Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Michael Field: A Brief Chronology
Michael Field’s Circle: A Key to Names
Introduction

Poetry

1. From Long Ago (1889)

• [Epigraph]
  Preface
  I. “They plaited garlands in their time”
  II. “Come, dark-eyed Sleep, thou child of Night”
  III. “Oh, not the honey, nor the bee!”
  VI. “Erinna, thou art ever fair”
  XI. “Dreamless from happy sleep I woke”
  XIV. “Atthis, my darling, thou did’st stray”
  XVI. “Delicate Graces, come”
  XVII. “The moon rose full: the women stood”
  XX. “I sang to women gathered round”
  XXI. “Ye rosy-armed, pure Graces, come”
  XXV. “Ah for Adonis! So”
  XXVIII. “Love, fatal creature, bitter-sweet”
  XXX. “Thine elder that I am, thou must not cling”
  XXXIII. “Maids, not to you my mind doth change”
  XXXIV. “‘Sing to us, Sappho!’ cried the crowd”
  XXXV. “Come, Gorgo, put the rug in place”
  XXXVI. “Yea, gold is son of Zeus: no rust”
  XLIV. “Nought to me! So I choose to say”
  LII. “Climbing the hill a coil of snakes”
  LVII. “My shell is mute; Apollo doth refuse”
  LXI. “There is laughter soft and free”
  LXIII. “Grow vocal to me, O my shell divine!”
  LXV. “Prometheus fashioned man”
  LXVIII. “Thou burnest us; thy torches’ flashing spires”
  “O free me, for I take the leap”

2. From Sight and Song (1892)

• [Epigraph]
  Preface
  L’Indifférent,Watteau
  Venus, Mercury and Cupid, CorreggioLa Gioconda, Leonardo da Vinci
  The Faun’s Punishment, Correggio
  The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli
  Spring, Sandro Botticelli
  A Portrait, Bartolommeo Veneto
  Saint Sebastian, Correggio
  Venus and Mars, Sandro Botticelli
  A Fête Champêtre, Antoine Watteau
  Saint Sebastian, Antonello da Messina
  A Pen-Drawing of Leda, Sodoma
  Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Tintoretto
  The Sleeping Venus, Giorgione
  L’Embarquement Pour Cythère, Antoine Watteau

3. From Underneath the Bough (1893)

• [Epigraph]
  Invocation

The First Book of Songs

• “Mortal, if thou art beloved”
  “Death, men say, is like a sea”
  “Ah, Eros doth not always smite”
  “Men, looking on the Wandering Jew”
  “Love’s wings are wondrous swift”
  An Apple-Flower
  “Through hazels and apples”
  “Say, if a gallant rose my bower doth scale”
  “Ah me, if I grew sweet to man”

The Second Book of Songs

• “Others may drag at memory’s fetter”
  “Little Lettuce is dead, they say”
  A Death-Bed
  “A curling thread”
  “She mingled me rue and roses”
  Unconsciousness
  “When the cherries are on the bough”
  “Thanatos, thy praise I sing”

The Third Book of Songs

• “Already to mine eyelids’ shore”
  Cowslip-Gathering
  “A girl”
  “Methinks my love to thee doth grow”
  “If I but dream that thou art gone”
  Love’s Sour Leisure
  “I sing thee with the stock-dove’s throat”
  “A gray mob-cap and a girl’s”
  “It was deep April, and the morn”
  An Invitation

The Fourth Book of Songs

• “Across a gaudy room”
  “As two fair vessels side by side”
  “The lady I have vowed to paint”
  “The iris was yellow, the moon was pale”
  “I lay sick in a foreign land”
  “The roses wither and die”
  “There are tears in my heart”
  “On, o Bacchus, on we go”
  “I would not be a fugitive”
  “Sunshine is calling”

4. From Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908)

• [Epigraph]
  Pan Asleep
  Penetration
  Onycha
  Violets
  Sweet-Basil
  “The woods are still that were so gay at primrosespringing”
  Embalmment
  What Is Thy Belovéd More Than Another Belovéd?
  Love: A Lover
  A Violet Bank
  Reality
  Enchantment
  From Baudelaire
  Fifty Quatrains
  Reveille
  The Poet
  A Forest Night
  “I love you with my life—’tis so I love you”
  A Vision
  IV:The Mummy Invokes His Soul
  October
  Ebbtide at Sundown
  Sirenusa
  Avowal
  Renewal
  Life Plastic
  Absence
  Parting
  Old Ivories
  Balsam
  Constancy
  A Palimpsest
  Absence
  Whym Chow
  A Minute-Hand
  Good Friday

5. From Poems of Adoration (1912)

• Of Silence
  Real Presence
  Another Leadeth Thee
  Relics
  A Dance Of Death
  Imple Superna Gratia
  After Anointing
  Viaticum
  Transit

6. From Mystic Trees (1913)

• The Captain Jewel
  The Winding-Sheet
  The Five Sacred Wounds
  White Passion-Flower
  Praises
  Before Requiem
  The Rosary of Blood
  Dread St. Michael
  She is Singing to Thee, Domine!
  Caput Tuum ut Carmelus

7. From Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914)

• [Epigraph]
  IV. “O Dionysus, at thy feet”
  V.Trinity
  VI. “What is the other name of Love?”
  VIII. Out of the East
  IX. “My loved One is away from me”
  XXII. “Sleeping together: Sleep”
  XXIX. “O Chow, the Peace of her I love above”

8. From Dedicated: an Early Work by Michael Field (1914)

• Dionysus Zagreus
  The Genethliacs of Wine
  De Profundis
  Sylvanus Cupressifer
  Caenis Caeneus
  Eros
  The Mask
  Fellowship

9. From The Wattlefold: Unpublished Poems by Michael Field (1930)

• Blessed Hands
  My Birthday
  Poets
  How Letters Became Prayers
  How Prayers Became Letters Again
  Pomegranates
  Lovers
  “Lo, my loved is dying”
  Respite
  They Shall Look on Him
  “I am thy charge, thy care!”
  A Cradle Song
  Fading
  “What shall I do for Thee to-day?”

Life-Writing

1. Diaries

• From Works and Days: The Diaries of Michael Field, 1888–1914

2. Letters

Reviews

Appendix: Index to Names of Major Artists and Literary Figures Appearing in the Life-Writing Section
Bibliography of Bradley and Cooper’s Major Published Volumes
Select Bibliography of Critical and Related Work

About the Author

Marion Thain is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Ana Parejo Vadillo is Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Reviews

“This selection from the extensive oeuvre of the two women, aunt and niece, who called themselves ‘Michael Field,’ is a revelation. The editors have given us the most generous selection of the poems to date. The cold fire of Michael Field’s lyricism, its compact, enigmatic language, is fully contextualized in the poet’s debt to Nietzsche, to late century aestheticism, Hellenism, and feminism. The joint diary and the letters of this astonishing poet, with their intellectual astringency, wit, and frankly sensuous homoeroticism, and their acquaintance with major figures of aesthetic culture Pater, Vernon Lee, Browning, and the Berensons enable us to read the late nineteenth-century’s modernism in a wholly new way.” — Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London“The two women who loved and wrote as ‘Michael Field’ feature in recent histories of Victorian sexuality, but this collection convincingly demonstrates their importance in the history of British poetry. A balanced and informative introduction and generous selections highlight the breadth of elements their lyrics synthesized—ancient Greek and Persian, Elizabethan, German, French, Roman Catholic, and even painterly. Extracts from Bradley and Cooper’s journals and correspondence place them amidst aesthetes and critics from Ruskin and Wilde to Berenson, although contemporary reviews show them denied proper recognition. This anthology surveys a unique literary partnership that both reflected and influenced the main artistic currents of turn-of-the-century Britain.” — Margaret Stetz, University of Delaware“Perhaps the most important of the year’s publications, in terms of its effect on the future direction of Victorian poetry studies, was Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials, edited by Ana Parejo Vadillo and Marion Thain. Bringing together a wide range of writings by the two women who worked under the name ‘Michael Field’, this single-volume edition is a product of the growing scholarly interest in this important fin-de-siècle writer, and it will surely be a spur to further work on the poet.” — review in The Nineteenth Century: The Victorian Period