“Power in Silence” appeared in Michael Field’s Underneath the Bough which was published in 1893 and was a collection of lyric poems that had previously appeared the Field’s verse dramas and diary. In this collection contained an anthology of their work and was divided into four “books of songs”. The poems in this collection were not connected in any front, except for the fact that they run free with each other on the page, joining them visually. Some of the poems in the collection were also in Works and Days which included their poetry side by side with accounts of their days. The poems that were in their verse dramas, if multiple appeared in Underneath the Bough, were not even joined together in print, scattered about the collection showing the disconnect. The lyrics in Underneath the Bough, split into each book of song, were not arranged in any form. They were not chronological or even titled in the table of contents. The table of contents for each book of song had the first line of the poem as the “title”, even if the poem themselves had titles on the page where they were found. On the left side of the poem in the table of contents were numbers in order in which they appeared, with no mention of any page numbers. As you read the collection, the poems are distinguished on the page with the capitalization of the first word with the initial letter in a larger font. “Power in Silence” appears on page 54 in “The Third Book Of Songs” which includes 16 poems. In this specific book of songs was the imagery of doves and bees which are mentioned in “Power in Silence” and mentions of Greek Mythology such as Zeus, Acheron, Lethe, Apollo, Charon, Aphrodite, and more.

Information Sourced From:

Field, Michael. “Underneath the Bough : A Book of Verses : Field, Michael : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, Portland, Me. : T. B. Mosher, 1 Jan. 1898, archive.org/details/underneathboughb00fielrich/page/n11/mode/2up. 

Harrington, Emily. “Michael Field and the Detachable Lyric.” Victorian Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, 2008, pp. 221–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40060321. Accessed 13 Sept. 2023.

Further Reading:

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Field_Underneath_the_Bough.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25056324?seq=5

https://blogs.baylor.edu/19crs/2023/03/22/conceive-her-free-representations-of-death-and-natural-communion-in-the-poetry-of-michael-field-and-christina-rossetti/

Image Source:

The Table of the Third Book. 1898. Underneath the Bough : A Book of Verses : Field, Michael, Internet Archive, https://ia601603.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/24/....