Kathleen Raine was born in 1908 and educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she specialized in biology and received a Master in Natural Science in 1929. She contributed to New Verse in the thirties, but her first collection of poems was Stone and Flower (1943), a book illustrated with drawings by Barbara Hepworth. Later volumes of verse are Living in Time (1946), The Pythoness and Other Poems (1949), and The Year One (1952). Her Collected Poems were published in 1956.
A concern with religious ideas and religious vision, missing from her earliest 'periodical' poems, is apparent in Stone and Flower. From her poems, too, one might perhaps infer an interest in Blake and the 'visionary' Coleridge, writers whom she introduced in the British Council 'Writers and Their Work' series. For her, Balke 'overtops all but the greatest men of genius that England .. has known', combining, as for her he seems to do, 'the intellectual honesty of the scientist with a saint's sense of the holy'. It is the scientist in Kathleen Raine who writes of the 'maypole dance & Of chromosome and nucleus', but it is the stronger inure of the visionary who asserts that
Behind the tree, behind the house, behind the stars
Is the presence that I cannot see
Otherwise than as house and stars and tree.
Kathleen Raine is most at ease in the 'timeless' short lyric, and the reader will be able to see from these poems that she writes musically in unaffected language and that she can express an apocalyptic element in feeling without inflation. To turn over the pages of her Collected Poems is to be won to admire a narrow independent talent very faithfully served.
PASSION
Full of desire I lay, the sky wounding me,
each cloud a ship without me sailing, each tree
possessing what my soul lacked, tranquillity.
Waiting for the longed-for voice to speak
through the mute telephone, my body grew weak
with the well-known and mortal death, heartbreak.
The language I knew best, my human speech
forsook my fingers, and out of reach
were Homer's ghosts, the savage conches of the beach.
Then the sky spoke to me in language clear,
familiar s the heart, than love more near.
The sky said to my soul, 'You have what you desire!
'Lift up your heart again without fear,
sleep in the tomb, or breathe the living air,
this world you with the flower and with the tiger share.'
Then I saw every visible substance turn
into immortal, every cell new born
burned with the holy fire of passion.
This world I saw as on her judgement day
when the war ends, and the sky rolls away,
and all is light, love and eternity.
THE SPRING
(Song)
Out of hope's eternal spring
Bubbled once my mountain stream
Moss and sundew, fern and fell,
Valley, summer, tree and sun
All rose up, and all are gone.
By the spring I saw my love
(All who have parted once must meet,
First we live, and last forget),
With the stars about his head
With the future in his heart
Lay the green earth at my feet.
Now by the spring I stand alone
Still are its singing waters flowing;
Oh need thought I here to greet
Shadowy death who comes this way
Where hope's waters rise and play!
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En espa�ol:
Bibliography:
Bernard, Philippa 2009: No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine. London: Shepheard Walwyn.
Raine, Kathleen 2001 (1956): Collected Poems. London: Counterpoint.
En espa�ol:
Raine, Kathleen 2008: Poes�a y naturaleza (edici�n, traducci�n de Adolfo G�mez Tom�). Murcia: Tres Fronteras.
Raine, Kathleen 2006: Fragmentos de una visi�n sagrada: poemas escogidos (edici�n biling�e de Emilio Alzueta). Madrid: Aljam�a.
