IT is not Love, this beautiful unrest,This tremor of longing that invades my breast:For Love is in his grave this many a year,He will not rise--I do not wish him here.It is not memory, for your face and eyesAre not reflected where that dark pool lies:It is not hope, for life makes no amends,And hope and I are long no longer friends:It is a ghost out of another SpringIt needs but little for its comforting--That I should hold your hand and see your faceAnd muse a little in this quiet place,Where, through the silence, I can hear you sighAnd feel you sadden, O Virgin Mystery,And know my thought has in your thought begotSadness, its child, and that you know it not.
II.
If this were Love, if all this bitter painWere but the birth-pang of Love born again,If through the doubts and dreams resolved, smiledThe prophetic promise of the holy child,What should I gain? The Love whose dream-lips smiledCould never be my own and only child,But to Love's birth would come, with the last pain,Renunciation, also born again.
III.
If this were Love why should I turn away?Am I not, too, made of the common clay?Is life so fair, am I so fortunate,I can refuse the capricious gift of Fate,The sudden glory, the unhoped-for flowers,The transfiguration of my earthly hours?
Come, Love! the house is garnished and is swept,Washed clean with all the tears that I have wept,Washed from the stain of my unworthy fears,Hung with the splendid spoils of wasted years,Lighted with lamps of hope, and curtained fastAgainst the gathered darkness of the past.
I draw the bolts! I throw the portals wide,The darkness rushes shivering to my side,Love is not here--the darkness creeps aboutMy house wherein the lamps of hope die out.Ah Love! it was not then your hand that cameBeating my door? your voice that called my name?
IV.
'It is not Love, it is not Love,' I said,And bowed in fearful hope my trembling head.'It is not Love, for Love could never riseOut of the rock-hewn grave wherein he lies.'But as I spake, the heavenly form drew nearWhere close I clasped a hope grown keen as fear,Upon my head His very hand He laidAnd whispered, 'It is I, be not afraid!'
V.
And this is Love, no rose-crowned laughing guestBy whom my passionate heart should be caressed,But one re-risen from the grave; austere,Cold as the grave, and infinitely dear,To follow whom I lay the whole world down,Take up the cross, bind on the thorny crown;And, following whom, my bleeding pilgrim feetFind the rough pathway sure and very sweet.The august environment of mighty wingsShuts out the snare of vain imaginings,For by my side, crowned with Love's death-white rose,The Angel of Renunciation goes.
About the author
About the poet
Edith Nesbit (married name Edith Bland) was an English author and poet whose children's works were published under the name of E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on over 60 books of fiction for children, several of which have been adapted for film and television. She was also a political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society, a precursor to the modern Labour Party.
Biography
Nesbit was born in 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, Surrey (now part of Greater London), the daughter of an agricultural chemist, John Collis Nesbit, who died in March 1862, before her fourth birthday. Her sister Mary's ill health meant that the family moved around constantly for some years, living variously in Brighton, Buckinghamshire, France (Dieppe, Rouen, Paris, Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Pau, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and Dinan in Brittany), Spain and Germany, before settling for three years at Halstead Hall in Halstead in north-west Kent, a location which later inspired The Railway Children (this distinction has also been claimed by the Derbyshire town of New Mills).
When Nesbit was 17, the family moved again, this time back to London, living variously in South East London at Eltham, Lewisham, Grove Park and Lee.
A follower of William Morris, 19-year-old Nesbit met bank clerk Hubert Bland in 1877. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on 22 April 1880, though she did not immediately live with him, as Bland initially continued to live with his mother. Their marriage was a stormy one. Early on Edith discovered another woman believed she was Hubert's fiancee and had also borne him a child. A more serious blow came later when Edith discovered that her good friend, Alice Hoatson, was pregnant with Hubert's child. Edith had already agreed to adopt Hoatson's child and allow Hoatson to live with her as their housekeeper. When she discovered the truth, Edith quarreled violently with her husband and suggested that Hoatson and the baby should leave; Hubert threatened to leave Edith if she disowned the baby and its mother. Hoatson remained with them as a housekeeper and secretary and became pregnant by Hubert again 13 years later. Edith again adopted Hoatson's child.
Nesbit's children were Paul Bland (1880–1940), to whom The Railway Children was dedicated; Iris Bland (1881-1950s); Fabian Bland (1885–1900); Rosamund Bland (1886-?) , to whom The Book of Dragons was dedicated; and John Bland (1899 -?) to whom The House of Arden was dedicated. Her son Fabian died aged 15 after a tonsil operation, and Nesbit dedicated a number of books to him: Five Children And It and its sequels, as well as The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels. Nesbit's daughter Rosamund collaborated with her on the book Cat Tales.
Nesbit and Bland were among the founders of the Fabian Society in 1884. Their son Fabian was named after the society. They also jointly edited the Society's journal Today; Hoatson was the Society's assistant secretary. Nesbit and Bland also dallied briefly with the Social Democratic Federation, but rejected it as too radical. Nesbit was an active lecturer and prolific writer on socialism during the 1880s. Nesbit also wrote with her husband under the name "Fabian Bland", though this activity dwindled as her success as a children's author grew.
Nesbit lived from 1899 to 1920 in Well Hall House, Eltham, Kent (now in south-east Greater London), which appears in fictional guise in several of her books, especially The Red House. She and her husband entertained a large circle of friends, colleagues and admirers at their grand "Well Hall House".
On 20 February 1917, some three years after Bland died, Nesbit married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker, a ship's engineer on the Woolwich Ferry. She was a guest speaker at the London School of Economics, which had been founded by other Fabian Society members.
Towards the end of her life she moved to a house called "Crowlink" in Friston, East Sussex, and later to St Mary's Bay in Romney Marsh, East Kent. Suffering from lung cancer, she died in 1924 at New Romney, Kent, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh.
Literature
Nesbit published approximately 40 books for children, including novels, collections of stories and picture books. Collaborating with others, she published almost as many more.
According to her biographer Julia Briggs, Nesbit was "the first modern writer for children": "(Nesbit) helped to reverse the great tradition of children's literature inaugurated by [Lewis] Carroll, [George] MacDonald and Kenneth Grahame, in turning away from their secondary worlds to the tough truths to be won from encounters with things-as-they-are, previously the province of adult novels." Briggs also credits Nesbit with having invented the children's adventure story. Noël Coward was a great admirer of hers and, in a letter to an early biographer Noel Streatfeild, wrote "she had an economy of phrase, and an unparalleled talent for evoking hot summer days in the English countryside."
Among Nesbit's best-known books are The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1898) and The Wouldbegoods (1899), which both recount stories about the Bastables, a middle class family that has fallen on relatively hard times. Her children's writing also included numerous plays and collections of verse.
She created an innovative body of work that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects - what would now be classed as contemporary fantasy - and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds. In doing so, she was a direct or indirect influence on many subsequent writers, including P. L. Travers (author of Mary Poppins), Edward Eager, Diana Wynne Jones and J. K. Rowling. C. S. Lewis wrote of her influence on his Narnia series and mentions the Bastable children in The Magician's Nephew. Michael Moorcock would go on to write a series of steampunk novels with an adult Oswald Bastable (of The Treasure Seekers) as the lead character.
Nesbit also wrote for adults, including eleven novels, short stories, and four collections of horror stories.