Ruth Manning-Sanders
Ruth Manning-Sanders Poems
Now where the candles hke two praying angels.
Slim, white, and golden aureoled, keep back
The endless leagues of night.
She in a luminous ring
...
Enter, magician,—now the world is thine,
Robbed of its bitterness. Within this room
The regal sunlight, sifted froni the gloom.
Heaps up its dazzling radiance. Here the fine.
...
When I went down the gallery,
A million shapes of clay
Stood in the selfsame way
Upon their pedestàls of ebony,
...
Low in the road under the withering hedge
They stand, the woman drearyand thin shouldered.
The three small ragged boys,—and the white faces
They lift to the high hedge are blotched with cold.
...
Coming up the path behold
A pedlar bent and very old.
With round dark eye,
A black bag in his small right hand.
...
As we sat in dim firelight,
You and I, when starless night
Pressed against the cottage wall,
And the flames wrought webs of dreaming,
...
For me, your lover, life is a great room
Scattered with your belongings, and I see
Nothing you have not touched, and whoso comes
Carries your messages, and who departs
...
Now we in the small stable watched with Death,
Death that stood hesitant, where rusty gold
Old Stalwart's flanks gleamed dimly mid a throng
Of crowding shadows; for the storm-lamp burned
...
Little ones, guileless ones,
So fair and dainty.
All the guests are gathered here.
Come and acquaint ye.
...
Good-night, good-night, the log bums low.
The nodding shadows nod more slow.
Lift, and fall, and die ;
The night hangs drear.
...
Naked you come, and naked go.
Nor hold of too great worth
The riches and the fame
And the green ways of earth.
...
Now everything was wrong, and all our souls
Shrivelled to tired old dwarfs, whose sunken gaze
No torch of hope could light to kindly blaze :
So sat they mute and helpless, though live coals
...
Out of the clear starlight,
Into a tunnel of night.
Muffling closie, falling steep.
Boughs stir above the place.
...
She, with her old witch-face turned upward, stares,
Frowning intent, her small hands still and folded
Upon her snow-white pinafore that shields
The fine red dress.—for this is Sunday evening.
...
On to the grey and gaping floor, and through
The broken window in the rough white wall,
In long beams of moted radiance
Falls light ; across the piled disordered bench.
...
Hobbling, hobbling, hobbling,
I am hobbling after you.
Up the sunny little street
Where your merry morning feet
...
Once in a golden hour
Spring brought a sign to you,
For the dark house door stood open.
And peeping through,
...
Now for you again—
Scanty blades and shrivelled clover.
Dead leaves strewing a sad field over,
Where you tread pools of rain,
...
When from the baby's hand they took,
With a large gentleness.
The tiptoe-proferred grass, and bent
Their great dark eyes to express
...
Out in a night of cold and gloom
I spied a little lirelit room;
I heard the flare of flickering flame,
Through the half-open door there came
...
Ruth Manning-Sanders Biography
Ruth Manning-Sanders (21 August 1886 – 12 October 1988) was a prolific British poet and author who was perhaps best known for her series of children's books in which she collected and retold fairy tales from all over the world. All told, she published more than 90 books during her lifetime. Ruth Vernon Manning was the youngest of three daughters of John Manning, an English Unitarian minister. She was born in Swansea, Wales, but, when she was three, her family moved to Cheshire, England. As a child, she had a great interest in reading books on many topics. She and her two sisters wrote and acted in their own plays. She described her childhood as "extraordinarily happy ... with kind and understanding parents and any amount of freedom." Manning-Sanders studied English literature and Shakespearean studies at Manchester University. She married English artist George Sanders in 1911 (they changed their name to Manning-Sanders) and spent much of her early married life touring Great Britain with a horse-drawn caravan and working in the circus (a topic she wrote about extensively). Eventually, the family moved into a cottage in the fishing hamlet of Land's End, Cornwall. She and her husband had two children together, one of whom, Joan Floyd (17 May 1913, to 9 May 2002), found some fame as a teenage artist in the 1920s while under her maiden name of Joan Manning-Sanders. After the Second World War and the accidental death of her husband in 1952, Manning-Sanders published dozens of fairy-tale anthologies, mostly during the 1960s and '70s. Many of them had titles beginning with "A Book of..." Some titles, therefore, were A Book of Wizards, A Book of Dwarfs, and so forth. Manning Sanders died in 1988 in Penzance, England. In the February 1989 issue of The Junior Bookshelf, Marcus Crouch wrote, "For many long-lived writers, death is followed by eclipse. I hope that publishers will (continue to re-release Manning-Sanders') priceless treasury of folk-tales. We would all be the poorer for their loss.")
The Best Poem Of Ruth Manning-Sanders
Music
Now where the candles hke two praying angels.
Slim, white, and golden aureoled, keep back
The endless leagues of night.
She in a luminous ring
Sits singing.
Her little head set slantwise, and the hair
In short soft lines falling about her face,
Her body lightly swaying.
Her fingers touching the keys
Very deftly.
The melody from out the ring of light
Is rising pure and sufficient, and the listeners
Thrill, crouched in darkness.
Yet are their hearts within them
Sad,—oh sad,!
For they feel their world to be nought but broken pieces.
Evil or good, 'tis nought but fragments of things;
And this strain of music that rises
Triumphant into the night.
Puts them to shame.
Not for perfection they long, for that is death ;—
There is music beyond this strain, and beyond for ever,
Yet without harmony none,
Neither strength nor completeness.
Nor any rest.
And they who long for harmony, find a world
Of crazed and baffling discords, and are sad,—
Sad though the music rises
Triumphant, sure of itself.
Into the night.
Ruth Manning-Sanders Comments
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