The Weekly Machen
It is perhaps well-known to readers of this column that not only did Arthur Machen write articles for the Evening News, but he also contributed stories. However, below we have what may be the only example of a poem written by Machen to appear in the paper. Though he wrote much on the art of poetry throughout his long career, Machen wrote very little verse. Outside some choice examples found within his novels, such as can be read in The Secret Glory, he published only a handful of poems in periodicals. The following example, as well as its subject and origin, may be his most obscure piece of poetry.
To Mistress Mumford of Willesdan
by
Arthur Machen
December 9, 1919
To Mistress Hilda Mumford of Willesden, under the name of Julia: Upon being troubled by Envious Virgins—A. M. (Quite a long way after Herrick)
Be not afraid, my Julia, though you see
Your sister virgins glance disdainfully
Upon you when you walk abroad, and find
Envy with hundred eyes, before, behind.
What though they clammer on your path, let none
Behold your grief or perturbation.
Things that be fair are oft-times thus beset
Roses have spines to make their coronet
Clouds wax contentious when the star appears,
The sowrest winds are summer’s harbinger,
Strong vex the calmest seas, and so, I say
The virgins cavil at my Julia,
Yet be not vext, for daffodils, ’tis known
Shine bright with thorns for their foundations.
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darklybrightpress.com 
Wikipedia tells me a Hilda Mumford was made a Member of the British Empire by King George V in 1918 and that this was published in The London Gazette on 7 June, with her listed under “India”. And that is all I can find!
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Looking for editions of poems by, and books about, Robert Herrick that would be fairly recent in 1919, I find Frederic William Moorman’s Robert Herrick: A Biographical and Critical Study (1910) in which he devotes six pages to Julia, whom Herrick mentions “in some sixty poems of the Hesperides” but of whom he finds no conclusive evidence for her real existence. His edition of the Poetical Works was published in 1915 by the Clarendon Press. Both are scanned in the Internet Archive. (Moorman taught at Leeds, but died a year before Tolkien started teaching there.)
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Thank you for digging up this information! I’d like to know more about the background on this poem, but it seems rather misty and obscure… even for Machen!
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Indeed! Unless he had a very free hand, there must be some background likely to be known to the public – to start with, if it was she, how did she come to get an MBE some 18 months earlier?
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Thinking further, there seems a lot specificity here, again of an apparently distinctly public nature – who were these other, cavilling, disdainful, seemingly envious virgins? And why were they behaving this way?
There are also the curious literary and contemporary ‘non-parallels’. Hilda Mumford is apparently a well-known figure, whereas it seems likely (according to Moorman) that there never was any real woman who ‘appeared under the name of Julia’ in Herrick poems.
And there is the contrast between the erotic dalliance (so to put it) with various women (most notably, ‘Julia’) by the speaker in poems written by the priest of the Church of England, Herrick, and the very-unlike-Herrick-in-this Machen, who yet chooses this way to address a known young lady MBE (again, assuming these Hildas are one and the same).
Mystery upon mystery (for the readers of 105 years later, but presumably not for the readers of the Evening News, then)!
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You’ve put a fine point upon the multiple layers of mysterty in this short piece. I’ll report any additional information as I find it.
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Reading around (as I probably should have done sooner), I suspect the reference to “daffodils” alludes primarily to Herrick’s poem “To Daffodils” – in which he calls on those flowers to stay
But to the even-song;
And, having pray’d together, we
Will go with you along.
But further “daffodil” searching would probably be rewarding, too. For, I note that his Wikipedia article says “The first composers to set Herrick to music were near-contemporaries: at least 40 settings of 31 poems appear in the extant manuscript and printed songbooks of 1624–1683” and “From the early 20th century, Herrick’s verse became popular with a range of composers” – followed by quite a list of examples, including reference to eight settings of ‘daffodil’ poems, though sadly mostly without noting their dates.
And the anonymous/unattributed author of the Herrick biography on the Poetry Foundation website writes:
“Whether they were flesh and blood or, as modern consensus has it, pretty fictions, is of little consequence: Herrick is only conforming to the common poetic practice of the time when he addresses his uniformly young and beautiful Julias, Corinnas, and Antheas. Where he does not conform is in his penning of romantic verses to identifiable women whose real names he supplies—for example, Elizabeth Wheeler, Lettice Yard, and Katherine Bradshaw. His poems to these flesh-and-blood, well-born ladies, however, tend to be more ‘cleanly’ than ‘wanton.'” So, here there would seem a curious kind of ‘cross-over’ in Machen’s chaste address to a named young lady – but, as ‘Julia’.
This author also notes “(although their dating is not certain), works of his such as ‘A Christmas Caroll’ and ‘The New-yeeres Gift’ would be set to music by the well-known musician Henry Lawes and sung before King Charles I.” Might there be an implicit nod to Herrick as ‘Christmas(etc.)-carolsmith’ by Machen in publishing his own poem in December?
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Finally starting to get acquainted with The Hill of Dreams, I met in the first chapter with the account of young Lucian Taylor’s reading, including “Long did he linger with the men of the seventeenth century; […] and Herrick made Dean Prior magic ground by the holy incantation of a verse” – Dean Prior being the village where (its Wikipedia article tells me) Herrick “was vicar from 1629 to 1646 and 1660 to 1674” of St. George the Martyr Church, where he is buried.
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