Poetry
The Lamp of Poor Souls, and Other Poems
Marjorie Pickthall · 1916
Opening lines
Above my head the shields are stained with rust,
The wind has taken his spoil, the moth his part;
Dust of dead men beneath my knees, and dust,
Lord, in my heart.
Text quoted from canadiana.ca
Synopsis
Short poems, which for the most part take up a first collection of 1913 and add new pieces to it. The title piece starts from a custom predating the Reformation, the lamp that English churches left burning so that prayers would be said for the dead too poor to pay for them; a voice keeps watch there and mourns a young dead man for whom no one has prayed. Others go in search of biblical, saintly or distant figures: the wedding at Cana, a mother in Egypt, Saint Ives, Jesuit missionaries, a Japanese goddess, a Saxon epitaph.
Context
The second collection by its author, published in 1916 in Toronto by S. B. Gundy and in New York by John Lane, while she was living in England; most of the pieces came from The Drift of Pinions, published in 1913. Critics received it favourably. Her manner was already going out of fashion at her death, and a generation later modernist criticism ridiculed it; more recent readings have taken it up again.
Who it is for
A short collection, with an easy musicality and an archaizing vocabulary. One enters it through the narrative pieces rather than the lyrical ones.
Prizes and reception
In her lifetime, the country's critics hailed her as one of the purest voices of its poetry; her reputation did not survive the arrival of modernism.
Sources for this page 9
The pages consulted to check this page.