ABSTRACT
Michael Field's best poems are love poems. Throughout their lives, Katherine and Edith wrote verses about and to each other, celebrating their love as a sensual and sexual end in itself. Strikingly free of the morbid penalties and self-denying mischances of much Victorian women's love poetry, they write in a voice which is forthright, requited and relaxed. In general, then, this is a love poetry which focuses on physical desire as an enlightened, innocent end in itself. Instead of that bookish and dusty exchange of goods, which the courtly model substitutes for desire, the natural imagery of Michael Field's love poetry insists on an alternative perspective. The motivation for love is a force which pushes darkly from 'before the world's beginning'. The 'ancient law of pleasure' which is also, inseparably, the law of 'love', is an idea which runs through much of Michael Field's work, and gives to its human purpose the harsh association of nature's post-Dagwinian insouciance and age.
