‘Portugal, 1912’ by Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

And will they cast the alters down,
Scatter the chalice, crush the bread?
In field, in village and in town
He hides an unregarded head;      4

Waits in the corn-lands far and near,
Bright in His sun, dark in His frost,
Sweet in the vine, ripe in the ear
Lonely, unconsecrated Host          8

In ambush at the merry board
The victim lurks unsacrificed;
The mill conceals the harvest’s Lord,
The wine-press holds the unbidden Christ.

Considering the Poem

‘And’, the first word of this poem, suggests that its creation is part of a series of events that are going on at the time of writing, and that the poem itself is pushed into existence by the writer’s response to those events. On 5^th October, 1910, the ancient Portuguese monarchy was overthrown in a revolution that was to establish the First Republic and begin a system of rule that lasted until the introduction of military dictatorship in Portugal in 1926. The 1910 revolution was fiercely opposed to Catholicism, which it considered to be an impediment to its version of progress and modernity.

It’s not all that unusual for a poem to be directly related to close political and social events. Being so related, however, does cause two problems: a poem that is too dependent on particular events can become irrelevant over time, and a reader (perhaps many years later) does have to know something about the events themselves if the work is to make sense without the writer having to clog the poem with laborious factual detail.

So, we do have to know something about the 1910 revolution – at least its hostility to religion – to make sense of the poem. The answer to the other problem is to imbue the poem with some general truth that will make the work permanent and universal and, of course, to give the poem an individual style that makes it interesting in itself. We can consider how well Alice Meynell solves the problems inherent in the kind of responsive poem she has written.

Most of Alice Meynell’s poems were written later in her life and rarely feel particularly Victorian. This one, certainly, has a 20^th century manner in every dimension. The word choice is as plain as it can be: there are very few words of more than two syllables, and those are familiar ones. Particularly non-Victorian, though, is the dynamic simplicity in the language as a whole: the verbs in the first and third verses are frequent, active and direct: cast, scatter, crush, hide, lurk, conceal, hold. The poet is also concerned to avoid florid writing in general and the overuse of adjectives which, especially if in a series of two or three before a noun, can slow and stultify verse. The active, verb-rich style is just right for embodying in a poem the busy attack on Catholicism that the revolution incited.

The second verse is an exception, however. The only verb in the second verse is its first word, ‘Waits’ (5), and this is a verb denoting inactivity, not active movement. What Alice Meynell wants to convey at this point in the poem is something special – the mystical stillness and immanence of the abiding Christ, in all things, but uncommunicating, and uncommunicated with, during the revolutionary purge. Having made simple, active verbs the norm in the first verse, all she has to do to create the sense of mystical stillness is to deviate from the language norm she has just established.

Christ is waiting out the interregnum. With outstanding craft awareness, the poet crystallizes His reserved biding of time in the four uses of words beginning with the prefix ‘un-‘, three of them occurring in exactly the same place in each of the verses. By using the prefix, for example, in the word ‘unregarded’ (4), the poet reminds us of the positive state (being regarded) as well as its negative so makes the lack of regard seem transitory and reversible. The same is true of ‘unconsecrated’, ‘unbidden’ and ‘unsacrificed’.

The idea of the close and immanent presence of Christ, even in a hostile world, is a mystical one, and it is the general truth, here expressed with quiet, clever poetic skill, that gives wide significance to a poem about a particular, local, political event of a century ago.