Was ever a moment meeter made for love? Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss; And all your yielding sweetness beautiful-- Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!"
Iris Tree is worth reading for her vivacity, her hatred of shams, her intellectual fireworks, her simple love of the beautiful, her youthful rebellion, her sense of colour, her harmony, her humour, but most of all for this:
"Many things I'd find to charm you, Books and scarves and silken socks, All the seven rainbow colours, Black and white with 'broidered clocks. Then a stick of polished whalebone And a coat of tawny fur, And a row of gleaming bottles Filled with rose-water and myrrh. Rarest brandy of the 'fifties, Old liqueurs in leather kegs, Golden Sauterne, copper sherry And a nest of plovers' eggs. Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper, Little boxes cut in jade; Handkerchiefs of finest cambric, Damask cloths and dim brocade, Six musicians of the Magyar, Madness making harmony; And a bed austere and narrow With a quilt from Barbary. You shall have a bath of amber, A Venetian looking-glass, And a crimson-chested parrot On a lawn of terraced grass. Then a small Tanagra statue Found anew in ruins old, Or an azure plate from Persia, Or my hair in plaits of gold; Or my scalp that like an Indian You shall carry for a purse, Or my spilt blood in a goblet ... Or a volume of my verse."
If this doesn't make you rush out and buy her poems, nothing will. It is the topmost level of her achievement, and it is an achievement that even so musical a poet as Walter de la Mare would not be ashamed of having written. Where, I would know, has the love of little material things been so deliciously, so naïvely confessed by any other poet? Listen to her in rebellious mood:
"You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs With rights and wrongs and arguments of good, You choke my song and fill my mouth with hymns, You stop my heart and turn it into wood.
I serve not God, but make my idol fair From clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood, Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hair By Beauty's fingers to her changing mood.
The long line of the sea, the straight horizon, The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet, And moonlight clear as grass my great religion, And sunrise falling on the quiet street.