Portrait of Helen Waddell by Grace Henry, reproduced on the cover of D. Felicitas Corrigan’s biography, by courtesy of Mollie Martin.

You chanted medieval Latin lyrics

          and bawdy love songs into English.[i]

 

You enchanted innumerable

          friends and admirers,

          scholars and vagrants,

          suitors unsuitable,

          relations, well related,

          multitudes at lectures

          in Oxford, Columbia and Glasgow.

 

You chanced upon love, profound yet platonic:

George Saintsbury, scholar of English,

          founder of subject at Cambridge,

          like Gilles, in Peter Abelard,[ii]

thinks ‘in jest and feels in earnest’.[iii]

Otto Kylmann, publisher at Constable and Co,

          cultured, courteous, connoisseur,

was later a tenant in your house

and an echo of Abelard.[iv]

 

You became Héloïse,

brilliant, spiritual, efflorescent.[v]

Your sister, Meg, became Denise,

Abelard’s sister.

 

Meg was Cassandra

to your Jane Austen.

Otto was George Lewes

to your George Eliot.

You are three in one,

          Helen, Jane and George:

          celebrated authors,

          sufferers in emotion,

          with depths of hinterland.

         

Your words were magical,

your voice musical,

your person magnetic.[vi]

You had grace and dignity,

          dazzling intellect,

          charm, balance and humour.

Your talking and writing were

          ‘babblative and scribblative.’[vii]

Your conversation was

          scintillating and allusive,

          leaping from stone to stone.

You enjoyed dancing and flirting

          the night away in New York.

Your wisdom transmitted something undying

to another generation.

Your scholarship was ripe

          and your spirituality deep.[viii]

 

Your God was ‘untotalitarian’,[ix]

a ‘wayside God,

a man that other men

wanted to go along with,

before they thought of

          their sins and repentance.’[x]

You poured out the love of God

          for the disenchanted, disenfranchised,

          desolate and undistinguished.

You summed up the Cross in a rabbit,

          caught in a trap and released.

          Abelard elucidated it.[xi]

 

You were like Héloïse, as Gilles saw her:

‘Some spring of mercy in her overflowed

and steeped his heart in its strange dew.

Laughter used to well in her and

the light come and go on her face

like the broken lights of running water.’[xii]

 

From girlhood in Tokyo,

bereft of parents,

You engaged in one key quest:

          to reach out to the Eternal.

Your Desert Fathers and Mothers embodied it.[xiii]

          They brought ‘eternity into men’s minds

          by their exaggeration of it

          and contempt for the bus-stop of time.’[xiv]

 

Manuscripts were your texts

          and translations your métier.

Until you revealed the power and beauty

of Medieval Latin,

          philology and history

          had the monopoly.

‘Dark Ages’ were illuminative, no longer only

          superstition, sterility

          wars and vagabons[xv]

but delight in God

in love between men and women,

in Wandering Scholars.[xvi]

‘The scholar’s lyric of the twelfth century

seems as new a miracle as the first crocus:

but its earth is the leafdrift of centuries

of forgotten scholarship.’[xvii]

 

In your portrait, we overlook your left shoulder

          as you write in a notebook,

          balanced on a manuscript.

With thick, bobbed hair, beautifully dressed,

          and wearing a fur wrap, you emanate

elegance, concentration and scholarship.[xviii]

 

 

And, near the end, with Otto dead, you felt

‘a fog in the head and a bog in the feet.’[xix]

With memory loss, you echoed Swift,

in enjoying your earlier work:

‘O God, what genius I had when I wrote that.’

 

You lived your life in plenitude

          and entered God’s eternal joy:

‘To see Thee is the end and the beginning.

Thou carriest us, and thou dost go before,

Thou art the journey, and the journey’s end.’[xx]