3462. EBB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 294–295.
Casa Guidi
Monday. [ca. September 1854] [1]
My dearest Isa[,] Though I am to see you tonight I will write down my thoughts of your poems, because it will be better & clearer for us both than the “stammering tongue” [2] which is too apt to come with the full heart. I have been happy in reading the poems—they are superior to any expectation I had formed of them. There is considerable fancy, & power both in the feeling & expression—some defect I think in art,—a redundancy of epithets sometimes, & a raggedness about the rhythm. I should like often too more compression .. a pushing together of paragraphs .. to make the whole more weighty. The curious thing is (and I accept the omen for you gladly) the curious & the promising thing is, that the long poems are the best by far. I think I acceded to Hatty yesterday when she called the sonnets best, but that was because at the time I had rather looked through the poems than read them. The master-work without any comparison, in my mind, is “Seeming.” There is power & passion in it to a degree which surprised me. Then comes the ‘church of the Jesu’—I had read & admired that before in Rome. The ‘Love Rhapsody’, ‘Orphanhood’ ‘Angels of Life’ .. and the sonnets, which have beautiful thoughts, must take each their turn—only ‘Seeming’ comes first, I do hold. [3]
Oh—I shall make Robert read it when he has done with “Which were best” [4] —and I hope the proofs may be free from him to go back to you this evening, seeing that I have marked in pencil a few marginal criticisms & suggestions.
As to the Magnetic story, [5] now, dearest Isa I do mean to petition you to make some changes in the rhythm of it—because the rhythm is not good, and the poem is good & excellently conceived enough for you to give it a worthy rhythm. The lines of twelve syllables constructed in the fashion you have chosen I object to strenuously– Turn them into lines of ten, by dropping out two syllables as you go .. I have shown how, with my pencil’s impertinence .. & with very little trouble could have continued to the end .. only the sense of my impudence suddenly confounded me– Also I would, if I were you, write the fifth line in two as you have rhymed it—thus—
But dark my heart with boding gloom
I, one of three, who in that room.
Shortening the first & third lines has the advantage (besides the rest), of getting rid of some weakening redundancy of epithet–
All these things I say freely, truly .. heart to heart, as I love you. Dont think me bold & conceited in saying them when I am only true. Of course I am as liable to mistake as another, & your own judgement is free to set me to rights in that case.
Your ever most affectionate
Ba—
Publication: B-IB, pp. 57–58.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum.
1. Dated by the reference to Harriet Hosmer, who spent the summer of 1854 at Isa’s villa before returning to Rome in October.
2. Cf. Isaiah 28:11. The first line of EBB’s sonnet “The Soul’s Expression” is a paraphrase of this verse.
3. “The Church of the Gesù,” “A Love Rhapsody,” “Orphanhood,” and “The Angels of Life” all appear in Isa’s Poems (Edinburgh, 1873). “Seeming” was not included in that volume. It does contain a sonnet sequence entitled “The Seven Chords of the Lyre,” individually sub-titled as follows: “No. I.—Aspiration,” “No. II.—Love,” “No. III.—Joy,” “No. IV.—Doubt,” “No. V.—Sorrow,” “No. VI.—Endurance,” and “No. VII.—Faith.”
4. “Say Which Were Best” also appeared in Isa’s Poems.
5. “Mesmerism: A Death-Bed Confession,” published in Poems, reflects the changes suggested by EBB. Lines 5 and 6 in the first stanza appear as: “But chill my heart with boding gloom / When we three met in this dark room.”
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