The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPoems

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPoemsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: PoemsAuthor: Theodore MaynardAuthor of introduction, etc.: G. K. ChestertonRelease date: July 9, 2017 [eBook #55079]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Larry B. Harrison, Chuck Greif, Bryan Ness andthe Online Distributed Proofreading Team athttp://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from imagesgenerously made available by The Internet Archive/CanadianLibraries)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: PoemsAuthor: Theodore MaynardAuthor of introduction, etc.: G. K. ChestertonRelease date: July 9, 2017 [eBook #55079]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Larry B. Harrison, Chuck Greif, Bryan Ness andthe Online Distributed Proofreading Team athttp://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from imagesgenerously made available by The Internet Archive/CanadianLibraries)

Title: Poems

Author: Theodore MaynardAuthor of introduction, etc.: G. K. Chesterton

Author: Theodore Maynard

Author of introduction, etc.: G. K. Chesterton

Release date: July 9, 2017 [eBook #55079]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Larry B. Harrison, Chuck Greif, Bryan Ness andthe Online Distributed Proofreading Team athttp://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from imagesgenerously made available by The Internet Archive/CanadianLibraries)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***

P O E M S

Contents

POEMSByTHEODORE MAYNARDWITH AN INTRODUCTION BYG. K. CHESTERTONTORONTOMcCLELLAND AND STEWART,Ltd.PUBLISHERS

ByTHEODORE MAYNARDWITH AN INTRODUCTION BYG. K. CHESTERTONTORONTOMcCLELLAND AND STEWART,Ltd.PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1917, 1918, by Daniel E. Hudson; Copyright, 1917, 1918, by The Sisters of Mercy; Copyright, 1917, 1919, by The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle in the State of New York.———Copyright, 1919, byFrederick A. Stokes Company———All Rights ReservedPrinted in U. S. A.

We two have seen with our own eyesGod’s multitudinous disguise;Waylaid Him in His voyagingAmong the buttercups of Spring;In valleys where the lilies shoneMore glorious than SolomonWe met a poet passing by,And learned his lyric—you and I!But oh! did kindly Heaven not blessOur lives with more than loveliness,When, cast on every sapling-rod,Was seen the motley of our God;When having picked our way with craftUp cliffs to hear Him when He laughed,We felt, uplifted on the wind,His folly blown into our mind?What doubt can touch us? We have heardThe baby laughter of the Word!We mingle with solemnityA Catholic note of revelryIn hypostatic union.From love’s carved choir-stalls we conThe plain-song of the BreviaryIllumined by hilarity.For as each cleansing sacramentTo our soul’s comforting was sent(Through water and oil and wheat and wine,Bringing to human the divine),So shall we find on lovers’ lipsThe splendour of apocalypse,And through the body’s five gates comeTo all the good of Christendom.We have no fear that we shall loseThis joyous Gospel of good news,For our symbolic love has stoodBy virtue of its fortitude—Knowing a bitter Lenten fast,Satan discomforted at last,A bowed back scalding with great scars,Gethsemane of tears and stars,A journey of the cross, and ah,Its part and lot in Golgotha!We know—let the marvellous thing be said!—Love’s resurrection from the dead ...For as Magdalen came with cinnamonAnd aloes to smear Love’s limbs upon,But met alone on the Easter grassLife’s Lord, though she wist not Who He was—So we, till He spoke as He spoke to her,Mistook Him for the gardener.

But oh! did kindly Heaven not blessOur lives with more than loveliness,When, cast on every sapling-rod,Was seen the motley of our God;When having picked our way with craftUp cliffs to hear Him when He laughed,We felt, uplifted on the wind,His folly blown into our mind?

What doubt can touch us? We have heardThe baby laughter of the Word!We mingle with solemnityA Catholic note of revelryIn hypostatic union.From love’s carved choir-stalls we conThe plain-song of the BreviaryIllumined by hilarity.For as each cleansing sacramentTo our soul’s comforting was sent(Through water and oil and wheat and wine,Bringing to human the divine),So shall we find on lovers’ lipsThe splendour of apocalypse,And through the body’s five gates comeTo all the good of Christendom.

We have no fear that we shall loseThis joyous Gospel of good news,For our symbolic love has stoodBy virtue of its fortitude—Knowing a bitter Lenten fast,Satan discomforted at last,A bowed back scalding with great scars,Gethsemane of tears and stars,A journey of the cross, and ah,Its part and lot in Golgotha!

We know—let the marvellous thing be said!—Love’s resurrection from the dead ...For as Magdalen came with cinnamonAnd aloes to smear Love’s limbs upon,But met alone on the Easter grassLife’s Lord, though she wist not Who He was—So we, till He spoke as He spoke to her,Mistook Him for the gardener.

April 14th, 1918.

This edition of Theodore Maynard’s poems represents the author’s own selection of such of his published verse as he wishes included in a permanent collection. With few omissions, it represents the contents of the three volumes issued in Great Britain under the titles, “Laughs and Whifts of Song,” 1915; “Drums of Defeat,” 1917; “Folly,” 1918, none of which has hitherto been published in this country.

Inthe case of any poet who has caught and held our recollection, there is generally a particular piece of work which remains in our mind, not as the crown, but as the key. And ever since I saw inThe New Witnesssome lines called “A Song of Colours,” by Theodore Maynard, they have remained to me as a sort of simplification, or permanent element, of the rest of the poet’s writings; and I have felt him especially as a poet of colour. They are not by any means the best of his lines. They are direct, as is appropriate to a ballad; and they have none of the fine whimsicality or the frank humour to be found elsewhere in his work. Among these others the choice is hard: but I should say that the finest poetry as such is to be found in the images, and even in the very title, of “The World’s Miser”: and even more in the poem called “Apocalypse.” In this latter the poet imagines a new world which shall be supernatural in the strongest sense of the word; that of being more vivid and positive than the natural; and not (as it is so often imagined) more tenuous and void.

“Or what empurpled blooms to oust the roseOr what strange grass to glow like angels’ hair!”

The last line has the touch of the true mystic, which changes a thing and yet leaves it familiar. True artistic pugnacity, a thing that generally goes with true artistic pleasure, is well-expressed in the shrewd lines of the poem printed as a sequel to another poem called “To a Good Atheist.” The sequel is called “Toa Bad Atheist,” with the charming explanation: “Who wrote what he called a trinity of meek retorts to the preceding poem, which were not meek, but full of pride and abominable heresy.” He describes the bad atheist’s mind as containing nothing but sawdust, sun and sand; which is accurate and exhaustive. And in so far as poetry appeals to particular temperaments, I myself find enjoyment expecially in the part of the collection properly to be called “Laughs”; in the ballads of feasting and fellowship; and especially in that sublime absolution gravely offered to the Duke of Norfolk.

But the sentiment of colour still ran like a thread through the whole texture; and I think there is hardly a poem that does not repeat it. And this is important; because the whole of Mr. Maynard’s inspiration is part of what is the main business of our time: the resurrection of the Middle Ages. The modern movement, with its Guild Socialism and its military reaction against the fatalism of the Barbarian, is as certainly drawing its life from the lost centuries of Catholic Europe, as the movement more commonly called the Renaissance drew its life from the lost languages and sculptures of antiquity. And, by a quaint inconsistency, Hellenists and Neo-Pagans of the school of Mr. Lowes Dickinson will call us antiquated for gathering the flowers which still grow on the graves of our mediæval ancestors, while they themselves will industriously search for the scattered ashes from the more distant pyres of the Pagans.

And the visible clue to the Middle Ages is colour. The mediæval man could paint before he could draw. In the almost startling inspiration which we call stained glass, he discovered something that is almost more coloured than colour; something that bears the same relation to mere colour that golden flame does to golden sand. He did not, like other artists, try in his pictures to paint the sun; he made the sun paint his pictures. He mixed the aboriginal light with the paints upon his palette. And it is this translucent actuality of colour which I feel in the phraseology of this writer, in a way it is not easy to analyse. We can only say that when he says—

“Among the yellow primrosesHe holds His summer palaces”

we have an impression, which it is the object of all poetry to produce. It can only be described by saying that a primrose by the river’s brim ayellowprimrose is to him, and it could not possibly be anything more. And this almost torrid directness and distinctness of tint is again connected with another quality of the poet and his poetic tradition: what many would call asceticism alternating with what many would call buffoonery. The colour conventions of the Middle Ages were copied very beautifully by the school of Rossetti and Swinburne. But they lost the exuberance of the Gothic and became a pattern rather than a plan; chiefly because they were not seriously inspired by any of the enthusiasms of the Middle Ages. Itsdecorative repetitions sometimes became quite dreary and artificial; as in Swinburne’s unfortunate couplet about the lilies and languors of virtue and the raptures and roses of vice. A little healthy gardening would have taught Swinburne that it takes quite as much virtue to grow a rose as to grow a lily. It might also have taught him that virtue is never languid, whatever else it may be: and that even lilies are not really languid so long as they are alive. If such decadents want an image of what it really is that holds up the heads of lilies or any other growing things, I can refer them to a couplet in this little volume, which is more beautiful and more original and means a great deal more—

“What wilful trees of any springThan your young body are more fair?”

These lines contain a principle of life and mark the end of a pagan sterility. They contain the secret, not of gathering rosebuds while we may, but of growing them when we choose.

G. K. Chesterton.

GOLDfor the crown of Mary,Blue for the sea and sky,Green for the woods and meadowsWhere small white daisies lie,And red for the colour of Christ’s bloodWhen He came to the cross to die.These things the high God gave usAnd left in the world He made—Gold for the hilt’s enrichment,And blue for the sword’s good blade,And red for the roses a youth may setOn the white brows of a maid.Green for the cool, sweet gardensWhich stretch about the house,And the delicate new frondageThe winds of Spring arouse,And red for the wine which a man may drinkWith his fellows in carouse.Blue and green for the comfortOf tired hearts and eyes,And red for that sudden hour which comesWith danger and great emprise,And white for the honour of God’s throneWhen the dead shall all arise.Gold for the cope and chalice,For kingly pomp and pride,And red for the feathers men wear in their capsWhen they win a war or a bride,And red for the robe which they dressed God inOn the bitter day He died.

GOLDfor the crown of Mary,Blue for the sea and sky,Green for the woods and meadowsWhere small white daisies lie,And red for the colour of Christ’s bloodWhen He came to the cross to die.

These things the high God gave usAnd left in the world He made—Gold for the hilt’s enrichment,And blue for the sword’s good blade,And red for the roses a youth may setOn the white brows of a maid.

Green for the cool, sweet gardensWhich stretch about the house,And the delicate new frondageThe winds of Spring arouse,And red for the wine which a man may drinkWith his fellows in carouse.

Blue and green for the comfortOf tired hearts and eyes,And red for that sudden hour which comesWith danger and great emprise,And white for the honour of God’s throneWhen the dead shall all arise.

Gold for the cope and chalice,For kingly pomp and pride,And red for the feathers men wear in their capsWhen they win a war or a bride,And red for the robe which they dressed God inOn the bitter day He died.

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