4 - “Our dead”: Michael Field and the Elegiac Tradition

Summary

No more shall wayward grief abuse

The genial hour with mask and mime;

For change of place, like growth of time,

Has broke the bond of dying use.

—Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living: in that world I shall abide forever.

—Sophocles, Antigone (c. 441 BCE)

By the early spring of 1908, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s beloved dog, Whym Chow had been dead for twenty-six months. Their first book of verse in fifteen years, Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908), had recently come out; and despite the widespread praise they were enjoying from Britain’s literati, they were annoyed at how the volume and “Michael Field” had been represented in the local press. Catholic converts now for about a year, they also worried what their new friends and mentors in the Church would think about the diverse collection of poems in “the Honey-book”: pagan nature poetry and Sapphic love lyrics dating as far back as 1893; more recently composed devotional verse; and a considerable quantity of elegy. The elegies mourn a variety of subjects: Cooper’s father James, who had tragically disappeared in a mountaineering accident in 1897; their religious shift away from the Bacchic life that had sustained their intertwined identity as Poets and Lovers for so many years; and, of course, Whym Chow, whose loss still had the ability to throw them into episodes of acute mourning. Yet despite their ongoing grief over the death of the chow, “Michael” and “Henry” were hard at work writing religious poetry, collaboratively composing historical verse dramas to be published “by the author of Borgia,” and taking trips to consult with clergy at various cathedrals and abbeys, in order to delve deeper into the intellectual and spiritual mysteries of Catholic theology.

This complex tapestry of events and emotions provide a back-drop that may help us interpret a curiously paradoxical and elegiac moment recorded in the joint diary during a trip they took that Lenten season, a journal entry that indicates, among other things, the extent to which Bradley and Cooper continued to be devastated by Chow’s death, and that has considerable implications for understanding the last decade of their work:

And on the couch and up and down the stairs and by the inn-door-always beside us is our bright Whym Chow: all the sun on the couch falls on him and when we are happy we are happy among us three.