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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Rediscovering a lost poet
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
Some years ago, whilst researching something else, I discovered a "lost" poet. She had had two volumes of poetry published, in 1886 and 1888, but I suspect both were short print runs and few copies remain. Several of her poems appeared in larger anthologies, and those have survived.
I fell in love with her poetry, so much so that, as she was out of copyright, I self-published a booklet of her poems in an attempt to disseminate her poetry. I've also had one academic paper published.
I've made a couple of attempts at writing a full length biography - I have plenty of raw material after researching her off and on over several years, and her life story is full of drama - but I'm not a very good writer.
Has any other Shipmate tried to revive a "lost" poet?
Can I put some of her poems on this thread? I'm not sure of the copyright position but as I've published them, I don't think there's a copyright issue.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
Let me get back to you on the copyright thingie.
Nothing even in the NLS? (Deposit libraries, eh? Where are they when you need 'em?)
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
I've just found out that the 1886 book can be downloaded onto Kindle for free as a "forgotten book." So presumably I'm not the only one to assume she's out of copyright.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
How can something from that long ago not be out of copyright? Apart from the James Barrie Peter Pan being connected with that children's hospital, and then only in the UK, I think.
(Current copyright law makes me twitch, as it seems that big corporations are doing everything they can to get around the "X years after death of author" thing.)
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
How can something from that long ago not be out of copyright?
Life + 70 years. It's not impossible that the author of poetry published in the 1880s was still alive in 1944.
(My understanding is that, unlike the US, the UK's "life +70 years" copyright extension was retrospective, and brought back in to copyright some works which had dropped out.)
Posts: 5026 | From: USA | Registered: Feb 2013
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
She died in Feb 1933, predeceased by her siblings and only nephew.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
It sounds as though you could certainly quote from her - toss enticing tidbits that would have us scrambling to our Kindles, like gulls after a trawler.
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
This one was written in 1883; her father has died and she is sorting through his papers. I've removed some of the middle verses.
Old Letters
Waterloo fought! That dates the first,
(The years they span are over fifty),
When postage-stamps were yet unknown,
And “franks” not unknown to the thrifty.
Yet, spite of paper-tax, we find
The early letters here in plenty,
Recipient was just turned fifteen,
And correspondent not yet twenty.
The student, just emancipate
From Greek and Higher Mathematics,
Writes to the lonely friend he left
Unpartnered in their dreary attics.
....
.....
Then comes a change, -“O caeca mens”-
And among newer scenes and faces,
A newer Dulcinea shines.-
Such things are usual in such cases.
A kirk, a manse, a wedding-tour,
A long farewell to dreary teaching,
The ardent student settles down
To sober, douce and decent preaching.
....
Here’s the last sentence that he wrote;
“And if in aught I have offended,
I crave forgiveness for my faults,
Dear Frank.” And here the letter ended.
The last! A mist is o’er my eyes,
And in my heart are thoughts unspoken.
Both dead! It may be somewhere lasts
That college friendship still unbroken.
I like this one because the tone is light and witty, but affectionate and yet the ending is so poignant. Anyone else like it?
(Sorry, screeds - however OOC - make the PTB twitch. I think there's enough there to represent the strengths and weaknesses of the poem)
[ 11. August 2014, 17:06: Message edited by: Firenze ]
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
I'd be interested in negative comments, too. I don't think I can read her work dispassionately at all, having let myself become enraptured by her life story and work.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
Yes and no.
I think the focus - like the scansion - wobbles a bit. It's best when it presents telling detail of that one, particular life - weakens when it throws in some generalised 'twas ever thus comment.
It also, to my mind, shows the utility of more complicated verse forms such as we have been playing about with on other threads. The quatrains with their insistent - and sometimes obtrusive rhymes - push it too far towards comic verse IMO.
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
I've cut this one down from four verses to two.
At the Nets
(Mark 1 20 and Matthew IV 19-21. Did any third brother decline the brothers’ call to follow?)
.....
“Called by the Master.” True. Thy lot is fair:
But mine? My work is here. How can I dare
Leave God’s sea-harvest on the shore to spoil?
Think you no hands would fain grow white in prayer,
That now grow hard and brown through daily toil?
Is it so easy? Ask that Lord of thine
Whether in carpentering-work the line
Fell always true, the harsh plane went not slow.
Not wholly wrong, if, in counting cost, you find
Christ-following easier than net-mending, go.
.....
[ 11. August 2014, 15:17: Message edited by: North East Quine ]
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
I have a photo of the poet, looking demure in ruffles and a bustle, gloves and a high neckline.
This poem seems in complete contrast to the woman in the photo. She's describing swimming in a way that is vigorous and sexual.
First two verses only.
A Bathing Snatch
Come back from the town of heat and unrest!
Come back at my mistress the sea’s behest!
Leaving the old grey pier to the leeward,
Striking out, while the soul of me yearns to seaward,
With the crash of the water on arms and breast.
The wave-voice fills me in heart and brain
With the pulse of a joythrob keen as pain;
Is the foam on my forehead my lady’s greeting?
Does she thrill with the sense of a lover’s meeting?
I am hers, both body and soul again.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Doublethink.
Ship's Foolwise Unperson
# 1984
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Posted
I really don't get her verse, not sure why. Might be because the content doesn't grab me.
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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. George Orwell
Posts: 19219 | From: Erehwon | Registered: Aug 2005
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
I found her poetry, already knowing something of her professional background (teacher training college / teaching / lecturing), so I have never read it "cold" as it were.
She published a lot of poetry. She appears to have been asked to write verses for various occasions (A Few Lines on the Retirement of...) and these are indifferent. Then she wrote competent but, IMO, uninspired nature poetry. The next category comprises poems she wrote while playing with a particular verse form. These are competent, but "clever" rather than good.
Finally, the poems I love, about her life. She fell in love with a female colleague, Maggie, but her love was unrequited. Maggie fell in love with a man, but died prior to the marriage. My poet had a nervous breakdown. She recovered, and fell in love with another (unnamed ) woman, but this second relationship was blighted by her ongoing grief over Maggie. She grew gradually more eccentric as the years went on, sustained by good friends. She mourned Maggie till the day she died.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
Re-Awakening
Great trees stretch their arms above us
As we pass,
Like a priestly benediction
After mass,
And the poppies drop their hoodlets
On the grass.
Such a sleepy, slumberous silence
On the land,
As if some enchanter swayed it
With his wand!
On my arm, as on we wander,
Rests your hand.
And the holy quiet on us
Softly lies,
Over, round us, and between us,
Garment-wise.
While the tender light of evening
Slowly dies.
Still you say, as Love made perfect
Casts out fear,
It should cast out all past sorrow.
With you here
Life should burgeon into blossom.
Listen, dear.
(Three verses omitted)
Passion-phantoms? Yes. But love-ones
Can, and will;
At my side there walks a Presence
Cold and chill,
And the hands of a dead woman
Hold me still.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
There you probably have it - someone whose available range of expression wasn't quite - or perhaps, since I haven 't seen her total oeuvre, only intermittently - up to conveying her experience.
Or maybe it was a limitation of her time and place - her central subject wasn't one she could describe fully, I imagine. The current literary models were mainstream. Perhaps in other circumstances, she could have been franker, and discovered a more radical poetic voice,
So many literary Movements were just a few people talking in bars or striding the fells or doing opium by Lake Geneva. It's a rare Emily Dickinson who can create their own style in isolation.
[ 18. August 2014, 11:40: Message edited by: Firenze ]
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
She was quite frank in some of her poems. Reading between the lines, I think that those around her were assuming her feelings were a "schoolgirl pash" even once she was in her late twenties, and she was protesting that she really was passionately in love with another woman.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
This is the full poem:
A Study in Style
That Night
On the dim seashore, where the night-winds roam,
Two burdens fell, and all two lives grew light,
A mist-pall shrouded the dead land in white,
And the sea shivered into lines of foam,
That happy night.
What mattered it if, in embrace that weds
The things that are, the things beyond earth’s sight,
The long grey waves that, in the grey twilight,
Crashed on the sand, had closed above our heads,
We lived, that night.
One lightning-flash cleft air from sky to shore,
And showed two faces through great love grown white,
Fear panted on the lips of our delight,
Then – Fear and Shame fell slain for evermore.
That happy night.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
I think to you, knowing her story, her poems are always going to be more resonant. I'm not saying they're bad, or ineffectual, just that they don't affect me strongly.
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
E l i z a b e t h (Bessie) C r a i g m y l e .
The love of her life was Margaret (Maggie) D a l e (1861-1887)
(Apologies for the gaps, but it prevents anyone googling her name finding my ship name.)
Maggie wanted to be a doctor, but women couldn't study medicine at Scottish Universities. So Maggie trained as a teacher, to earn enough to save up to to go abroad to study medicine. Premium salaries were being paid to teachers in unhealthy areas. So she went to Argentina in 1885 on a 3 year contract, to teach at St Andrews Church of Scotland School in Buenos Aires. And she died there of a fever in 1887.
Bessie had planned to follow in Maggie's steps and also eventually study medicine. Once qualified the two women planned to live together and run a joint medical practice. I think publishing her poems was Bessie's way of supplementing her teaching salary to save towards going abroad.
However, it reads as though Maggie valued the friendship primarily as a meeting of minds, whilst Bessie hoped for a physical relationship.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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