‘Easter Night’ by Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

All night had shout of men
And cry of woeful women filled his way;
Until that noon of sombre sky    3
On Friday, clamour and display smote him;
No solitude had He,
No silence, since Gethsemane.  6

Public was death;
But power, but Might,
But Life again, but Victory,   9
Were hushed within the dead of night,
The shuttered dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone,  12
He rose again behind the stone.

Considering the Poem

On what we call Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem to acclaim and noisy veneration. A few days later, on Good Friday, he was condemned, scourged, crowned with thorns, reviled and taunted as he bore his cross to his own crucifixion. On the intervening days, he had been at the centre of a public hubbub: he had, presumably amid noise and chaos, driven the traders from the temple precincts and had surely felt the pressure of the authorities, aided by the disloyalty of Judas, as they pressed in on him, eventually confronting him in a violent arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Thursday evening of Holy Week.

These public events were not the only things happening. There were times of private quietness also. Perhaps during the days on which Jesus stayed with Lazarus, Martha and Mary at Bethany, he had peace. We remember, too, the quiet humility of the washing of the disciples’ feet; but the agony of Jesus’ intimate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane in which he asked to be excused his apparent fate and learned, as he had taught his followers to acknowledge in the Lord’s Prayer, that the will of God, not our own personal wills, is what had to be done on earth.

Alice Meynell builds her extraordinary poem around these events. She does this in two ways, both involving a contrast, firstly between quietness and noise and, secondly, between public and private events.

The Gethsemane prayer is the hinge around which the poem turns: it is placed exactly half way through the poem (6): the first verse takes us through the rowdy public events of ‘clamour and display’ (4) to Good Friday and starts with what looks like a report of Jesus’ dreams of the ‘shout of men and cry / Of woeful women’ (1-2) during whatever broken sleep he had on the Thursday night. But these recollections are presented in truncated form as a kind of composite image of the public disturbances that had occurred during the week. Alice Meynell does not want us to worry about what happened when. She has rejected that kind logical fluency in favour of something far, far more radical – a compositional approach that allows her to represent the inner workings of Jesus’ mind, including his dream-mind.

This condensed, broken and concise manner is the main stylistic feature of what is, by any standards, an extraordinary piece of work. By the time she wrote this later poem, Meynell had the confidence to leave behind, when necessary, the ideals of euphony and lucid elegance of expression that was the dominant (if not the only) manner of 19th century poetry in English. She often misses out conjunctions, prepositions, verbs, even definite and indefinite articles like ‘the’ or ‘a’ whenever possible, so ending up with a discontinuous and fragmented language that is almost like a shorthand or note form. Of course, there could be no better language style for the internal and external events she is depicting.

The broken language style causes fitful rhythms in the verse that contribute to the tension and anxiety of the poem. There are two places, however, where the rhythms and expression gain more ease and fluidity: the final lines of the first verse (5-6) and the final lines of the poem as a whole both have a regular rhythm that is strengthened by alliterative effects, by the chiming repetition of the key word ‘alone’ (11) and, of course, by the rhyme scheme that finishes each verse with a perfect couplet. Both these moments of fluency are about silence, withdrawal and resolution: the personal Gethsemane prayer that ends the first verse and then, bringing the poem as a whole to its climax, the moment of mysterious transformation from death to a new life that happens in the complete seclusion of the tomb, segregated from all worldly hubbub and confusion, ‘behind the stone’ (12).