Alice Meynell
Alice Meynell
Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynellwas an English writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 September 1847
lying night mind
My day-mind can endure / Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. / But O, afraid, unsure, / My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.
time bells towers
From the shaken tower A flock of bells take flight, And go with the hour.
rome clouds age
Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, / Floats in the mist, a little cloud at tether.
pain heart effort
Now, in our opinion no author should be blamed for obscurity, nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry.
echoes bird utterance
With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.
loneliness ocean sea
But, visiting Sea, your love doth press / And reach in further than you know, / And fills all these; and, when you go, / There's loneliness in loneliness.
light bishops boots
I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman.
life-is ifs
If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.
art laughter would-be
Assuredly it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.
simple looks sides
O daisy mine, what will it be to look / From God's side even of such a simple thing?
running children sleep
There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.
solitude
Solitude is separate experience.
children elderly half
Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.
journey men world
Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them; it goes its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no wearinesss, it knows no bonds.