E510300C. Poems (1850).
Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, March 1851, pp. 277–278.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 293–295.
The peculiarities and the powers of Mrs. Barrett’s genius are now generally known, and we do not notice this edition of her poems with the intention of giving an exposition of her poetic method and character, but for the purpose of calling the attention of our readers to forty-three sonnets at the conclusion of the second volume, which are not in the late American edition of her works. These are entitled “Sonnets from the Portuguese;” but it is very evident that they are original poems, intended to describe the growth of her love for the poet Browning, and genuine utterances right from her own “brain-lit heart.” In this view, they are among the most striking and peculiar poems in the literature of affection. The opening sonnets exhibit her as prepared for death, a consummation which long years of afflicting maladies had made “devoutly to be wished;” but Love, in the midst of this “other-worldliness” of her moods, glides in to turn earth itself into heaven—
I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals old and young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years—
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung,
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery while I strove—
“Guess now who holds thee!”—“Death,” I said.
But there,
The silver answer rang—“Not Death but Love.”
In the following sonnet, Browning is directly addressed, and the depth of the love is indicated by the very humility in which it finds expression:
Unlike are we, unlike, O princely heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens at social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears, even, can make mine, to ply thy part
Of chief musician. What has thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer? singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine hand—on mine, the dew—
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
This feeling is continued through several sonnets, and the “most gracious singer of high poems” is adjured to “go,” in solemn, grief-smitten words whose spirit says “stay.” What a massive weight of darkly impassioned thought is there in the following lines:
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,
As once Electra her sepulchral urn,
And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn
The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,
And how the red, wild sparkles dimly burn
Through the ashen grayness. If thy foot in scorn
Could tread them out to darkness utterly,
It might be well perhaps. But if instead
Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow
The gray dust up—those laurels on thy head,
O, my beloved, will not shield thee so,
That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred
The hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.
In the next sonnet—of which we quote the conclusion—this feeling melts into the deepest pathos. It begins with “Go from me;” but how could the object of this command obey, with such an assurance added as this?
The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes, the tears of two.
The next is more joyous and hopeful:
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh, still beside me; as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I who thought to sink
Was caught up into love, and taught the whole
Of life in a new rhythm.
In the following, the thought becomes finely ecstatic, and the peculiar energy of the writer’s nature leaps impatiently forth at the conclusion in lines, that kindle instinctive sympathy:
Yet love, mere love, is beautiful indeed,
And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,
Let temple burn, or flax! An equal light
Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed,
And love is fire: and when I say at need
I love thee—mark! I love thee!—in thy sight
I stand transfigured, glorified, aright,
With conscience of the new rays that proceed
Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low
In love, when love the lowest; meanest creatures
Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.
The sonnet which we now quote, suggests a sentiment almost unreachable to expression, and the feeling has a searching pathos and lingering sweetness that “lie too deep for tears:”
I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
“Take it.” My day of youth went yesterday;
My hair no longer bounds to my foot’s glee,
Nor plant I it from rose or myrtle tree,
As girls do, any more. It only may
Now shade on two pale cheeks, the mark of tears,
Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside
Through sorrow’s trick. I thought the funeral shears
Would take this first; but Love is justified:
Take it, thou—finding pure, from all those years,
The kiss my mother left there when she died.
The conclusion of the twenty-third sonnet is the most ingenious of all offerings to the divinity of Love. The whole poem is perhaps as beautiful as any in the collection.
Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead,
Would’st thou miss any life in losing mine!
And would the sun for thee more coldly shine,
Because of grave-damps falling round my head?
I marveled, my beloved, when I read
Thy thought so in the letter? Can I pour thy wine
While my hands tremble? Then, my soul, instead
Of dreams of death, resumes life’s lower range!
Then love me, love! Look on me—breathe on me!
As brighter ladies do not count it strange,
For love, to give up acres and degree,
I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange
My near sweet view of Heaven, for earth with thee! [p. 278→]
With one more sonnet, which we cannot resist the temptation of quoting, we close our extracts from these magical little pieces:
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write,
And ever since it grew more clean and white—
Slow to world-greetings—quick with its “oh, list,”
When the angel’s speak. A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here plainer to my sight,
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which Love’s own crown,
With sanctifying sweetness did precede.
The third, upon my lips was folded down
In perfect, purple state! since when, indeed,
I have been proud, and said, “My love, my own.”
We have made these quotations to exhibit the sentiment of the sonnets, and have passed over those minor defects of expression and obstinate obscurities of thought, which still slightly disfigure the poems of Mrs. Browning. Her mind is certainly one of the largest ever deposited in a woman’s head, but its great elements of thought and emotion have not yet been harmoniously combined, and her best poems accordingly lack perfect unity of effect. But after subjecting her faults to the severest scrutiny, her excellences are still, in comparison, transcendent, and the impression her whole works leave on the reader’s mind is the impression of a great and deep nature, whose thoughts
Step out grandly to the Infinite,
From the dark edges of our sensual ground,
And whose emotions connect the vastest conceptions of her imagination with human sympathies perceptible to the simplest heart. We fear that she is not popular, and we cannot hope that she ever will be popular until the purity, elevation, and essential greatness of her nature are expressed with more uniform clearness and melody than now characterize her style.
[?Rufus W. Griswold]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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