Alice Meynell Quotes

English publisher, editor, writer, poet, activist (1847–1922)

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Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson Meynell (11 October 1847 – 27 November 1922) was an English writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet.

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Alternative Names: Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell • Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson

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This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851 or thereabouts—the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace—has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman though her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex.

The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.

Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,
Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,
And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers;
A poet's face asleep in this grey morn.
Now in the midst of the old world forlorn
A mystic child is set in these still hours.
I keep this time, even before the flowers,
Sacred to all the young and the unborn.

[N]o mirror keeps its glances.

She walks—the lady of my delight— A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; She guards them from the steep;
She feeds them on the fragrant height, And folds them in for sleep.

Solitude is separate experience.

Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.

The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated questions. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged.

[A]n English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has not too much, but too little, art.

We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies.

Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion.

[S]he used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song.

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.

A poet of one mood in all my lays, Ranging all life to sing my only love, Like a west wind across the world I move,
Sweeping my harp of floods mine own wild way.

In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives the precious instability, the spring and balance that are so organic.