Lionel Johnson

Lionel Pigot Johnson (15 March 1867 – 4 October 1902) was an English poet, essayist and critic.

• Ill times may be; she hath no thought of time:
  She reigns beside the waters yet in pride.
  Rude voices cry: but in her ears the chime
  Of full, sad bells brings back her old springtide.

  Like to a queen in pride of place, she wears
  The splendour of a crown in Radcliffe's dome.
  Well fare she, well! As perfect beauty fares;
  And those high places, that are beauty's home.

  • "Oxford"

• The winds are sometimes sad to me,
  The starry spaces, full of fear;
  Mine is the sorrow on the sea,
  And mine the sigh of places drear.

  Some players upon plaintive strings
  Publish their wistfulness abroad;
  I have not spoken of these things,
  Save to one man, and unto God.

  • "The Precept of Silence"

• What comes now? The earth awaits
  What fierce wonder from the skies?
  Thunder, trampling through the night?
  Morning, with illustrious eyes?
  Morning, from the springs of light:
  Thunder, round Heaven's opening gates..
  • "July"

• Imageries of dreams reveal a gracious age:
  Black armour, falling lace, and altar lights at morn.
  The courtesy of saints, their gentleness and scorn,
  Lights on an earth more fair, than shone from Plato's page:
  The courtesy of knights, fair calm and sacred rage:
  The courtesy of love, sorrow for love's sake borne.
  Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn,
  We hunger against hope for the lost heritage.

• Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,
  Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!
  Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.

• Alone he rides, alone,
  The fair and fatal king:
  Dark night is all his own,
  That strange and solemn thing.

• Which are more full of fate:
  The stars; or those sad eyes?
  Which are more still and great:
  Those brows; or the dark skies?

• Vanquished in life, his death
  By beauty made amends:
  The passing of his breath
  Won his defeated ends.

• Our wearier spirit faints,
  Vexed in the world‘s employ:
  His soul was of the saints;
  And art to him was joy.

• King, tried in fires of woe!
  Men hunger for thy grace:
  And through the night I go,
  Loving thy mournful face.

  Yet, when the city sleeps;
  When all the cries are still:
  The stars and heavenly deeps
  Work out a perfect will.

Full text at Wikisource

• Dark Angel, with thine aching lust
  To rid the world of penitence:
  Malicious Angel, who still dost
  My soul such subtile violence!

• Through thee, the gracious Muses turn,
  To Furies, O mine Enemy!
  And all the things of beauty burn
  With flames of evil ecstasy.

  Because of thee, the land of dreams
  Becomes a gathering place of fears:
  Until tormented slumber seems
  One vehemence of useless tears.

• The ardour of red flame is thine,
  And thine the steely soul of ice:
  Thou poisonest the fair design
  Of nature, with unfair device.

  Apples of ashes, golden bright;
  Waters of bitterness, how sweet!
  O banquet of a foul delight,
  Prepared by thee, dark Paraclete!

• Thou art the whisper in the gloom,
  The hinting tone, the haunting laugh:
  Thou art the adorner of my tomb,
  The minstrel of mine epitaph.

• I fight thee, in the Holy Name!
  Yet, what thou dost, is what God saith:
  Tempter! should I escape thy flame,
  Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death:

  The second Death, that never dies,
  That cannot die, when time is dead:
  Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries,
  Eternally uncomforted.

• Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,
  Dark Angel! triumph over me:
  Lonely, unto the Lone I go;
  Divine, to the Divinity.

• For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
  Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;
  Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
  By falling from a high stool in a pub...
  But showed no trace of alcohol
  At the autopsy, privately performed—
  Tissue preserved—the pure mind
  Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
  • Ezra Pound, '"Seina Mi Fe', Disfecemi Maremma"', Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), p. 15

• Dowson and Johnson most I praise—
  To troop with those the world's forgot,
  And copy their proud steady gaze.
  • William Butler Yeats, 'The Grey Rock', Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916), p. 6

• Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian, for he had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our plans. Historic Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas, stirred his passion like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who thought good literature or good criticism dangerous were in his eyes "all heretics."
  • William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (1922), p. 104

• He had the delicate strong features of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an archaistic Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and that resemblance seemed symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse.
  • William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (1922), p. 105

• Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing to human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, "I wish those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realise their unspeakable vulgarity."
  • William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (1922), p. 105

• Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect, and always, I think, deliberately picked his company.
  • William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (1922), p. 187

• Johnson's poetry, like Johnson himself before his last decay, conveys an emotion of joy, of intellectual clearness, of hard energy; he gave us of his triumph.
  • William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (1922), p. 188

• Lionel Johnson at Catholic Encyclopedia
• Lionel Johnson at Hutchison Encyclopedia
• Poems of Johnson at The Other Pages