MARY COLERIDGE   (1861-1907)

Unwelcome
The Other Side of a Mirror
The Witch
The White Women
Wilderspin
Master and Guest

Mary Coleridge, the great grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was born in London into an affluent family with artistic and literary connections. The Coleridge household was regularly visited by artists, writers, and critics such as John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Anthony Trollope, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and John Ruskin. Coleridge herself, a shy child, was awed by these famous visitors. However, she revealed her own artistic and literary inclinations at a young age. She read Shakespeare and Scott with enthusiasm, and met each Saturday with a group of friends to enact the Waverley novels. Her education was largely informal, although she studied for a time under the scholar William Cory. She showed a particular aptitude for languages, mastering Hebrew, German, French, Italian, and Greek, and travelled regularly with her family, both in England and on the continent. Later in life, she taught English literature at the Working Women's College.
           During her lifetime, Coleridge was known primarily as a novelist and essayist. Her first published work was a novel, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (1893), which was praised by Robert Louis Stevenson but was not a popular success. Although Coleridge had been writing poetry since the age of thirteen, she was reluctant to show her poems to anyone outside her circle of family and friends. However, a friend showed a manuscript of her poems to the poet Robert Bridges, who was so impressed that he offered to arrange for publication and assist with revisions. The collection Bridges helped Coleridge assemble was published in 1896 as Fancy's Following. Coleridge chose to publish under the pseudonym "Anodos," Greek for "on no road," after the protagonist in her favorite novel, George MacDonald's Phantastes. She published a second collection of poems, Fancy's Guerdon, under the same pseudonym in 1897. That year Coleridge also published her second and most successful novel, The King With Two Faces. Several books followed: The Fiery Dawn (1899); a collection of essays titled Non Sequitur (1900); The Shadow on the Wall (1905); and her most mature novel, The Lady on the Drawing-Room Floor (1906). However, Coleridge never published another volume of poetry. She died suddenly at the age of forty-five following an operation for appendicitis, leaving behind an unfinished medieval romance and the completed manuscript of a biography of Holman Hunt, which she had written at his request.
           Although Coleridge is now remembered for her poetry, most of her poems were not published during her lifetime. They were gathered by friends from her notebooks and letters, and published in a collected edition after her death. Coleridge has been praised primarily for her lyricism, but her poetry also addresses the issue of female identity in important ways. In "The Other Side of a Mirror," the female speaker confronts a monstrous reflection, the strong and despairing woman that the Victorian definition of female identity denied and rendered voiceless. This poem shows us a later version of the famous scene in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre where Jane looks into a mirror and sees the reflection of her monstrous double, Bertha Rochester. In Coleridge's poem, however, the speaker recognizes that the monstrous reflection is herself. In "The White Women," Coleridge creates an alternative vision of the strong woman who has found her voice, the voice of nature itself, and who is deadly to a male gaze. Coleridge's parthenogenic white women resemble the inhabitants of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist utopia in the novel Herland, an important expression of the early movement for female equality. Coleridge's poems continue to give pleasure because they combine a complex lyricism with an unspecifiable sense of dread. Why should we fear "a woman with the West in her eyes, / and a man with his back to the East"? Yet reading Coleridge's most famous poem, "Unwelcome," we find ourselves fearing them indeed.
 
UNWELCOME

We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,
           And the door stood open at our feast,
When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes,
           And a man with his back to the East.

O, still grew the hearts that were beating so fast,
           The loudest voice was still.
The jest died away on our lips as they passed,
           And the rays of July struck chill.

The cups of red wine turned pale on the board,
           The white bread black as soot.
The hound forgot the hand of her lord,
           She fell down at his foot.

Low let me lie, where the dead dog lies,
           Ere I sit me down again at a feast,
When there passes a woman with the West in her eyes,
           And a man with his back to the East.
 
THE OTHER SIDE OF A MIRROR

I sat before my glass one day,
     And conjured up a vision bare,
Unlike the aspects glad and gay,
     That erst were found reflected there –
The vision of a woman, wild
     With more than womanly despair.

Her hair stood back on either side
     A face bereft of loveliness.
It had no envy now to hide
     What once no man on earth could guess.
It formed the thorny aureole
     Of hard unsanctified distress.

Her lips were open – not a sound
     Came through the parted lines of red.
Whate'er it was, the hideous wound
     In silence and in secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
     She had no voice to speak her dread.

And in her lurid eyes there shone
     The dying flame of life's desire,
Made mad because its hope was gone,
     And kindled at the leaping fire
Of jealousy, and fierce revenge,
     And strength that could not change nor tire.

Shade of a shadow in the glass,
     O set the crystal surface free!
Pass – as the fairer visions pass –
     Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
     That heard me whisper, "I am she!"
 
THE WITCH

I have walked a great while over the snow,
And I am not tall nor strong.
My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set,
And the way was hard and long.
I have wandered over the fruitful earth,
But I never came here before.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

The cutting wind is a cruel foe.
I dare not stand in the blast.
My hands are stone, and my voice a groan,
And the worst of death is past.
I am but a little maiden still,
My little white feet are sore.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

Her voice was the voice that women have,
Who plead for their heart's desire.
She came – she came – and the quivering flame
Sank and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor,
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.
 
THE WHITE WOMEN¹

Where dwell the lovely, wild white women folk,
                 Mortal to man?
They never bowed their necks beneath the yoke,
They dwelt alone when the first morning broke
                 And Time began.

Taller are they than man, and very fair,
                 Their cheeks are pale,
At sight of them the tiger in his lair,
The falcon hanging in the azure air,
                 The eagles quail.

The deadly shafts their nervous hands let fly
     Are stronger than our strongest – in their form
Larger, more beauteous, carved amazingly,
And when they fight, the wild white women cry
                 The war-cry of the storm.

Their words are not as ours. If man might go
     Among the waves of Ocean when they break
And hear them – hear the language of the snow
Falling on torrents – he might also know
                 The tongue they speak.

Pure are they as the light; they never sinned,
     But when the rays of the eternal fire
Kindle the West, their tresses they unbind
And fling their girdles to the Western wind,
                 Swept by desire.

Lo, maidens to the maidens then are born,
     Strong children of the maidens and the breeze,
Dreams are not – in the glory of the morn,
Seen through the gates of ivory and horn –
                 More fair than these.

And none may find their dwelling. In the shade
     Primeval of the forest oaks they hide.
One of our race, lost in an awful glade,
Saw with his human eyes a wild white maid,
                 And gazing, died.

¹From a legend of Malay, told by Hugh Clifford.
 
WILDERSPIN

In the little red house by the river,
     When the short night fell,
Beside his web sat the weaver,
     Weaving a twisted spell.
Mary and the Saints deliver
     My soul from the nethermost Hell!

In the little red house by the rushes
     It grew not dark at all,
For day dawned over the bushes
     Before the night could fall.
Where now a torrent rushes,
     The brook ran thin and small.

In the little red house a chamber
     Was set with jewels fair;
There did a vine clamber
     Along the clambering stair,
And grapes that shone like amber
     Hung at the windows there.

Will the loom not cease whirring?
     Will the house never be still?
Is never a horseman stirring
     Out and about on the hill?
Was it the cat purring?
     Did some one knock at the sill?

To the little red house a rider
     Was bound to come that night.
A cup of sheeny cider
     Stood ready for his delight.
And like a great black spider,
     The weaver watched on the right.

To the little red house by the river
     I came when the short night fell.
I broke the web for ever,
     I broke my heart as well.
Michael and the Saints deliver
     My soul from the nethermost Hell!
 
MASTER AND GUEST

There came a man across the moor,
     Fell and foul of face was he.
     He left the path by the cross-roads three,
And stood in the shadow of the door.

I asked him in to bed and board.
     I never hated any man so.
     He said he could not say me No.
He sat in the seat of my own dear lord.

"Now sit you by my side!" he said,
     "Else may I neither eat nor drink.
     You would not have me starve, I think."
He ate the offerings of the dead.

"I'll light you to your bed," quoth I.
     "My bed is yours – but light the way!"
     I might not turn aside nor stay;
I showed him where we twain did lie.

The cock was trumpeting the morn.
     He said: "Sweet love, a long farewell!
     You have kissed a citizen of Hell,
And a soul was doomed when you were born.

"Mourn, mourn no longer for your dear!
     Him may you never meet above.
     The gifts that Love hath given to Love,
Love gives away again to Fear."