``Come let us sit upon yon cliff, we twain,Whence we may gaze across your soft green Isle,Girt by the strong immeasurable main,That, see! looks up, and sweetens to a smile;And you shall talk to me of all your pain,Through deep blue eyes and dark unbraided tressesHooded by wimple that your own hands weavedWhen you and Winter last together grieved,While far beneath our feet the fast foam pressesRound bluff, and creek, and bay, and seabird-sung-to nesses.''
Then half withholding, yielding half, her gaze,She smoothed her kirtle under her, and claspedHer hands about her knees, as one who prays,Watching the clambering billows as they graspedAt slippery rocks where wild-goats may not graze,Then fell back foiled, shivered to spray and smoke.And I could see the warm blood of her raceCrimson beneath her weather-beaten face:As though her heart would break, her voice would choke,In accents harsh with hate, and brimmed with sobs, she spoke.
``They came across the sea with greed of spoil,And drove me hither and thither from fen to foam,Reaving and burning, till the blackened soilWaxed bitter-barren as the brine they clomb,Sterile to seed and thankless unto toil.Harried and hunted, fleeing through the land,I hid among the caves, the woods, the hills,Where the mist curdles and the blind gust shrills,Suckling my hate and sharpening my brand,My heart against their heart, my hand against their hand.
``And ever as I fled, they ever pursued.They drove away my cattle and my flocks,And left me, me a Mother! to claw for food'Mong ocean-boulders and the brackish rocksWhere sea-hogs wallow and gorged cormorants brood;Unroofed my hut, set the sere thatch aflame,Scattered my hearth-fire to the wintry air,Made what was bare before stretch yet more bare,I waxing wilder more they strove to tame,To force and guile alike implacably the same.
``They would not suffer me to weep or pray:Upon the altar of my Saints they trod;They banned my Faith, they took my Heaven away,And tried to rob me of my very God!And, when I sued them leave me where I lay,And get them hence, still, still they would not go.They reft the spindle from my famished hands,My kith and kin they drove to other lands,Widowed and orphaned me! And now you knowWhy all my face is wet, and all my voice is woe!''
I crept a little nearer, and I laidMy hand on hers, and fondled it with mine;And, ``Listen, dear Sister Erin,'' soft I said,``Not to the moaning of the salt-sea brine,Nor to the melancholy crooning madeBy thoughts attuned to Sorrow's ancient song,But to the music of a mellower day.Forgive! Forget! lest harsher lips should say,Like your turf fire, your rancour smoulders long.Now let Oblivion strew Time's ashes o'er this wrong.
``The robber bands that filled the Isle with groansWere long since clamped and prisoned in their graves:The flesh hath dried and shrivelled from their bones,Their wild war-standards rotted from their staves;Their name is nought. 'Tis thus that Time atonesFor all the griefs man fastens on his kind.The days were dire, his passions swift and fell:His very Heaven was but a sterner Hell.His love was thraldom, hatred black and blind,As headstrong as the wave, as wayward as the wind.
``Nor did alone you suffer. You too dealtFull many a stroke, too fierce to be subduedTill you had made the fangs of vengeance felt.Mercy and truce you spurned, and fed the feudOf Celt with Saxon, Saxon against Celt,Till lust enforced whatever law forbade.Nay! do not linger on that painful dream,But turn and smile! as when a silvery gleamDimples your loughs that whilom seemed so sad,And runs along the wave, and glistens and is glad!
``We own our fault the greater, so we nowFor balance of that wrong would make amends.Lift the low wimple from your clouded brow,Give me your gaze, and say that we are friends;And be your mountains witness of that vow,Your dewy dingles white with blossoming sloe,Your tawny torrents tumbling to the sea:For You are far the fairest of the Three,And we can never, never, let you go,Long as your warm heart beats, long as your bright eyes glow.
``The Triune Flag, none now save Tyrants dread,That with Imperial peace protects the world,Hath by the sinewy sons you bore and bredRound the wide globe been carried and unfurled.Where danger greatest, they it was who led,And stormed death rather than be backward driven.Now, gaze no more across the western main,Whose barren furrows hope still ploughs in vain.Turn Eastward, where, through clouds by sunrise riven,England holds out her hand, and craves to be forgiven.
``Live your own life, but ever at our side!Have your own Heaven, but blend your prayer with ours!Remain your own fair self, to bridegroom bride,Veiled in your mist and diamonded with showers,We twain love-linked whom nothing can divide!Look up! From Slievemore's brow to Dingle's shore,From Inagh's lake to Innisfallen's IsleAnd Garriffe's glen, the land is one green smile!The dolphins gambol and the laverocks soar:Lift up your heart and live, enthralled to grief no more!''
About the author
About the poet
A writer who wore several hats throughout his career, Alfred Austin was a critic, novelist and political journalist. Although he was educated in law, his professional life focused primarily on literature. Austin published regularly for half a century and succeeded Alfred, Lord Tennyson as poet laureate of England in 1896. Nonetheless, he carries the reputation of having been the worst and least read English poet.
Austin was born on May 30, 1835, in Headingley, near Leeds, to Roman Catholic parents Joseph and Mary Austin. His father was a merchant and a magistrate of Headingley and his mother was the sister of Joseph Locke, a member of Parliament and a civil engineer. He was schooled first at Stoneyhurst College and then St. Mary's College, Oscott. He received a B.A. in 1853 from the University of London. Called to the Bar of the Inner Temple in 1857, he became a barrister on the Northern Circuit at his parents urging but left the legal world within three years in pursuit of a career in literature. This decision came upon the heels of his father's death in 1861 and his newfound financial freedom with the assumption of an inheritance. In 1855, he published Randolph: A Poem in Two Cantos, and three years later he published a novel, entitled Five Years of It. From 1866 to 1896, he worked as a foreign affairs writer for the London Standard, where he was known as a conservative journalist.
Foreign politics was one of Austin's major interests. He had a special enthusiasm for Polish and Italian patriots. His hatred of Russia made him a steadfast devotee of Disraeli. He also was a frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review. He represented the Standard in Rome during the sittings of the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. He was the Standard's special correspondent at the headquarters of the King of Prussia during the Franco-German War in 1870 and also served as the German correspondent at the Congress of Berlin in 1884. Among his political writings are "Russia Before Europe" (1861), "Tory Horrors (1876) and "England's Policy and Peril" (1877). He founded the National Review in 1883 with William John Courthope and remained an energetic joint-editor for the journal until 1893, and then continued as its sole editor from 1887, when Courthope retired, until 1895. He had unsuccessful candidacies for Parliament as a Conservative for Taunton in 1865, and again for Dewsbury in 1880.
Although his writing was inspired and shaped by the works of Byron and Scott, Austin was actually a mediocre poet, and was the target of much derision. He was most often parodied for his ode on the Jameson Raid, in which he praised what turned out to be military disaster and embarrassment for the British government. He saw narrative and dramatic verse as the height of poetic expression, and believed that Shakespeare and Milton were exemplars of these styles and worthy of imitation. He codified these criticisms in The Poetry of the Period, which was published in 1869 in Temple Bar and appeared the following year in book form. In this work, he attacked highly accomplished and widely respected authors, including Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson Tennyson and Whitman, seeing them as "feminine" and "essentially childish." It was the audacity, rather than the substance, of these claims that distinguished Austin at the time. Yet his attack on Tennyson included some astute observations that revealed some of the great poet's weaknesses.
Austin's only popular book, The Garden that I Love (1894), was considered to be his best work, and was thoroughly enjoyed by the public at the time. It was a work in prose of a type known as "garden diaries," which relished the charm of his Kentish home in Swinford Old Manor. Other idyllic prose works included In Veronica's Garden (1895), Lamia's Winter Quarters (1898) and Spring and Autumn in Ireland (1900). His best work revealed a literate and proficient writer, who benefits from simplicity and sincerity. Some critics believed that Austin, while generally acknowledged to be an untalented writer, did not deserve the opprobrium heaped upon him. In addition to his capable bucolic verses, his early satire, The Season, is a noteworthy piece of heroic poetry. However, its poor critical reception by the Athenaeum induced Austin to compose a sequel attacking the journal and its editor, William Hepworth Dixon. Fortunatus the Pessimist: A Dramatic Poem (1892) and The Conversion of Winckelmann, and Other Poems (1897) were also moderately successful publications.
Austin's surprising ascension to the status of poet laureate in 1896 following Tennyson was probably more due to his stature as journalist for the conservative party rather than his skill as a poet. A writer for British Authors of the Nineteenth Century mentions that Austin was "appointed over the heads of abler men because of sins he had not committed." Apparently, the logical candidacies of Swinburne and Kipling were deemed unacceptable to Queen Victoria. His appointment was made at the recommendation of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, and was seen as a decision concerning Conservative Party patronage, as Austin had served that party well in his journalistic writings. Writing for the Nation, Stuart P. Sherman declared "his self-complacency appears in the record of his influence with political leaders," and claimed that he possessed "a divine satisfaction with his own position, [and] a bland unconsciousness of contemporary feeling and opinion."
Austin's appointment negatively affected the prestige of the laureateship. He became a standard target of ridicule in the journal Punch, appearing in a cartoon as "Alfred the Little," an appellation referring to Austin's 1896 play England's Darling, about Alfred the Great. Sherman went on to say that Austin was "the last minstrel of Toryism. As he writes, he feels himself soothed, sustained, and magnified by the support of the landed gentlemen of England. He is not, he fancies, dipping his pen into the shallow well of egotism, but into the inexhaustible springs of English sentiment." Door of Humility, a poem of fifty-seven cantos published in 1906, concerns the young poet's questioning of his religion and his travels across the globe in search for the truth. It was reviewed by a critic for the Athenaeum, who writes, "the philosophy and its sentimental setting are patiently planned on the Tennysonian model, but unhappily it is not enough to succeed a poet in order to be successful in imitating him."
Austin's Autobiography of Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate, 1835-1910 was written in a year and appeared in two volumes in 1911. Sherman reported that it is "written with unflagging zest and genuine power in self-revelation." In it, Austin voiced his pride in his family history, saying "no one admires honorable descent and the easy gradations of English society, from class to class, more than I do." However, Sherman claimed that "he contrives to cast an additional glamour over his family tree." A reviewer for the Saturday Review of Literature wrote of the Autobiography: "A traveller in many lands, a war correspondent, a diligent interviewer, Mr. Austin gossips about men and things in a way which is occasionally interesting, but not very entertaining on the whole. He tells us little that is new. In fact, the two portly volumes of his Autobiography might have been borne, not inaptly, as their motto, a line from one of his own verses which he quotes, 'Patter, chatter everywhere!'"
Sherman asserted that "the sentimental romantic Toryism of Mr. Austin is not so much dull as false; false and at the same time obsolete; obsolete but not yet old enough to have acquired an antiquarian interest." A contributor to British Authors of the Nineteenth Century stated that "his autobiography is almost incredible in its calm assumption that its writer was a great genius; it may survive his poems as a document portraying the vagaries of human self-deception." P. F. Bicknell, reviewing Austin's autobiography for Dial, maintained that "the world has a cruel way of refusing to take altogether seriously a man who takes himself too much so; and thus our autobiographer, with his somewhat conspicuous lack of humor, becomes, in a manner the reverse of Falstaff's, the cause of humor in other men."