Poetical works of Mathilde Blind/Preface
PREFACE
In preparing this edition of Mathilde Blind's Poetical Works, I have rearranged the contents of her five published volumes in a way that I think she would have approved. Having been appointed, in conjunction with Mr. Ludwig Mond, her literary executor, I made a selection from her poems in 1897, which was published in a small volume, and I now complete a task which has been a pleasure, in the issue of a complete collected edition of her poems. No poems of any importance have been found among her papers since her death, and I have only met with one poem in a magazine, so that this edition is practically a reprint of the following volumes: The Prophecy of St. Oran, and other Poems, 1882; The Heather on Fire, 1886; The Ascent of Man, 1889; Dramas in Miniature, 1891; Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident, 1895; together with the few additional poems contained in the selection called Songs and Sonnets, 1893. I have followed the text of these volumes scrupulously, occasionally altering the punctuation where it was clearly wrong. In one instance only have I made any variation from the printed text. A copy of the St. Oran volume has been found, containing a number of corrections in Mathilde Blind's handwriting. These corrections I have adopted. In arranging the contents of this collected edition I have put the three long poems first; then, under the title of "Dramas in Miniature," the narrative poems in the volume of that name, among which I have inserted poems out of other volumes which seem to belong to this group. The lyrical poems follow, arranged into groups, somewhat on the lines of my Selection of 1897. My only real difficulty was in connection with "Love in Exile," as Mathilde Blind herself published two versions of it, one in The Ascent of Man in 1889, and another in Songs and Sonnets in 1893. For the text I have followed the second version, and I have left in their places the additional, formerly unpublished, poems which were then added. But I have omitted three poems which were inserted out of Dramas in Miniature, where they form part of a set of lyrics, evidently though not formally connected together. This set of lyrics I have put as a second part of "Love in Exile," and I have added a few other poems which seem to me to belong to the same sequence of moods. Then come "Poems of the Open Air," among which I have included not only the greater part of the poems originally published under that name in The Ascent of Man, but all those in other volumes which come under the same title. The "Songs of the Orient " are reprinted, exactly as they stand, from Birds of Passage. After these come a certain number of lyrical poems which do not fit into any of the main divisions of Mathilde Blind's work, and after these the Sonnets, among which I have included all those sonnets which do not form an integral part of some longer poem, or of some definite series of poems. The only omission I have made is that of the notes to The Heather on Fire, which consist entirely in extracts from books, magazines, and newspapers, in reference to the Highland clearances. These, I imagine, which are already ancient history, can no longer have any interest for the reader of poetry, to whom this volmiie is offered on its own merits.
London, November 4, 1899