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PT010
[Typescript Poem] “Treasures/(For G.E.M.)

  1. 00018575_0001
  2. 00018575_0002

Mary Webb. “Treasures / (For G. E. M.)” Typescript poem, one leaf, 8½″ x 6¾″, white wove watermarked paper. Eighteen lines in two stanzas. Next to the second line of the title is written in pencil: “(her father).” At the bottom is written in pencil: “Typed by Mary Webb.” “G. E. M.” is Mary Webb’s father, George Edward Meredith, who (as father, teacher, kindred spirit and companion) had a formative influence upon his eldest child. George Meredith’s qualities and personality are enshrined in many of Mary’s poems and in her first novel The Golden Arrow, in the character of John Arden. This very moving tribute, a finely crafted poem in rhyming couplets, reveals Mary’s tender love and the spiritual anguish she suffered at her father’s passing. George Meredith died at age 67, when Mary was 28, and her grief was acute and long-standing. Mary’s unassuaged sorrow gave greater emotional immediacy to her poetry.