(2 of 2)
On Dame Edith, Dame Edith is less severe. On her own evidence, she was a mortally serious Christian and a ferociously committed artist, a childless woman who lay in her bed and labored every day for six hours a day, all year for more than 40 years, to bring forth a race of poems. The worst of them are idiot brainchildren afflicted with echolalia; the best of them are fierce and radiant creatures of the metaphysical imagination. In Dirge for the New Sunrise, dated the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima, Dame Edith writes in her ultimate Miltonic manner:
And the ray from the heat came soundless, shook the sky
As if in search for food, and squeezed the stems
Of all that grows on the earth till they were dry—And drank the marrow of the bone:
The eyes that saw, the lips that kissed are gone—Or black as thunder lie and grin at the murdered Sun.
Dame Edith in her last best years struck the attitude of a withered grand Cassandra. Her memoirs involuntarily reveal that in this, as in all her cold, impressive poses, it was seldom a grown woman who spoke. It was more often poor little E, getting even with the world for making her poor little E.