A Girl

A Girl

By Michael Field Michael Field
A Girl,
     Her soul a deep-wave pearl
Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;
     A face flowered for heart’s ease,
     A brow’s grace soft as seas
     Seen through faint forest-trees:
     A mouth, the lips apart,
Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze
     From her tempestuous heart.
     Such: and our souls so knit,
     I leave a page half-writ —
           The work begun
Will be to heaven’s conception done,
           If she come to it.

Source: Underneath the Boughs (Thomas B. Mosher, 1893)

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Poet Michael Field

POET’S REGION England

SCHOOL / PERIOD Victorian

Subjects Relationships, Men & Women, Nature, The Body, Romantic Love, Infatuation & Crushes

Poetic Terms Rhymed Stanza

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Under the pseudonym Michael Field, Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper collaboratively published eight books of poetry and twenty-seven plays in late 19th-century Britain. The two women enjoyed a warm reception as Field in Victorian literary circles upon the release of their first major verse drama, Callirhoë and Fair Rosamond (1884), even garnering the admiration of Walter Pater, George Meredith, and Robert . . .

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SUBJECT Relationships, Men & Women, Nature, The Body, Romantic Love, Infatuation & Crushes

POET’S REGION England

SCHOOL / PERIOD Victorian

Poetic Terms Rhymed Stanza

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Originally appeared in Poetry magazine.

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