"The Tides of the Mind":
Alice Meynell's Poetry of Perception
Maria Frawley
One hundred years ago, Alice Meynell (1847-1922) was something of a household name, respected as much for her poetry as for her journalism, recently elected to the highly visible position of President of the Society of Women Journalists and soon to be demonstrating for the Women Writers' Suffrage League. So well known was Meynell's writing that some considered her a likely candidate for a position as her nation's poet laureate. Yet, despite the revival of interest in and scholarly attention to Victorian and Edwardian women's poetry that has characterized the past five to ten years, Meynell's poetry is still regarded as marginal. The poems are seen as occupying a distinct and rarified space within Meynell's own ouevre, standing clearly separate from her political activities and from much of her journalism. 1 Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds typify the tone of and trend in Meynell scholarship when in Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology they write that "in spite of her political and journalistic activity, Meynell's poetry remains largely personal and lyrical." 2 Despite--or perhaps because of--the fact that she wrote poetry alongside Kipling, Wilde, Housman, Hardy, and Yeats, attempts to contextualize Meynell's writing beyond her own career have been equally limited. Reference to her work appears only in the "Postscript" to Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, where Isobel Armstrong, focusing primarily on Meynell's representation of silence, argues that the poems be seen as a "symptomatic example of writing by women." 3 Seeing her poems about motherhood as issuing "a quiet challenge to the still-standing icon of the sublime Madonna and perfect mother of much popular women's poetry" (p. 265), Angela Leighton in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart is, as her title announces, no less determined to situate Meynell squarely within a tradition of women's writing. She describes Meynell's "sparing, chiselled, intellectual lyricism" as "quietly original" and notes the poetry's "resonant resource of silence" as "one of its strengths" (p. 246).
In this essay I want both to question the wisdom of segregating Meynell's poetry into its own sphere and to suggest what can be gained in analysis by de-emphasizing her status as a woman poet, this latter initiative long overdue given the fact that some of Meynell's earliest critics seemed to [End Page 62] have recognized the necessity. In his Dublin Review obituary, for example, G. K. Chesterton amplified on his opening remark that "England has lost a great poet" by writing, "There is a certain sombre satisfaction in using the word poet instead of poetess. The latter description, which is native to the newspapers, would always . . . have aroused her own delicate indignation." 4 Although issuing quite different evaluative verdicts on Meynell's poetry, both Armstrong and Leighton seem to find in Meynell's poetic use of silence especially convincing evidence with which to justify positioning the poetry within a gendered tradition. Although it is indubitable that, as Armstrong contends, silence is a "central preoccupation of woman's poetry," it does not follow that it is only that. Throughout Meynell's work, silence reveals not so much her beliefs about the status or predicament of women in her society as it does her assumptions about the "mental experience of man," to use a phrase she invoked in her essay "The Rhythm of Life." 5 Nor does Meynell develop what Janis Stout has called "strategies of reticence" only to serve her particular interests as a woman writer or to depict her beliefs about "women's ways of knowing." 6 Rather, silence is more typically allied with a broader thematic of secrecy and solitude, which in turn is deployed in the interest of representing the intricacies of the mind, the conditions of subjectivity itself, and the varieties of thought processes associated with it. 7 These interests so dominate Meynell's poetry that it makes more sense to grapple with the relationship of her work to emerging modernist interests in psychology (and Judith Ryan reminds us of "the simultaneous emergence of modern psychology and modernist literature") than it does to view her at the late end of a Victorian tradition of women's writing. 8
While Kathy Alexis Psomiades has found in Meynell's prose evidence of her successful use of "interiorization as a technology of knowledge," her poetry provides more sustained material with which to assess her evolving interest in mental processing. 9 Resisting the temptation to depict thought processes as the solipsistic activity of isolated individuals, Meynell's poems more typically establish an interaction between voices, some presumed to be entirely internal and others more overtly externalized; in this sense, what might be called her dialogic strategies, her experimental understanding of and approach to "self," are nicely illuminated by recent Bahktinian-inspired discourse analysis, particularly that which has sought to make more sophisticated our understanding of the complexities of lyric poetry. 10
From Early Poems onward, one can trace a trajectory of Meynell's thinking about thought--what she memorably referred to as "the tides of the mind." 11 Mapping this trajectory across the Mey nell canon exposes the inextricable link between the ideas expressed in her poetry and her prose and, more critically, reveals her nuanced response both to Romantic [End Page 63] versions of the lyric form and to the aestheticism so often associated with her literary period but so infrequently used to illuminate her own writing. Acknowledging that Meynell wrote on many topics considered the province of aestheticists--for example, gardens, interior decorating, the arts, and the nature of style more generally--Linda K. Hughes has argued that her "emphasis on renunciation and impassioned if intellectual faith" nevertheless distinguish her from "the aesthete's celebration of sensory experience that provides access to aesthetic beauty." 12
The theme of renunciation is indeed evident in Meynell's writing, especially in early poems such as "Parted," "Thoughts in Separation," "Regrets," "Renouncement," and "Song of the Night at Daybreak." Yet even in these poems the initial commitment to a life of denial is undercut by processes of the mind over which, according to Meynell, the poet only exercises limited control. Thus, although the speaker of "Renouncement" begins with the declaration "I must not think of thee," the poem builds toward an eruption of thought released as her "will"--that preeminent Victorian and Edwardian category for mental capacity--which gives way to "dream." 13 The dream functions here much as Meynell imagined in a characteristically enigmatic essay titled "The Hours of Sleep," in which she wrote of her belief in the "night mind of man" as follows: "The powers of the mind in dream, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of a tide's, and they do return" (p. 89). "After a Parting" has a momentum similar to "Renouncement," moving from the initial stasis of "Farewell has long been said; I have / Foregone thee; / I never name thee even" to an evocation of mental and emotional process: "Swift are the currents setting all one way; / They draw my life, my life, out of my heart" (p. 17).
Poems in later collections celebrate the range of the poet's response, intellectual and emotional. Yet, rather than emphasize the external conditions that give rise to response, or the object that commands aesthetic respect--that is, what would in many cases appear to be a paradigmatic Romantic exchange between interior self and exterior world--Meynell's poems nearly always attend to levels within the act of response itself. In intellectually challenging language that scrutinizes the connections between perception, thought, emotion, and expression, her poems study the dynamics of the mind, both as it processes experience and, more critically, in its consciousness of this act. 14
Representations of silence are the foundation on which Meynell builds her exploration of mental life, and her use of silence is made more evocative by fact that it was so often associated with herself. To outsiders Meynell's characteristic reserve was often treated as her distinct manner of communication. Her admirer Coventry Patmore wrote "Alicia's Silence," a poem [End Page 64] that declares "Now all your mild and silent days / Are each a lyric fact" (Writing Against the Heart, p. 251). In his eulogistic tribute, "Her Portrait," family friend Francis Thompson wrote, "What of her silence, that outsweetens speech? / What of her thoughts, high marks for mine own thoughts to reach?" 15 The letters of George Meredith, yet another of Meynell's devotees, similarly acknowledge the statements made by her silence and suggest that it was at least in part cultivated to do so. In an April 28, 1896, response to one of her letters, Meredith writes, "You write of your not being a talker. I can find the substance I want in your silences, and can converse with them. . . . I am well disposed either to listen or to worship the modest lips that have such golden reserves." 16 Meynell herself in an 1893 essay "A Remembrance" expresses keen appreciation of her father's "reticent graces," which she claims inspire her own desire to capture in her writing "so many significant negatives." 17 Despite the sheer abundance of these tributes to silence, some evidence suggests that Meynell could find it debilitating. As Leighton and Reynolds note, "She became prey to incapacitating headaches and suffered from long creative blocks, when the silence she claimed to admire became a painful and hampering reality" (Leighton and Reynolds, p. 510).
Painful or not, Meynell's association with silence clearly extended to her writing. Noting that "implication or suggestion through silence is also a necessary part of [Meynell's] art," Valerie Sedlak has written that "if a serious analytical study is ever made of the poetry of Alice Meynell, it will be strengthened by a search for the silences." 18 The Pall Mall Gazette--the journal to which she contributed the columns that would become The Wares of Autolycus--referred to her as "the prophet of silence and dejection, the herald of abstention and pause." 19 Meynell's preoccupation with silence evidences itelf in her earliest poetry. For example, in "In Early Spring," a poem about poetic inspiration, she parades her ability to "hear" silence in much the way Patmore and Meredith would later claim interpretive abilities with Meynell's own silences. The narrator of "In Early Spring" insists, "Mine ear, awake to silence, can foretell / The cuckoo's fitful bell" and declares, "I shall be silent in those days desired / Before a world inspired" (p. 3). "To The Beloved," another early poem, makes a similar search for silence in the interstices of sound: "Oh, not more subtly silence strays / Amongst the winds, between the voices, / Mingling alike with pensive lays" (p. 5), and the poet praises an unspecified object of devotion as follows:
Thou art like silence all unvexed,
Though wild words part my soul from thee.
Thou art like silence unperplexed,
A secret and a mystery
Between one footfall and the next. (p. 5) [End Page 65]
Clearly not arguing that she or another individual have been socially silenced, Meynell instead implies that silence is crucial to the communion between this narrator and the unnamed other.
While in these particular poems Meynell concerns herself with the meaningful silences of other beings or things, more typically the focus of her poems extends to an individual's awareness of her own silence and to the inability of others to access these unspoken thoughts. Romantic in its opening invitation to "Come, my own, Into thy garden," the sonnet "The Garden" ends with a Tennysonian-like insistence on the privacy of thought: 20
My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,
Flit to the silent world and other summers, with wings that dip beyond the silver seas. (p. 22)
Although characteristic in its evocation of separation, "Spring on the Alban Hills" foregrounds the speaker's awareness of her own inability to penetrate the interiority of another: "Thou lookest on me from another place; / I touch not this day's secret, nor the thing / That in the silence makes thy soft eyes wild" (p. 25). Here, as in many other poems, Meynell treats private thought not as an impasse that leaves the narrator bereft and unfulfilled but rather as a feature of the mind that enhances the beauty and integrity of experience.
So using silence to indicate incommunicability--a felt, but seemingly necessary and revered, separation between selves--Meynell's poems evidence a growing interest in complexities of language and psychology. Sedlak argues that, "as a self-conscious artist, [Meynell] worked from what she termed the 'essential and interior separateness in which few men have the grace to live,' to produce a poetry which she asserted must be complex in thought to qualify as 'modern'" (Sedlak, p. 34). Silence becomes the most typical signifier of this "interior separateness" and is almost always represented as the condition that makes perception meaningful. In poems such as "The Visiting Sea," "To a Daisy," and "The Young Neophyte" she uses silence and its counterparts of secrecy and solitude to create more extended meditations on the nature of perspective, evoking in the process what Matthew Arnold had long before scorned in his "Preface to Poems, 1853" as a "dialogue of the mind with itself." 21 Writing of "My silent rivulets, over-brimmed," in "The Visiting Sea," for example, the poet concludes:
What! I have secrets from you? Yes.
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. (p. 16)
The narrating voice of "The Visiting Sea" directs much of her commentary [End Page 66] to the "you" for whom the sea stands symbolically, but the point of the poem is really to demarcate the differences in what can from each subject position be seen, as, for example, when Meynell writes, "You see the happy shore, wave-rimmed, / But know not of the quiet dimmed / Rivers your coming floods and fills" (p. 16). Similarly, the speaker of "To a Daisy," an early sonnet, sees in the flower a kind of secrecy akin to the solitude so often represented in poems about individuals, but the poem progresses to foreground the perspective of the poet, who stands, according to the poem, "upon the hither side" (p. 16) .
With the poet waiting for a retrospective vision that will enable her "to penetrate all things and thee," the poem ends in a stasis of anticipation:
For this I must abide,
Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,
And from a poet's side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God's side even of such a simple thing? (p. 29)
Asking first "when shall I . . . then look back," and later "what will it be to look," the poem juxtaposes the relativity of the poet's temporal perspective to the spatial (through its references to the daisy standing "between me and the world" and the promise that the poet will "drink from in beneath a spring"). Ultimately the temporal and spatial are united through references to the "hither side," the "poet's side," and "God's side," which cumulatively enable Meynell to underscore variations of perspective within the poem more generally.
A preoccupation with the nature of perspective surfaces as well in Later Poems, where her far more frequent use of "I," "me," and "my" (for example, in "The Shepherdess," "The Watershed," "The Joyous Wanderer," "West Wind in Winter," "The Fold," "A Poet's Wife," and "The Unexpected Peril," among many others) indicates not so much that her poetry is, as Leighton and Reynolds contend, "largely personal," but rather signifies a commitment to representing the complexities of subjective experience and the multidimensional qualities of personal utterance. Just as recent critics of the Romantic lyric have come to the conclusion that the genre is less defined by belief in or reverence for "autotelic subjectivity" than by its use of "'intersubjective' or 'transubjective' viewpoints, multiple perspectives marked by manifold voices, tonal diversity, deictic shifts, and more prominently, the rhetoric of apostrophe," so, too, does Meynell's poetry invite a consideration of dialogic exchange (Macovski, p. 8). Consider, for example, [End Page 67] the frequently anthologized poem "The Shepherdess." First published in the Pall Mall Gazette and later in the 1896 Other Poems, the poem opens the section of "Later Poems," included in the 1923 Complete Edition. It is an intriguing study of self-control and regulation of thought whose ambiguity lies in the fact that the relation between the poem's subject--the shepherdess--and the poet/narrator is not made clear. Seeing the figure of the shepherdess as depicted by J. F. Millet as emblematic of solitude and all that is psychologically inaccessible, in her essay "Solitude" Meynell seems almost to covet the detachment, privacy, and autonomy that she believes to be represented: "The little figure is away, aloof," she writes. "The girl stands so when the painter is gone. . . . Millet has her as she looks, out of sight" (p. 95). What is intriguing about her response here is that even as she praises the subject's unselfconsciousness and the painter's alleged ability to absent himself from the painting, she in fact emphasizes the crucial presence and perspective of the spectator who sees the girl "as she looks." In its emphasis on the multilayered perspectives that are involved in understanding Millet's painting, Meynell's essay features one of the major thematic emphases of her poetry.
Referring within her poem to the shepherdess only as "the lady of my delight," the speaker of this poem notes with confidence that the shepherdess "holds her little thoughts in sight," despite their tendency to roam, and praises her for being "so circumspect and right" (p. 51). The emphasis on mental control and self-regulation in "The Shepherdess" stands in marked contrast to the more emotive processes depicted in later poems such as "The Watershed," with its triumphant conclusion "I flowed to Italy" (p. 56) or "The Fold," where the speaker of the poem, referring to her thoughts as "flocks of fancies, wild of whim," expresses a desire to enclose "thy frolic thoughts untold" (p. 61). As in "To a Daisy" and "The Visiting Sea," many poems included in Later Poems create an implicit dialogue, presumed to be conducted within the poet's mind, that helps to evoke shifts within the poet's thought processes. In this sense, Meynell's poems often invite their readers to consider what Bahktin in his discussion of speech genres termed "addressivity," the quality of "turning to" another within an utterance or expression. 22 Some of Meynell's most memorable poems are those in which the reader must constantly question who is speaking and who is listening, poems in which the determination of addressivity is always at stake. For example, "A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age" begins with a directive to "Listen," but, in charting what Meynell's narrator at one point calls "our shifting phases," the poem moves ambiguously between addressing the subject as "mother" and "daughter" (pp. 34-36). Rather than position these voices in clear opposition to one another, Meynell encourages her readers to see them in apposition, a technique that Judy Little, in a study of Virginia [End Page 68] Woolf, Barbara Pym, and Christina Brooke Rose, associates with the twentieth-century interest in "experimental selves." In language very applicable to Meynell's techniques, Little writes, "The experimental self . . . is one constructed by discourses that are placed next to each other; that are in creative and transformative apposition." 23 As the title of "A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age" makes evident, the dual voices of Meynell's poem represent such an experimental self; they are clearly not supposed to represent externalized and separate selves but, rather, distinct versions of a consciousness separated only by her awareness of temporal change.
Most innovative in their exploration of the dynamics and representation of mental life, however, are those poems devoted specifically to the topic of poetry and writing. In so often treating the narrating "I" as more specifically "I, the Poet," Meynell undercuts the association of the lyric with the purely personal and also makes more complex the assumed voices of her poetry, for the narrating voice of her many poems about poetry almost always exists as a composite of other voices. These ideas are pursued in detail in the works collected under the heading "A Poet's Fancies." "Fancies" functions here not so much to denote a capricious liking or fondness but rather in its less traditional sense of an artistic power to create and represent. Indeed, in some of the poems this power is directly addressed, as for example in "Unlinked" when the poet asks "If I should quit thee, sacrifice, forswear, / To what, my art, shall I give thee in keeping?" (p. 47). The remainder of the poem responds to this opening question through a series of affirmations, all designed to suggest that the speaker's artistic fancy, or ability to create and represent, is an inseparable aspect of her mental capability. Proclaiming that "I shall die a poet unaware," Meynell juxtaposes the epistemological uncertainties surrounding the idea of how artistic ability shapes her identity and art comes into existence out of the quotidian with confidence that creativity and cognition work mutually to complete the process. 24 The poem ends: "Through my indifferent words of every day, / Scattered and all unlinked the rhymes shall ring, / And make my poem; and I shall not know" (p. 47). Other poems in the collection address similar questions regarding the poetic imagination. "A Song of Derivations" begins "I come from nothing; but from where / Come the undying thoughts I bear?" (p. 44). Here again, Meynell foregrounds a kind of epistemological uncertainty with regard to her art only to go on and celebrate the origins of creative thought, which come in this poem in the form of "voices" that she claims are yet unheard and "thoughts" that "are blessed / With relics of the far unknown" (p. 45). As Michael Macovski has noted in relation to Wordsworth's poetry, this "link with a rhetorical past, with a primal 'other,'" helps to establish dialogism within the poem, augmenting its "textual chorus" 25 It is worth noting as well that the crises of uncertainty that these [End Page 69] poems establish only to embrace are enacted via dialogues conducted within the poet's own mind and that, within these dialogues, subject positions are situated appositionally to one another.
In "Singers to Come," the ninth poem in "A Poet's Fancies," Meynell again invokes alternating voices to create an interior dialogue within the poet's mind as she contemplates the creative process. It begins, though, by suggesting the shift in perspective that she believes to be necessary to the creative process and, in doing so, draws on language much like that she would later use in a poem titled "Winter Trees on the Horizon" (which ends "And, when I gain / The hills, I lift it as I rise / Erect; anon, back to the plain / I soothe it with mine equal eyes" [p. 120]), as well as in an essay titled "The Horizon," both extended meditations on the physical and psychological nature of perspective. This essay begins: "To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up" (p. 176). The landscape in "Singers to Come," as in "Winter Trees on the Horizon," is undeniably a mental one; invoking language akin to that in "The Horizon," the poem begins:
No new delights to our desire
The singers of the past can yield.
I lift mine eyes to hill and field,
And see in them your yet dumb lyre,
Poets unborn and unrevealed. (p. 45)
As in "A Song of Derivations," the poem moves to address the origin of the thoughts that will transform to poetry: "Singers to come, what thoughts will start / To song?" (p. 46). In a maneuver characteristic of other Meynell poems, the subject of address shifts several times, moving first from the "singers" who inspire the poet to a more overtly introspective study in which the poet compares herself to the mythical maid who carries the lyre of Orpheus with its "silent sacred strings" (p. 46). "I, too, clasp mystic strings at rest," she writes (p. 46).
Throughout "A Poet's Fancies," silence undergirds Meynell's representation of mental processing. In "The Love of Narcissus," the first poem within "A Poet's Fancies," for example, she writes of the "trackless ways / His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavour" and notes that "his dreams are far among the silent hills" (p. 38). In "To Any Poet" she calls "Silence, the completest / Of thy poems, last and sweetest" (p. 40). And in "To One Poem in a Silent Time" she questions the source for creative and intellectual inspiration as follows: "Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine? This winter of a silent poet's heart" and asks "How, my December violet, shall I name thee?" (pp. 40-41). "A Poet's Fancies" includes several poems with subtitles underscoring the kind of mental dialogue that she had begun [End Page 70] to use to experiment with addressivity. "The Moon to the Sun" is subtitled "The Poet sings to her Poet," for example; "The Spring to the Summer" and "The Day to the Night" have similar subtitles, "The Poet Sings to her Poet" and "The Poet Sings to his Poet," respectively.
In their focus on interchange conducted within the individual mind, these poems pave the way for subsequent works that use dialogue to explore the distinctive subjectivity of the artist who engages in the creative process with a heightened consciousness of the relativity of his or her perspective. "The Two Poets," a poem included in Later Poems, is such a work, and begins provocatively with a question:
"Whose is the speech / That moves the voices of this lonely beech?" As in earlier works, Meynell ponders the expression of silence, this time by juxtaposing the image of wind meeting tree as follows:
Two memories,
Two powers, two promises, two silences
Closed in this cry, closed in these thousand leaves
Articulate. (p. 52)
Putting the lines within the third and last stanza in quotation marks to signify that they are uttered aloud, Meynell invites her readers to reconsider their assumptions about the narrating voice of the poem and again to recognize voices situated appositionally. The final stanza underscores the impossibility of knowing with certainty the origins or directions of one's thoughts and can be read either as a dialogue or as parallel monologues:
"Whose is the word?
Is it I that spake? Is it thou? Is it I that heard?"
"Thine earth was solitary, yet I found thee!"
"Thy sky was pathless, but I caught, I bound thee,
Thou visitant divine."
"O thou my Voice, the word was thine." "Was thine." (p. 52)
"A Poet's Wife," another poem from this collection, foregrounds perspective in ways akin to those poems in "A Poet's Fancies." It begins with the speaker, presumably the woman indicated by the title, analogously identifying the position of the poet as "a tract of ocean locked inland," and, from her position, the boundaries of enclosure are continually shifting: "Afar it fled the strand, And gave the seasons chase" (p. 76). The second stanza of the poem employs the vocative to shift the perspective from the "I" who narrates the story; instead the speaker now directly addresses the "Poet":
O Poet, more than ocean, lonelier!
In inaccessible rest
And storm remote, thou sea of thoughts, does err
Scattered through east to west,--
Now, while thou closest with the kiss of her
Who locks thee to her breast. (p. 76) [End Page 71]
The apostrophic form functions here less as a prototypical rhetorical device for the lyric than as a means to call attention to the narrator's need for both direct and indirect auditors. The dynamic of self-regulation and resistance, so central to Meynell's earlier poems, resurfaces as well, suggesting that she understood dialogue to be crucial to that control. Finally, the poem emphasizes the consciousness of emotions and thoughts believed to be inaccessible even to one's own "self," and in doing so questions in another way the notion of a unified or discretely bounded self.
Last Poems, the final section in the Complete Edition, includes several poems that continue the threads established in "A Poet's Fancies" and in the poems devoted to poetry within Later Poems. One such work is "The Poet and His Book," which begins with the metaphor familiar from "The Shepherdess"and "The Fold." 26 It begins:
Here are my thoughts, alive within this fold,
My simple sheep. Their shepherd, I grow wise
As dearly, gravely, deeply I behold
Their different eyes. (p. 115)
The emphasis on perspective is here more central than the metaphor of the sheep. The use of "Here" and "alive" establish an immediacy much like Meynell's use of the apostrophic form in other poems, in this instance creating temporal tension with the poet's declaration that she "grow[s] wise" through the contemplative process. Again making use of the vocative to foreground the poem's experiment with addressivity, the second stanza directly addresses the thoughts that she contemplates; "O distant pastures in their blood!" it begins (p. 115). Shifting back to the descriptive mode, the poem ends with a familiar emphasis, this time juxtaposing mental control with renewal: "They wander out, but all return anew," she claims, embracing at once both those that are seemingly unchanged by the experience and "the fruitful few" that return to her ready to spawn new, original thought.
The third of the series titled "Reflexions" uses the image (and metaphor) of a mirror facing a mirror to tackle the transformation of thought over time. Given Bakhtin's claim for dialogue as an expression of a speaker's self-consciousness, Meynell's choice of a mirror is particularly compelling. Titled "In Two Poets," this work celebrates the "migratory greatness" of thoughts that accumulate and transform as did those praised in "A Poet and His Book," and ends with the claim:
greater far
For that return, returns; now grow divine
By endlessness my visiting thoughts, that are
Those visiting thoughts of thine. (p. 126)
The repetition of phrasing works well here to mimic the dialogue presumably [End Page 72] transacted between the poets, emphasizing as it does the way that responses are conditioned by the originating utterance. Finally, juxtaposing "endlessness" to "visiting," the poem highlights the importance of attending to the temporality of thought itself.
In the penultimate poem in the Complete Edition, "The Poet to the Birds," Meynell writes that "My human song must be / My human thought" (p. 143), explicitly linking at last her interest in the interconnectedness of poetic and cognitive processes. Interestingly, the poem begins with an injunction from a presumed auditor, in this case the "birds" of the title: "You bid me hold my peace, / Or so I think, you birds" (p. 143). Meynell qualifies the directive by calling attention to the narrator's consciousness that she has constructed the dialogue in her mind. The dialogue, moreover, is made more resonant by the surrounding voices of silence--either hers or that of the birds--that bound and hence define it. Both the poet and the birds are linked in subsequent stanzas to their respective rhetorical pasts, the birds to the "hereditary song" of "Illyrian lark and Paduan nightingale" and the speaker, though "single, local, lonely, mortal, new," to "all [her] race" (p. 143). In its attention to the voices that surround one and that, at the same time, exist within one, this poem evidences well the ways Meynell's ongoing interest in the thematics of the mind of man inflected her writing to its end.
The mere fact that the poem is titled "The Poet to the Birds"--as opposed to, say, "To the Birds"--is another reminder that Meynell's poems should not be read as "largely personal." Within a body of published poems that extended to a mere eighty or so, the sheer abundance of examples directed to the representation of thought in process suggests that Meynell should instead be credited with a fairly sophisticated understanding of the relationship of human psychology to conventions of language, and its implications for literary forms such as the lyric. Although studying a very different set of writers, Judith Ryan's description of the way early modernist writers responded to some of the questions posed by the "philosopher-psychologists," whose work was most available to the public at the time, is applicable to the study of Meynell as well. As Ryan puts it, "The new conceptions of consciousness and subjectivity had implications that tempted writers to explore them in their own ways" (p. 3). More work needs to be done to assess how Meynell's interests inform others more familiarly associated with the 1890s and their aftermath. Was G. K. Chesterton right to conclude that "it was an accident that she found fame in the days of the decadents"? (p. 5). If we accept the premise that Meynell would seem through her poetry to urge--that thought itself constitutes a variety of sensory experiences--then Chesterton was evidently wrong. While many of Meynell's peers looked for and located the sensory on the surface of experience, she [End Page 73] should be grouped with those who instead probed its depths.
An additional question raised by these poetic impulses is what, if anything, can be deduced from them about her politics. Kathy Psomiades argues that the "interiorizing mission" that evidences itself in Meynell's essay "Symmetry and Incident" is one that is simultaneously depoliticizing, but it is risky to generalize from this insight, for Meynell's poetry consistently complicates the act of self-regulation that Psomiades sees as crucial to interiorization. 27 Furthermore, Meynell's poetic contributions to the study of self-regulation need also to be linked to her Catholicism, dependent as it was on the value of self-discipline. Despite the fact that considerably more work needs to be done in contextualizing Alice Meynell's poetry, it is worth reminding ourselves in conclusion of the ways that silence proved crucial to her explorations of thought processes. Writing of how Meynell's "absence distorts the 1890s as we know them," Psomiades finds irony in her distance from the canon: "To read her is thus to see both the power of the forces that have made her disappear and the cultural authority that she garnered from the very gendered categories that would ultimately create the conditions for her obscurity." 28 Stressing as it consistently does the importance of shifting perspective, though, Meynell's poetry is an instructive reminder that, rather than interpret this silence as an end in itself, it can instead be used as a means with which to understand the process.
Maria Frawley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Notes
1. Angela Leighton, who in Victorian Women Poetry: Writing Against the Heart (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) offers one of the more sustained examinations of Meynell, writes that "in general, however, unlike Barrett Browning's or Augusta Webster's, Meynell's poetry tends to occupy a separate sphere from her political activities" (p. 255). A noteable exception to this trend is Sharon Smulders, "Feminism, Pacifism and the Ethics of War: The Politics and Poetics of Alice Meynell's War Verse," ELT 36, no. 2 (1993): 159-177.
2. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995), p. 510. As Leighton and Reynolds note, Meynell was a "staunch supporter of the non-militant suffragists" (p. 509). Referring to her last twenty years as those when she became most active in the suffrage movement, they write, "She marched alongside Ethel Smyth, Cicely Hamilton and May Sinclair in the big demonstrations of 1910-12, and was a prominent member of the Society of Women Journalists" (p. 510).
3. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 482.
4. G. K. Chesterton, "Alice Meynell," The Dublin Review 172 (January 1923): 1. There is a certain irony in the fact that Chesterton's remarks contain their own less obvious ways of feminizing Meynell and her writing. Moreover, he cannot be said to be representative. Agnes Repellier noted in her memoir for The Catholic World that a wreath with the inscription "Poetess of poets, shepherdess of sheep, saint of women" was laid upon Meynell's coffin. See "Alice Meynell," The Catholic World 75 (March 1923): 724.
5. Alice Meynell, "The Rhythm of Life," in Essays (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1930), p. 78. All references to Meynell's prose are, unless otherwise indicated, to this edition and will hereafter be cited parenthetically in the text.
6. See Janis P. Stout, Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1990). Stout argues that silence is the woman writer's mechanism for undercutting the silence imposed on her by patriarchal ideologies.
7. Here again Meynell's early readers evidence a perceptiveness. Repellier ends her memoir by paying tribute to Meynell's own "delicate processes of thought" (p. 730). Chesterton in varying ways called attention to her interest in thought, as when he wrote, "She was one of those to whom stray thoughts are themselves adventures" (p. 2) or described her writing as "a thing with the bones of thought in it" (p. 3).
8. For an overview of this topic, see especially the introductory chapter of Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 1.
9. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, "Troping Japan: Gender and Cultural Imperialism," in INCS Proceedings: Borders of Culture/Margins of Identity (New Orleans: Xavier Review Press, 1994), p. 55.
10. Michael Macovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), provides a cogent analysis of critical approaches to the Romantic lyric and draws on Bahktinian notions of dialogue to amplify and modify this scholarship.
11. This phrase is also from "The Rhythm of Life," Essays, p. 78.
12. Linda K. Hughes, "A Female Aesthete at the Helm: Sylvia's Journal and 'Graham R. Tomson,' 1893-1894," VPR 29, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 173-192.
13. Alice Meynell, "Renouncement," from The Poems of Alice Meynell (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. 28. All quotations from Meynell's poems are from this edition unless otherwise indicated and will hereafter be cited by page number parenthetically in the text.
14. While I do not want to make the historically suspect argument that Meynell anticipates the work of recent philosophers of mind or cognitive scientists, I have found some of their work helpful in articulating the issues of selfhood, agency, and consciousness that I see at the heart of Meynell's poetry. Particularly lucid and helpful has been The Discursive Mind by Rom Harre and Grant Gillett (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1994), which has chapters on "Thoughts," "The Discursive Origins of the Sense of Self," and "Agency and Personality."
15. Francis Thompson, "Her Portrait," in Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry, ed. Frederick Page, Viola Meynell, Olivia Sowerby, and Francis Meynell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), p. 28.
16. Letter "To Mrs. Alice Meynell," April 29, 1896. Reprinted in The Letters of George Meredith, ed. C. L. Cline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 3:1228.
17. Quoted in Leighton, Writing Against the Heart, p. 246. Leighton goes on to argue, "The reserve of character which she shared with her father is turned, in the poems, into a language loaded with the significant negatives, of the unsaid." Beverly Schlack makes a similar point about Meynell's style, writing, "Her unsettling qualities include a restraint which is not an absence of something, but rather the strong presence of significant silences." See "The 'Poetess of Poets': Alice Meynell Rediscovered," Women's Studies 7 (1980): 113.
18. Valerie Sedlak, "Alice Meynell's 'A Thrush Before Dawn,'" MAWA Review 1, nos. 2-3 (1982): 34.
19. In "Troping Japan," p. 53, Kathy Alexis Psomiades quotes from this Pall Mall Gazette review from a publisher's advertisement as it appears at the end of the third edition of The Rhythym of Life.
20. The stanza quoted echoes in some respects Section 48 of In Memoriam, A.H.H., which ends "Nor dare she trust a larger lay, / But rather loosens from the lip / Short swallow-flights of song, that dip / Their wings in tears, and skim away" (The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987], 2:365-366).
21. Matthew Arnold, "Preface to Poems, 1853," in Arnold: The Complete Poems, ed. Kenneth and Miriam Allott (New York: Longman, 1979), p. 654.
22. See Bakhtin's "The Problems of Speech Genres," in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986), p. 95. In his discussion of constitutive markers of utterance, Bakhtin distinguishes between kinds of addressees, identifying the addressee of monological utterances of an emotional type, as typically "indefinite" and "unconcretized."
23. Judy Little, The Experimental Self: Dialogic Subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1996), p. 2.
24. Arguing that Meynell's interest in the everyday undercuts criticism that she displayed "an excess of artifice," Chesterton in fact celebrated Meynell's ability "to take an imaginative interest in any ordinary objective prosaic thing that lay in her path, though it were a beetle or even a button" (p. 9).
25. Macovski is careful to stress that "these rhetorical responses are a function not of any identifable reader but of dialogue itself" (p. 22).
26. Beverly Schlack also notes the coincidence of tropes in these poems in her study of Meynell, p. 122.
27. In a compelling conclusion, Psomiades writes, "The ultimate end of 'Symmetry and Incident' is the elaboration of a specific kind of humanity, one that values self-regulation, the repeated representational enactments of control and resistance, and the complex and variegated depths of psyche. This elaboration is a mode of cultural imperialism in that it reaffirms the occidental as the most fully human mode of existence" (p. 59). While persuasive in her reading of this particular essay, I am not convinced that cultural imperialism can be seen to undergird the representations of self throughout Meynell's poetry.
28. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, review of Poetry by Women to 1900: A Bibliography of American and British Writers, compiled by Gwenn David and Beverly A. Joyce. In Nineteenth-Century Contexts 16, no. 2 (1992): 198.
