And even through faith of still averted feet,
Making full circle of our banishment,
Amazéd meet;
The bitter journey to the bourne so sweet
Seasoning the termless feast of our content
With tears of recognition never dry.
In "Amelia" (Patmore's favourite poem, but scarcely his readers') we find this ode-form combined with the simpler narrative theme of his earlier days. And once again we are forced to feel how dangerous and difficult a thing truth to the letter of life may become. Yet there are perfect touches in the poem; suggestions of Patmore's really great sea music, and Nature-flashes like that
young apple-tree, in flush'd array
Of white and ruddy flow'r, auroral, gay,
With chilly blue the maiden branch between.
"St. Valentine's Day" and many another lyric bear witness to this poet's searching observation of natural beauty, yet this was less an object in itself to him than a sensitive mise en scène for the human drama. To the core he was a symbolist; and of natural phenotnena he seems to have felt what he somewhere declared of natural science—that its only real use was "to supply similes and parables" to the spiritually elect.
The year 1880 brought sorrow back into Patmore's life in the sudden death of his wife Mary. Her loss proved the first of a bitter trilogy. Scarcely two years later, his well-loved daughter Emily (Sister Mary Christina, as she had become, of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus) died in her near-by convent. The passing of this rare and understanding spirit, from childhood so deeply in sympathy with his own—a poet herself, and one of the best critics of her father's work—can
