“the web of being blindly wove / By man and beast and earth and air and sea / Burns bright and dim”

For Poetry Monday:

Is Love, Then, So Simple?, Irene Rutherford McLeod

Is love, then, so simple, my dear?
    The opening of a door,
And seeing all things clear?
    I did not know before.

I had thought it unrest and desire
    Soaring only to fall,
Annihilation and fire:
    It is not so at all.

I feel no desperate will,
    But I think I understand
Many things, as I sit quite still,
    With Eternity in my hand.


A striking Dickinsonian note, that ending. McLeod (1891-1968) was another early 20th century poet/writer and activist, though her activism does not seem to have extended much beyond women’s suffrage. This comes from her 1915 collection Songs to Save a Soul. Irrelevant of anything, her husband was writer and translator Aubrey de Sélincourt, which makes her aunt-by-marriage to Christopher Robin—a fact that amuses me greatly for no good reason.

---L.

Subject quote from Adonais, Percy Shelley.