1867. EBB to Sara Coleridge
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 129–130.
50 Wimpole Street.
March 19. 1845.
My dear Mrs Coleridge,
As you justify so kindly dear Mr Kenyon’s encouragement to me to send you my poems, I am sure I may write to thank you for your letter without any further encouragement at all. [1] I may say also that, owing you much personal esteem, it is pleasant to me to unite this sense of your goodness to me to my reverence for the illustrious name you bear, which presented one of the earliest shrines of my hero worship, as it must do one of the latest. Of course you are accustomed to hear such allusions .. as all members of royal houses are: but I am writing to you for the first time & I cannot arrest it on my pen. And I feel besides that you, who have sate all your life under a living laurel, must smile in your sleeve a little scornfully at all the pretenders to the “leafë greene” whom you see stretching out their hands on all sides of you,—& that if you speak goodnaturedly to any of us, the grace should have a double price– So I thank you doubly! & for the rest, through all that strikes you unfavorably in my poetry, let the love of my art be clearer to you than my ambition by means of it. It is quite true of me that I have more love than ambition—and I take courage to say it is true, to the daughter of Coleridge, … through this “breach in the wall of partition.” [2]
And is not Poetry worth living for—or worth dying for .. if Mr Wordsworth should be right? [3] Which he is not perhaps, precisely, .. because it is the temperament of the worker rather than the work itself, in which the evil lies,—& the value of utterance makes secure–— But is not Poetry worth dying for—?– Is not Poetry universal truth, as opposed to special truth, .. truth in its highest & eternal relations? It is truth ‘in the highest’ [4] .. as the angels sang of God– It sees ‘all things near’—and I have sometimes thought that, if Plato was right, & the ideas of things lay gloriously & ever near & unworn in the Divine Hand, [5] .. the poets saw them there rather than in the world. Religious truth is high, .. is sublime: but when it acts most sublimely on the religious man .. when his heart melts within him & his eyes are full of tears, .. he is in the sphere of poetic truth, .. is he not? Do not think that I write wildly or from the point. You see I do not like you to speak of poetry as ‘a diversion’, when I take it to be rather a sublimation. But I chiefly wish you to see how I love it, .. & how with such views I cannot think sanguinely, .. or at least that it is always easier for me to despair than hope at all .. of my own verses. And so, as the “partition” is down, .. may I use Shakespeare’s curse
‘Cursed be he who moves these stones,’ [6]
in disfavour of the rebuilder of it? Will you let me?
Believe me
very sincerely yours
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
Publication: Earl Leslie Griggs, Coleridge Fille (1940), p. 174 (in part).
Manuscript: University of Texas.
1. See SD1225.
2. EBB’s thoughts in this paragraph seem to echo the story of “The Flower and the Leaf” which was included in The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (1841); however, this poem no longer appears in the Chaucerian canon.
3. Possibly a reference to “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” stanza 33, in The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (1841), p. 45.
4. Luke 2:14.
5. Perhaps an allusion to the concept of ideas as developed in Parmenides, 133–135, trans. H.N. Fowler.
6. Shakespeare’s epitaph reads: “Blest be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.”
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