Michael Field

Michael Field was the shared pen name of two English women, the aunt Katharine Harris Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece Edith Emma Cooper (1862–1913), who lived and wrote together for most of their adult lives. Their early verse dramas appeared under the name in the 1880s, and for a time critics took “Michael Field” for a man; Robert Browning was among the first to praise the work. In later years both women became Roman Catholics, and their last books are devotional.

The poems here come from three books. Sight and Song (1892) answers paintings in European galleries, each poem taking the picture’s title and naming painter and gallery in its note. Underneath the Bough, in the 1898 edition with new songs added (preface dated 8 September 1898), gathers lyrics in numbered Books of Songs. From A Selection from the Poems of Michael Field (The Poetry Bookshop, 1923) only poems not already taken from those two books are included; the note on each says which earlier volume it was first printed in, among them Long Ago, Wild Honey, Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees.