And I have painted peace upon the sky above’ … old wooden sea defences at Winchelsea beach, East Sussex. Photograph: Helen Dixon/Alamy
The Secret Day
My yesterday has gone, has gone and left me tired,
And now tomorrow comes and beats upon the door;
So I have built To-day, the day that I desired,
Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more,
Lest comfort come no more.
So I have built To-day, a proud and perfect day,
And I have built the towers of cliffs upon the sands;
The foxgloves and the gorse I planted on my way;
The thyme, the velvet thyme, grew up beneath my hands,
Grew pink beneath my hands.
So I have built To-day, more precious than a dream;
And I have painted peace upon the sky above;
And I have made immense and misty seas that seem
More kind to me than life, more fair to me than love —
More beautiful than love.
And I have built a house — a house upon the brink
Of high and twisted cliffs; the sea’s low singing fills it;
And there my Secret Friend abides, and there I think
I’ll hide my heart away before tomorrow kills it
A cold tomorrow kills it.
Yes, I have built To-day, a wall against To-morrow,
So let To-morrow knock — I shall not be afraid,
For none shall give me death, and none shall give me sorrow,
And none shall spoil this darling day that I have made.
No storm shall stir my sea. No night but mine shall shade
This day that I have made.
This poem by the novelist, journalist and suffragist Stella Benson appears in her collection, Twenty, published in June 1918, shortly before the end of the first world war. (Some of her own reactions to the first world war are recorded here.) Benson (1892-1933) went to California that same year, largely because she was in poor health and her doctor had recommended the climate.
I imagine that most of Twenty had been put together before she embarked on her travels. The Secret Day may have emerged from her fears concerning the journey and her future in a strange country. Interestingly, it illustrates the psychological need to find a sanctuary in time rather than space. Benson is aware that the device is an artificial one, but launches a convincing appeal for its necessity, beautifully structured by the constant echoes of anaphora. She has “built To-day” (a day she was hoping to greet in another form) “Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more, / Lest comfort come no more.” Each stanza’s concluding line of trimeter is always effective, but never more than here, with its frank admission of the most basic animal need – for “comfort”.
In stanza two, the poet concedes the limits of her “building” metaphor, and creates a specific picture of an English coastal landscape, in which she conjures flowers instantly out of the earth. The day is now bigger than a stage-set, although Benson continues to highlight her original metaphor, as in the third stanza image of peace being “painted” on the sky, and the making of “immense and misty seas …”
Besides a separation from her country, there’s the implied rift with a “Secret Friend”. The capitalisation here seems a childish gesture. I don’t know how easily a female poet in 1918 could have solved the problem Benson has set herself, but some Imagist sidestepping might have been recommended. It would have helped her case for “Secret Friend” if she’d at least dropped the capitalisation.
Despite its moments of sentimentality, Benson’s poem doesn’t lack intensity and originality. The confessional tone of voice is effective. The speaker trusts the reader with her introspective project, in which simple diction and repetitions imply genuine candour and vulnerability. Do the hexameter lines provide a little too much space to fill? Here and there, perhaps, but at the same time, the rhythms add to the insistence of the speaker, the authority of her first-person account of things.
The closing trimeter line of the last stanza emphasises the pathos of her new metaphorical turn: she has built a wall, not a house, and her cherished “To-day” is already fading into nightfall, although the claim to sanctuary remains defiant.
Benson’s focus was primarily on fiction and journalism. It seems that Twenty was the only full collection of her poems to have been published during her lifetime. A late-awarded distinction is that two other Benson poems appear in Philip Larkin’s 1972 Oxford Anthology of 20th Century English Verse. (Perhaps this was at Monica Jones’s suggestion? But Larkin takes credit for agreeing!)
• You can read a version of Frost introducing chapter three of her 1936 novel Goodbye, Stranger here. It shows Benson’s later poetic style taking a new direction. I wish there had been time for her to write more.
