On 22 February 1916, a fortnight after her forty-second birthday, the Eastern Daily Press of Norwich printed on page 4 a short poem in three stanzas. It is headed “The Wind in the Boughs” and signed “OLIVE DOUGLAS (Lady Alfred Douglas).” I had not seen it before. It is in none of her four collections, and I have found it nowhere else. I think she sent it in herself, and that the sending matters as much as the poem.
The poem
Will there be leaves again on the trees, and little flowers?
And flowers in the grass again?
And shall we see great rainbows shine through the showers?
And roses after the rain?And will the blue come back once more to the darkened skies?
And sad days come to an end?
And forget-me-nots return, and blue butterflies?
And the blue eyes of my friend?Oh, cold enchanted house of my heart . . .
Oh, sleeping life,
That only the Prince can rouse!
Have faith in the Spring and love, in spite of tears and strife . . .
And the rough wind in the boughs!OLIVE DOUGLAS
(Lady Alfred Douglas).
The Eastern Daily Press (Norwich), 22 February 1916, p. 4. View the page image
A message in a bottle
A Norwich daily does not go digging for a poem in some obscure London periodical of the nineties, and if it had, we would find the poem there. We don’t. It is not in her collections, and it is not in any other paper I can find. The plain explanation is the right one: the daughter of Colonel Custance of Weston House, Norwich, a local name, who signed herself Lady Alfred Douglas, sent her county paper a poem, and the paper printed it.
That makes the poem an act. For anyone who thinks of herself as a poet, a thing is not quite said until it is published. Printing it, with the date and her name, was in 1916 what pressing “publish” is now. She could not say this to her father. In the middle of a custody war she could not easily say it to her husband, and I doubt that Bosie saw a Norwich paper that week. A county newspaper was the safe place to say it: public, because it was printed, dated and signed, and almost private in practice, because hardly anyone with a stake in the quarrel was likely to read it. It was a message in a bottle. It was also a kind of prayer, which is addressed to no one in the room and is meant all the same. Like her diary, it formalised something she felt and could not put in a letter.
Ten weeks later
The date matters because of what came next. Olive’s marriage was in the courts. On 30 June 1915 Douglas had asked the Chancery Division, before Mr Justice Eve, for all of Raymond’s holidays. The reports print extracts from Olive’s letters, among them: “I love him above everything, and would never have left him if he had not taken away Raymond.” Eve dismissed the application.
On 3 May 1916, ten weeks after the poem appeared, custody of Raymond came back to court, this time before Mr Justice Peterson. Olive sat at the solicitors’ table beside Sir George Lewis. When Douglas read from his affidavit that she was afraid to return to him because of her father, she rose and said, “That is not true.” Then, according to the Evening Express:
Lady Alfred Douglas.—I am perf[ectly] willing to be reconciled.
Lord Alfred Douglas.—Do you hear that, my lord? We are devoted to each other, and it is this man (Colonel Custance) who has [parted] us and broken up our home, and [taken our] child away. This man is a scoundrel.
Lady Alfred Douglas.—No, he is not.
Peterson directed that custody go to Colonel Custance, and Douglas was ordered to pay the costs.
The poem and the courtroom say the same thing in two registers. In court she says it aloud, in public and in front of both men: she is willing to be reconciled, and she will not hear her father called a scoundrel. In February she had said it in verse, to a newspaper. She was trying to be loyal to everyone, as she had written in her diary in May 1913, and the poem is the part of that loyalty that was not allowed to be spoken at home.
Nine questions
The poem asks nine questions and answers none. They begin with the oldest questions of spring poetry: will the leaves return, and the flowers, and the blue sky? They narrow as they go, from leaves and grass to forget-me-nots, and then to a person: “And the blue eyes of my friend?”
The friend is Douglas. The last stanza says so in the language of the fairy tale. The “cold enchanted house of my heart” and the “sleeping life, / That only the Prince can rouse” are the vocabulary she had made for him, and Rainbows is dedicated “To the Fairy Prince.” She is asking, in the last weeks of an unhappy winter, whether he will come back. The court answer in May gives her own answer to the question.
Her old images
Almost every image in the poem is one she had used before. In Rainbows (1902) the fifth of the “Songs of a Fairy Princess” is “Forget-me-nots,” first printed in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1898. It ends:
Love, because they are like your eyes,
Blue as the wild blue butterflies.
In 1916 those three things, forget-me-nots, blue butterflies and the beloved’s blue eyes, come back in a single run of questions. So do the rainbows. The prefatory poem of Rainbows begins “Songs! that like rainbows following after storm”; here the rainbows shine “through the showers.”
Some of the Fairy Prince poems, I have argued, began life as poems to John Gray. If so, the images of 1898 were meant for one man and came back in 1916 for another.
“Have faith in the Spring and love”
The last stanza turns the questions into a command: “Have faith in the Spring and love, in spite of tears and strife.” In January 1915 she had written to Douglas that “we are told to put bitterness out of our hearts – and leave things to God.” The poem puts the same thought into a nature lyric. She would be received into the Catholic Church the following year, and the language of faith is already easy in her hands.
The poem ends on a rough note. After flowers, butterflies and blue eyes, the last word is “the rough wind in the boughs.” The spring she asks for will arrive as wind in bare branches, and she trusts it anyway, and she put it in print under her own name, her marital name; that is, the name of the man she still loved.
Sources and textual notes
- Publication. The Eastern Daily Press (Norwich), 22 February 1916, p. 4, from the Newspapers.com archive. I have found no other printing, in the British newspapers online or in my Newspapers.com searches.
- How it got there. No record of the submission survives that I know of. The conclusion that she sent it herself is mine, from the fact that the poem appears nowhere else and that the family home, Weston House, was addressed as Norwich.
- Weston. The family home was Weston House, Norwich: that is the letterhead printed address on various letters of Olive’s, which I have seen.
- Text. Transcribed from the page image and read twice. The printed text has a typesetting flaw (“O’h,” for “Oh,” in the third stanza), spaces before two question marks, and a stray speck after “rouse!”, none of which is reproduced here. Column breaks are closed up.
- Collections. The poem is not in Opals (1897), Rainbows (1902), The Blue Bird (1905) or The Inn of Dreams (1911).
- The court reports. Liverpool Echo, 30 June 1915, p. 8; The Daily Telegraph, 1 July 1915, p. 7; Evening Express (Liverpool), 3 May 1916, p. 6 (page image). The right-hand letters of the 1916 page are lost in the binding; “perfectly” is partly reconstructed from “perf,” and the other bracketed words are reconstructions.
- “Forget-me-nots.” The English Illustrated Magazine (1898), p. 416; Rainbows (1902), p. 14.
- Her letter. Olive Custance to Lord Alfred Douglas, 9 January 1915 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).
- What the page doesn’t say. The newspaper does not say when the poem was written.
