree an evil secret thing like that which lay in wait for Childe Roland beyond the blasted heath. Flowers, even in their loveliness, the iris blooming, the cyclamen opening its buds, give her delight but evoke thoughts that lie too deep for tears and awaken a memory too conscious of the world's sadness and ironies to forget for long. Wind, sea, and stars intrigue her most: to dwellers in another planet, our earth, though flaming to destruction, would seem but like a shooting star taking a swift and casual flight into darkness; the winds are things of mystery, driven on by some relentless force, symbols perhaps of those miracles which Carlyle pointed to as all about us and scourged us for ignoring:

O voice that ever wanderest o'er the earth
   Lamenting, roaring, sighing,
  Where was thy place of birth,
   And where shall be thy dying?

In the sea touched by the wind she saw the symbol of eternal sameness, eternal change, and in the most perfect of her sonnets she prays for a final resting place, not on Earth's breast but

Far from thy living, farther from thy dead,
  From every fetter of remembrance free,
  Deep in some ocean cave, and overhead
  The ceaseless sounding of thy waves, O Sea!

Her thoughts turn most often to love, not love as a sentimental episode but love as a transforming experience. She sings of its intuitions, its delights, its bitterness, its disillusionment, its fears, its memories that turn winter into spring and those others that are as deathless as beauty's self. To her as to Christina Rossetti, love is a mighty thing, dawn after darkness, a garden in the desert, a voice out of the silence, swift as light, sharp as a sword, whose memories for weal or woe outlast heartbreak and the empty years.

A MOMENT

The clouds had made a crimson crown
   Above the mountain 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.

Christina Rossetti's love lyrics are mournful; she renounced and laughter left her eyes forever. Mary Coleridge was made of sterner stuff; she wrote nothing so radiant as "A Birthday" (though her "News" is lovely in its simplicity and eager joy), nothing so desolating as "When I am dead, my dearest" (read her "Hail and Farewell" and compare them for yourself); her spirit has the bravery of Emily Brontë's defiance. Read "Whether I live," "We were not made for refuges of lies" and this, entitled "Knowledge":

Let weaker souls at His decrees repine!
   To us eternity in time was given.
  Whene'er we parted, 'twas your death and mine.
   Whene'er we met again, why then 'twas Heaven.

Now let the tempest rise, the fierce winds blow,
   And shake the house of life from floor to rafter!
  Whichever goes, whichever stays, we know
   Both death and what comes after.

In conjunction with this read "A Moment" and ask yourself if Mrs. Browning ever soared higher. Read this, called "Invocation," and see if the gorgeously vestured passion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "House of Life" says more than this Englishwoman's veiled ecstasy:

Come, long-awaited dawn of wondrous Night,
     Come, heart's delight!
The Moon hath risen, the Sun of lovers' eyes;
  The stars are fainting now, the pale moth flies;
  The air is still, the bird of darkness cries.

Spirits of Sleep, beware, and come not near!
       Tremble and fear!
  When with excess of life the senses numb
  Call to the lips of Love, and they be dumb,
  Then, to restore defeated nature, come!

What Mrs. Browning and Gabriel Rossetti know and feel she shares; what they in their abundance pour out as from an overflowing cup she distils into a single golden drop. They exhaust language in an effort to make it convey every aspect of their thought; she presents her thought in a hint, an implication, a swiftly suggested parallel, a figure of speech.

A primary secret of her art is understatement; like a true Greek she knows that in real art the part is greater than the whole. To the unimaginative she is often enigmatic; to those ignorant of life and the world of the spirit, always so. Her longest poems are short, her shortest a quatrain. None is finished before the last word of the last line; it is only then that the key clicks open on the unguessed treasure of her thought. And that treasure is always surprising, sometimes breath-taking:

I saw a stable, low and very bare,
   A little child in a manger.

The oxen knew Him, had Him in their care,
   To men He was a stranger.
  The safety of the world was lying there,
   And the world's danger.

Can you match that among modern Christmas poems? In six lines you have the substance of every Christmas sermon ever uttered; the final line, climaxed by the final word, comes like the discharge of a masked battery. Simplicity? Yes, the simplicity that Wordsworth praised and attained only at his best; the simplicity for which Mary Coleridge never seemed to strive, but always attained, and which accounts in part at least for her abiding power and freshness. What weighty thoughts her frail monosyllables and dissyllables carry, not haltingly but as lightly as thistle-down!

Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,
   Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art?
  Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,
   Thou little heart?

Dust art thou, and to dust again returnest,
   A spark of fire within a beating clod.
  Should that be infinite for which thou burnest?
   Must it be God?

In Mary Coleridge's lyrics one finds the occasional influence of other poets, of Coleridge in poems where things of evil and mystery are abroad as "At Dead of Night" and "Wilderspin"; of Shelley in "Invocation"; of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in "Whither Away"; of Blake (whom she greatly admired) in "High Wind," "Gifts," "The Witch," and "Master and Guest"; of the ballad in such poems as "At Dead of Night," "Over the Hills," and that triumph of simplicity, "Our Lady"; and of the profoundly spiritual Crashaw and George Herbert. Christina Rossetti too was deeply spiritual; she too felt the influence of George Herbert. Most often Herbert prayed against his coldness of heart, Christina Rossetti for patience to endure; Mary Coleridge, like so many of us, confesses her failures—and her love. Read Christina Rossetti's "The Resurrection" and then this to which it must give place:

Good Friday in my heart! Fear and affright!
  My thoughts are the Disciples when they fled,
  My words the words that priest and soldier said,
  My deed the spear to desecrate the dead.
  And day, Thy death therein, is changed to night.

Then Easter in my heart sends up the sun.
  My thoughts are Mary, when she turned to see.
  My words are Peter, answering, "Lov'st thou
    Me?"
  My deeds are all Thine own drawn close to Thee,
  And night and day, since Thou dost rise, are one.

The sincerity of that is Mary Coleridge's; the form and development are in the tradition of Crashaw and Herbert purified of all self-consciousness. Sometimes doubts shadow her soul, sometimes she bows in abasement, sometimes, like Christina Rossetti, like Newman, like every troubled soul that seeks God, she is caught in the torment of Yea and Nay, and the conflict of moods is reflected in hurrying antitheses that are reminiscent of Christina Rossetti's "The Three Enemies" and of Herbert's "The Collar":

Depart from me. I know Thee not!
   Within the Temple have I sought Thee,
   And many a time have sold and bought Thee
  In that unhallowed, holy spot.
  Depart from me, I know Thee not!

Depart from me. I know Thee not!
   Full oft among the poor I found Thee.
   There did I grieve, neglect, and wound Thee.
  I never strove to share Thy lot.
  Depart from me. I know Thee not!

I know Thee not. Abide with me!
    More than aught else do I admire Thee,
    Above all earthly things desire Thee.
  I am Thy prisoner. Make me free!
  I know Thee not. Abide with me!

A two-fold miracle permits true poets to utter their hearts in words and music, while a subtler cadence runs its course far below the surface of the meter carrying, perhaps, the low laughter of lovers or giving the sense of unshed tears. Perhaps it is this latter that Virgil meant by "lacrimae rerum" and Wordsworth by "the still sad music of humanity." In Christina Rossetti's poems it often deepens the sense of sadness to the point where Walter Raleigh confessed he felt more like crying than discussing them. To an often striking degree Mary Coleridge revealed this power. Here is a lyric which in theme, poignancy, brevity, sense of intimate relation, as if One Alone were meant to hear this voice and see these unshed tears, should be compared with Christina Rossetti's "The Lowest Place." In it are Herbertian echoes and haunting repetitions which Christina Rossetti managed so adroitly that they seem the perfection of naturalness. It is Mary Coleridge's and no one else's and in form and feeling it is beyond praise. (Note the effect of the slowly descending second half of the final line.) No English poet who ever heeded the admonition Sursum Corda but might envy Mary Coleridge this response:

Lord of the winds, I cry to Thee,
   I that am dust,
  And blown about by every gust,
   I fly to Thee.

Lord of the waters, unto Thee I call.
    I that am weed upon the waters borne,
       And by the waters torn,
  Tossed by the waters, at Thy feet I fall.

One secret of Mary Coleridge's power is to say much in little, as becomes one whose verse is the result of "concentrated meditation and desire." Read Browning's "Any Wife to Any Husband" (in 126 lines) and then turn to Mary Coleridge's "Contradictions" (in ten) and her sonnet "Alcestis to Admetus," and you will discover that genius, like victory, is not always on the side of the big guns. When, like Watson and Tabb, she turns her skill to the quatrain, she makes it a thing of beauty, not yielding a gem-like flame like theirs but a softer glow as befitted a deeper emotion. Mrs. Browning in a celebrated sonnet offered an answer to the question, "How do I love thee?" In the following quatrain Mary Coleridge answers the question, "How did I love thee?" and if it be with simplicity and passion that heart speaks to heart most directly Mary Coleridge has nothing to fear by the comparison:

The sum of loss I have not reckoned yet
   I cannot tell.
  For ever it was morning when we met,
 Night when we bade farewell.

The imprint of Mary Coleridge is there: everything is implied in the two final lines, passion, with all its ecstasy, with all its pain, equally defying appraisal and oblivion. Here is a song which likewise bears her imprint, the imprint this time of that side of Mary Coleridge which her great namesake, master of the ballad and lover of the remote and mysterious, would have recognized at once:

UNWELCOME

We were young, we were merry, we were very
    very wise,
   And the door stood open at our feast,
  When there passed us a woman with the West in
    her eyes,
   And a man with his back to the East.

O, still grew the hearts that were beating so fast,
   The loudest voice was still.
  The jest died away on our lips as they passed,
   And the rays of July struck chill.

The cups of red wine turned pale on the board,
   The white bread black as soot.
  The hound forgot the hand of her lord,
   She fell down at his foot.

Low let me lie, where the dead dog lies,
   Ere I set me down again at a feast,
  When there passes a woman with the West in her
   eyes,
  And a man with his back to the East.

Like Emily Dickinson, Mary Coleridge had an acute sense of the mystery of life, the soul's secrets, the hidden forces which lie below all plummets' reach, the seemingly minor things that are charged with high and sometimes frightening significance:

There with two lives before me did I choose,
  There did I lose to win, and win to lose,
  Not till the day all secrets are displayed
  Shall that Great Angel show the choice I made.

It is this side of Mary Coleridge's gift which, when all is said, is most essentially and characteristically her own. To most of us, bereft of the seeing eye and understanding heart, life is "a petty round of irritating concerns and duties," but to Mary Coleridge it was a curious and infinitely varied journey made through sun and rain, under clouds and stars, whose joys turn to bitterness, whose woes may find a strange beatitude, whose loves breed their own torment, where Fear may follow Love as "lord of one's house and hospitality," where Death, long resisted, is welcomed at the last, where deeds are done too dark for human eye to witness and words spoken that, all unknown, slay a living soul, where a glance thrills a heart beyond all forgetting, and a thought is born, too secret, perhaps too shameful, to be uttered. What casual thing reveals to the lover the duplicity of his mistress so that the "daisies fair" at their trysting place wither away? What unwitting word betrays to the prescient eye of a dying wife her mourning husband in another's arms? Why do men give to those who love them best not their adoration but their tears? Why do we shrink from seeing to its depths another soul or revealing to that other the hidden places of our own? Why will we confess to all the world a secret kept from one? Why does our blessing upon our friend turn to his bane, our curse upon our foe to his advantage? Why must a shadow follow every light? What sudden fears chill the heart at the thought of the soundless hurrying hours that rob us of the happy present, that bring ever nearer the future dark with destiny? What divine alchemy changes the joys of the lowly to the sorrows of the great? How cruelly we punish those who have destroyed our illusions, with what folly we cast aside some priceless irrecoverable thing! Mary Coleridge does not attempt an answer. What she does is to offer us a series of brief lyrics, each "the essence of an experience," sometimes poignantly, often arrestingly, always beautifully done, and it is not her fault as a woman or as a poet if we fail to become aware of new things in earth and heaven that fill us with humility, joy, and unending wonder.

MORTAL COMBAT

It is because you were my friend,
   I fought you as the devil fights.
  Whatever fortune God may send,
   For once I set the world to rights.

And that was when I thrust you down,
   And stabbed you twice and twice again,
  Because you dared take off your crown,
   And be a man like other men.

Henry Newbolt remarks that at times "she entered very deep shadows filled with strange shapes" but adds truly and revealingly: "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."