Johnson was a member of the Rhymers Club, founded by 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys. This was principally a group of London poets who met and read poetry — usually in the Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street. The group published two collections of poems in 1892 and 1894, with Johnson contributing to both. Other influential members of the Rhymers Club included Oscar Wilde; poet, critic and magazine editor Arthur Symons; Selwyn Image, clergyman, designer and poet and later Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford; Irish poet and playwright John Todhunter; Thomas Rolleston the Irish poet, literary and political writer.
His poetry, termed 'a catholic puritanism', was considered traditionallist, spare, austere, and at times sometimes anguished. It was usually spiritual in content and deeply emotional reflecting Johnson who was a fervent and largely orthodox Roman Catholic — indeed his homosexuality formed the backdrop to much of his writing and was never far from the surface — as he could never quite reconcille his sexuality to his adopted religion.
His works include Poems (1895) and Ireland and Other Poems (1897), and a critical work, The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894). His Reviews and Critical Papers were published 1921.
The Dark Angel
DARK Angel, with thine aching lust
To rid the world of penitence:
Malicious Angel, who still dost
My soul such subtile violence!
Because of thee, no thought, no thing,
Abides for me undesecrate:
Dark Angel, ever on the wing,
Who never reachest me too late!
When music sounds, then changest thou
Its silvery to a sultry fire:
Nor will thine envious heart allow
Delight untortured by desire.
Through thee, the gracious Muses turn,
To Furies, O mine Enemy!
And all the things of beauty burn
With flames of evil ecstasy.
Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering place of fears:
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears.
When sunlight glows upon the flowers,
Or ripples down the dancing sea:
Thou, with thy troop of passionate powers,
Beleaguerest, bewilderest, me.
Within the breath of autumn woods,
Within the winter silences:
Thy venomous spirit stirs and broods,
O Master of impieties!
The ardour of red flame is thine,
And thine the steely soul of ice:
Thou poisonest the fair design
Of nature, with unfair device.
Apples of ashes, golden bright;
Waters of bitterness, how sweet!
O banquet of a foul delight,
Prepared by thee, dark Paraclete!
Thou art the whisper in the gloom,
The hinting tone, the haunting laugh:
Thou art the adorner of my tomb,
The minstrel of mine epitaph.
I fight thee, in the Holy Name!
Yet, what thou dost, is what God saith:
Tempter! should I escape thy flame,
Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death:
The second Death, that never dies,
That cannot die, when time is dead:
Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries,
Eternally uncomforted.
Dark Angel, with thine aching lust!
Of two defeats, of two despairs:
Less dread, a change to drifting dust,
Than thine eternity of cares.
Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,
Dark Angel! triumph over me:
Lonely, unto the Lone I go;
Divine, to the Divinity.
