Download the full version of the ebook at

https://ebookgate.com

Encarnación s Kitchen Mexican Recipes from

Nineteenth Century California California
Studies in Food and Culture 9 1st Edition
Encarnación Pinedo
https://ebookgate.com/product/encarnacion-s-
kitchen-mexican-recipes-from-nineteenth-century-
california-california-studies-in-food-and-
culture-9-1st-edition-encarnacion-pinedo/

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookgate.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Theology and California Theological Refractions on

California s Culture Sanders

https://ebookgate.com/product/theology-and-california-theological-
refractions-on-california-s-culture-sanders/

ebookgate.com

American Tuna The Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food

Volume 37 California Studies in Food and Culture First
Edition Smith
https://ebookgate.com/product/american-tuna-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-
improbable-food-volume-37-california-studies-in-food-and-culture-
first-edition-smith/
ebookgate.com

Born Again Bodies Flesh and Spirit in American

Christianity California Studies in Food and Culture 12 1st
Edition R. Marie Griffith
https://ebookgate.com/product/born-again-bodies-flesh-and-spirit-in-
american-christianity-california-studies-in-food-and-culture-12-1st-
edition-r-marie-griffith/
ebookgate.com

The Vocabulary Files C2 Advanced IELTS 7 0 8 0 9 0 1st

Edition Andrew Betsis

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-vocabulary-files-c2-advanced-
ielts-7-0-8-0-9-0-1st-edition-andrew-betsis/

ebookgate.com
German Modernism Music and the Arts California Studies in
20th Century Music 1st Edition Walter Frisch

https://ebookgate.com/product/german-modernism-music-and-the-arts-
california-studies-in-20th-century-music-1st-edition-walter-frisch/

ebookgate.com

C2 Re envisioned The Future of the Enterprise 1st Edition

Marius S. Vassiliou

https://ebookgate.com/product/c2-re-envisioned-the-future-of-the-
enterprise-1st-edition-marius-s-vassiliou/

ebookgate.com

Our Overweight Children What Parents Schools and

Communities Can Do to Control the Fatness Epidemic
California Studies in Food and Culture 1st Edition Dalton
https://ebookgate.com/product/our-overweight-children-what-parents-
schools-and-communities-can-do-to-control-the-fatness-epidemic-
california-studies-in-food-and-culture-1st-edition-dalton/
ebookgate.com

Reading Culture Writing Practices in Nineteenth Century

France Studies in Book and Print Culture 1st Edition Lyons

https://ebookgate.com/product/reading-culture-writing-practices-in-
nineteenth-century-france-studies-in-book-and-print-culture-1st-
edition-lyons/
ebookgate.com

Warships in the War of the Pacific 1879 83 1st Edition

Angus Konstam

https://ebookgate.com/product/warships-in-the-war-of-the-
pacific-1879-83-1st-edition-angus-konstam/

ebookgate.com
 California Studies in Food and Culture
DARRA GOLDSTEIN, EDITOR

Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices, by Andrew Dalby

Eating Right in the Renaissance, by Ken Albala

Food Politics: How the Food Industry

Influences Nutrition and Health, by Marion Nestle

Camembert: A National Myth, by Pierre Boisard

Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism,

by Marion Nestle

Eating Apes, by Dale Peterson

Revolution at the Table: The Transformation

of the American Diet, by Harvey Levenstein

Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating

in Modern America, by Harvey Levenstein

Encarnación’s Kitchen:
Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California:
Selections from Encarnación Pinedo’s El cocinero español,
by Encarnación Pinedo, edited and translated by Dan Strehl,
with an essay by Victor Valle

Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and Its Wine,

by Charles L. Sullivan, with a foreword by Paul Draper
E NC A R NAC I ÓN ’S K I TC H E N
 ENCARNACIÓN’S
KITCHEN
MEXICAN RECIPES FROM
NINETEENTH-CENTURY CALIFORNIA

Selections from Encarnación Pinedo’s

El cocinero español

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY

DA N S T R E H L

WITH AN ESSAY BY VICTOR VALLE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

Frontispiece: Encarnación Pinedo, ca. 1864.
(Photograph by H. Schoene, artist and photographer,
Santa Clara, California; reproduced courtesy of
Santa Clara University Archives.)

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pinedo, Encarnación, b. 1848.
[Cocinero español. Selections. English]
Encarnación’s kitchen : Mexican recipes from
nineteenth-century California / edited and
translated by Dan Strehl ; with an essay by
Victor Valle.
p. cm.—(California studies in food and
culture ; 9)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-23651-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Cookery, Mexican. 2. Cookery—
California. I. Strehl, Dan. II. Title. III. Series.
tx716.m4 p553213 2003
641.5972—dc21 2002041379

Manufactured in Canada
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication is both acid-
free and totally chlorine-free (tcf). It meets the
minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992
(r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8
 CON T E N T S

Acknowledgments / vii

A Curse of Tea and Potatoes: The Life and Recipes

of Encarnación Pinedo . VICTOR VALLE / 1
In Encarnación’s Kitchen . DAN STREHL / 19

EL COCINERO ESPAÑOL . THE SPANISH COOK

A Note on the Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Introduction: The Art of Cooking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

RECETAS . RECIPES
S O P A S , P A N , H U E V O S . Soups, Breads, Eggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
P E S C A D O . Fish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
A V E S . Poultry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
C A R N E . Meat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
V E R D U R A S Y M A Í Z . Vegetable and Corn Dishes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
R E L L E N O S . Stuffings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
S A L S A S . Sauces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
D U L C E S . Desserts and Sweets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

Ingredients and Procedures / 193

Bibliography / 197
Index / 205
 A C K NOW L E DG M E N T S

This reincarnation of Encarnación Pinedo has been aided by many

people. Ruth Reichl, then at the Los Angeles Times, was the first to re-
publish Pinedo’s recipes, in an article on the history of California cui-
sine. Nohemi Carrasco Walker and her husband, J. Michael, have
helped by checking my translations and clarifying traditional culinary
technique. Master printer Vance Gerry published The Spanish Cook, a
selection of Pinedo’s recipes, in a fine-press edition from the Weather
Bird Press. Victor and Mary Lau Valle and I have been discussing Pinedo
for many years, and she was included in their Recipe of Memory. Joan
Nielsen Castle scripted her into a Too Hot Tamales segment on the Tele-
vision Food Network.
In Santa Clara, Charlene Duval, Sourisseau Academy for State and
Local History, San Jose State University, gave good direction and intro-
duced me to many local sources, including Bob Johnson at the Califor-
nia Room, San Jose Public Library. Anne McMahon, university archivist,
Santa Clara University Archives, remarkably found Pinedo photo-
graphs. Lorie Garcia, a historian in Santa Clara, was immensely help-
ful and was a source of all things Berreyesa. Paula Jabloner, archivist at
History San José, was also very helpful in providing photographs.
At the Huntington Library, Jennifer Watts found photographs, and
Stephen Tabor helped decipher Encarnación’s jumbled citations to
early English books.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks go to Darra Goldstein of Williams College and Sheila

Levine of the University of California Press for enthusiastically em-
bracing the project and having endless patience with me.
And especially, thanks go to my wife, Romaine Ahlstrom. While at
the Los Angeles Public Library and later at the Huntington Library,
she chased down obscure references, graciously listened to Pinedo
talk, tasted endless dishes, and continued to be encouraging long past
reason.

Dan Strehl
 A C U R S E O F T E A A N D P O TA TO E S
The Life and Recipes of Encarnación Pinedo

VICTOR VALLE

There is nothing new in saying that cookbooks are read in bed or the
garden as often as they are read inside the kitchen, for motives that
have nothing to do with cooking. List all the cookbooks that have made
the link between childhood memories and unsatisfied adult hunger,
and you have filled a library with culinary nostalgia. But what about
a recipe book that is intended to settle old scores, or one that is in-
tended to protect its user from disappearing and doubles as a disguise
from mortal enemies?
That, among other things, is what Encarnación Pinedo serves forth
in El cocinero español (The Spanish Cook), a work of obvious importance
for culinary historians. Published in 1898 in San Francisco, it is Califor-
nia’s first, and clearly most extensive, Spanish-language cookbook.
Anyone who reads Spanish and is lucky enough to get a copy of the
thousand-recipe collection—you can find a copy in the Los Angeles
Central Public Library—will discover a seminal text of Southwestern
cuisine. Pinedo’s Cocinero documents the start of California’s love
affair with fruits and vegetables, fresh edible flowers and herbs, ag-
gressive spicing, and grilling over native wood fires. Her book also gives
us California’s first major collection of Mexican recipes, reason
enough, it would seem, to translate and republish Pinedo’s recipes. But
recent scholarship suggests that she wrote more than just a memo-
rable cookbook.

1
2 A CURSE OF TEA AND POTATOES

Pinedo and her book stand out in a time and place where men dom-
inated the world of letters, and those letters were published in English.
She was among that handful of nineteenth-century Latinas who pub-
lished their works in the period following the conquest of Alta Cali-
fornia. Moreover, Pinedo wrote exceptionally well, read and wrote in
at least two languages, and received some formal education. Her lit-
eracy and education clearly mark Pinedo as a member of California’s
cultural elite.
A recent study by Rosaura Sánchez allows us to appreciate Pinedo’s
unique status. In her rereading of the nineteenth-century Californio
testimonies collected by historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, Sánchez ar-
gues that his comprehensive history of California silences Mexican
women in several ways. First, Bancroft allows the testimonies and his-
tories written by Mexican, European, and American men to define Mex-
ican female identity.1 The American and European writers, for exam-
ple, typically stressed the beauty and subservience of the Californio
women, and the indolence and effeminate character of the Californio
men, in order to justify taking “possession of both land and women.”2
Second, Bancroft and his collaborators collected fewer testimonies
from female Californios. Third, although he utilized parts of their tes-
timonies, he rarely identified them as sources. The silences he created
gave him the liberty to fragment and reassemble their accounts in ways
that suited his apologies for Manifest Destiny.3 These silences also hid
the individual voices of his informants. We know now that the female
informants Bancroft’s collaborators interviewed did not speak with one
voice, but instead interpreted the conquest from different and some-
times conflicting political and social perspectives. At moments, their
testimonies challenged the idea that Anglo conquest represented
progress, and at other moments acquiesced to the new order. Bancroft’s
glosses, however, effectively suppressed the complexity of the female
Californio testimonies for more than a century.
 A CURSE OF TEA AND POTATOES 3

Pinedo’s Cocinero, meanwhile, fell into obscurity despite her best

wishes. In the Cocinero’s introduction, she addresses her subscribers,
a clear indication of her efforts to defray the cost of publication. Like
other nineteenth-century authors, Pinedo had sought advance sales
of her book to demonstrate its sales potential to her printer, a Mr. E. C.
Hughes. Judging from his publishing record, Hughes did not run a van-
ity press. The steam-driven press he operated in his shop published
government and technical manuals, corporate bylaws, travel guides,
commemorative speeches by visiting diplomats, and an occasional lit-
erary work.4 Nevertheless, Pinedo’s book suffered the fate of others
written in a recently conquered language.
As a result, El cocinero and other seminal Californio texts languished
in private libraries, while the life stories of other nineteenth-century
Latinas collected dust in Bancroft’s folios. For decades, few scholars
thought to call upon these women as historical witnesses of the con-
quest and its aftermath. Instead, they preferred images of beautiful
señoritas as objects of description. In recent decades, however, schol-
ars from a number of disciplines have unearthed these nineteenth-
century texts in an effort to reconstruct their voices. These efforts have
yielded important cultural texts.
Published in 1885 in San Francisco, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s
novel, The Squatter and the Don, would be the first to retell California’s
conquest from a Mexican perspective. Written in English, her histori-
cal romance revisits the past in order to question “the ‘American way’
as a just, democratic and liberating system.” Ruiz de Burton also sub-
verted the negative Mexican stereotypes circulated by the Anglo press
of her day. She created Mexican characters—though economically and
politically subordinate—who were culturally and intellectually supe-
rior to their Yankee counterparts.5 Pinedo’s Cocinero, which was pub-
lished in the same city thirteen years later, appears to have nothing in
common with Ruiz de Burton’s novel. It does not narrate a history; it
4 A CURSE OF TEA AND POTATOES

does not create an imaginary world, or redress wrongs. It does not ap-
pear to be any more than it is—a book filled with culinary instructions,
or so it would seem.
Scholars from various disciplines have now begun to read memoirs,
letters, personal testimonies, and even cookbooks as literary texts rich
in cultural meanings. Pinedo’s Cocinero is simultaneously a book of
recipes and identities. She shows us how her family dined, and how
she reimagined her identity during a period of violent upheaval. By list-
ing the ingredients of family recipes, she invoked the ghosts of a cul-
ture that was fast disappearing. By explaining how these ingredients
were combined, she reconnected the fragments of her life, her indi-
viduality, and sense of feminine self-worth in a present filled with un-
certainty. Pinedo’s recipes can thus be read as testaments of hunger.
She hungered for culinary and cultural continuity in a time of upheaval.
Yet sating her special appetites depended upon her creative powers of
memory and imagination. Through such an exertion of memory, she
recalled the recipes of her childhood. The recipes she recorded sum-
moned her past to the table. Once published, the recipes fixed her for-
mulas for invoking that past, especially for family and friends who had
not lived the glory of the ranchos. Pinedo, a custodian of memory, thus
emerges as a precursor of such Latina memory artists as Denise
Chavez, Maria Helena Viramontes, and Sandra Cisneros.
As with her literary descendants, however, her act of remembering
was fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. Dead worlds revived
by memory are not replicas of the past. They are interpretations rid-
dled with gaps; the survivors fill in these gaps with their own inven-
tions. These inventions of a past recreated in the present reveal much
about the author’s desires. The title of El cocinero español also betrays
the author’s desires. In her cookbook, she elected to bring aspects of
her past to the foreground, while pushing others to the background.
 A CURSE OF TEA AND POTATOES 5

Before Anglo conquest, Pinedo’s ancestors had used the label of gente
de razón ( people of reason) to stress their status as Catholic settlers and
to downplay their mestizo ambiguities. Among the racially mixed pop-
ulation of settlers, culture, religion, wealth, and regional loyalty
counted more than skin color alone as social descriptors. Like other
settlers in the borderlands, Pinedo’s ancestors did not want to be con-
fused with heathen indios. And by calling themselves Californios they
stressed their local loyalties and their distance from the administra-
tive centers of Guadalajara and Mexico City. But after conquest, Lis-
beth Haas argues,

That comparatively ample tolerance for color difference was not

shared by the Anglo population, which had generally accepted a set
of ideas about “white” racial superiority just prior to the Mexican War
of 1846. After 1900, difference in terms of skin color superceded all
other distinctions, and it became harder for Californios to negotiate
a favorable status.6

While the new Anglo majority invariably racialized poor Californios

by labeling them “Mexicans,” some elite Californios insisted on call-
ing themselves Spanish. Some chose this label because they believed
it. Some elite Californios had fashioned their Spanish cultural identi-
ties before the Yankees arrived, while others deployed the label to pass
as second-class whites. Some Anglos were inclined to accept the
ranchero elite as honorary whites, and ignore antimiscegenation laws,
if doing so brought them land, money, or higher social status. Euro-
pean Americans “were not oblivious to the advantages of marrying into
wealthy ranchero families,” writes historian Tomás Almaguer. “With el-
igible white women being scarce in the territory, fair complexioned,
upper-class Mexican women were among the most valued marriage
partners available.”7 Few Californio women could have matched the
6 A CURSE OF TEA AND POTATOES

social prestige of the women in Pinedo’s family tree. Not surprisingly,

many of the women of Pinedo’s generation and social station used their
family names and reputations, real or embellished, to marry into the
new Anglo elite. As Pinedo’s family history reveals, a woman’s deci-
sion to marry the conqueror often provoked a sense of bitterness, dis-
appointment, and betrayal among her immediate relations.

On June 28, 1846, at San Rafael in the northern borderlands of Alta Cali-
fornia, a group of Bear Flag rebels led by Kit Carson noticed a small
boat in which a pair of teenage boys rowed an older gentleman toward
shore. José de los Reyes Berreyesa, one of California’s wealthiest ranch-
ers, had just crossed San Francisco Bay with his two nephews, Fran-
cisco and Ramón de Haro. He had traveled north from San Jose to find
his son, who, at that moment, was jailed in Sonoma for allegedly con-
spiring against the rebels, an allegation that was later proved false.8
Carson intercepted the party, suspecting them of spying. He had been
instructed by Major John C. Frémont to take no prisoners, an order he
interpreted with perverse literalness. Carson gave the signal to fire.
Some accounts report that Carson’s men fired upon Francisco and
Ramón as they rowed to shore.9 The Berreyesa descendants, however,
say the men executed don José’s nephews after they had disem-
barked.10 Both accounts agree that the sixty-one-year-old don José then
flung himself over the bodies of the young boys, asking Carson’s men
why they had not taken his life instead. They promptly obliged don
José’s request.11
Eight years later, in a bid to take control of the New Almaden Mine—
a fabulously rich mercury deposit that soon proved invaluable in
refining the Gold Rush ore—a gang of hooded men lynched Nemesio
Berreyesa, don José’s son. By 1856, Yankee miners and vigilantes had
lynched or shot eight Berreyesa men, including the brother, named En-
 A CURSE OF TEA AND POTATOES 7

carnación, of Pinedo’s mother, María del Carmen Berreyesa. Crooked

lawyers and squatters also beset the family’s 160,000 acres of Santa
Clara Valley land. And so it went until this family, once one of the most
land-rich among Californio families, lost everything. Broke and mired
in litigation, the seventy-member clan had no choice but to beg the
San Jose town government for a small plot on which to build new
homes. The family blamed treacherous Yankee lawyers, freebooters,
and squatters for robbing and murdering them, and the Mexican gov-
ernment for failing to protect their vast holdings. To other disillusioned
Californios, the Berreyesa tragedy came to symbolize the measure of
their collective defeat.12
For Encarnación Pinedo, that decade must have seemed a nether-
world in which a dying past coexisted with a hostile future. Pinedo,
the daughter of María del Carmen Berreyesa, was born May 21, 1848,
a year before the second onslaught of Yankee miners into California.
She lived close enough to her past to invoke its presence, and long
enough to see its decline.13 At age fifty, a spinster living upon her mar-
ried sister’s generosity, she preserved her family’s recipes even as the
world to which they belonged was ending. She began her book with a
dedication to her nieces: “So that you may always remember the value
of a woman’s work, study this volume’s contents.”14 Her dedication
does not mention that her nieces married Anglo men. The omission
disguises the dual nature of her gift: the recipes would not only con-
tribute to their domestic happiness, but her descendants would also
use these formulas to transmit the Californio half of their newly hy-
bridized cultural identities to another generation.
Pinedo builds her bridge to the past without mentioning her fam-
ily’s persecution and material losses. I believe her evasions have a
strategic function. In an article written in 1901 for Santa Clara’s Sun-
day Bulletin, she relates her family’s role in developing the New Al-
8 A CURSE OF TEA AND POTATOES

maden Mine, but without mentioning Nemesio’s lynching. She merely

notes that “the Government of the United States took possession of
the mine,” a version of events that neither asserts nor contradicts her
family’s claims.15 Years later, the Berreyesa family accused Major Fré-
mont of ordering their uncle’s murder. They insisted that the men he
commanded had killed Nemesio to force Nemesio’s wife into selling
their ranch.16
One of the last surviving members of the Berreyesa clan said she un-
derstood Pinedo’s silences. Naomi Berreyesa, who was ninety-two
years old when I interviewed her, said her family feared their tor-
mentors. “My great-grandfather was afraid his family was going to get
it next. That’s why he said to his family, ‘Let’s go back to Mexico.’ Even
to this day, we have been treated like criminals,” she said, referring to
her fruitless efforts to persuade the government to acknowledge the
legality of her family’s land claims. “You wonder why my blood boils
over. There are still family members who feel this way.”17
And felt that way in Pinedo’s day as well, judging by María del Car-
men’s order forbidding her daughters to talk to Gringos, whom she still
blamed for killing Pinedo’s grandfather and uncles.18 Yet Pinedo would
see her sister and six of her nieces defy her mother’s wishes and marry
Yankee men.19 Surely, Pinedo sensed the disappointment and betrayal
these marriages provoked in the elder Berreyesas. Surely, her mother
and relatives reminded her that she bore the name of an uncle lynched
by the Yankees. Her aunt Engracia, for example, refused to forgive Car-
son’s men for killing her father. This is how she recounted the story
of José’s murder to a reporter: “When my mother heard the news of
my father’s death she fainted. . . . The Gringos were a bloodless people.
They lived on tea and potatoes.”20 Tellingly, Engracia used a culinary
insult to denounce those whom she believed to be as soulless as their
cooking.
 A CURSE OF TEA AND POTATOES 9

Pinedo echoes her aunt’s disdain for Yankee cooking, but with more
refinement and with a flair for condescension. In the Cocinero’s intro-
duction, Pinedo casts Latinized Catholics, not Protestant Yankees, in
the leading culinary roles. She conveys this idea by foregrounding her
recipes with a culinary history that begins in classical antiquity, im-
plicitly claiming Lucullus and Apicius as her culinary forerunners. She
also notes the debt French cooks owed to Italian cuisine, and the su-
periority of French culinary technique above all others.21 Pinedo, in
other words, by presenting her recipes as a continuation of a classic
tradition, places her cuisine in the culinary mainstream, which for her
was Catholic Europe. Pinedo stressed her Catholicity as her ancestors
had. She belonged to la gente de razón. Then she turns a scornful eye
upon the English:

The English have advanced the art a bit, enough that several of its writ-
ers have published on the subject: a Mr. Pegge in 1390, Sir J. Elliot in
1539, Abraham Veale in 1575, and Widovas Treasure in 1625. Despite
all this, there is not a single Englishman who can cook, as their foods
and style of seasoning are the most insipid and tasteless that one can
imagine.22

Pinedo’s mention of a book attributed to a Widovas Treasure, which

does not appear to exist, suggests that her knowledge of these texts
came from hearsay. Still, the level of her culinary gossip should not
come as a complete surprise, if one considers Pinedo’s education and
the company she kept. At the Notre Dame Academy in San Jose, she
came under the influence of a northern European convent culture with
a cosmopolitan outlook that valued bilingualism. As a day student she
studied under French- and Flemish-speaking nuns, some with European
university degrees, who taught the academy’s elementary through
high-school curriculum.23 As with other Catholic orders established in
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Yea, gold is son of Zeus: no rust
Its timeless light can stain;
The worm that brings man’s flesh to dust
Assaults its strength in vain:
More gold than gold the love I sing,
A hard, inviolable thing.

Men say the passions should grow old

With waning years; my heart
Is incorruptible as gold,
’Tis my immortal part:
Nor is there any god can lay
On love the finger of decay.

* * *
Thou burnest us; thy torches’ flashing spires,
Eros, we hail!
Thou burnest us, Immortal, but the fires
Thou kindlest fail:
We die,
And thine effulgent braziers pale.

Ah, Phaon, thou who hast abandoned me,

Thou who dost smile
To think deserted Lesbos rings with thee,
A little while
Gone by
There will be muteness in thine isle.

Even as a god who finds his temple-flame

Sunken, unfed,
Who, loving not the priestess, loves the fame
Bright altars spread,
Wilt sigh
To find thy lyric glory dead?

Or will Damophyla, the lovely-haired,

My music learn,
Singing how Sappho of thy love despaired,
Till thou dost burn,
While I,
Eros! am quenched within my urn?

* * *
 I sang to women gathered round;
Forth from my own heart-springs
Welled out the passion; of the pain
I sang if the beloved in vain
Is sighed for—;when
They stood untouched, as at the sound
Of unfamiliar things,
Oh, then my heart turned cold, and then
I dropt my wings.

Trembling I seek thy holy ground,

Apollo, lord of kings;
Thou hast the darts that kill. Oh, free
The senseless world of apathy,
Pierce it! for when
In poet’s strain no joy is found,
His call no answer brings,
Oh, then my heart turns cold, and then
I drop my wings.

When through thy breast wild wrath doth spread

And work thy inmost being harm,
Leave thou the fiery word unsaid,
Guard thee; be calm.

Closed be thy lips: where Love perchance

Lies at the door to be thy guest,
Shall there be noise and dissonance?
Quiet were best.

Apollo, when they do thee wrong,

Speechless thou tak’st the golden dart:
I will refrain my barking tongue,
And strike the heart.

To pass immediately from Long Ago to the poets’ last lyrical works may
seem a wilful act, considering the length of time between the books, and
their amazing unlikeness. Yet there is a very great interest in the contrast
and all that it implies, and a piquancy which one may hope is not too
irreverent in the reflection that at the root there is no great difference, after
all, between the Lesbian songs and the Christian ones.
The volume called Poems of Adoration was published in 1912, and
Mystic Trees in 1913. They were both signed Michael Field, but the first is
all Henry’s work with the exception of two pieces, and the second is all by
Michael except the poems called Qui Renovat Juventutem Meam and The
Homage of Death. The two volumes therefore provide material for a useful
study from the point of view of the collaboration; and they are a positive
lure to a comparison with the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century,
notably, of course, with Herbert and Vaughan. One would not go so far as to
claim an absolute likeness between Henry and George Herbert, if only
because Henry does not spread herself in tedious moralizing nor indulge in
concetti. To that extent her work is purer poetry and, one would suppose,
purer religion than that of the old poet; and she rises oftener to sublimity.
But in essentials the two are close akin—;in sweetness and strength and
clarity, in their sense of form, and in terse, vigorous expression. Between
Michael and Vaughan the likeness is even closer, and would tempt one far if
it were not that our limits prevent straying. But indeed the human and
spiritual values of the two books transcend mere literary questions so
greatly as to make those look trivial and even impertinent.
For Poems of Adoration was published only a few months before Henry
died. Much of the book was composed at dead of night, during great pain,
when, as her father confessor has remarked, “most of us would be trying not
to blaspheme.” The poems are in fact those of a dying woman, and one who
had refused herself any alleviating drug. Two of them, Extreme Unction and
After Anointing, were written when she was at the point of death and had
received the last offices of the Church. Some bear evidence of acute crises
of body or soul; and in some the vision of the mysteries of her faith is so
vivid that the poet herself is almost overwhelmed. Once or twice, when she
has gone to the limit of spiritual sight, she falters; but never does that fine
intelligence stumble into the outer darkness. Perceiving that it is coming
near the verge of sanity, it draws back in time to leave the vision distinct
and credible.
To the strict eye of criticism these poignant facts may appear irrelevant. I
cannot bring myself to think that such splendour of soul has no relation to
the art that it produced; but those persons who insist on cleaving the two
asunder may be reassured as to the technical accomplishment of this poetry.
Often cast into something of the poets’ earlier dramatic form, its music is
sweet, its measures are rhythmical, and its language has force and clarity. It
has a majesty which proclaims its origin, and one has no need to know the
circumstances of its birth. Imagination rises, swift and daring, to heights
which are sometimes sublime, as in the first poem quoted below. Here the
conception of Christ the wine-treader is treated with magnificent audacity
of image and metaphor, while underneath runs a stream of thought which,
though it makes great leaps now and then, pouring its strong current into
cataract as it goes, yet bears its craft safely up and on.
DESOLATION
 Who comes?...
O Beautiful!
Low thunder thrums,
As if a chorus struck its shawms and drums.
The sun runs forth
To stare at Him, who journeys north
From Edom, from the lonely sands, arrayed
In vesture sanguine as at Bosra made.
O beautiful and whole,
In that red stole!

Behold,
O clustered grapes,
His garment rolled,
And wrung about His waist in fold on fold!
See, there is blood
Now on His garment, vest and hood;
For He hath leapt upon a loaded vat,
And round His motion splashes the wine-fat,
Though there is none to play
The Vintage-lay.

The Word
Of God, His name ...
But nothing heard
Save beat of His lone feet forever stirred
To tread the press—;
None with Him in His loneliness;
No treader with Him in the spume, no man.

. . . . .
 O task
Of sacrifice,
That we may bask
In clemency and keep an undreamt Pasch!
O Treader lone,
How pitiful Thy shadow thrown
Athwart the lake of wine that Thou hast made!
O Thou, most desolate, with limbs that wade
Among the berries, dark and wet,
Thee we forget!

THE BLESSED SACRAMENT

Lo, from Thy Father’s bosom Thou dost sigh;

Deep to Thy restlessness His ear is bent:—;
“Father, the Paraclete is sent,
Wrapt in a foaming wind He passeth by.
Behold, men’s hearts are shaken—;I must die:
Sure as a star within the firmament
Must be my dying: lo, my wood is rent,
My cross is sunken! Father, I must die!”
Lo, how God loveth us, He looseth hold....
His Son is back among us, with His own,
And craving at our hands an altar-stone.
Thereon, a victim, meek He takes His place;
And while to offer Him His priests make bold,
He looketh upward to His Father’s face.

THE HOMAGE OF DEATH

How willingly
I yield to Thee
This very dust!
My body—;that was not enough!
Fair was it as a silken stuff,
Or as a spice, or gold,
Fair to behold!

Beloved, I give Thee all

This Adam’s Fall,
This my desert—;
Thy Father would not let Thee see
Corruption, but I give it Thee.
Behold me thus abhorred,
My penance, Lord!

A handful in Thy Hand,

As if of fair, white sand,
Thou wroughtest me;
Clean was I for a little while....
This dust is of another style;
Its fumes, most vile of sin
To stink begin.

. . . . .
 O Victor King, and when
Thou raisest me again,
For me no fame;
Just white amid the whiter souls,
Efface me ’mid the shining stoles,
Lost in a lovely brood,
And multitude:

My soul even as the Maid

Cophetua arrayed
In samite fine;
And set her by Him on His throne,
O Christ, what homage can atone
For this caprice in Thee
To worship me?

QUI RENOVAT JUVENTUTEM MEAM

 Make me grow young again,
Grow young enough to die,
That, in a joy unseared of pain,
I may my Lover, loved, attain,
With that fresh sigh
Eternity
Gives to the young to breathe about the heart,
Until their trust in youth-time shall depart.

Let me be young as when

To die was past my thought:
And earth with straight, immortal men,
And women deathless to my ken,
Cast fear to naught!
Let faith be fraught,
My Bridegroom, with such gallant love, its range
Simply surpasses every halt of change!

Let me come to Thee young,

When Thou dost challenge Come!
With all my marvelling dreams unsung,
Their promise by first passion stung,
Though chary, dumb....
Thou callest Come!
Let me rush to Thee when I pass,
Keen as a child across the grass!

Mystic Trees, the last book which Michael gave to the world, is more
strictly theological than Henry’s. Always less the philosopher than her
fellow, she took her conversion to Catholicism, in externals at least, more
strenuously. She developed, for example, a proselytizing habit which a little
tried the patience of her friends, especially those who remembered her as a
joyful pagan. That her Christian zeal was as joyful, to her, as her paganism
had been did not much console them, or soften the onslaught of her blithe
attacks. Indeed, it occasionally led her to acts which she herself afterward
repented of. Thus there is a comic touch in the spectacle of Michael, truly
English as she was, urging upon Ireland, in the person of a poor old
Irishwoman, every benefit but that one which the old woman craved for.
For Michael went to great pains to help her, and to get her placed in a home,
and she subsequently wrote to a friend, “I am so deeply regretting my part
in putting an Irishwoman in a Nazareth house: their love of freedom is so
great.” The little parable holds Michael’s character almost in entirety
—;impulsive, eager, generous, wilful, rash; and then deeply penitent and
rushing to make noble amends.
But that over-zeal had a significance for her artistic life too. She wrote in
a letter to another friend, “I will pray for Orzie’s conversion: O Louie, be
religious! You cannot ‘laugh deep’ unless you are.” In the phrase I have
italicized Michael is surely confessing, though it may be without intent to
do so, that her religion is now awaking in her the same ecstasy which had
formerly been awakened by the poetic impulse. To herself it seemed that
she had suffered an enormous change, and that she was no longer the old
Michael. And it is true that for a time the tragic inspiration of her art was
suspended. Perhaps that follows of necessity from the nature of the
Christian doctrine, its hope, its humility, its vicariousness, and its
consolation. Yet the moment one turns to these religious lyrics one finds the
same ecstasy with which the earlier Michael had adored the beauty of the
world and had sung the love of Sappho. So, too, in the first work which
Michael Field had produced, Callirrhoë, the theme is none other than the
worship of the god by love and sacrifice. That, in fact, is the meaning
implied in nearly all her poetry, as it was the motive force of all her life; and
the only change that has occurred when we reach, with Mystic Trees, the
end, is that the name of the god is altered. But whichever god possessed her
had the power to make Michael “laugh deep” in a rapture which, whether of
delight or rage or sorrow, was always an intense spiritual joy—;which is
simply to say, to evoke the poet in her. The exaltation of spirit which in
Callirrhoë said of Dionysos “He came to bring Life, more abundant life,”
and declared “Wert thou lute to love, There were a new song of the heaven
and earth,” is the same as that which wrote to a friend in early days, “We
are with the nun in her cell as with the pagan at the Dionysos’ feast”; and
which affirmed in a letter to another friend that she welcomed inspiration
from whatever source, “whether the wind and fire sweep down on us from
the mighty realms of the unconscious or from the nostrils of a living God,
Jehovah, or Apollo, or Dionysos.”
 But, as we said, to herself she seemed a new creature; she had found a
treasure and must run to share it, even as she had burned to impart the
Bacchic fire thirty years before. Thence came the scheme of Mystic Trees,
which, as Father Vincent McNabb suggested to me, seems to be unique in
religious poetry. The book contains a cycle of poems, designed to express
the mysteries of the Roman Catholic faith as they are celebrated in the
seasons of the Church. The “Trees” of the title are the Cedar and the
Hyssop, used as an image of the Incarnation: the great Cedar, the Son of
God, becoming the little Hyssop, which, in the lovely cover-design by Mr
Charles Ricketts, stands on either side of the Cross with bowed head.
The book is divided into three parts, with a small group of poems added
at the end, which Michael wrote while Henry was dying. In the first part,
called “Hyssop,” the story of the Redemption is unfolded in a series of
poems representing the life and death of Christ. It is possible to quote only
two or three of the incidents thus treated, but we may take first this one
describing the presentation of the infant Christ in the Temple:
THE PRESENTATION
 They say it is a King
His Temple entering!

The great veil doth not rock

With gust and earthquake shock:

But all the air is stilled

As at a law fulfilled.

Dreams from their graves rise up—;

Melchizidek with cup;

Abraham most glad of heart,

A little way apart.

Mary, to keep God’s word,

Brings Babe and turtle-bird.

Lo! Simeon draweth in,

And doth his song begin!

Great doom is for her Son,

And Mary’s heart undone.

Oh, Simeon is blest,

Christ in his arms is prest!

Mary’s sweet doves are slain,

She takes her Babe again:

And in her heart she knows

He will be slain as those:

And on her journey home

She feels God’s kingdom come.

Passing some intervening poems, we take from the same sequence these
two members of a group of imagined incidents on the evening of the
Crucifixion:
SUNDOWN ON CALVARY

Where art Thou, wandering Bird?

Thy sweet voice is not heard
On this wild day,
When the Father mourns the Son,
When the Son no Father hath,
And Thou hast but chaos for Thy path.

The Father keeps the Sepulchre,

The Son lies quiet there.
Where is thy place?
Where rest in a world undone?
Holy Ghost, a multitude
Guards the Cross; there hardly canst Thou brood.

To the dark waters haste,

Spread pinions on the waste;
There breathe, there play;
Forsake the Wood!
There is no resting-place for Thee
On this lovely, noble, blighted Tree.

. . . . .

But lo, it is sundown;

The bodies taken down,
Quiet the hill:
The Tree drips blood on the path:
And, the jolted beams above,
Croons, calls across the evening-winds, a Dove!

A FRIDAY NIGHT
 The Questioner
“Lo, you have wounds and you are speeding fast!
The light is gone!
Have you no cloak to screen you from the blast?
It is not well!”

The Answerer
“Show me the way to Hell,
I must pass on.”

The Questioner
“There is indeed hard by a little gate:
But there thou shalt not go.
Thou art too fair;
Golden thy hair doth blow.”

The Answerer
“There I must go:
I have an errand there for those that wait,
Have waited for me long.”

I showed the gate.

Now is He shut within, and I am found

Alone with blood-stains on the ground.
Would I could go down to that dim
Murk of the shades to those that wait for Him!

We may take from the second part of the book, called “Cedar” and
dedicated to the Virgin, two short pieces which help to illustrate the
sweetness of this poetry, its tenderness, its intimacy of approach to divine
things, and its innocence.
CALLED EARLY
 It is a morning very bright;
Through all the hours of the long starry night
Mary hath not been sleeping: for delight
She hath kept watch through the starry night.

Joseph comes to her quietly:

“A journey I must take with thee,
Mary, my wife, from Galilee.”
He saw that she had wept,
And all her secret kept.

UNDER THE STAR

Mary is weary and heavy-laden

As a travailing woman may be.
She calleth to Joseph wearily,
“At the inn there is no room for me,
Oh, seek me a little room!”

Joseph returns. “In a cattle-shed

Hard by, I will make for thee thy bed—;
Dost fear to go?
O Mary, look, that star overhead!”
And Mary smiled—;“Where the cattle low
My Son shall be loosed from the womb.”

From the third part, which is called “Sward” and therefore is obviously
dedicated to ordinary folk, we need take only the little poem which follows.
But we ought to remember the occasion of it, that Michael had been
compelled to go alone to Mass because Henry was too ill to accompany her.
 Lovingly I turn me down
From this church, St Philip’s crown,
To the leafy street where dwell
The good folk of Arundel.

Lovingly I look between

Roof and roof, to meadows green,
To the cattle by the wall,
To the place where sea-birds call,

Where the sky more closely dips,

And, perchance, there may be ships:
God have pity on us all!

Michael said, in a letter to a friend, “Mystic Trees is for the young”; and
one perceives the truth of that. But I do not think that her word ‘young’
means only ‘youthful,’ although children would probably understand the
poems readily, and a certain kind of child would delight in them. Nor do I
think that they were written with any special audience in mind. But the
poet, in reading them afterward, recognized their childlike qualities of
simplicity and directness, and their young faith and enthusiasm. Did she
realize, one asks oneself, how she had in them recaptured her own youth
and its lyrical fervour? She was nearly seventy years old when she wrote
them, which is a wonder comparable to Mr Hardy’s spring-songs in winter.
And though we may accept, if we like, the dubious dictum of the psycho-
analyst that every poet is a case of arrested development, that does not
make any less the marvel that in old age, after the lyric fire had subsided
and the sufferings of her fellow had destroyed the joy of her life, she should
have written such poems. For here it is certainly relevant to remember that
at this time Henry was dying, and that Michael herself was suffering,
silently, the torture of cancer. “Michael has a secret woe of her own,” was
all that she permitted herself to reveal, in a letter to her closest woman
friend. But so stoical was her courage, and so composed her manner, that
the hint was not taken, and no one guessed that she too was ravaged by the
disease. Before her intimates, as before the world, she kept a cheerful face,
in terror lest her fellow should come to know of her state. Her doctor knew,
of course, and Father Vincent McNabb. But they were under a bond to spare
Henry the added anguish of knowing the truth, and the bond was faithfully
kept. Not until her fellow was dead, when Michael had, in fact, laid her in
her coffin, did she break silence to the friend who was with her in that
ordeal. Two days later a hæmorrhage made it impossible to conceal her
condition any longer. “God kept her secret,” said Father McNabb, “until the
moment when it was no longer necessary”; and without disloyalty to the
godhead of the heroic human spirit, we may accept that word from one who
brought consolation and devoted friendship to the poets’ last sad days.
It was, then, during the closing weeks of Henry’s life, and while Michael
was suffering that sorrow and great bodily pain, that she wrote Mystic
Trees. Yet the poems manifestly bear within them a deep creative joy, and
breathe sometimes a holy gaiety of spirit; and it is only at the end of the
book, in a tiny section containing four short poems, that the poet allows her
anguish of body and mind the relief of expression. For that brief space, so
rightly named “A Little While,” the inspiration to “laugh deep” failed, and
stark tragedy overwhelmed her.
BELOVED, MY GLORY

Beloved, my glory in thee is not ceased,

Whereas, as thou art waning, forests wane:
Unmoved, as by the victim is the priest,
I pass the world’s great altitudes of pain.
But when the stars are gathered for a feast,
Or shadows threaten on a radiant plain,
Or many golden cornfields wave amain,
Oh then, as one from a filled shuttle weaves,
My spirit grieves.

SHE IS SINGING TO THEE, DOMINE!

She is singing to Thee, Domine!
Dost hear her now?
She is singing to Thee from a burning throat,
And melancholy as the owl’s love-note;
She is singing to Thee from the utmost bough
Of the tree of Golgotha where it is bare,
And the fruit torn from it that fruited there;
She is singing.... Canst Thou stop the strain,
The homage of such pain?
Domine, stoop down to her again!

CAPUT TUUM UT CARMELUS

I watch the arch of her head,

As she turns away from me....
I would I were with the dead,
Drowned with the dead at sea,
All the waves rocking over me!

As St Peter turned and fled

From the Lord, because of sin,
I look on that lovely head;
And its majesty doth win
Grief in my heart as for sin.

Oh, what can Death have to do

With a curve that is drawn so fine,
With a curve that is drawn as true
As the mountain’s crescent line?...
Let me be hid where the dust falls fine!
 III. THE TRAGEDIES—;I

T HE important fact concerning Michael Field is, of course, that she is a

tragic poet. The truth may seem too obvious to need stating, when we
glance down the list of her works and observe that of the twenty-seven
complete plays created within thirty years every one has a tragic theme. But
the attributes of a tragic poet are not necessarily revealed in the externals of
his art: more than another he is difficult to recognize by his theme, form,
and manner. If he could be confidently measured by a rule and appraised on
a formula, many anomalies might be drawn to our net, including the urbane
and essentially comic spirit of the author of Cato, and (not using too fine a
mesh in the net) the mere dramaturgic facility of the author of Herod. With
such as these, behind the formula of tragedy nothing remains—;no tragic
vision, no sense of inimical and warring forces, no terror at their subtle and
formidable power, no pity for human creatures doomed to live. But surely it
is in these imponderable things that the tragic poet is made manifest,
whether they take the garment of tragedy or, as often with Thomas Hardy,
gleam sombrely in a lyric. It is in possessing them, and possessing them
intensely, with a fierce dramatic impulse driving them, that the greatness of
Michael Field consists.
Yet, once assured of the nature of our poet’s genius, the mere data of
manner become significant. All the plays are tragedies, some of them in
Elizabethan form, of five-act length. The very titles are eloquent. Michael
Field took thought for the naming of her plays; and although she was often
content to adopt simply the name of the protagonist, that is always resonant.
Thus Attila, Borgia, Mariamne, Deirdre, Tristan, Fair Rosamund are words
with solemn echoes; but, more than that, they indicate the vast issues to
which this mind was drawn, and suggest the range of which it was capable.
Sometimes a phrase was chosen for a title, as The Tragic Mary. This was
lifted, with acknowledgments, from Walter Pater; and no apology is needed
on that score, for surely it is no minor part of a poet’s equipment to know
how “to take his own wherever he finds it.” In that sense The Race of
Leaves may be said to have been lifted too—;from Homer and Marcus
Aurelius; The World at Auction possibly from Gibbon or some much earlier
historian, and In the Name of Time certainly from Shakespeare.