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詩人 L. S. ベヴィントン |
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L. S. ベヴィントン バイオグラフィー＆ビブリオグラフィー (5) |
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A Life of Louisa Sarah Bevington
By. Eijun Senaha Hokkaido University |
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What, with this fenced human mind,
What can I do to help my kind?
I such a stammerer, they so blind! --- “My Little Task” (1882) |
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Toward the end of the poem, Bevington sees the present as “the very Day of Judgment”
and concludes mysteriously that “the Letter’s reign is over/ And the Spirit waxes fast,” suggesting the end of her literary career
and the beginning of her intense involvement as a revolutionist with the anarchist communism.
While her apocalyptic view grows in another of her poems, “Revolution,”
Bevington also proposes a progressive political vision of the future. In “Dreamers?,” calling and recognizing Christ as
“our comrade of long, long ago,” she says, “That ‘Kingdom’ is coming, on earth as ‘within you’.” “In and Out of Church”
is also reminiscent of her earlier religious belief that is now politically united with her vision:
“the great Hope warms the fighter,/ And the broad New Day grows brighter/ And more just.” Originally dedicated to her diseased
comrades in the 11 November 1893 issue of Commonweal, “In Memoriam” explains that the anarchist’s task is to assail and unmask
liberty’s plausible foes, “handing the torch as it glows/ To all who may ask.
As in “Bees in Clover” in Poems,
Lyrics, and Sonnets, Bevington uses, in this new volume, the insect
as an appropriate literary image of the people in an ideal community. In “The Secret of the Bees,” the poet first wonders the difference
between the lives of the insect and human; “Economy, Liberty, Order, and Wealth!--/Say, busy bee, how you reached Social Health?”
Reporting that the bees have freedom, no money, and no hypocritical press, the bee answers, “And we got our good habits through
sheer Common-Sense.” “The Spider and the Bee, A Tale for the Times” is another allegorical poem, but its tone is more meditative
than the other. A man, who believes that the “world must be saved by sympathies,” finds a bee trapped in the spider’s web.
The man says, “I wish you may both--survive(?).” Being sympathetic to the bee while understanding that the spider also needs
to prey on it to survive, the baffled man sighs and goes home to bed. Then, the poet takes over: |
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What of the tale? Well, it isn’t exact;
Yet it hints at an ugly and pitiful fact.
“Philosophy” severing language from fact--
Sympathy’s name is a shibboleth spoken;
Dreams of web-spinners be speedily broken!--
This story one tiny superfluous token. |
This can be read as a poem for children, but, in light of her earlier poems,
it is also an allegorical poem politically intended. The bee represents a member of a communist society,
and the spider stands for the exploiting institution, or government. The confrontation between the two would be inevitable,
regardless of the public’s sympathy, or wish. Bevington is well aware that the anarchists’ issues allow no compromise.
In her last poem of the volume “Dinner,” Bevington tells her past for the first and last time in poetry.
Looking back how she was raised to be a “proper” woman, she describes herself; |
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Perhaps mine is a tenth-rate soul, not worth the while to save;
Perhaps a quite incorrigible soul that can’t behave;
But it is mine, and I shall have to wear it to my grave. |
In the last four stanzas, she mentions her fellow anarchists who helped her revive and hoist
“living Life’s red flag for goal.” This poem is not as critical or scornful of society as other poems were. It is rather
a poem appreciative of the way she had lived her life. Later that year, Louisa Sarah Bevington, who had been fighting against
society and her own heart disease for years, succumbed to mortality.
The following year, in January and November, Bevington’s voice echoed in her posthumous article
“Anarchism and Violence” and her very last poem “Wishes.” Though the date actually written is unknown, the article maintains
Bevington’s aggressive view on terrorism: “there are cases where poison becomes medicinal, and there is such a thing as warring
against the cause of war.” The poem was, according to the accompanying note, “among the last of the contributions received
from our late comrade, L. S. Bevington,” and was most probably written after Liberty
Lyrics: |
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Oh, would it could be shared by all,
That vision of the soul,
Whose will, in tune with social due,
Needs but its own control:
For then a brave “new earth” would be
Where all should love, and all were free. |
Contrary to her militant attitude in the prose, Bevington in this poem appears to
step aside and seems unruffled. She may have been suggesting a middle ground, since the anarchists’ espousal of violence was
alienating the general public. Yet, it is too presumptuous to say that she changed her political stance at the end. Instead,
it would be more appropriate to say that her poetic diction, in contrast to a direct scornful accusation in the prose writing,
reached a more meditative as well as a more suggestive tone. Her “Dinner” and allegorical “bee” poems are also written
in this manner, and, certainly, this style is as modern as the twentieth-century political poets. Her death a year previously
had also ended her evolution as a poet.
Louisa Sarah Bevington’s life was as dramatic as it could be, but her literary evaluation is yet to be
completed. Bevington’s first literary critic was Alfred H. Miles who included her in The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth
Century in the 1890s, but he introduced her carelessly as “Louisa S. Guggenberger” while admitting she was “better known to
the public by her maiden name.” He mentioned that her “chief defects are over-facility common to so many poetesses, and a
deficient perception of the humorous” and ignored her poetic intention; i.e. “What can I do to help my kind?” Like other
women poets, for Bevington, poetry was a means to express her serious concerns, quite different from what Miles expected from
women poets. Since Miles, Bevington’s poetic achievements have been neglected until the 1980s.
During the last decade, however, the poet has been re-introduced and her works have been reprinted
in several anthologies and literary encyclopedias. Yet, the information of her life is still largely dependent on Miles’
brief essay, and academic essays on her individual poems are still sparse. Bevington’s intense political involvement may
have overshadowed her poetic contributions, but Leighton and Reynolds’ comparison of Bevington to her contemporary, Christina
Rossetti (1830-94), may shed more light on Bevington’s literary place: “Bevington’s poetry lacks the darker, imaginative
recesses of Rossetti’s, and often sounds, in spite of its secularist goals, more religious and high-minded than hers.” |
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