The Poet 
The poet is a magician,
The philosopher’s stone is his;
It turns all baser metals
To priceless rarities.
The common scenes around us,
The graceless and the old,
Beneath his pencil’s shaping touch
Assume the sheen of gold.
From every habitation
He takes some shining thread;
By many a distant channel
His “Land of Song” is fed;
From regions that are distant,
From home’s familiar dress,
From many a verdant solitude,
From many a wilderness,
From babbling streams and rivers,
From air, and wood, and sky,
He steals the “light-winged” sweetness
That floats unbidden by.
With trill of birds’ enchantment,
With low of pensive kine,
With shadows from the verdure,
He weaves a song divine.
And ever as the moments
Assert their constant change,
The numbers rise still higher,
And grow more surely strange.
The uncommon and the common
Meet in such perfect blend,
The myst’ry is where each begins,
Or either finds its end.
He takes into his hands the clay
All shapeless, black and dull,
Tears every harsher vein away,
And leaves it beautiful;
Leaves in the place of what has been
A mass of baseless mould,
A figure, shape, or fantasy,
Transformed to purest gold.
from Leo’s Poetical Works (1883)
The Spirit Stone
A maiden wandering by a river lone,
Beneath soft algae found a smooth grey stone,
She found a smooth, grey, queenly fashioned stone.
Beyond all pebbles had she known the why,
She would have let that smooth grey pebble lie,
That quaintly shaped peculiar pebble lie.
For ‘twas the stone that called the river sprite,
That called the spirit to the gaze of light,
That brought the river spirit up to light.
But knowing not all carelessly she threw
The stone into the water out of view,
Far in the water where it sank from view.
And scarce could count twice three, ere, cool and fair,
The water spirit with her tangled hair,
Arose and gleamed a dreadful presence there.
Her shining curls were piled dark fold on fold,
Like waves of ebon rolling and unrolled,
An awesome sight most wondrous to behold.
Her eyes were clear as fresh skies after rain
And in them stars did seem to flash and wane,
To flash and wane and flash and wane again.
Her arms were firm and polished like a pearl,
They gleamed from underneath a mass of curl,
White from beneath an ebon weight of curl.
No mortal form like that could ever beam,
No mortal eyes like those could ever gleam,
No mortal hair fall in such a flowing stream.
No mortal lips could look so ripe and red,
No mortal head poise like that spirit’s head,
Ah! dread, most dreadful was the pow’r she shed.
Her ears were pink like tiny shells, or roses,
Like fairy, light-touched leaves when evening closes
Where bud on blooming bud in rest reposes.
I would not for the world have seen her then,
That awful sylvan Circe of the glen,
That dread enchantress of the silent glen.
Upon the maid she fixed her deep, dense eyes,
She fixed her deep, black, awful-seeming eyes,
Ah! me, and as the cooing dovelet dies
Beneath the glassy orbs of some dread snake
That crawls from out a dense East India brake,
So slept that luckless maiden nevermore to wake.
She lay full length upon the flowery marge,
With heavy, rigid limbs and eyeballs large,
Sad, very sad, with eyeballs wide and large.
I fear the forest and its rivers clear,
I fear its loneliness, its depths I fear,
For spirits live and moan and wander there.
from Leo’s Local Lyrics (1886)
The rarely mentioned poet and short story writer Leo, whose real name was Egbert Martin (c. 1861 – June 23, 1890), is almost forgotten today. Yet, he was one of the most important of Guyanese writers; the founder of modern Guyanese literature.
The modern period of Guyanese literature began with him and thereafter may be divided into the Era of Imitation, the Age of Nationalism, Pre-Independence Literature and the Literature of Post-Independence.
Martin published his first collection, “Leo’s Poetical Works” in 1883, followed by “Leo’s Local Lyrics” in 1886; his collection of short stories titled “Scriptology” came out in 1885.
He was a Victorian writer and that was, not unexpectedly, reflected in his language and verse forms, but his poetry was particularly free of imitation, unlike so many West Indians who came more than 40 years after him. Concerning the short stories, Scriptology was not only the first published collection by a native West Indian, but it was remarkable in quality and exhibited a distinct sense of place. In both poetry and prose the work identified with British Guiana in a way nothing before him managed to do.
Much of Martin’s poetry engages the landscape, a common romantic and Victorian trend. But he dramatises the Guianese landscape as is exemplified by “The Spirit Stone”. In fact, that seemed to have been his intention, as he mentioned in the preface to the 1886 publication, in spite of his rather dismissive and uncomplimentary references to “current Creole superstitions and the peculiar beliefs of Indian animism”. Despite that attitude, not surprising for the times in which he lived in a British colony, he turned them into powerful poetry which defined the makings of a national literature.
The two poems printed here, “The Poet’ and “The Spirit Stone” give an idea of two sides of his work – a philosophical engagement that projects the poet as a kind of alchemist with words, and another spiritual preoccupation. As he expresses in other poems, notably “The Creek” in which he says
“The creek is dark and full of rest,’
‘Tis heavy with the silent weight of rest,
But oh! it hath a spirit in its breast.”
He makes reference to such Guyanese water spirits as the fairmaid or water mooma; a creature who is a vengeful spirit as in this poem “The Spirit Stone”. She can be a source of riches or of harm.
