The Two Poets,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.
The Two Poets by Alice Meynell
Whose is the speech
That moves the voices of this lonely beech?
Out of the long West did this wild wind come –
Oh strong and silent! And the tree was dumb,
Ready and dumb, until
The dumb gale struck it on the darkened hill.
Two memories,
Two powers, two promises, two silences
Closed in this cry, closed in these thousand leaves
Articulate.
This sudden hour retrieves
The purpose of the past,
Separate, apart–embraced, embraced at last.
“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.”
