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Michael Field (pseud)
Katherine Bradley, 1846-1914
& Edith Cooper, 1862-1913
Bradley and Cooper collaborated under the name of Michael Field, producing some eleven volumes of poetry and thirty historical tragedies, in the form of verse drama.
Katherine Bradley published her first volume of poetry The New Minnesinger in 1875, under the pseudonym of Arran Leigh. At this time she was also attending Newham, the Cambridge college for women, and was a member of the Guild of St. George, a Utopian society founded by Ruskin in 1871. Ruskin and Bradley were regular correspondants.
Edith Cooper wrote poetry from a very young age, and their first collaboration was in 1871, under the name of Arran and Isla Leigh. They chose a new name in 1884 – Michael Field – to publish a pair of verse plays, Callirrhoe and Fair Rosamund, which received rave reviews.
They formed friendships with Walter Pater, Mary and Bernhard Berenson, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, and many others in literary and artistic circles.
Although they wanted to maintain the strictest secrecy about their identity, they did confide in one friend, Robert Browning, and were subsequently identified as “she” in the Athenaeum by a reviewer within a few months.
To some extent they maintained their anonymity with the public, but their friends came to call them “Michael.”
Field, Michael.
Mystic Trees.
Eveleigh Nash [1913].
Green cloth, spine and upper side gilt-lettered and designed, all edges uncut, the design being by Charles Ricketts.
Undoubtedly the prime “association” book of this colletion. It has the Hawkesyard library stamps, and on the half-title Father Vincent McNabb (the Prior) has written: “This copy was given by ‘Michael’ to ‘Henry.'” Above this, in Miss Bradley’s hand: “on the day of the Apparititio, 1913. Michael.”
Constancy
I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower: in all kinds
My love is perfect, and in each she finds
Herself the goal: then why, intent to teaze
And rob her delicate spirit of its ease,
Hastes she to range me with inconstant minds?
If she should die, if I were left at large
On earth without her-I, on earth, the same
Quick mortal with a thousand cries, her spell
She fears would break. And I confront the charge
As sorrowing, and as careless of my fame
As Christ intact before the infidel.
Come Gorgo, put the rug in place’
Come Gorgo, put the rug in place,
And passionate recline;
I love to see thee in thy grace,
Dark, virulent, divine.
But wherefore thus thy proud eyes fix
Upon a jewelled band?
Art thou so glad the sardonyx
Becomes thy shapely hand?
Bethink thee! `Tis for such as thou
Zeus leaves his lofty seat;
`Tis at thy beauty’s bidding how
Man’s mortal life shall fleet;
Those fairest hands – dost thou forget
Their power to thrill and cling?
O foolish woman, dost thou set
Thy pride upon a ring?
Ah, Eros doth not always smite
Ah, Eros doth not always smite
With cruel, shining dart,
Whose bitter point with sudden might
Rends the unhappy heart —
Not thus forever purple-stained,
And sore with steely touch,
Else were its living fountain drained
Too oft and overmuch.
O’er it sometimes the boy will deign
Sweep the shaft’s feathered end;
And friendship rises without pain
Where the white plumes descend.
Sometimes I do despatch my heart
Sometimes I do despatch my heart
Among the graves to dwell apart:
On some the tablets are erased,
Some earthquake-tumbled, some defaced,
And some that have forgotten lain
A fall of tears makes green again;
And my brave heart can overtread
Her brood of hopes, her infant dead,
And pass with quickened footsteps by
The headstone of hoar memory,
‘Till she hath found
One swelling mound
With just her name writ and beloved,
From that she cannot be removed.
So jealous of your beauty
So jealous of your beauty,
You will not wed
For dread
That hymeneal duty
Should touch and mar
The lovely thing you are?
Come to your garden-bed!
Learn there another lesson:
This poppy-head,
Instead
Of having crimson dress on,
Is now a fruit,
Whose marvellous pale suit
Transcends the glossy red.
What, count the colour
Of apricot,
Ungot,
Warming in August, duller
Than those most shy,
Frail flowers that spread and die
Before the sun is hot!
Lady, the hues unsightly,
And best forgot,
Are not
Berries and seeds set brightly,
But withered blooms:
Alack, vainglory dooms
You to their ragged lot!
Already to mine eyelids’ shore
Already to mine eyelids’ shore
The gathering waters swell,
For thinking of the grief in store
When thou wilt say ‘Farewell.’
I dare not let thee leave me, sweet,
Lest it should be for ever;
Tears dew my kisses ere we meet,
Foreboding we must sever:
Since we can neither meet nor part,
Methinks the moral is, sweetheart,
That we must dwell together.
A Girl
A Girl,
Her soul a deep-wave pearl
Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;
A face flowered for heart’s ease,
A brow’s grace soft as seas
Seen through faint forest-trees:
A mouth, the lips apart,
Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze
From her tempestuous heart.
Such: and our souls so knit,
I leave a page half-writ —
The work begun
Will be to heaven’s conception done,
If she come to it.
‘I sing thee with the stock-dove’s throat’
I sing thee with the stock-dove’s throat,
Warm, crooning, superstitious note,
That on its dearie so doth dote
It falls to sorrow,
And from the fair, white swans afloat
A dirge must borrow.
In thee I have such deep content,
I can but murrnur a lament;
It is as though my heart were rent
By thy perfection,
And all my passion’s torrent spent
In recollection.
Nightfall
She sits beside: through four low panes of glass
The sun, a misty meadow, and the stream;
Falling through rounded elms the last sunbeam
Through night’s thick fibre sudden barges pass
With great forelights of gold, with trailing mass
Of timber: rearward of their transient glearn
The shadows settle, and profounder dream
Enters, fulfils the shadows. Vale and grass
Are now no more; a last leaf strays about,
Then every wandering ceases; we remain.
Clear dusk, the face of wind is on the sky:
The eyes I love lift to the upper pane —
Their voice gives note of welcome quietly
‘I love the air in which the stars come out.’
Sweet-Briar in Rose
So sweet, all sweet — the body as the shyer
Sweet senses, and the Spirit sweet as those:
For me the fragrance of a whole sweet-briar
Beside the rose!
Lo, my loved is dying
Lo, my loved is dying, and the call
Is come that I must die,
All the leaves are dying, all
Dying, drifting by.
Every leaf is lonely in its fall,
Every flower has its speck and stain;
The birds from hedge and tree
Lisp mournfully,
And the great reconciliation of this pain
Lies in the full soft rain.
My Darling
Atthis, my darling, thou did’st stray
A few feet to the rushy bed,
When a great fear and passion shook
My heart lest haply thou wert dead;
It grew so still about the brook,
As if a soul were drawn away.
My darling! Nay, our very breath
Nor light nor darkness shall divide;
Queen Dawn shall find us on one bed,
Nor must thou flutter from my side
An instant, lest I feel the dread,
At this, the immanence of death.
WHERE THE BLESSED FEET HAVE TROD
OT alone in Palestine those blessed Feet have trod,
For I catch their print,
I have seen their dint
On a plot of chalky ground,
Little villas dotted round;
On a sea-worn waste,
Where a priest, in haste,
Passeth with the Blessèd Sacrament to one dying, frail,
Through the yarrow, past the tamarisk, and the plaited snail:
Bright upon the grass I see
Bleeding Feet of Calvary–
And I worship, and I clasp them round!
On this bit of chalky, English ground,
Jesu, Thou art found: my God I hail,
My Lord, my God!
It was deep April
It was deep April, and the morn
Shakespere was born;
The world was on us, pressing sore;
My love and I took hands and swore,
Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore,
To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore,
To sing to Charon in his boat,
Heartening the timid souls afloat;
Of judgement never to take heed,
But to those fast-locked souls to speed,
Who never from Apollo fled,
Who spent no hour among the dead;
Continually
With them to dwell,
Indifferent to heaven and hell.
Michael Field
(Katherine Bradly and Edith Cooper)
Maids, not to you my mind doth change
Maids, not to you my mind doth change;
Men I defy, allure, estrange,
Prostrate, make bond or free:
Soft as the stream beneath the plane
To you I sing my love’s refrain;
Between us is no thought of pain,
Peril, satiety.
Soon doth a lover’s patience tire,
But ye to manifold desire
Can yield response, ye know
When for long, museful days I pine,
The presage at my heart divine;
To you I never breathe a sign
Of inward want or woe.
When injuries my spirit bruise,
Allaying virtue ye infuse
With unobtrusive skill:
And if care frets ye come to me
As fresh as nymph from stream or tree,
And with your soft vitality
My weary bosom fill.
CONSTANCY
I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower: in all kinds
My love is perfect, and in each she finds
Herself the goal: then why, intent to teaze
And rob her delicate spirit of its ease,
Hastes she to range me with inconstant minds?
If she should die, if I were left at large
On earth without her-I, on earth, the same
Quick mortal with a thousand cries, her spell
She fears would break. And I confront the charge
As sorrowing, and as careless of my fame
As Christ intact before the infidel.
Unbosoming
The love that breeds
In my heart for thee!
As the iris is full, brimful of seeds,
And all that it flowered for among the reeds
Is packed in a thousand vermilion-beads
That push, and riot, and squeeze, and clip,
Till they burst the sides of the silver scrip,
And at last we see
What the bloom, with its tremulous, bowery fold
Of zephyr-petal at heart did hold:
So my breast is rent
With the burthen and strain of its great content;
For the summer of fragrance and sighs is dead,
The harvest-secret is burning red,
And I would give thee, after my kind,
The final issues of heart and mind.
