A chant of love for England, and other poems — Text and Context

Patriotic Address and Its Counterpoints

The opening poem establishes a public, declarative voice through anaphora and catalog: 'Glory of thought and glory of deed, / Glory of Hampden and Runnymede; / Glory of ships that sought far goals, / Glory of swords and glory of souls!' The repeated 'Glory of' builds a litany of English historical and cultural figures—Milton, Nelson, Shelley, Sidney—framing national identity as a legacy of intellectual and martial achievement. Yet the poem also introduces a defensive note: 'Shatter her beauteous breast ye may; / The Spirit of England none can slay!' This combative tenderness recurs in the memorial verses 'In Memoriam P. M. and A. C. D. KILLED IN ACTION, 1915,' where 'Pride with Grief go hand in hand' and the dead are imagined as 'Good knights of all the years foregone' riding on. The collection does not sustain this elevated register uniformly; other poems shift to intimate or narrative modes, suggesting Cone uses the patriotic frame as one voice among many.

Dramatic Monologue and Character Voice

Several titles point to dramatic monologues or character studies: 'Greencastle Jenny,' 'The Gaoler,' 'The Trumpeter,' 'The Arrowmaker,' 'Ivo of Chartres.' These suggest Cone's interest in inhabiting specific historical or fictional personas. The excerpt from 'The Gaoler' (not fully provided) and the ballad-like 'The Ballad of Calnan's Christmas' indicate a narrative impulse that contrasts with the lyrical sonnets. In 'A Memory of Ellen Terry's Beatrice,' Cone uses the sonnet form to capture a performance: 'A wind of spring that whirls the feignéd snows / Of blossom-petals in the face, and flees: / Elusive, made of mirthful mockeries.' The description of Beatrice as 'A falcon, by a prince to be possessed, / Gay-graced with bells that ever chiming are' reveals Cone's method of translating theatrical presence into compressed imagery. Without full texts, the range of voices can only be inferred, but the variety of speakers—from medieval figures to contemporary soldiers—points to a poet practicing historical and psychological ventriloquism.

Sensory Imagery and Emotional Landscape

Cone's descriptive passages often anchor emotion in physical sensation. In 'A Nocturne of Rubinstein,' the moon's absence becomes a structuring device: 'Night hopeless, since the moon is in her grave!' The poem traces a storm's progress through tactile and auditory details: 'The groaning branches chafe / Till scarce the small, hushed singing-birds are safe, / Tossed rocking in the nest, / Like gentle memories in a stormy breast.' The resolution arrives with 'the pale, the patient moon' and a calm 'by struggle won.' Similarly, the sonnet 'The Common Street' (listed in contents) and the flower poems—'A Yellow Pansy,' 'The Spring Beauties,' 'Thisbe'—suggest Cone's attention to small, domestic subjects. The excerpt from an unnamed poem describes a girl who 'has looked on other faces white, / Pale bloom of fear, before war's whirlwind blown' and 'in some low sheltering shed / To tend dark wounds, the leaping arrow's bite.' Here, war intrudes on pastoral imagery, merging the sensory with the traumatic.

Formal Range and Structural Choices

The collection employs a variety of verse forms: the title poem's irregular meter and rhyme, the sonnet's fourteen-line constraint, the nocturne's five-part structure with refrain, and the ballad's narrative quatrains. 'A Nocturne of Rubinstein' uses a repeating question—'What now remains, what now remains but night?'—that shifts in each section: 'Night hopeless,' 'Night lawless,' 'Night grieving,' finally 'Night peaceful.' This incremental change mirrors the emotional arc from despair to resolution. The sonnet 'A Memory of Ellen Terry's Beatrice' is a Petrarchan sonnet with an octave describing the actress's quality and a sestet that compares her to 'a falcon' and 'a billow that has rapt into its breast / The swayed reflection of a dancing star.' Cone's control of the form is evident in the enjambment and the volta at line 9. The contents also list a sequence of 'Posies'—short epigrammatic poems—and a 'Rhyme of Robin Puck,' indicating experiments with lighter, folk-inflected verse.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the interplay between public and private registers. Cone's patriotic poems gain resonance when read alongside her dramatic monologues and nature lyrics, which reveal a poet equally concerned with individual consciousness and sensory detail. The excerpts suggest a writer who uses form as a tool for emotional precision, whether in the refrain of a nocturne or the compressed imagery of a sonnet. Without the full text, the coherence of the volume remains an open question, but the variety of voices and structures invites exploration of how Cone balances national sentiment with personal lyricism.

There’s something in Helen Gray Cone’s careful sonnets—the way she turns a flower or a street corner into a quiet ache—that reminds me of evenings spent rereading old favorites. I found a similar tenderness in Truth and the Myth: Couplet Quips — A Reader’s Guide, where the wit feels worn soft, like a stone held long enough to warm. Just a lingering thought, nothing more.