Whom passion, flaring up too high, too sudden,
Blackened like a lamp-chimney. Oh, long-dead flame!
They say there comes a lightening before death.
Light, any light, come – ray of mercy or bale-fire –
And run some stitch of meaning through my life,
The shreds and snippets of that Madeleine,
Her after-life!
Well, there were compensations,
They think? The wicked prospered? George was kind,
Smooring the question in his heart. Affluence
We had: travel: the house in Onslow Gardens:
Artists and thinkers round us – William Morris,
William de Morgan: the Social Democrat Club.
Yes, I was quite a firebrand for those days …
A brand plucked from the burning: charred, chastened –
So you would figure me, all you respectable
Fathers and mothers of nubile daughters who
Must cool their blood with albums, prayers, tea-parties?
I hear your judgment, hypocrites, mealy-mouthed
Over the porridge at the mahogany sideboards:
‘Guilty or innocent of murder, she
Has shamed our womanhood. Illicit love
Were shame enough; but that a female should
Write to her lover, exulting in the act,
Baring herself in words to acknowledge pleasure –
Depraved! Unnatural! Doubtless she repents now.’
Repentance? Shame? Little you know, Papa,
Nor you, Lord Justice-Clerk, sitting in judgment
On me, where lies the core of my remorse,
The cancer of my shame …
No, they are dead,
Those stuffed men – long ago dead. Foolish Madeleine,
Dreaming yourself once more back to the trial,
The aftermath! Aye, at one bound, as if
The years between were a wee burn to jump
And not the insipid mere, the bottomless pit
Which has swallowed up my youth, my pride, my graces
Like dumped rubbish, and still been unfulfilled.
Would I return, live it again, to keep death
Waiting a while for me? Would the old actress
Re-live her greatest triumph! – and not to stay death;
To spurn him from the pinnacle of her fame.
Yes, I would walk as then, flushed with achievement,
Out of the cheering courtroom through the chill
Silence of Rowaleyn (Papa frock-coated,
A plaster figure of repudiation,
The family Jehovah buttoned up in
Self-righteous outrage; brothers and sisters cowed
Less by his wrath than by my flung defiance:
Mother, of course, had taken to her bed) –
Stride like a tragic heroine, through that last
Ordeal, into my life’s long anti-climax.
Dusk already? What time is it? My skin
Sweats cold. Doctor! You cannot let me die –
Not yet! Madeleine Smith must go to court:
Her trial is not yet over. She must live
Through the command performance once again.
Doctor!… Doctor, are you familiar with
The signs of poisoning by arsenic? No,
He is not here. Contempt of court. And I
Despise it too – the cant and rigmarole
Of the Law. Quick then, Madeleine, dress yourself:
Demure black mantle, and the straw scoop-bonnet
Trimmed with white ribbon, leaving your face naked
To all the prurient, cringing eyes – unveiled,
But in its cold, bold calm inviolable.
Madeleine takes the dock – how did they put it? –
With the air of a belle entering a ballroom.
See,
The room fills up with shadows – a sibilant audience
Of ghosts: they rise: Hope, Handyside and Ivory,
Robed and bewigged, come soberly on – dead men
To sit in judgment on a dying actress.
No, no, my Lords, it is not you, tricked out
In gravity and fine feathers, who will make
This play immortal; nor you, Lord Advocate,
Plaiting your rope of logic round my neck;
Nor even you, John Inglis, Dean of Faculty,
My eloquent defender: no, it is I,
The silent heroine of the wordy drama,
Who pack your theatre day after day.
Let them drone on – what do I care? – over
That trash, that reptile thing which died writhing.
Ah, how the drab years fly up like a blind
At his vile touch, to show the lighted past!
And through that scene, a play behind a play,
Moncrieff, Lord Advocate, frigidly weaving
His figured plot … On such and such occasions
The panel purchased arsenic, stating that
It was to kill rats, or for her complexion.
On such and such occasions the deceased
Took ill; and the third time he died of it.
We’ve no eye-witness: but no doubt the panel
Administered the poison in a cup
Of cocoa which she handed to her lover
That last night through the basement window of
The house in Blythswood Square, the scene of previous
Assignations – passed it across the space
Between her window and the railings, where
She had been used to put her letters for
Pierre Emile L’Angelier to pick up –
Those passionate letters which he threatened now
To show her father, if she would not abandon
Her purpose of wedding another, William Minnoch.
To all the panel’s desperate entreaties
That he should return her letters, L’Angelier
Was adamant. Rather than be exposed
As a vicious wanton and ruined irretrievably,
She murdered him. That is the Crown’s case.
‘What did you think, Miss Smith, of the Lord Advocate’s
Address?’ When I have heard the Dean of Faculty,
I’ll tell you. I never like to give an opinion
Until I have heard both sides of the question.
By God! I was a pert young lassie then,
And fearless too – letting my wit dance
On the scaffold’s trap-door, over the drop, the quick-lime –
So you believed? Or a monster from the Pit,
Murderess, whore, with the vibrant, mordant tongue
Of the damned? But I was neither, I tell you; only
A woman, the husk that’s left of a woman after
Premature birth, when her rich, quickened body
Has dropped a stillborn thing (dropped? aborted?)
A love, conceived in ecstasy, that became
A deadweight burden, a malignant growth
Of self-disgust …
But listen, the Dean of Faculty
Rises to address the jury. Listen.
Gentlemen of the Jury, the charge against the prisoner
is murder, and the punishment of murder is death;
and that simple statement is sufficient to suggest to us
the awful solemnity of the occasion
which brings you and me face to face.
Inglis! Listen to me, Inglis. You must drive home
The point about my letters. The prosecution
Has said I would go any length to stop
Those letters being revealed. And so I would have,
Almost, but not to the folly of–oh, they must
Realize there was no surer way of having
My letters to him made public than for Emile
To die by poison. Do they suppose that I
Would not see this? They insult my intelligence. But
The panel is a woman:
all men know
The weaker sex have little power of reason.
Weaker? Pah! Why, why must I be silent
While self-important lawyers play at ball
With my life? No, I will speak!
My Lords, and you
Gentlemen of the jury, listen to me.
Lay by your masks, all this majestic flummery –
You, lords of creation, who keep us women
To fawn on you, be petted, brought to heel –
And think: although nature has trained our bodies
To fawn, our hearts to love subjection, how would
A woman – slave and Spartacus to her sex –
Once she’d revolted from this rule of nature,
Loathe him for whom nature had made her kneel!
And what if such a woman found her master,
Not weak, vain, tyrannous merely – you are all so –
But abject, sirs, abject as a maggot
That clings to the flesh it has gorged on? a maggot who,
After his first meal, sermonized to me
About the weakness of my flesh! Ach, men,
The moral hypochondriacs, for ever
Coddling their timid minds against the real,
Medicining themselves with patent lies
And sedative abstractions – look, how bravely
Cowardice makes a conscience for them all!
I am accused of poisoning my lover.
Bring him to trial, I say. Let Pierre Emile
L’Angelier be arraigned for poisoning love.
Aye, the deep wells of my awakened body,
The pent abundance, and the dancing fountains
That leapt and wept for him like paradise trees
In diamond leaf – he tainted them. How soon
My springs went bitter and the loving cup
Tasted metallic!… Sirs, you have marvelled at
My strange composure. Do you not recognize
The calm of a face prepared for burial? Which,
Which is the tragic victim? – one who dies
Vomiting up a trumpery soul? or one
Who, legend-high in love, proud as Diana,
Awakes to find her matchless Prince deformed
Into a Beast, a puny, whimpering lapdog?
Oh waste, waste, waste! Sir, I plead guilty of
Self-mutilation. Cutting that hateful image
Out of my heart, I should have bled to death:
But hatred’s a fine cautery for such wounds,
And love as wild as mine needs but a flick of
Indignity or disrelish to become
That searing, healing, all-redeeming hatred.
But what do you know of such things, my Lords,
With your tame wives and farthing-dips of lust?
As for this trial of yours – a man has ceased,
A paltry creature whom my passion exalted
Into a figment of its own white fire.
That furnace proved him dross. He is better dead,
My Lords …
My Lords! Hear me out! Why do they –
Hope, Handyside and Ivory – why withdraw,
Dissolve to moonshine? Moonshine, and a haze of
Branches knitted above me. I am caged in
From the star-daisied heaven. Ah, my rowans:
The garden of Rowaleyn, and beside me –
Emile! Emile, wake up! I have had a terrible
Dream. I dreamt that I had – dreamt that you
Were dead. Comfort me. Do not be cold.
You are not angry with me? I am your wife now,
Truly your wife, the woman you’ve created
As God created woman. I worship you.
Listen to my heart, Emile – close, come closer –
How the blood pulses for you, calm and crazing
As torrents of moonshine; crazed and calmed by you.
Husband, speak to me. Do not be afraid:
They are all asleep in the house. Papa is sleeping
The sleep of the self-righteous: he’ll never dream
That I’d creep out to you, your cat, your vixen,
For a midsummer mating. Are you ashamed
Because I am so shameless in love? But I
Have high blood in these veins; dare-devil blood:
My kin’s not all the halfway kind who live
Haltered by prudence and propriety – no,
Remember, I am Madeleine Hamilton Smith.
Why are you silent, Emile? – and so cold,
Clay-cold to my fevered lips! The night is chill
For June, and you are delicate: you must go, love:
Your Mimi must not be the death of you.
Go quickly, then. We shall soon be together –
One bed, one life – for always. I will coax
Papa, or else defy him. I am all yours now.
Quick! – by the side gate … Why will you not go?
Are you frozen to my side? Leave me! No, no more
Loving – get away from me! You shall not –
Oh!
The fearful dream! Loathing. A clay man:
Incubus from the grave. What was he doing
Here at my bedside? trying to fright me into
Death-bed confession? Always he misprized me,
Misjudged: it is not well to underrate
A woman such as I … Had I been born
Fifty years later, I should leave the world
Richer for me and be remembered as
A maker, a pioneer, not an enigma.
What an end for the Lucifer who rebelled
Against their sanctimonious, whiskered god –
To be smuggled out, like a prisoner who has served
Life-sentence, by a side door of the jail,
Fameless and futureless!
Who’s this at my door
In black among the shadows? A minister?
I have nothing to say to you. Nothing. He draws
Nearer. It is the minister of bone.
Sir, I shall be no burden for you to carry.
I am light and small now – small in your arms:
A wisp of flesh; some courage; and what weighs
Heavier than they – my secret. I can trust you
With it. Hold me up. It is hard to speak,
To breathe. Whose hand – the cup of poison? His?
Mine? But so long ago it happened, how
Can I be sure? Their busy arguments
Hummed in my ears like echoes from a dream,
Making unreal all that had passed between us,
Emile and me, till I became two phantasms –
One innocent, one guilty, and the truth
Went down in the gulf between them, the real I –
What she had done or not done – sinking away
From me, dubious, hidden, lost, amid
A fog and welter of words.
It lies too deep now
In the black ooze. My heart quakes. The sea-bed
Heaves. Last agony. Heaves to give up its dead.
I cannot. Sir, have mercy on me. Make haste.
I am heavy with you. Deliver me.
Madeleine, Madeleine, tell me the truth.
I have forgotten … long ago … forgotten.
Wind’s Eye
Eye of the wind, whose bearing in
A changeful sky the sage
Birds are never wrong about
And mariners must gauge –
The drift of flight, the fluttered jib
Are what we know it by:
Seafarers cannot hold or sight
The wind’s elusive eye.
That eye, whose shifting moods inspire
The sail and trim the sheet,
Commands me, though I can but steer
Obliquely towards it.
In Loving Memory
E. M. BUTLER1
1
‘Goodbye’ – the number of times each day one says it!
But t
he goodbyes that matter we seldom say,
Being elsewhere – preoccupied, on a visit,
Somehow off guard – when the dear friend slips away
Tactfully, for ever. And had we known him
So near departure, would we have shut our eyes
To the leaving look in his? tried to detain him
On the doorstep with bouquets of goodbyes?
I think of one, so constant a life-enhancer
That I can hardly yet imagine her dead;
Who seems, in her Irish courtesy, to answer
Even now the farewell I left unsaid.
Remembering her threefold self – a scholar,
A white witch, a small girl, fused into one –
Though all the love they lit will never recall her,
I warm my heart still at her cordial sun.
2
There was the small-boned witch who would accost us
In Notting Hill Gate, white shoes and hairnet on,
Having just flown out of a dream of Doctor Faustus,
Vanished from Cambridge or Ceylon,
Or merely passed intact under the wheels
Of several buses. And instantly her spells
Worked on us – we were young, a drab day shone.
Then the attentive scholar, listening for clues
To meaning, like a bird with its head inclined
Earthward: one in whose presence to misuse
Truth was hazardous – she would find
You gently out. But her own truth sang and tingled
With a Mozartian gaiety that mingled
Wise innocence and pure elegance of mind.
But I think I loved in her most the original Alice –
The round blue gaze ready for wonderland,
The mien, polite, inquisitive, without malice,
Of one who nevertheless would stand
No nonsense from cardboard kings or tinpot knights –
A little girl who reached spectacular heights
By chewing on whatever came to hand …
Child, with a scholar’s cool, precise discerning:
Scholar, unfeigned in her bewitching glee:
White witch, whose subtle essences were burning
With a child’s candour. Now all three
Are in one grave. But still her nature glows
Through earth and night, and like trefoil there grows
On us the sweetness of her memory.
1 E. M. Butler: former Professor of German at Cambridge, and author.
Edward Elgar
Complete Poems Page 42
