E501130A. Poems (1850).
The Athenæum, 30 November 1850, pp. 1242–44.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 313–318.
When Lord Bacon spoke of imagination as the faculty which “conforms the shows of things to the desires of the soul,” he furnished a definition so just and comprehensive that it embraces every true poet whatever may be his comparative rank. The genuine painter of external Nature conforms (not violates or alters, be it observed) visible objects to a mental influence, and detects through the whole world of appearances types of human action and passion. Thus, to use familiar illustrations, the rocks “frown,” the sun “awakes,” the brook goes “singing” on its way, and the sea “laughs” or “rages” according to the mood of the writer. In dealing with the life of man the same principle is apparent. Feeling and circumstance are separated by the poet from all that is merely petty and accidental in their developement, and conformed into pure symbols of the soul. In the highest poetry of all, a yet more transcendant point is attained. The ideal and divine harmony which, though distinct from our human nature, incessantly speaks to it through the conscience, is so manifested in the struggles and aspirings of our hearts that the story of humanity itself becomes an emblem of that supreme law. The motives and impulses which agitate us are connected, not only with their mutual relations and results, but also with their source; and through the entire series of human emotions and natural objects, the loftiest needs or “desires of the soul” are shadowed forth.
It is to the credit of contemporary poetry that, though for the most part presenting no massiveness of structure, and being especially defective in those heroic forms which stand out in the masterpieces of epic song, it does aim—so far as purpose is concerned—at exercising the noblest functions of imagination. Material beauty is applied by it to spiritual uses, and the workings of an unfailing beneficence are traced even through the records of strife and suffering. Of such teaching our times afford no purer examples than those furnished by the verse of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:—and as we think that full justice has never yet been done in print to her genius, we take the opportunity presented by this new collection of her poems to offer a few remarks on the subject.
The volumes before us include, with slight exceptions, all the pieces written by this Lady under her maiden name, as Miss Barrett,—several which have subsequently appeared in periodicals,—and some few which are now for the first time made public. The additions are welcome, but none of them are of sufficient magnitude to alter the order of precedence in which we were previously disposed to rate Mrs. Browning’s compositions. The “Drama of [p. 1243→] Exile” and the “Seraphim” are still the most ambitious of her efforts; while, as regards her larger pieces,—the “Vision of Poets,” the “Lay of the Brown Rosary,” “Isobel’s Child,” the “Poet’s Vow,” “Bertha in the Lane,” and “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” yet continue the most successful of her realizations.
In the “Drama of Exile” the form is not sufficiently massive for the theme. Eve, its central character, beautiful in her devoted wifehood, is yet rather the embodiment of a woman than of woman. Neither in her nor in Adam do we find those grand lineaments which belong to the founders of the human dynasty in creation; while from the want of an action proportioned to the agents, Lucifer becomes little more than a vehicle for eloquent invective. And yet, what true lover of poetry would wish this drama unwritten? If it falls short of its own ideal, it contains enough of fine thought and imagination to furnish a hundred inferior but still beautiful conceptions. What passages in modern poetry excel in description or suggestiveness the following colloquy, occasioned by the demand of Lucifer, if he do not still retain his angelic beauty?—
Eve. Thou hast a glorious darkness.
Luc. Nothing more?
Eve. I think no more.
Luc. False Heart—thou thinkest more!
Thou canst not choose but think, as I praise God,
Unwillingly but fully, that I stand
Most absolute in beauty. As yourselves
Were fashioned very good at best, so we
Sprang very beauteous from the creant Word
Which thrilled around us—God Himself being moved,
When that august work of a perfect shape,
His dignities of sovran angel-hood,
Swept out into the universe,—divine
With thunderous movements, earnest looks of gods,
And silver-solemn clash of cymbal wings:—
Whereof was I, in motion and in form,
A part not poorest. And yet,—yet, perhaps,
This beauty which I speak of, is not here,
As God’s voice is not here; nor even my crown—
I do not know. What is this thought or thing
Which I call beauty? is it thought, or thing?
Is it a thought accepted for a thing?
Or both? or neither?—a pretext—a word?
Its meaning flutters in me like a flame
Under my own breath: my perceptions reel
For evermore around it, and fall off,
As if it too were holy.
Eve. Which it is.
Adam. The essence of all beauty, I call love.
The attribute, the evidence, and end,
The consummation to the inward sense,
Of beauty apprehended from without,
I still call love. As form, when colourless,
Is nothing to the eye; that pine-tree there,
Without its black and green, being all a blank;
So, without love, is beauty undiscerned
In man or angel. Angel! rather ask
What love is in thee, what love moves to thee,
And what collateral love moves on with thee;
Then shalt thou know if thou art beautiful.
Luc. Love! what is love? I lose it. Beauty and love!
I darken to the image. Beauty—Love!
[He fades away, while a low music sounds.
Adam. Thou art pale, Eve.
Eve. The precipice of ill
Down that colossal nature, dizzies me—
And, hark! the starry harmony remote
Seems measuring the heights from whence he fell.
Need we point out the exquisite significance of Lucifer’s disappearance while pondering on the mystery of love, or claim admiration for the noble imagery which concludes our extract?
How full of rare pathos, how imbued with a sense of natural beauty, is Eve’s reminiscence of Eden.—
For was I not,
At that last sunset seen in Paradise,
When all the westering clouds flashed out in throngs
Of sudden angel-faces, face by face,
All hushed and solemn, as a thought of God
Held them suspended,—was I not, that hour,
The lady of the world, princess of life,
Mistress of feast and favour? Could I touch
A rose with my white hand, but it became
Redder at once? Could I walk leisurely
Along our swarded garden, but the grass
Tracked me with greenness? Could I stand aside
A moment underneath a cornel-tree,
But all the leaves did tremble as alive,
With songs of fifty birds who were made glad
Because I stood there? Could I turn to look
With these twain eyes of mine, now weeping fast,
Now good for only weeping,—upon man,
Angel, or beast, or bird, but each rejoiced
Because I looked on him?
But it is in such poems as “Isobel’s Child” and others which we have already mentioned that Mrs. Browning’s genius shines conspicuously. Hers is not the dramatic imagination which from the fulness of creative life delights to translate itself equally into the most opposite objects. With her, imagination has emphatically its source in the heart. It is her intensity of personal feeling which produces the vivid symbols by which it is expressed: and dealing with her poetry by this standard, we say unhesitatingly, that we know no record of woman’s nature which in depth, purity, and force can be compared to that which these pages contain. The ardour of woman’s individual devotion, her self-sacrificing love, her sympathy with the victims of wrong, and her faith in a presiding good that consecrates and chastens affection, find their fullest exposition in Mrs. Browning’s writings. Love in its highest sense—love for whatever is ennobling and beautiful—is the inspiration of her song:—a love not only fervent enough to fathom the abysses of sorrow, but clear-sighted to perceive, and firm to grasp, the pearls of faith which lie beneath those troubled depths. While we have no more thrilling utterance than hers of the heart’s anguish under change, bereavement, or treachery,—we possess no finer morals than those which she derives from such experience. The transient and fickle only raise her spirit to the immutable and the constant. Her trust leaps higher for the barriers that obstruct it. For her the bow of promise gleams on the very brow of the cataract. As a special instance of our meaning we may refer to “Isobel’s Child;” where the holy rest and happiness of the unseen future form the touching argument which wins the mother to relax the grasp of her detaining prayer from the spirit of her boy, and for his sake to resign him to heaven:—
The nurse awakes in the morning sun,
And starts to see beside her bed
The lady, with a grandeur spread
Like pathos o’er her face; as one
God-satisfied and earth-undone:—
The babe upon her arm was dead!
And the nurse could utter forth no cry,—
She was awed by the calm in the mother’s eye.
“Wake, nurse!”—the lady said:
“We are waking—he and I—
I, on earth, and he, in sky!
And thou must help me to o’erlay
With garment-white, this little clay
Which needs no more our lullaby.”
I changed the cruel prayer I made,
And bowed my meekened face, and prayed
That God would do His will! and thus
He did it, nurse: He parted us.
And his sun shows victorious
The dead calm face;—and I am calm:
And Heaven is hearkening a new psalm.
In the poem just quoted we are shown human affection transformed by self-sacrifice into religion. The doctrine that man cannot sustain man is earnestly enforced. In the “Poet’s Vow” a different but not conflicting lesson is presented:—namely, that man cannot dispense with man. The poet—that he may live in communion with the forms of nature and free his soul from the contact of mortal weakness—alienates himself from his kind and from his betrothed. In this proud lonelihood the naked grandeur of things blinds the eye that would gaze on them untempered by the medium of human sympathy. The poet’s inspiration shrinks before these awful presences.—
A lonely man, a feeble man,—
A part beneath the whole—
He bore by day, he bore by night
That pressure of God’s infinite
Upon his finite soul.
His betrothed, dying, mourns more for the sin of his pride than for her own abandonment, and directs that in last appeal her lifeless form shall be borne into his hall.—
O’er the windy hill, through the forest still
Let them gently carry me;
And through the piney forest still,
And down the open moorland—
Round where the sea beats mistily
And blindly on the foreland—
And let them chant that hymn I know,
—Bearing me soft, bearing me slow,
To the old hall of Courland.
She is laid before him, and a scroll in her hand utters what the lips can no longer speak.—
“I left thee last, a child at heart,
A woman scarce in years:
I come to thee, a solemn corpse,
Which neither feels nor fears.
I have no breath to use in sighs;
They laid the death-weights on mine eyes,
To seal them safe from tears.
Look on me with thine own calm look—
I meet it calm as thou!
No look of thine can change this smile,
Or break thy sinful vow.
I tell thee that my poor scorned heart
Is of thine earth .. thine earth,—a part—
It cannot love thee now.
But out, alas! these words are writ
By a living, loving one,
Adown whose cheeks, the proofs of life,
The warm, quick tears do run.
Ah, let the unloving corpse controul
Thy scorn back from the loving soul,
Whose place of rest is won.
I have prayed for thee with deep sobs,
When passion’s course was free:
I have prayed for thee with mute lips,
In the anguish none could see!
They whispered oft, ‘She sleepeth soft’—
But I only prayed for thee.
Go to! I pray for thee no more—
The corpse’s tongue is still:
Its folded fingers point to heaven,
But point there stiff and chill:
No farther wrong, no farther woe
Hath licence from the sin below
Its tranquil heart to thrill.
I charge thee, by the living’s prayer,
And the dead’s silentness,
To wring from out thy soul a cry,
Which God shall hear and bless!
Lest Heaven’s own palm droop in my hand,
And pale among the saints I stand,
A saint companionless.”
The intensity of love was never expressed in a sublimer picture than these last lines present.
We well know in Mrs. Browning’s case, as in that of every true artist, how impossible it is to do justice to a complete work by detached examples. The axiom “ex pede Herculem,” if it be a tolerably safe guide as to the proportion of various members, affords but a poor clue to the harmony which combines them in one symmetrical frame. As the most perfect illustration of Mrs. Browning’s pathos, however, which our limits will afford, we give in a condensed form the poem entitled—
Catarina to Camoens;
Dying in his absence abroad, and referring to the Poem in which he recorded the sweetness of her eyes.
On the door you will not enter,
I have gazed too long—adieu!
Hope withdraws her peradventure—
Death is near me,—and not you!
Come, O lover,
Close and cover
These poor eyes, you called, I ween,
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen.”
When I heard you sing that burden
In my vernal days and bowers,
Other praises disregarding,
I but hearkened that of yours,—
Only saying
In heart-playing,
“Blessed eyes mine eyes have been,
If the sweetest, his have seen!”
But all changeth. At this vesper,
Cold the sun shines down the door.
If you stood there, would you whisper
“Love, I love you,” as before,—
Death pervading
Now, and shading
Eyes you sang of, that yestreen,
As the sweetest, ever seen?
Yes! I think, were you beside them,
Near the bed I die upon,—
Though their beauty you denied them,
As you stood there, looking down,
You would truly
Call them duly,
For the love’s sake found therein,—
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen.”
* * * *
O my poet, O my prophet,
When you praised their sweetness so,
Did you think, in singing of it,
That it might be near to go? [p. 1244→]
Had you fancies
From their glances,
That the grave would quickly screen
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen?”
* * * *
Will you come? When I’m departed
Where all sweetnesses are hid—
When thy voice, my tender-hearted,
Will not lift up either lid.
Cry, O lover,
Love is over!
Cry beneath the cypress green—
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen.”
* * * *
“Sweetest eyes!” How sweet in flowings,
The repeated cadence is!
Though you sang a hundred poems,
Still the best one would be this.
I can hear it
’Twixt my spirit
And the earth-noise, intervene—
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen!”
But the priest waits for the praying,
And the choir are on their knees,—
And the soul must pass away in
Strains more solemn high than these!
Miserere
For the weary—
Oh, no longer for Catrine,
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen!”
Keep my riband: take and keep it,—
I have loosed it from my hair;*
Feeling, while you overweep it,
Not alone in your despair,—
Since with saintly
Watch, unfaintly,
Out of Heaven shall o’er you lean
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen.”
But—but now—yet unremoved
Up to Heaven, they glisten fast:
You may cast away, Beloved,
In your future, all my past;
Such old phrases
May be praises.
For some fairer bosom-queen—
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen!”
Eyes of mine, what are ye doing?
Faithless, faithless,—praised amiss.
If a tear be of your showing,
Dropt for any hope of his!
Death hath boldness
Besides coldness
If unworthy tears demean
“Sweetest eyes, were ever seen.”
I will look out to his future—
I will bless it till it shine.
Should he ever be a suitor
Unto sweeter eyes than mine,
Sunshine gild them,
Angels shield them,
Whatsoever eyes terrene
Be the sweetest his have seen!
We add no comment. We have mistaken the effect of these lines if they need any.
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*She left him the riband from her hair.
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To show how, with a true woman’s heart, this writer can pass from the region of ideal sorrow to that of actual every-day wrong, we extract the following verses, terrible in their truth, from “The Cry of the Factory Children.”
“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap—
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping—
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring,
Through the coal-dark, underground—
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning,—
Their wind comes in our faces,—
Till our hearts turn,—our heads with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places—
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling—
Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall—
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling—
All are turning, all the day, and we with all.—
And all day, the iron wheels are droning;
And sometimes we could pray,
‘O ye wheels,’ (breaking out in a mad moaning,)
‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’”
Ay! be silent! Let them hear each other breathing
For a moment, mouth to mouth—
Let them touch each other’s hands, in a fresh wreathing
Of their tender human youth!
Let them feel that this cold metallic motion
Is not all the life God fashions or reveals—
Let them prove their inward souls against the notion
That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!—
Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward,
Grinding life down from its mark;
And the children’s souls, which God is calling sunward,
Spin on blindly in the dark.
In what way poetry can lift the heart-sickening facts of suffering into ideal pity and terror may be learned from such painting as this. The authoress of “Mary Barton” has nothing more real:—Mrs. Browning herself has scarcely anything more imaginative.
We have already said that Mrs. Browning’s imagination is not characteristically of that dramatic kind which delights in activity for its own sake; but so general are her sympathies with what is true and beautiful, that her range in them is as large as their own domain. How instinct with chivalrous fire (albeit too diffuse,—a frequent fault of Mrs. Browning’s) is the “Rhyme of the Duchess May”! How keen a perception of patrician grace, how deep a sense of human right, are combined in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”! Was there ever a fairy architecture that surpassed the “House of Clouds” in its delicious fusion of sportiveness, fancy, and emotion? Could not Landseer draw “Flush, my Dog” to the life from reading the lines so entitled? Our readers will remember some of these poems as they first appeared in our own columns. Did ever supernatural spell more congeal the blood than that of the “Brown Rosary,” and the legend of her at whose wicked vow
The spirits trailed, along the pines, low laughter like a breeze,
While high atween their swinging tops, the stars appeared to freeze?
Did ever the sublimity of pathos more touch and raise the heart than that of “Bertha in the Lane”?—which, but for a defect of mechanism, would be of its class the gem of these poems. The flaw we refer to is the disclosure which the heroic sister makes of her own sacrifice. Lastly, to say nothing of its fine lesson, have we any other examples of condensed and picturesque criticism to equal those in the “Vision of Poets”?—the vision in which appeared
Euripides, with close and mild
Scholastic lips,—that could be wild,
And laugh or sob out like a child,
Right in the classes. Sophocles,
With that king’s look which, down the trees,
Followed the dark effigies
Of the lost Theban. Hesiod old,
Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold,
Cared most for Gods and bulls. And bold
Electric Pindar, quick as fear,
With race-dust on his cheeks, and clear,
Slant startled eyes that seem to hear.
* * * *
Theocritus, with glittering locks
Dropt sideway, as betwixt the rocks
He watched the visionary flocks.
* * * *
And soft Racine,—and grave Corneille—
The orator of rhymes, whose wail
Scarce shook his purple. And Petrarch pale,
Who from his brainlit heart hath thrown
A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,
Each perfumed with the name of One.
The italics are our own.
From the new poems in this collection we give one specimen of Mrs. Browning’s lighter vein.—
A Man’s Requirements.
Love me, sweet, with all thou art,
Feeling, thinking, seeing,—
Love me in the lightest part,
Love me in full being.
Love me with thine open youth
In its frank surrender;
With the vowing of thy mouth,
With its silence tender.
Love me with thine azure eyes,
Made for earnest granting!
Taking colour from the skies,
Can Heaven’s truth be wanting?
Love me with their lids, that fall
Snow-like at first meeting:
Love me with thine heart, that all
The neighbours then see beating.
Love me with thine hand stretched out
Freely—open-minded:
Love me with thy loitering foot,—
Hearing one behind it.
Love me with thy voice, that turns
Sudden faint above me;
Love me with thy blush that burns
When I murmur “Love me!”
Love me with thy thinking soul—
Break it to love-sighing;
Love me with thy thoughts that roll
On through living—dying.
Love me in thy gorgeous airs,
When the world has crowned thee!
Love me, kneeling at thy prayers,
With the angels round thee.
Love me pure, as musers do,
Up the woodlands shady:
Love me gaily, fast, and true,
As a winsome lady.
Through all hopes that keep us brave,
Further off or nigher,
Love me for the house and grave,—
And for something higher.
Thus, if thou wilt prove me, dear,
Woman’s love no fable,
I will love thee—half-a-year—
As a man is able.
Of the serious poems now added, that entitled “Calls on the Heart” is the finest; but we must content ourselves with extracting as a shorter instance—
A Dead Rose.
O rose! who dares to name thee?
No longer roseate now, nor soft nor sweet;
But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubble-wheat,—
Kept seven years in a drawer—thy titles shame thee.
The breeze that used to blow thee
Between the hedge-row thorns, and take away
An odour up the lane to last all day,—
If breathing now,—unsweetened would forego thee.
The sun that used to smite thee,
And mix his glory in thy gorgeous urn,
Till beam appeared to bloom, and flower to burn,—
If shining now,—with not a hue would light thee.
The dew that used to wet thee,
And, white first, grow incarnadined, because
It lay upon thee where the crimson was,—
If dropping now,—would darken where it met thee.
The fly that lit upon thee,
To stretch the tendrils of its tiny feet,
Along thy leaf’s pure edges, after heat,—
If lighting now,—would coldly overrun thee.
The bee that once did suck thee,
And build thy perfumed ambers up his hive,
And swoon in thee for joy, till scarce alive,—
If passing now,—would blindly overlook thee.
The heart doth recognise thee,
Alone, alone! The heart doth smell thee sweet,
Doth view thee fair, doth judge thee most complete—
Though seeing now those changes that disguise thee.
Yes, and the heart doth owe thee
More love, dead rose! than to such roses bold
As Julia wears at dances, smiling cold!——
Lie still upon this heart—which breaks below thee!
Several translations—including an entirely new, and a striking one, of the “Prometheus Bound”—are included in the present edition.
For those who care to find them, there are undoubtedly faults and short-comings in Mrs. Browning’s poetry. She is occasionally guilty of mannerisms which we are prevented only by her earnestness from regarding as affectations. At times, too, the symbols of her feeling seem too weak to convey it. They dissolve in the heat—by which they are made plastic. Often in the struggle to overtake her ideal, the Muse totters to the goal. But she gains it. The wreath is justly awarded, though it crowns a fainting victor. Such defects as we notice are, however, all of style,—not of essence or purpose.—We close these volumes by a Poet and the Wife of a Poet with deep admiration and reverence. Desirous as we have been to afford glimpses of Mrs. Browning’s genius in its various phases, we are conscious that we have here given due prominence only to its sympathetic truth and its high spiritual tone. Much remains to be said on its electric passion, its noble thought, its bold yet delicate imagination. But in adverting for a moment to the blending of these various qualities in the same mind, we will briefly say that literature has few precedents of such an union. Mrs. Browning is probably, of her sex, the first imaginative writer England has produced in any age:—she is, beyond comparison, the first poetess of her own.
[John Westland Marston]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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