A Song of Derivations,Alice Meynell was an English poet who, following her marriage to a Catholic newspaper publisher and editor, followed in his line of work becoming a successful editor and critic in her own right. She came late to the world of published poetry; she was aged 28 before her first collection was seen.
It was called Preludes and attracted the favourable attention of other writers such as John Ruskin but was barely noticed by the reading public. Later in her life Alice served as vice-president of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, a much less militant branch of the suffragette movement that was gathering pace in the early years of the 20th century.
A Song of Derivations by Alice Meynell
I come from nothing; but from where
Come the undying thoughts I bear?
Down, through the long links of death and birth,
From the past poets of the earth,
My immortality is there.
I am like the blossom of an hour.
But long, long vanished sun and shower
Awoke my breath i’ the young world’s air;
I track the past back everywhere
Through seed and flower and seed and flower.
Or I am like a stream that flows
Full of the cold springs that arose
In morning lands, in distant hills;
And down the plain my channel fills
With melting of forgotten snows.
Voices, I have not heard, possessed
My own fresh songs; my thoughts are blessed
With relics of the far unknown.
And mixed with memories not my own
The sweet streams throng in my breast.
Before this life began to be,
The happy songs that wake in me
Woke long ago and far apart.
Heavily on this little heart
Presses this immortality.
