E510621A. Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems; Including Sonnets from the Portuguese, Casa Guidi Windows, etc. (New York, 1851).
The Literary World (New York), 21 June 1851, pp. 491–493; 5 July 1851, pp. 6–7.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 316–320.
casa guidi windows.
This is the quaint looking title of Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s new poem, the first fruits, if we except some revisions and additions to her Collected Poems, of her married and Italian life. Casa Guidi Windows is not the name of a heroine or a patronymic, but simply indicates to us what may have been observed in Florence of the recent revolutionary movements from the windows of our poet’s residence, the Casa Guidi—with her reflections on the scene. In the brief advertisement prefixed, the author says:—“This Poem contains the impressions of the writer upon events in Tuscany of which she was a witness. ‘From a window,’ the critic may demur. She bows to the objection in the very title of her work. No continuous narrative, nor exposition of political philosophy, is attempted by her. It is a simple story of personal impressions, whose only value is in the intensity with which they were received, as proving her warm affection for a beautiful and unfortunate country; and the sincerity with which they are related, as indicating her own good faith and freedom from all partisanship.” These conditions are fully met in the poem, which is the most eloquent tribute the Muse has yet offered to the genius of Modern Italy; and, like every true poem, built on a particular interest, it contains within itself the seeds of an ampler development. It is a succession of distinct pictures, of description and philosophy. The actual world is brought before us; but it is bathed in the new light of old tradition, and every fact comes to us impressed with a genius sublimated to the finer issues of the spiritual life.
There is much more of daylight in the poem than in Mrs. Browning’s previous writings. The verse is clear, sounding, straightforward, colloquial. It has an open-air breath about it and deals with living things, although every coarseness is redeemed and all is sanctified by the poet’s meditation. The reader embarks on its pure current, and is borne winding through many an isle, lingering or advancing as feeling ebbs and flows, but the course is onward to the great goal of human freedom. It is a poem full of heart, which we may the readier trust to as its enthusiasm is balanced by the reserve, the “pale cast of thought” of the philosophic mind.
It is a book of pictures and reflections, grouped in scenes and essays. The unity of epic interest it lacks, for, written at different periods and representing different states of the author’s and the Italian mind, the two parts of which it is composed, differ in sentiment, the second being partly expended in undoing the impressions of the first. It is the fair and active morning of 1848 sinking into the heavy lethargic noon of 1851: but it is not evening or night yet. This, though unfavorable to the development of the action of the poem—the movement of thought and feeling we have already spoken of—provides us with two contrasted dramatic scenes. Looking from the Window we shall get a glimpse of both:—
freedom’s hopeful day.
.... The day was such a day
As Florence owes the sun. The sky above,
Its weight upon the mountains seemed to lay,
And palpitate in glory, like a dove
Who has flown too fast, full-hearted. Take away
The image! for the heart of man beat higher
That day in Florence, flooding all her streets
And piazzas with a tumult and desire.
The people, with accumulated heats,
And faces turned one way, as if one fire
Did draw and flush them, leaving their old beats,
Went upward to the palace Pitti wall,
To thank their Grand-duke, who, not quite of course,
Had graciously permitted, at their call,
The citizens to use their civic force
To guard their civic homes. So, one and all,
The Tuscan cities streamed up to the source
Of this new good, at Florence; taking it
As good so far, presageful of more good,—
The first torch of Italian freedom, lit
To toss in the next tiger’s face who should
Approach too near them in a cruel fit,—
The first pulse of an even flow of blood,
To prove the level of Italian veins
Towards rights perceived and granted. How we gazed
From Casa Guidi windows, while, in trains
Of orderly procession—banners raised,
And intermittent bursts of martial strains
Which died upon the shout, as if amazed
By gladness beyond music—they passed on!
The magistrates, with their insignia, passed;
And all the people shouted in the sun,
And all the thousand windows which had cast
A ripple of silks, in blue and scarlet, down,
As if the houses overflowed at last,
Seemed to grow larger with fair heads and eyes.
The lawyers passed; and still arose the shout,
And hands broke from the windows, to surprise
Those grave calm brows with bay-tree leaves thrown out.
The priesthood passed: the friars, with worldly-wise
Keen, sidelong glances from their beards, about
The street, to see who shouted! many a monk
Who takes a long rope in the waist, was there!
Whereat the popular exultation drunk
With indrawn “vivas,” the whole sunny air,
While through the murmuring windows rose and sunk
A cloud of kerchiefed hands! “the church makes fair
Her welcome in the new Pope’s name.” Ensued
The black sign of the “martyrs!” name no name,
But count the graves in silence. Next, were viewed
The artists; next, the trades; and after came
The populace, with flag and rights as good;
And very loud the shout was for that same
Motto, “Il popolo,” Il Popolo,—
The word meant dukedom, empire, majesty,
And kings in such an hour might read it so.
And next, with banners, each in his degree,
Deputed representatives a-row,
Of every separate state of Tuscany:
Siena’s she-wolf, bristling on the fold
Of the first flag, preceded Pisa’s hare;
And Massa’s lion floated calm in gold,
Pienza’s following with his silver stare;
Arezzo’s steed pranced clear from bridle-hold,—
And well might shout our Florence, greeting there
These, and more brethren! Last, the world had sent
The various children of her teeming flanks—
Greeks, English, French—as to some parliament [p. 492→]
Of lovers of her Italy, in ranks,
Each bearing its land’s symbols reverent;
At which the stones seemed breaking into thanks
And rattling up to the sky, such sounds in proof
Arose! the very house-walls seemed to bend,
The very windows, up from door to roof,
Flashed out a rapture of bright heads, to mend,
With passionate looks, the gesture’s whirling off
A hurricane of leaves! Three hours did end
While all these passed; and ever in the crowd,
Rude men, unconscious of the tears that kept
Their beards moist, shouted; and some laughed aloud,
And none asked any why they laughed and wept:
Friends kissed each other’s cheeks, and foes long vowed
Did it more warmly; two-months’ babies leapt
Right upward in their mother’s arms, whose black
Wide, glittering eyes looked elsewhere; lovers pressed
Each before either, neither glancing back;
And peasant maidens, smoothly ’tired and tressed,
Forgot to finger on their throats the slack
Great pearl-strings; while old blind men would not rest,
But pattered with their staves and with their shoes
Still on the stones, and smiled as if they saw.
O Heaven! I think that day had noble use
Among God’s days. So near stood Right and Law,
Both mutually forborne!
This is in a vein, the marshalling of states and the domestic pathos which the pen of Dante would not have disdained—there are Dantesque foot-prints throughout the poem—and swiftly changes the view to the same master’s darker mood. Tired of the plaything, Liberty, the children of Florence look out upon
the return of the grand duke.
From Casa Guidi windows, gazing, then,
I saw and witness how the Duke came back.
The regular tramp of horse and tread of men
Did smite the silence like an anvil black
And sparkless. With her wide eyes at full strain,
Our Tuscan nurse exclaimed, “Alack, alack,
Signora! these shall be the Austrians.” “Nay,
Hush, hush,” I answered, “do not wake the child!”
For so, my two months’ baby sleeping lay
In milky dreams upon the bed and smiled;
And I thought “he shall sleep on, while he may,
Through the world’s baseness. Not being yet defiled,
Why should he be disturbed by what is done?”
Then, gazing, I beheld the long-drawn street
Live out, from end to end, full in the sun,
With Austria’s thousands. Sword and bayonet,
Horse, foot, artillery,—cannons rolling on,
Like blind, slow storm-clouds gestant with the heat
Of undeveloped lightnings, each bestrode
By a single man, dust-white from head to heel,
Indifferent as the dreadful thing he rode,
Calm as a sculptured Fate, and terrible!
As some smooth river which hath overflowed,
Doth slow and silent down its current wheel
A loosened forest, all the pines erect,—
So swept, in mute significance of storm,
The marshalled thousands,—not an eye deflect
To left or right, to catch a novel form
Of the famed city adorned by architect
And carver, or of Beauties live and warm
Scared at the casements,—all, straightforward eyes
And faces, held as steadfast as their swords,
And cognisant of acts, not imageries.
The key, O Tuscans, too well fits the wards!
Ye asked for mimes; these bring you tragedies—
For purple; these shall wear it as your lords.
Ye played like children: die like innocents!
Ye mimicked lightnings with a torch: the crack
Of the actual bolt, your pastime, circumvents.
Ye called up ghosts, believing they were slack
To follow any voice from Gilboa’s tents, …
Here’s Samuel!—and, so, Grand-dukes come back!
It would be difficult, without a running commentary for every page, to present the variety of this poem. One main source of its interest is the introduction of the great works of Art at Florence—
The sculptor’s Night and Day,
And Dawn and Twilight— * * *
That’s Michel Angelo! his statues wait
In the small chapel of the dim St. Lawrence!
Day’s eyes are breaking bold and passionate
Over his shoulder, and will flash abhorrence
On darkness, and with level looks meet fate,
When once loose from that marble film of theirs;
The Night has wild dreams in her sleep; the Dawn
Is haggard as the sleepless: Twilight wears
A sort of horror: as the veil withdrawn
’Twixt the artist’s soul and works had left them heirs
Of the deep thoughts which would not quail nor fawn,
His angers and contempts, his hope and love;
For not without a meaning did he place
Princely Urbino on the seat above
With everlasting shadow on his face;
While the slow dawns and twilights disapprove
The ashes of his long-extinguished race,
Which never shall clog more the feet of men.
Or in this of Cimabue and the triumph of his Virgin, ending with the moral,—rivalry overpowered by the ideal,—in all great minds:—
Or enter, in your Florence wanderings,
Santa Maria Novella church. You pass
The left stair, where, at plague-time, Macchiavel
Saw one with set fair face as in a glass,
Dressed out against the fear of death and hell,
Rustling her silks in pauses of the mass,
To keep the thought off how her husband fell,
When she left home, stark dead across her feet—
The stair leads up to what Orgagna gave
Of Dante’s dæmons; but you, passing it,
Ascend the right stair of the farther nave,
To muse in a small chapel scarcely lit
By Cimabue’s Virgin. Bright and brave,
That picture was accounted, mark, of old!
A king stood bare before its sovran grace;
A reverent people shouted to behold
The picture, not the king; and even the place
Containing such a miracle, grew bold,
Named the Glad Borgo from that beauteous face,
Which thrilled the artist, after work, to think
That his ideal Mary-smile should stand
So very near him!—he, within the brink
Of all that glory, let in by his hand
With too divine a rashness! Yet none shrink
Who gaze here now—albeit the thing is planned
Sublimely in the thought’s simplicity.
The Virgin, throned in empyreal state,
Minds only the young babe upon her knee;
While, each side, angels bear the royal weight,
Prostrated meekly, smiling tenderly
Oblivion of their wings! the Child thereat
Stretches its hand like God. If any should,
Because of some stiff draperies and loose joints,
Gaze scorn down from the heights of Raffaelhood,
On Cimabue’s picture,—Heaven anoints
The head of no such critic, and his blood
The poet’s curse strikes full on, and appoints
To ague and cold spasms for evermore.
A noble picture! worthy of the shout
Wherewith along the streets the people bore
Its cherub faces, which the sun threw out
Until they stooped and entered the church door!—
Yet rightly was young Giotto talked about,
Whom Cimabue found among the sheep,
And knew, as gods know gods, and carried home
To paint the things he painted, with a deep
And fuller insight, and so overcome
His chapel-Virgin with a heavenlier sweep
Of light. For thus we mount into the sum
Of great things known or acted. I hold, too,
That Cimabue smiled upon the lad,
At the first stroke which passed what he could do,—
Or else his Virgin’s smile had never had
Such sweetness in’t. All great men who foreknew
Their heirs in art, for art’s sake have been glad,
And bent their old white heads as if uncrowned,
Fanatics of their pure ideals still,
Far more than of their laurels which were found
With some less stalwart struggle of the will.
These are all subsidiary to the stirring, fervent appeal to Italy. There is one who we would were alive this day to hear it, Margaret Fuller: how nobly she would have rejoiced in its humanity, its classic utterance. She, too, had written on this theme, but the book and the living voice alike went down unheard amidst the stormier surges of the Atlantic wave. To her, Italy owes a place among the memorials of this period, for her devotion at Rome and that lost history of the time, the spirit of which all who knew her can divine. We think of her as we read this tribute to the wife of Garibaldi:—
In the name of Italy,
Meantime, her patriot dead have benizon!
They only have done well; and what they did
Being perfect, it shall triumph. Let them slumber.
No king of Egypt in a pyramid
Is safer from oblivion, though he number
Full seventy cerements for a coverlid.
These Dead be seeds of life, and shall encumber
The sad heart of the land until it loose
The clammy clods and let out the spring-growth
In beatific green through every bruise.
The tyrant should take heed to what he doth,
Since every victim-carrion turns to use,
And drives a chariot, like a god made wroth,
Against each piled injustice. Aye, the least
Dead for Italia, not in vain has died,
However vainly, ere life’s struggle ceased,
To mad dissimilar ends they swerved aside.
Each grave her nationality has pieced
By its own noble breadth, and fortified,
And pinned it deeper to the soil. Forlorn
Of thanks be, therefore, no one of these graves!
Not Hers,—who, at her husband’s side, in scorn,
Outfaced the whistling shot and hissing waves,
Until she felt her little babe unborn
Recoil, within her, from the violent staves
And bloodhounds of the world: at which, her life
Dropt inwards from her eyes, and followed it
Beyond the hunters. Garibaldi’s wife
And child died so. And now, the sea-weeds fit
Her body like a proper shroud and coif,
And murmurously the ebbing waters grit
The little pebbles, while she lies interred
In the sea-sand. Perhaps, ere dying thus,
She looked up in his face which never stirred
From its clenched anguish, as to make excuse
For leaving him for his, if so she erred.
Well he remembers that she could not choose.
A memorable grave!
Nor should we omit the sequel to the memory of
charles albert.
Another is
At Genoa, where a king may fitly lie,—
Who bursting that heroic heart of his [p. 493→]
At lost Novara, that he could not die,
Though thrice into the cannon’s eyes for this
He plunged his shuddering steed, and felt the sky
Reel back between the fire-shocks;—stripped away
The ancestral ermine ere the smoke had cleared,
And naked to the soul, that none might say
His kingship covered what was base and bleared
With treason, he went out an exile, yea,
An exiled patriot! Let him be revered.
Yea, verily, Charles Albert has died well:
And if he lived not all so, as one spoke,
The sin pass softly with the passing bell.
For he was shriven, I think, in cannon smoke,
And taking off his crown, made visible
A hero’s forehead. Shaking Austria’s yoke
He shattered his own hand and heart. “So best,”
His last words were upon his lonely bed,—
“I do not end like popes and dukes at least—
Thank God for it.” And now that he is dead,
Admitting it is proved and manifest
That he was worthy, with a discrowned head,
To measure heights with patriots, let them stand
Beside the man in his Oporto shroud,
And each vouchsafe to take him by the hand,
And kiss him on the cheek, and say aloud,
“Thou, too, hast suffered for our native land!
My brother, thou art one of us. Be proud.”
[Continued in the issue of 5 July 1851]
mrs. browning’s italian poem.
(Second Notice.)
The love of Italy displayed in Mrs. Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows is a philosophical sentiment, true both to the thought and the heart, to the closet and the field. The cloistered poetess of meditation “fancy free” comes forth from her seclusion, the world of books, the historians of old Rome, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, the Italy of Lorenzo and the painters, of Michael Angelo and Milton—to the open air of the present day with a mind braced by either condition. It is one of the charms of her new poem, this interlacing of the old and the new, the mingling of thought and action, the musing of the lyre, the “war-denouncing” blast of the trumpet. The poem is a wilderness of poetic beauties in which you linger now under a solemn grove, anon play with the sunlight on fairy meadow, or quitting the leafy shelter, stand with a firmer step on the rocky wall of a mighty flowing river. There is no tenderness which can surpass the solicitudes of a deeply poetic mind. The imagination is as anxious for its airy children of thought as the fondest maternity for its offspring. There are hope and fear, delicacy and strength embodied in this view of a great thought threading the history of a great people. Liberty and Rome! How the ideas vary, though the words remain the same. Mrs. Browning’s is the latest born Christian conception of these mighty sounds. There was a time when they meant paganism, or conquest, or superstition.
what’s italy?
“Less wretched if less fair,” perhaps a truth
Is so far plain in this—that Italy,
Long trammelled with the purple of her youth
Against her age’s due activity,
Sate still upon her graves, without the ruth
Of death, but also without energy
And hope of life. “What’s Italy?” men ask:
And others answer, “Virgil, Cicero,
Catullus, Cæsar.” And what more? to task
The memory closer—“Why, Boccaccio,
Dante, Petrarca,”—and if still the flask
Appears to yield its wine by drops too slow,—
“Angelo, Raffael, Pergolese,”—all
Whose strong hearts beat through stone, or charged, again,
Cloth-threads with fire of souls electrical,
Or broke up heaven for music. What more then?
Why, then, no more. The chaplet’s last beads fall
In naming the last saintship within ken,
And, after that, none prayeth in the land.
Alas, this Italy has too long swept
Heroic ashes up for hour-glass sand;
Of her own past, impassioned nympholept!
Consenting to be nailed by the hand
To the same bay-tree under which she stepped
A queen of old, and plucked a leafy branch;
And licensing the world too long, indeed,
To use her broad phylacteries to staunch
And stop her bloody lips, which took no heed
How one quick breath would draw an avalanche
Of living sons around her, to succeed
The vanished generations. Could she count [p. 7→]
Those oil-eaters, with large, live, mobile mouths
Agape for maccaroni, in the amount
Of consecrated heroes of her south’s
Bright rosary? The pitcher at the fount,
The gift of gods, being broken,—why, one loathes
To let the ground-leaves of the place confer
A natural bowl. And thus, she chose to seem
No nation, but the poet’s pensioner,
With alms from every land of song and dream;
While her own pipers sweetly piped of her,
Until their proper breaths, in that extreme
Of sighing, split the reed on which they played!
Of which, no more: but never say “no more”
To Italy! Her memories undismayed
Say rather “evermore”—her graves implore
Her future to be strong and not afraid—
Her very statues send their looks before!
What higher poetic life can be put into language than in that characterization of the three arts, Sculpture, Painting, and Music:
All
Whose strong hearts beat through stone, or charged, again,
Cloth-threads with fire of souls electrical,
Or broke up heaven for music.
We have seen the influences of art, of history, in this poetic disenthralment of the spirit of modern liberty.
This is the eloquent vindication of the Past. How touching, after its triumphant appeal to Marathon and the martyrs—the simple allusion to herself and the “dead masters:”—
Cold graves, we say? it shall be testified
That living men who throb in heart and train,
Without the dead, were colder. If we tried
To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure
The future would not stand. Precipitate
This old roof from the shrine—and, insecure,
The nesting swallows fly off, mate from mate.
Scant were the gardens, if the graves were fewer!
And the green poplars grew no longer straight,
Whose tops not looked to Troy. Why, who would fight
For Athens, and not swear by Marathon?
Who would build temples, without tombs in sight?
Who live, without some dead man’s benison?
Who seek truth, hope for good, or strive for right,
If, looking up, he saw not in the sun
Some angel of the martyrs, all day long
Standing and waiting! your last rhythms will need
The earliest key-note. Could I sing this song,
If my dead masters had not taken heed
To help the heavens and earth to make me strong,
As the wind ever will find out some reed,
And touch it to such issues as belong
To such a frail thing? Who denies the dead,
Libations from full cups? Unless we choose
To look back to the hills behind us spread,
The plains before us sadden and confuse!
If orphaned, we are disinherited.
Nature, too, must bear her part in this and every genuine poem. But the nature of Italy is learned and consecrate. It is Milton’s, Galileo’s, Petrarch’s. Select and choicely framed is the picture of
vallombrosa.
And Vallombrosa, we too went to see
Last June, beloved companion,—where sublime
The mountains live in holy families,
And the slow pinewoods ever climb and climb
Half up their breasts; just stagger as they seize
Some grey crag—drop back with it many a time,
And straggle blindly down the precipice!
The Vallombrosan brooks were strewn as thick
That June-day, knee-deep, with dead beechen leaves,
As Milton saw them ere his heart grew sick,
And his eyes blind. I think the monks and beeves
Are all the same too: scarce they have changed the wick
On good St. Gaulbert’s altar, which receives
The convent’s pilgrims; and the pool in front
Wherein the hill-stream trout are cast, to wait
The beatific vision, and the grunt
Used at refectory, keeps its weedy state,
To baffle saintly abbots, who would count
The fish across their breviary, nor ’bate
The measure of their steps, O waterfalls
And forests! sound and silence! mountains bare,
That leap up peak by peak, and catch the palls
Of purple and silver mist, to rend and share
With one another, at electric calls
Of life in the sunbeams,—till we cannot dare
Fix your shapes, learn your number! we must think
Your beauty and your glory helped to fill
The cup of Milton’s soul so to the brink,
That he no more was thirsty when God’s will
Had shattered to his sense the last chain-link
By which he drew from Nature’s visible
The fresh well-water. Satisfied by this,
He sang of Adam’s paradise and smiled,
Remembering Vallombrosa. Therefore is
The place divine to English man and child—
We all love Italy.
That northern love of Italy—it is America’s too, is further set forth in another fancy-tinctured soliloquy:—
our italy.
Our Italy’s
The darling of the earth—the treasury, piled
With reveries of gentle ladies, flung
Aside, like ravelled silk, from life’s worn stuff—
With coins of scholars’s fancy, which, being rung
On work-day counter, still sound silver-proof—
In short, with all the dreams of dreamers young,
Before their heads have time for slipping off
Hope’s pillow to the gound. How oft, indeed,
We all have sent our souls out from the north,
On bare white feet which would not print nor bleed,
To climb the Alpine passes and look forth,
Where the low murmuring Lombard rivers lead
Their bee-like way to gardens almost worth
The sight which thou and I see afterward
From Tuscan Bellosguardo,* wide awake.
When standing on the actual, blessed sward
Where Galileo stood at nights to take
The vision of the stars, we find it hard,
Gazing upon the earth and heaven, to make
A choice of beauty. Therefore let us all
In England, or in any other land
Refreshed once by the fountain-rise and fall
Of dreams of this fair south,—who understand
A little how the Tuscan musical
Vowels do round themselves, as if they planned
Eternities of separate sweetness,—we
Who loved Sorrento vines in picture-book,
Or ere in wine-cup we pledged faith or glee—
Who loved Rome’s wolf, with demi-gods at suck,
Or ere we loved truth’s own divinity,—
Who loved, in brief, the classic hill and brook,
And Ovid’s dreaming tales, and Petrarch’s song,
Or ere we loved Love’s self!—why, let us give
The blessing of our souls, and wish them strong
To bear it to the height where prayers arrive,
When faithful spirits pray against a wrong;
To this great cause of southern men, who strive
In God’s name for man’s rights, and shall not fail!
________
*Galileo’s villa near Florence is built on an eminence called Bellosguardo.
________
Reviewed:
Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis, 1851.
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