Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Critical and Biographical Essay by Alexander Hay JappSarah Williams (Sadie) (18411868)
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Sarah Williams is distinguished by originality, breadth, and versatility. She wrote many songs and hymns, touched with a mingled simplicity and subtlety, which greatly attracted the late Rev. F. D. Maurice, as well as the late Dean Plumptre. Her mind was very active; her sympathies were at once wide and keen. She tried to enter into and to understand the positions of others, and not only so, but to realise the determining motives, and even the evanescent fluctuations of feeling and sentiment, which do so much to modify habit and conduct, and so often impart an air of irresolution. Hence in a great portion of her poetic work she was really dramatic, though she loved to abide by the lyric form. Her longest and most sustained work is entitled “Sospiri Volate”; and it is really a dialogue (in a series of songs) between two lovers. In the course of this dialogue, many of the flying phases of human emotion that so mark an artificial age like ours are caught and cunningly presented. She had, like the hero of “In Memoriam,” “faced the spectres of the mind and laid them,” and “would not make her judgment blind”; and the sense of this imparts a reality and even a fascination to some of her poems.
With Dr. George Macdonald, whom she admired, but from whom she often differed, she could say,—
Her humour is sometimes as fine as it is unexpected, and when she allied it with the lightsome fancy she could so well command, in the writing of children’s poems, she was not seldom especially felicitous.
Her children’s poems, indeed, are so original, and so marked by fancy, gaiety, and fun, that they alone would have justified her appearance in such a selection as this; but some idea of her range and the firmness with which she touched the various strings of the lyre may be realised by turning from these children’s verses to such powerful and impressive pieces as that entitled “Baal,” “At the Breach,” “The Old Astronomer,” “The Coast-guard’s Story,” or “The Roundhead’s Chant.” Indeed, in some of her pieces there is a direct dramatic strength, a power of what has been called “vicarious thinking,” such as is seldom found in a woman together with the highly-strung, sensitive, impassioned thrill which goes for so much in what has been called the “lyrical cry.”
Her volume titled “Twilight Hours: A Legacy of Verse” is a kind of autobiography indeed. It is one of the books written from a woman’s heart. She died whilst she was engaged in the work of arranging her poems for press, so that they are in the truest sense her legacy. This work was finished by the present writer, and Dean Plumptre, as already stated, wrote a Prefatory Memoir of her, in which he quoted extensively from a memorial sketch contributed by the present writer to the pages of Good Words shortly after her death. A third edition of her poems appeared in 1872 with additions, and a note by “H. A. Page” respecting these additions. Probably she owed something to the strain of Welsh blood she received from her father; but it was qualified and supported by genuine English sense and sober thought. Some of her hymns—more especially “God’s Way,” which is quoted in this volume—are inspired by the truest religious experience.