Waxing Poetic: The Thought by Mary Webb

     Mary Webb (1881–1927), was an English romantic novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people which she knew. Her novels have been dramatized, most notably the film Gone To Earth in 1950.  Her novels, along with several other novelists of the time, inspired Stella Gibbons famous parody Cold Comfort Farm.

     She spoke negatively about her writing, called herself “wholly un-gifted”, and said she sometimes felt “whelmed in remorse & terror” over her perceived literary mistakes.  In her own lifetime, she won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse for Precious Bane, but her output was not otherwise greatly esteemed. Her schoolteacher husband abandoned her; she burned drafts of her novels to keep warm.  It was only after her death that Stanley Baldwin, then Britain's Prime Minister, brought about her commercial success through his approbation; at a Literary Fund dinner in 1928, Baldwin referred to her as a neglected genius.

The Thought

As a pale moth passes
In the April grasses,
So I come and go,
Softlier than snow.
Swifter than a star
Through the heart I flee,
Singing things that are
And things that cannot be.
I whisper to the mole
And the cold fish in the sea,
And to man's wistful soul
God sendeth me.
As a grey moth passes
In October grasses,
So I come and go,
Softlier than snow.