THE INALIENABLEHERITAGE
AND OTHER POEMS
BY
EMILY LAWLESS, Litt.D.
AUTHOR OF “WITH THE WILD GEESE,” ETC.
WITH A PREFACE BY
EDITH SICHEL
PRIVATELY PRINTED
1914
[Pg vi]
Copies of this book are being sold by Truslove and Hanson,Sloane Street, and at 153, Oxford Street, and by Messrs.Bumpus, 350, Oxford Street.
Emily Lawless was, before all else, a poet and a seeker aftertruth—and in her the two were one. Before all else, also, an Irishpoet. There have been few women-poets of creative force in anynation—none in Ireland before her, whose fame has endured. Andfor Ireland she stands, in verse and in prose. In history, in romance,in “Hurrish” and in “Grania,” in “Essex in Ireland” and “Withthe Wild Geese,” she is part of Ireland’s past and of its present. Sheis haunted by the strange bewitching surge of the waves of the Atlantic,of the Western waves “wild with all regret.” For her the rollingbrown stretches of bog and of peat-moss, with the blue smoke hanginglow over them, and their carpet of faithful little peat-flowers, meanhome, the enchanted home we all know, where we have played in childhoodand felt the first thrills of youth; the moist silver sky, the solitary,ageless stone crosses, the ruined churches, the hovels, the sad, shininglakes make the country where her spirit dwells. It was to Irish Naturethat her memory kept returning in the last years of pain and illnesswhen her body could no longer revisit the shores for which she longed.Pictures of the well-known landscapes were always passing before hervision, clear and consoling to the end. Irish Nature was the Natureshe knew best, and it inspired the last songs she gave us so gallantly,on the brink of death.
And Irish Nature was to her the symbol of all Nature, that Naturethrough which alone she faced mystery and found the Highest. Shehad in her poetry, as in herself, a twofold relation to Nature. Therewas the external aspect; the physical tie by which she became partof the earth and its teeming life; which made her in younger yearsadore movement—the rush through the air on a horse, the cleavingof the waves as she swam; which made her also a passionate naturalist,a moth-hunter who knew under which tree-root the grey moths lived,or where to stop the boat upon the sea and dredge for creatures unknown[Pg vii]even to the fishermen, or again, and more intimately, where there grewsome humble lichen or rock-bloom, the search for which took days ofpatient adventure.
And then there was the inward relation to Nature, the wisdomand comfort she drew from it to heal the distressful mystery of life;the evidence she found in it of man’s spirit, of a power, however baffled,which transcends material forces. She held to the brave companionshipbetween Nature and the intellect—to those questionings andhalf-answerings and silences which spur it onwards towards the unknown,towards “the untravelled land, where roams that stubbornbedouin man’s soul.”
Such are her three unfailing sources of inspiration—the visiblepagan Nature of the senses, and the search into Nature which meansscience, and the search concerning Nature which means though