THE INALIENABLE HERITAGE
AND OTHER POEMS

THE INALIENABLE HERITAGE
AND OTHER POEMS

BY
EMILY LAWLESS, Litt.D.
AUTHOR OF “WITH THE WILD GEESE,” ETC.

WITH A PREFACE BY
EDITH SICHEL

PRIVATELY PRINTED
1914

Copies of this book are being sold by Truslove and Hanson, Sloane Street, and at 153, Oxford Street, and by Messrs. Bumpus, 350, Oxford Street.

PREFACE

Emily Lawless was, before all else, a poet and a seeker after truth—and in her the two were one. Before all else, also, an Irish poet. There have been few women-poets of creative force in any nation—none in Ireland before her, whose fame has endured. And for Ireland she stands, in verse and in prose. In history, in romance, in “Hurrish” and in “Grania,” in “Essex in Ireland” and “With the Wild Geese,” she is part of Ireland’s past and of its present. She is haunted by the strange bewitching surge of the waves of the Atlantic, of the Western waves “wild with all regret.” For her the rolling brown stretches of bog and of peat-moss, with the blue smoke hanging low over them, and their carpet of faithful little peat-flowers, mean home, the enchanted home we all know, where we have played in childhood and felt the first thrills of youth; the moist silver sky, the solitary, ageless stone crosses, the ruined churches, the hovels, the sad, shining lakes make the country where her spirit dwells. It was to Irish Nature that her memory kept returning in the last years of pain and illness when her body could no longer revisit the shores for which she longed. Pictures of the well-known landscapes were always passing before her vision, clear and consoling to the end. Irish Nature was the Nature she knew best, and it inspired the last songs she gave us so gallantly, on the brink of death.

And Irish Nature was to her the symbol of all Nature, that Nature through which alone she faced mystery and found the Highest. She had in her poetry, as in herself, a twofold relation to Nature. There was the external aspect; the physical tie by which she became part of the earth and its teeming life; which made her in younger years adore movement—the rush through the air on a horse, the cleaving of the waves as she swam; which made her also a passionate naturalist, a moth-hunter who knew under which tree-root the grey moths lived, or where to stop the boat upon the sea and dredge for creatures unknown even to the fishermen, or again, and more intimately, where there grew some humble lichen or rock-bloom, the search for which took days of patient adventure.

And then there was the inward relation to Nature, the wisdom and comfort she drew from it to heal the distressful mystery of life; the evidence she found in it of man’s spirit, of a power, however baffled, which transcends material forces. She held to the brave companionship between Nature and the intellect—to those questionings and half-answerings and silences which spur it onwards towards the unknown, towards “the untravelled land, where roams that stubborn bedouin man’s soul.”

Such are her three unfailing sources of inspiration—the visible pagan Nature of the senses, and the search into Nature which means science, and the search concerning Nature which means thought. All three sources prove her a poet rather intellectual than emotional, but tense, sincere and beautifully lucid. None knew better than she that true imagination is never vague, that true vision is more definite than chairs and tables, that memorable poetry is never blurred.

There is another region of her poetic art. It is one in which her intellect yields; in which she is simple and instructive and entirely Irish. When she writes her ballads and tells stories with a swing, a lilt, a sorrowful march-music of her own, she finds, perhaps, her most native self. The ballad of “Fontenoy,” already almost a classic, the still more haunting “Dirge of the Munster Forest” vibrate with real life, move from within, transmit colour. Children can love them as well as critics. And to these will now be added the poem in this volume of verses which the poet herself liked the best of them: “The Third Trumpet,” the tale of the girl who went at the risk of her life to fetch the proscribed priest to come to her dying mother, and of the old priest who came at still greater peril. To this power of not only telling but of implying a story, we also owe others among these new poems—in the “Eighteenth Century Echoes,” less tragic, but swift in their interest and admirable in their compression, full of the same gifts that made their author a novelist of dramatic force and of virile directness.

Form was not Miss Lawless’s strong point, that is when she sought it. When it found her, it was perfect, as in some of these poems in “From the Burren,” verses of intuition. And certain metres that she loved she could master, like that of Meredith’s “Love in the Valley,” most musically followed in “Wide is the Shannon,” and in “A Bog-filled Valley.”

But in the poems of thought the verse is often but the scabbard for the finely tempered blade of the idea, and, as a rule, she needs the high pressure of a story to mould the rhythm for her. When we come to language, it is a different matter. Her words are always strong, melodious, distinguished, sometimes inspired, and the lines in one of her poems sound the unmistakable note of autobiography.

Who can say

On what poor, spent, and quite unhonoured brain

The pearly treasure of one spacious phrase,

Eight matchless words, worthy our dearest Keats,

May now and then alight, glow for a space,

And vanish, scarcely recognised while there,

And quite unguessed of by our sapient crowd?

At all events I who now speak to you

Would gladly—should some gracious power deign

(Say once or twice perchance in sixty years)

To make me the recipient of like gift,

And claim the promise—gladly would I vow

Here on my oath no mortal save myself

Should see, hear, aye or catch a rumour of it.

And Emily Lawless would have been capable of keeping that vow. The sincere love of poetry is a very purifying affection; her devotion to what was big made her big, and she showed a large humility where poetry was concerned—both in the way she accepted criticism from any one who cared, however insignificant, and in the modest place that she assigned to herself among singers. Notwithstanding, now and again she caught that “spacious phrase.” There are words, fragments, that run in our heads and make us wonder from which great poet they come, until we remember they are hers. They generally recall the Elizabethans, and the verse of the Elizabethans it was whose poetry most affected and most influenced her.

In one way these last poems have an especial distinction. They bear the marks of her struggle with bodily misery and marks of the victory she won. They are scarred, but they prove the final dominance of her mind. And although her lyrics of sleeplessness and suffering, such as “Night-Sounds” and “Resurgence,” haunt the hearer with their poignant weariness, their waking nightmares, yet they bear in them a note of endurance which may well strengthen others in like stress; and a better note—the conviction of that deeper truth wrested from illness which the strong man misses. Few poets have sung about pain, and fewer still without preaching. To have done this is characteristic of Miss Lawless.

The best of her work will not perish with the “vanished argosies, and all the flotsam of unthrifty Time.”[1] And it is to be hoped that one day her poems will be collected and given to the world together: those from “With the Wild Geese,” and those from “The Point of View,” the little volume printed for the benefit of the Galway fishermen, which contains so much of her intimate thought; as well as these latest songs which she herself desired should be privately published. She had just finished revising them when the pen dropped from her hand.

[1] “The Point of View” (“Of the Value of Masterpieces”).

Edith Sichel.

CONTENTS

THE INALIENABLE HERITAGE

I

I

From this loud noise of passing things,

These restless hours with ceaseless hum,

To centuries which, like sleeping kings,

Rest in the sun,

Turn we. Six hundred years twice told

Of blood and power, tears and fame,

Twelve hundred high-piled years have rolled

In pride or shame,

Since those strong brothers of the cross

A world deep-whelmed in strife and sin—

High throned on power, sunk in loss—

Set out to win.

The bitter, sanguinary lands

Which most abhorred the Faith, they trod,

And carried in their naked hands

The gifts of God.

Oh, wide-armed power of certitude!

All knowledge, wisdom, guile above!

Wrapped in a two-fold amplitude

Of faith and love,

They came, saw, won. No craft was there,

No conquering sword, no armed appeal,

Only a child’s belief in prayer,

And a child’s zeal.

Unarmed, unlearned, yet simply wise,

Oh sandalled soldiers, brave and true,

A mighty continent still lies

In debt to you!

II

From pastures deep in rain-fed grass,

From high, sea-smitten rocks austere,

As curlew, hern, and bittern pass,

So, year by year,

On tireless bleeding feet they trod

From Eiré to Imperial Rome,

Slept ’neath the stars; the breast of God

Their shield and home.

No devious track was theirs of fear,

The best-worn paths they loved to take,

Till Heaven itself seemed chiefly dear

For the world’s sake.

And if at times their loud-pitched screed

Rasps on our subtler nerves to-day,

Certes an older, dreamier creed

Behind it lay.

The wind-shod myrmidons of sleep,

The dancers upon heath and fell,

The fluters of the woodland deep—

They knew these well.

For who those flutes would mark as clear,

Or note the fluters dancing by

As men who prayed, and lay in fear

’Neath a dark sky!

A sky thick-set with rustling wing,

An earth thrilled through with awful knell

Amid whose hollow toilings ring

Loud cries of hell.

With ancient terrors worse than death;

Yet lit with lights beyond our ken;

Stern burden for the fleeting breath

Of short-lived men!

Yet no blind homage of a slave

Was theirs—dark souls which cringe to live—

To One they loved and served they gave

As lovers give.

III

Here, where a green and dripping land

Mounts to the softly dappled skies,

And the invasive careless hand

Of change defies,

Still seem those brown-clad forms to roam,

To musing pause, or dreaming stand,

Lone lookers for another home

Than this green land.

Grass-grown their ruined walls still top

Yon bare, brown hill, yon bleak, grey shore,

Half-fallen, titanic plinths still prop

A low, bent door.

Or under shudderings of the wave,

Which on some dripping threshold fall,

Yawns wide a dark, surf-fashioned cave

Where sea-mews call,

Where far and free the foam-bells fly,

And round its roof their white orbs toss,

Yet ’mid whose gleamings we descry

Half-hewn a cross.

Or low-roofed cave above some lake

To whose damp sides no sunbeams stray,

Yet where entangled ripples wake

Dim dreams of day,

In sheaves, in lines of dancing light,

Thin watery streaks of broken green,

Whose interlacings cheat the sight,

Dying ere seen.

IV

Oh ancient brother frank and true,

Great-couraged; heart and conscience free;

No cloistered pedant soul; in you

A man, I see.

Large-natured, filled with primal joys,

Young Earth’s own greater soul, meseems,

At home with death as ardent boys

With hopes or dreams.

Serene in solitude. In crowds

Austerely gay. Devoutly wise

The large clear light of yonder clouds

Shines through your eyes.

The tenets of your far-off home

From high-famed land to land you spread,

Nor to the might of mightiest Rome

Bent that shorn head.

Across these wind-swept waves of Time

Whose murmurings fill our listening ear,

Old thoughts, old deeds befitting rhyme—

Yours still shines clear.

II
YET WHEREFORE

Yet wherefore was this early light,

This glowing hope, this promise sent,

If, ere ’twas even marked aright,

It sank—it went?

We ask. But silence, grey, sedate,

Cold answer proffers as is fit

To questionings importunate,

Devoid of wit.

Mere probings of the how and why,

Poor words, scarce stronger than a moan,

Yet answered, if at all, then by

A God alone;

Who in the blade perceives the grain,

And in dumb flesh the dreaming soul,

Gathers the ends of joy and pain.

The foreseen whole.

And yet we ask, why thus allowed

This dawn, these hopes so fondly nursed,

These nascent gifts so high endowed,

Yet subtly cursed?

Cursed too by no mere vacant breath,

No priestly ban, or seer’s vain rhyme,

Cursed by a doom as old as Death,

As deep as Time;

Writ in some dull foreboding star,

Which, hovering o’er man’s little life,

Diffuses poison from afar,

Cold hate, dull strife.

Oh, lost the goodly growing years!

The years that shape a nation most!

Wasted in faction, drowned in tears,

Lost, lost, all lost!

“Yet, stay!” some urge, “such words estrange,

Hope’s freer, happier spirit blights,

Wisdom would take a larger range,

Climb loftier heights;

“What if the weeds your fields have marred,

What if your barns show vacant floors,

Are there not other lands unscarred,

Brighter than yours?”

“True,” we reply, “on alien shores

The weeds by hostile breezes sown

Men all unmoved see round the doors,

Not round their own!

“Not on the long-loved homelands, where

The child drew in its earliest breath,

For which the old hearts cease to care

Only in death.”

We hope, hope, hope; but whence, how brought,

New light shall dawn, who may declare?

We stumble on, too dark for thought,

Too dim for prayer.

“First last, last first,” so ran the word;

As dull and bent we slowly grope,

Above us, like some song of bird,

Carols that hope.

“First last, last first,” our hearts repeat;

An azure gleam invades the ground,

As when—heaven breaking ’neath the feet—

Bluebells are found.

As when, sore burdened, weary, we,

With feet deep sunk in miry sod,

Lift suddenly our eyes, and see

The Hills of God.

Hoping we pass. In grief, in mirth,

Like wind-torn clouds our days flit by,

Thin shadows of a shadowy earth,

And a pale sky.

We, and this land we tread, grow old,

Its thoughts, loves, ways are strange and dark,

Its ancient wrongs—a tale oft told—

Men cease to mark.

Its future? Nay, enough, enough!

See where the hills o’ertop the plains,

So smooth and vast, so poor and rough,

Man’s lot remains!

Not long their light the motes retain,

The chequered arrows, towering all,

Kiss the loved gleam; then find it wane,

And, turning, fall.

Striving we sink, fighting we fail,

Stout soldiers in a losing cause,

Out-fashioned knights whose ancient mail

Breaks in new wars.

Follows the dark, and sleep is dear;

Dearest to those, the Hope Forlorn,

Who, having toiled, scarce wait to hear

The notes of Dawn.

Who spent their day to heal the night,

Who sowed that other men might reap,

Whose simple guerdon is the right

Soundly to sleep.

Fetch laurels then, ye luckier swains,

Who in some later hour are born,

Whose barns brim over with the grains

These sowed in scorn!

Who, wandering through the Promised Land,

And noting how its ramparts fall,

Scarce heed where lies that earlier band,

Hard by the wall.

The men that fought, the men that failed,

The men that struggled through the night,

Remember!—Ye whose eyes have hailed

Their longed-for light.

Have seen it touch the smiling plain,

And waken every lake and rill,

Have watched its standards proudly gain

Hill after hill.

To you the prize, but theirs the praise,

Coequal heirs in one wild Past,

Spent mid the circles of a maze,

Now ’scaped at last!

Is that a dream? Ah! Who shall say

Save One whose name we do but guess,

Whose office—so we humbly pray—

Is to redress?

Whose coming? Nay, look up afar,

Through seas whose brineless waves immerse

The shores of that mysterious star

Our Universe.

Behold a gleam. The end! The end!

O, dream of dreams. O, hope immense,

On which thought, heart, love, soul attend,

All life, all sense!

Leave it close wrapped in silence, lest

By some ill-omened note we mar

A spell which, linking east to west,

Binds star with star:

And sweeps in one all-mastering flood

Ocean and rill to the same goal,

Gathers the tides of ill and good,

Completes the Whole.

With us meanwhile the rill still flows

With us the little days speed fast

And fast our changeful Present grows

Our changeless Past.

Island of faith, of hope, of pain,

Home of a thousand varying fears,

See you no light beyond your rain?

Across your tears?

Forbid it all the good, the strong,

True friends, true lovers, grave or gay,

Hatred and wrong endure for long,

But not for aye.

And not for ever bare and brown