5 - Becoming Catholic, Desiring Disability: Michael Field’s Devotional Verse

Summary

“You never attained to Him?” “If to attain

Be to abide, then that may be.”

“Endless the way, followed with how much pain!”

“The way was He.”

—Alice Meynell, “Via, et Veritas, et Via” (1902)

Lady of silences

Calm and distressed

Torn and most whole

Rose of memory

Rose of forgetfulness

Exhausted and life-giving

Worried reposeful

The single Rose

Is now the Garden

Where all loves end

—T. S. Eliot, from Ash Wednesday (1930)

“He detests religious poetry … and he breaks into a frenzy about the psalms, Verlaine’s ‘Catholic work,’ and Poems of Adoration. He Wd not know I had written it. [He says] there is nothing in it like me.” Thus, with unfiltered bitterness, writes Edith Cooper on 8 May 1912, after a visit from Michael Field’s close friend and fellow aesthete, Charles Ricketts. Indeed, for many students and literary scholars, a first encounter with Michael Field’s Catholic poems engenders much the same response as Ricketts’s. Readers tend not to like the Catholic poems, and (in my experience) their negativity is often articulated in a tone of disappointment, exasperation, and even betrayal. At least on a surface reading, Poems of Adoration (1912), written largely by Cooper, and Mystic Trees (1913), written largely by Bradley, seem to lack many of the elements—sexy sapphics, playful fauns, witty commentary on art, love poems filled with longing—that have long drawn literary critics and other readers to Michael Field’s earlier verse. Their Catholic poems do not seem to touch modern readers in the way that the devotional verse of Christina Rossetti or Gerard Manley Hopkins continues to do. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees have remained relatively unstudied compared to other Michael Field texts.

This chapter begins by asserting that Michael Field’s devotional verses should not, in fact, be so quickly categorized as anomalies. Here, I build upon the observations of Hilary Fraser and Marion Thain, who each argue that Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees possess many elements also found in Michael Field’s earlier poetry—that they represent a shift, rather than a radical departure, from Michael Field’s other writing.