Many Voices: Poems — Inside the Classic

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Authors: Nesbit, E. (Edith), 1858-1924 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 1999 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: English poetry Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 15,186

Reading time 67 min

Text sections 2

Many Voices: Poems — Inside the Classic can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 15,186 words, 1 hr 7 min estimated reading time, and 2 detected text sections.

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #1924

E. Nesbit's 1922 poetry collection 'Many Voices' uses recurring imagery of moonlight, houses, and thresholds to explore memory, loss, and the supernatural. The opening poem 'The Return' establishes a ghostly homecoming, while later poems like 'Mary of Magdala' and 'Age to Youth' shift between religious and personal registers. The excerpts show a poet attentive to domestic detail and natural cycles, often framing emotional states through physical spaces.

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Edition quality

File: pg1924

Read the Text

wering breath— Only a silence as deep as death.

Then I beat on the window, and called, and cried. No one heard me, and none replied. The golden silence lay warm and deep, And I wept as the dead, forgotten, weep; And there was no one to hear or see— To comfort me, to have pity on me.

But deep in the silence something stirred— Something that had not seen or heard— And two drew near to the window-pane, Kissed in the moonlight and kissed again, And looked, through my face, to the moon-shroud, spread Over the garlanded garden bed; And—“How ghostly the moonlight is!” she said.

Back through the garden, the wood, the lane, I came to mine own place again. I wore the garments we all must wear, And no one saw me walking there. No one heard my thin feet pass Through the white of the stones and the gray of the grass, Along the path where the moonlight hews Slabs of shadow for thirteen yews.

In the hollow where drifted dreams lie deep It is good to sleep: it was good to sleep: But my bed has grown cold with the drip of the dew, And I cannot sleep as I used to do.

FOR DOLLY WHO DOES NOT LEARN HER LESSONS

YOU see the fairies dancing in the fountain, Laughing, leaping, sparkling with the spray; You see the gnomes, at work beneath the mountain, Make gold and silver and diamonds every day; You see the angels, sliding down the moonbeams, Bring white dreams like sheaves of lilies fair; You see the imps, scarce seen against the moonbeams, Rise from the bonfire’s blue and liquid air.

All the enchantment, all the magic there is Hid in trees and blossoms, to you is plain and true. Dewdrops in lupin leaves are jewels for the fairies; Every flower that blows is a miracle for you. Air, earth, water, fire, spread their splendid wares for you. Millions of magics beseech your little looks; Every soul your winged soul meets, loves you and cares for you. Ah! why must we clip those wings and dim those eyes with books?

Soon, soon enough the magic lights grow dimmer, Marsh mists arise to cloud the radiant sky, Dust of hard highways will veil the starry glimmer, Tired hands will lay the folded magic by. Storm winds will blow through those enchanted closes, Fairies be crushed where weed and briar grow strong . . . Leave her her crown of magic stars and roses, Leave her her kingdom—she will not keep it long!

WHAT do the roses do, mother, Now that the summer’s done? They lie in the bed that is hung with red And dream about the sun.

What do the lilies do, mother, Now that there’s no more June? Each one lies down in her white nightgown And dreams about the moon.

What can I dream of, mother, With the moon and the sun away? Of a rose unborn, of an untried thorn, And a lily that lives a day!

IN the great green park with the wooden palings— The wooden palings so hard to climb, There are fern and foxglove, primrose and violet, And green things growing all the time; And out in the open the daisies grow, Pretty and proud in their proper places, Millions of white-frilled daisy faces, Millions and millions—not one or two. And they call to the bluebells down in the wood: “Are you out—are you in? We have been so good All the school-time winter through, But now it’s playtime, The gay time, the May time; We are out and at play. Where are you?”

In the gritty garden inside the railings, The spiky railings all painted green, There are neat little beds of geraniums and fuchsia With never a happy weed between. There’s a neat little grass plot, bald in places, And very dusty to touch; A respectable man comes once a week To keep the garden weeded and swept, To keep it as we don’t want it kept. He cuts the grass with his mowing-machine, And we think he cuts it too much. But even on the lawn, all dry and gritty, The daisies play about. They are so brave as well as so pretty, You cannot keep them out. I love them, I want to let them grow, But that respectable man says no. He cuts off their heads with his mowing-machine Like the French Revolution guillotine. He sweeps up the poor little pretty faces, The dear little white-frilled daisy faces; Says things must be kept in their proper places He has no frill round his ugly face— I wish I could find his proper place!

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The collection opens with 'The Return,' a poem that immediately establishes a distinctive voice: the speaker walks through a moonlit landscape, past yews and a lych-gate, toward a house that feels both familiar and spectral. Nesbit's eye for precise detail—'the grass was gray with the moonlit dew,' 'blocks of shade that the moonlight hews'—creates a scene suspended between life and death. The house itself is described through its contents: 'settles, the candles tall, / The black-faced presses against the wall.' This attention to domestic objects recurs throughout the excerpts, grounding abstract emotions in tangible things.

The poem's final lines, where the speaker observes the living inhabitants, set up a tension between presence and absence that runs through the collection. Readers should note how Nesbit uses architectural and natural thresholds—doors, windows, gardens, seasons—to mark transitions between states of being.

Moonlight and Liminal Spaces

Across the excerpts, moonlight functions as a consistent visual and emotional motif. In 'The Return,' the moon renders the landscape 'gray' and 'white,' draining color to suggest a world between waking and dreaming. The speaker moves through 'blocks of shade that the moonlight hews,' a striking image that treats light as a sculpting force. Later, in 'Mary of Magdala,' the setting shifts to a 'frozen grass for a bearing bed, / A halo of frost round a woman’s head'—a scene lit by cold, harsh light that contrasts with the warm firelight of the house in the opening poem.

Nesbit repeatedly places characters at thresholds: the lych-gate where 'corpses wait,' the garden path, the window through which the speaker peers. These liminal spaces mirror the poems' concerns with boundaries between life and death, past and present, the human and the supernatural. The house in 'The Return' is described as 'held close in the arms of the blossomed boughs,' suggesting both embrace and entrapment.

Domestic Objects as Emotional Anchors

Nesbit builds emotional resonance through careful catalogues of household items. In 'The Return,' the speaker lists 'settles, the candles tall, / The black-faced presses against the wall, / Polished beechwood and shining brass, / The gleam of china, the glitter of glass.' These objects are not mere decoration; they are 'the little things that were home to me,' charged with memory and loss. The poem 'White Magic' similarly focuses on a room transformed by a woman's presence: 'Her glance upon the lean white walls / Hung them with cloth of splendour.'

The contrast between the bare room and its transfigured state echoes the collection's broader interest in how memory alters physical spaces. In 'The Home-Coming,' the speaker returns to a house now inhabited by 'the beetle and the woodlouse,' yet insists that 'this, our house, still, still is yours.' The persistence of emotion in the face of decay is a recurring theme, expressed through the language of domestic architecture.

Shifting Registers: From Ghost Story to Religious Meditation

The excerpts reveal a poet comfortable moving between genres and tones. 'The Return' reads like a ghost story, with its moonlit journey, 'bats shrieked high,' and 'owls’ spread wings.' The speaker is invisible to the living, a presence that 'passed, and they were not afraid of me.' This supernatural frame gives way to the explicitly religious narrative of 'Mary of Magdala,' which reimagines the biblical figure's death in childbirth. Here, the poem shifts into dialogue between Mary and divine figures, with lines like 'I, the Lord God, who died for thee' and 'The Mother of God shall suckle thee.'

The juxtaposition of these two poems—one pagan in its imagery, the other Christian—suggests a collection that draws on multiple spiritual traditions. The final lines of 'Mary of Magdala' return to a harsh, judgmental tone: 'A drab and her brat that are better dead.' This abrupt shift from divine comfort to human cruelty underscores Nesbit's willingness to hold conflicting perspectives in tension.

The Passage of Time and the Persistence of Youth

Several poems in the excerpts directly address aging and the relationship between youth and age. 'Age to Youth' contrasts 'sunrise is in your eyes' with 'my eyes are full of shadow,' yet the speaker asks for connection: 'lend my hand your hand.' The poem 'In Age' reflects on a time when 'wrong was false, and right was true,' but now 'Right intertwines with wrong.' This moral ambiguity is presented as a consequence of experience, not a failing.

The collection's title, 'Many Voices,' is borne out by these varied perspectives. 'From the Portuguese I' recalls a 'village of youth' filled with 'lilies in all the orchards,' a pastoral memory that stands in contrast to the haunted landscapes of other poems. Readers should attend to how Nesbit uses different speakers and settings to explore a single theme from multiple angles, without settling on a single conclusion.

Reading 'Many Voices' sequentially reveals a poet experimenting with form and voice across a range of subjects. The excerpts suggest that Nesbit is less interested in consistent worldview than in capturing the emotional truth of particular moments. Pay attention to recurring images—moonlight, houses, thresholds, gardens—and how they accumulate meaning across poems. The collection rewards readers who move slowly, allowing each poem's distinctive atmosphere to settle before moving to the next.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to “The Return,” the way Nesbit lets a house feel both welcoming and strange. It reminded me of another old collection I found later, one with the same quiet pull between hearth and haunting: Poems of the Heart and Home — Text and Context. Somehow, the afternoon dissolved into that one, too.