The Crowning

MAURICE HEALY

In Memoriam
A Ballad of Friendship
In the Midst of Them
Sic Transit

MONICA SALEEBY

Retrospect

FRANCIS MEYNELL

Any Stone
Lux in Tenebris
Mater Inviolata
Song-burden
Gifts
Wraith
A Dedication

* * * * *

FOREWORD

My office on this occasion is one which I may well carry as lightly as
possible. In our society, I am told, one needs an introduction to a
beautiful woman; but I have never heard of men needing an introduction
to a beautiful song. Prose before poetry is an unmeaning interruption;
for poetry is perhaps the one thing in the world that explains itself.
The only possible prelude for songs is silence; and I shall endeavour
here to imitate the brevity of the silence as well as its stillness.

This collection contains four new poems by one whom all serious critics
now class with Shelley and Keats and those other great ones cut down
with their work unfinished. Yet I would not speak specially of him,
lest modern critics should run away with their mad notion of a one-man
influence; and call this a "school" of Francis Thompson. Francis
Thompson was not a schoolmaster. He would have said as freely as Whitman
(and with a far more consistent philosophy), "I charge you to leave all
free, as I have left all free." The modern world has this mania about
plagiarism because the modern world cannot comprehend the idea of
communion. It thinks that men must steal ideas; it does not understand
that men may share them. The saints did not imitate each other; not
always even study each other; they studied the Imitation of Christ.
A real religion is that in which any two solitary people might suddenly
say the same thing at any moment. It would therefore be most misleading
to give to this collection an air of having been inspired by its most
famous contributor. The little lyrics of this little book must surely
be counted individual, even by those who may count them mysterious.
A variety verging on quaintness is the very note of the assembled bards.

Take, for example, Mr. Colum's stern and simple rendering of the bitter
old Irish verses:

"O woman, shapely as the swan,
On your account I shall not die."

Like Fitzgerald's Omar and all good translations, it leaves one
wondering whether the original was as good; but to an Englishman the
note is not only unique, but almost hostile. It is the hardness of the
real Irishman which has been so