Embers, Complete
Embers, Complete is a collection of verse by Gilbert Parker, the Canadian-born novelist and poet, gathered as a personal "book of youth and memory and impressionism." Originally printed only for the author's friends and released to a wider public with real reluctance, it brings together spontaneous lyrics written across more than two decades. The poems range over Irish balladry and longing—"Rosleen," "Mary Callaghan and Me," "Will You Come Back Home?"—alongside pieces shaped by travel, war, and exile, many of them set to music by composers including Sir Edward Elgar and Arthur Foote.
At its heart, Embers is a meditation on memory as the one thing a life cannot be robbed of, framed by a proem in which a weary traveler offers an angel "one perfect yesterday." Its themes of homecoming, lost love, faith, and the pull of distant places give the collection a tender, song-like quality. It matters as a window into the lyric sensibility of a popular Edwardian writer, and as verse so musical that the finest composers of the age turned it into song.
How it begins
I had not intended that Embers should ever be given to the public, but friends whose judgment I respect have urged me to include it in the subscription edition at least, and with real reluctance I have consented. It was a pleasure to me to have one piece of work of mine which made no bid for pence or praise; but if that is a kind of selfishness, perhaps unnecessary, since no one may wish to read the verses, I will now free myself from any chance of reproach. This much I will say to soothe away my own compunctions, that the book will only make the bid for popularity or consideration with near a score of others, and not separately, and that my responsibility is thus modified. The preface to Embers says all that need be said about a collection which is, on the whole, merely a book of youth and memory and impressionism in verse. At least it was all spontaneous; it was not made to order on any page of it, and it is the handful left from very many handfuls destroyed. Since the first edition (intended only for my personal friends) was published I have written “Rosleen,” “Where Shall We Betake Us?
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.