Edmund William Gosse

Edmund William Gosse Poems

Edmund William Gosse Biography

Sir Edmund William Gosse CB (21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes. Gosse worked as assistant librarian at the British Museum from 1867 alongside the songwriter Theo Marzials, and in 1875 became a translator at the Board of Trade, a post which he held until 1904. From 1904 to 1914 he was chief Librarian of the House of Lords Library. In the meantime, he published his first volume of poetry, On Viol and Flute (1873) and a work of criticism, Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879). Gosse and Robert Louis Stevenson first met while teenagers, and after 1879, when Stevenson came to London on occasion, he would stay with Gosse and his family. He became acquainted with the pre-Raphaelites, and with Thomas Hardy, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne. He became, in the 1880s, one of the most important art critics dealing with sculpture (writing mainly for the Saturday Review) with an interest spurred on by his intimate friendship with the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft. Gosse would eventually write the first history of the renaissance of late-Victorian sculpture in 1894 in a four-part series for the Art Journal, dubbing the movement the New Sculpture. From 1884 to 1890 Gosse lectured in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, despite his own lack of academic qualifications. Cambridge University gave him an honorary MA in 1886, and Trinity College formally admitted him as a member, 'by order of the Council', in 1889. From 1904, he was librarian of the House of Lords, where he exercised considerable influence. He wrote for the Sunday Times, and was an expert on Thomas Gray, William Congreve, John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Coventry Patmore. He can also take credit for introducing Ibsen's work to the British public. Gosse and William Archer collaborated in translating Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder; those two translations were performed throughout the 20th century. Gosse and Archer, along with Shaw, were perhaps the literary critics most responsible for popularising Ibsen's plays among English-speaking audiences. His most famous book is the autobiographical Father and Son, about his troubled relationship with his Plymouth Brethren father, Philip, which was dramatised for television by Dennis Potter. Historians caution, though, that notwithstanding its literary excellence, Gosse's narrative is often at odds with the verifiable facts of his own and his parents' lives.In later life, he became a formative influence on Siegfried Sassoon, the nephew of his lifelong friend, Hamo Thornycroft. Sassoon's mother was a friend of Gosse's wife, Ellen. Gosse was also closely tied to figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, and André Gide. After Gosse's mother died of breast cancer, his father married in 1860 the deeply religious Quaker spinster Eliza Brightwen (1813–1900), whose brother Thomas tried to encourage Edmund to become a banker and whose brother George was the husband of Eliza Elder Brightwen (1830–1906), a naturalist and author, whose first book was published in 1871. After Eliza Elder Brightwen's death, Edmund Gosse arranged for the publication of her two posthumous works Last Hours with Nature (1908) and Eliza Brightwen, the Life and Thoughts of a Naturalist (1909), both edited by W. H. Chesson, and the latter book with an introduction and epilogue by Gosse.)

The Best Poem Of Edmund William Gosse

Lying In The Grass

Between two russet tufts of summer grass,
I watch the world through hot air as through glass,
And by my face sweet lights and colours pass.

Before me, dark against the fading sky,
I watch three mowers mowing, as I lie:
With brawny arms they sweep in harmony.

Brown English faces by the sun burnt red,
Rich glowing colour on bare throat and head,
My heart would leap to watch them, were I dead!

And in my strong young living as I lie,
I seem to move with them in harmony,--
A fourth is mowing, and that fourth am I.

The music of the scythes that glide and leap,
The young men whistling as their great arms sweep,
And all the perfume and sweet sense of sleep,

The weary butterflies that droop their wings,
The dreamy nightingale that hardly sings,
And all the lassitude of happy things

Is mingling with the warm and pulsing blood
That gushes through my veins a languid flood,
And feeds my spirit as the sap a bud.

Behind the mowers, on the amber air,
A dark-green beech-wood rises, still and fair,
A white path winding up it like a stair.

And see that girl, with pitcher on her head,
And clean white apron on her gown of red,--
Her even-song of love is but half-said:

She waits the youngest mower. Now he goes;
Her cheeks are redder than the wild blush-rose;
They climb up where the deepest shadows close.

But though they pass and vanish, I am there;
I watch his rough hands meet beneath her hair,
Their broken speech sounds sweet to me like prayer

Ah! now the rosy children come to play,
And romp and struggle with the new-mown hay;
Their clear high voices sound from far away.

They know so little why the world is sad,
They dig themselves warm graves and yet are glad;
Their muffled screams and laughter make me mad!

I long to go and play among them there,
Unseen, like wind, to take them by the hair,
And gently make their rosy cheeks more fair.

The happy children! full of frank surprise,
And sudden whims and innocent ecstasies;
What godhead sparkles from their liquid eyes!

No wonder round those urns of mingled clays
That Tuscan potters fashion'd in old days,
And coloured like the torrid earth ablaze,

We find the little gods and loves portray'd
Through ancient forests wandering undismay'd,
Or gathered, whispering, in some pleasant glade.

They knew, as I do now, what keen delight
A strong man feels to watch the tender flight
Of little children playing in his sight.

I do not hunger for a well-stored mind,
I only wish to live my life, and find
My heart in unison with all mankind.

My life is like the single dewy star
That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,--
A microcosm where all things living are.

And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death
Should come behind and take away my breath,
I should not rise as one who sorroweth,

For I should pass, but all the world would be
Full of desire and young delight and glee,
And why should men be sad through loss of me?

The light is dying; in the silver-blue
The young moon shines from her bright window through:
The mowers all are gone, and I go too.

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