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    The Poetry - Volume II: Under The Sycamores & Other Poems
    The Poetry - Volume II: Under The Sycamores & Other Poems
    The Poetry - Volume II: Under The Sycamores & Other Poems
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    The Poetry - Volume II: Under The Sycamores & Other Poems

    By Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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    About this ebook

    Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835.

    Braddon suffered early family trauma at age five, when her mother, Fanny, separated from her father, Henry, in 1840. When she was aged ten her brother Edward left England for India and later Australia.

    However, after being befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle she was much taken by acting. For three years she took minor acting roles, which supported both her and her mother, However, her interest in acting began to wane as she began to write. It was to be her true vocation.

    In 1860, Mary met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals. By the next year they were living together. The situation and the view from polite society was complicated by the fact that Maxwell was already married with five children, and his wife was under care in an Irish asylum. Until 1874 Mary was to act as stepmother to his children as well as to the six offspring their own relationship produced.

    Braddon, with a large and growing family, still found time to produce a long and prolific writing career. Her most famous book was a sensational novel published in 1862, ‘Lady Audley's Secret’. It won her both recognition and best-seller status.

    Her works in the supernatural genre were equally prolific and brought new menace to the form. Her pact with the devil story ‘Gerald, or the World, the Flesh and the Devil’ (1891), and the ghost stories ‘The Cold Embrace’, ‘The Face in the Glass’ and ‘At Chrighton Abbey’ are regarded as classics.

    In 1866 she founded the Belgravia magazine. This presented readers with serialised sensation novels, poems, travel narratives and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history and science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers an excellent source of literature at an affordable cost. She was also the editor of The Temple Bar magazine.

    Maxwell’s wife died in 1874 and the couple who had been together for so long were at last able to wed.

    Mary Elizabeth Brandon died on 4th February 1915 in Richmond and is buried in Richmond Cemetery.

    After her death her short story masterpieces would be regularly anthologised. But for the rest of her canon her reputation then went into decline. In the past decade her reputation and talent is once more being given the attention it so rightly deserves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPortable Poetry
    Release dateJan 4, 2019
    ISBN9781787803688
    The Poetry - Volume II: Under The Sycamores & Other Poems
    Author

    Mary Elizabeth Braddon

    Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was a Victorian English author best known for her sensation novels. She was rather prolific, having written more than eighty novels in her lifetime. In 1862, Braddon published Lady Audley’s Secret, a rousing success that earned her a fortune. She also founded Belgravia magazine, which serialized sensation novels, biographies, poems, and essays; and wrote supernatural fiction, such as Gerald: Or, The World, the Flesh and the Devil. Braddon’s works have endured through the years and been adapted into films and television shows.   

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      Book preview

      The Poetry - Volume II - Mary Elizabeth Braddon

      The Poetry of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

      Volume II – Under The Sycamores & Other Poems

      Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835.

      Braddon suffered early family trauma at age five, when her mother, Fanny, separated from her father, Henry, in 1840.  When she was aged ten her brother Edward left England for India and later Australia.

      However, after being befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle she was much taken by acting. For three years she took minor acting roles, which supported both her and her mother, However, her interest in acting began to wane as she began to write. It was to be her true vocation.

      In 1860, Mary met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals. By the next year they were living together.  The situation and the view from polite society was complicated by the fact that Maxwell was already married with five children, and his wife was under care in an Irish asylum.  Until 1874 Mary was to act as stepmother to his children as well as to the six offspring their own relationship produced. 

      Braddon, with a large and growing family, still found time to produce a long and prolific writing career.  Her most famous book was a sensational novel published in 1862, ‘Lady Audley's Secret’.  It won her both recognition and best-seller status.

      Her works in the supernatural genre were equally prolific and brought new menace to the form. Her pact with the devil story ‘Gerald, or the World, the Flesh and the Devil’ (1891), and the ghost stories ‘The Cold Embrace’, ‘The Face in the Glass’ and ‘At Chrighton Abbey’ are regarded as classics.

      In 1866 she founded the Belgravia magazine.  This presented readers with serialised sensation novels, poems, travel narratives and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history and science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers an excellent source of literature at an affordable cost. She was also the editor of The Temple Bar magazine.

      Maxwell’s wife died in 1874 and the couple who had been together for so long were at last able to wed.

      Mary Elizabeth Brandon died on 4th February 1915 in Richmond and is buried in Richmond Cemetery.

      After her death her short story masterpieces would be regularly anthologised.  But for the rest of her canon her reputation then went into decline.  In the past decade her reputation and talent is once more being given the attention it so rightly deserves.

      Index of Contents

      UNDER THE SYCAMORES

      THE SECRETARY

      Fugitive Pieces

      The Last Hours of the Girondists

      Joanna of Naples

      Louise de la Vallière

      Queen Guinevere

      Si and No

      By the Sea-Shore 

      At Last

      Tired of Life

      Waiting

      Under Ground

      Vale

      Going Down 

      Gabriel 

      Farewell 

      Waking 

      A Shadow 

      Life is a Child 

      To a Coquette

      The Lost Pleiad

      After the Armistice

      Among the Hyacinths 

      Mary Elizabeth Braddon – A Concise Bibliography

      UNDER THE SYCAMORES

      God guard that spot beneath the sycamores

      Where blood was med once by a woman's hand!

      Man shuns the dark made of those sycamores:

      There night is blackest—there the winter's wind

      Shrieks shrillest—or in loud prophetic voice,

      With fitful wailings through the short'ning days,

      Seems as it knew the story of the place

      And tried to tell it in harm syllables,

      To scare all sentient things from sheltering there.

      The smiling summer there can only frown,

      For the thick trees shut out the funny skies,

      And the damp ground will not be shone upon,

      Will only nourish rank and poisonous weeds,

      And will proclaim with black and hideous looks

      Here once was murder done.

      The records tell

      How a chiefs daughter, one Menamenee,

      Was left an orphan in her early years,

      And was proclaimed the Princess of her tribe,

      Male issue failing to her father's line.

      Thus the tribe said, "She shall select a mate,

      Dauntless and handsome as her glorious self;

      Shall choose from all our people him that is

      Swiftest of foot, boldest of heart and mien,

      Wisest and greatest. They shall have a son

      Whom they shall rear to be our children's chief,

      And to recall the virtues of her fire—

      The brave Dark Eagle." Young Menamenee

      Is straight and slender, graceful, light and free,

      As shadows thrown by flowers on funny grass

      That flicker as they fall, her deep black eyes

      Have the Dark Eagle's radiance in their glance,

      And can command as his were wont to do.

      Her hand can wing the arrow to its home

      In the bird's heart that flies above the trees;

      She has all his imperious grace; a queen

      In every gesture, word, and thought, and deed—

      What a strange fight to see such pride brought low,

      Such regal beauty prostrate in the duff,

      And such a warm and noble heart abased

      For man with reckless foot to trample on.

      She met a stranger in the forest path,

      Who turned aside to note her Indian grace;

      She met a stranger—and his deep blue eyes,

      Through the dark night, were with her in her dreams,

      And shone on her, till changing into stars,

      She woke, and gazing upward to the sky

      Still saw their light in depths of azure blue.

      Again she met him in the forest: glade,

      And this time in distress; thrown from his horse.

      In danger; so they bore him to her home,

      And laid him on a couch of soft dried herbs,

      Brown moss, and withered flowers. There he lay

      For weeks, she watching by him through the long

      Still days and nights, of fever and unrest,—

      Delirious wanderings of the burning brain,

      Through black despair to glimmering hope, until

      A change came o'er him, and he grew to know

      His tender nurse. To listen to her voice

      That soothed him to his rest with Indian airs

      Sung in a plaintive minor. Well he knew

      The touch of the light hand that smoothed his hair,

      Or laid cool simples on his burning brow,

      And had a power to soothe, apart from them,

      By very virtue of its tenderness.

      All suffering past, he lay as in a rest;

      So deep, it might be death—and all so sweet

      And heavenly peaceful, it could not be life.

      And she—alas! She sang a mournful song,

      That

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