Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By Miscellaneous Poems. I. The Modern Poet

Alice Meynell (1847–1922)

I COME from nothing: but from where

Come the undying thoughts I bear?

Down through 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 in 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 into 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.