Poems

Alice Meynell writes with the quiet authority of someone who has learned to listen. Her poetry occupies a rarefied space where observation becomes contemplation, where a glimpse of birds or a shift of light opens onto deeper questions of time and presence. This 1913 collection gathers her most essential work: sonnets of aching precision, lyrics that move like water between stones, meditations that find the infinite in the particular. Meynell is not a poet of dramatic declaration; her power lies in restraint, in what she implies rather than states. She writes about love not as passion but as steadfastness, about nature not as spectacle but as companion, about time not as enemy but as the medium through which meaning accumulates. These are poems to return to, to carry, to read slowly. They offer no easy consolations but instead the deeper gift of being witnessed in one's own stillness.