E510913A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Morning Chronicle, 13 September 1851, p. 7.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 335–337.
From the Windows alluded to in the title of this fine poem, Mrs. E. Barrett Browning witnessed the recent events in Tuscany. Hope for Italy inspired her muse, and she saw in Pio Nono corroborations of her heart’s deep and fervent wishes. The poem, divided into two parts, in the first expresses those feelings—to which recent experience, however, puts a veto. In the second part, the tone is altered—the Austrian influence has become dominant.
The poet—we will not call her poetess, for Mrs. Barrett Browning’s mind is masculine—thinks it proper to account for the discrepancy between the two sections, and rightly points to it as a sufficient guarantee to the public of her truthfulness. She candidly tells us that, “though she certainly escaped the epidemic ‘falling sickness’ of enthusiasm for Pio Nono,” she “takes shame upon herself that she believed, like a woman, some royal oaths, and lost sight of the probable consequences of some obvious popular defects.” Alas! all turns not out in this earth according to the beatific visions of prophets and poets. The future still looms in the distance; and fulfilment still is dim in the future, “pinnacled deep.”
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace.
Mrs. Barrett Browning very gracefully calls Italy the “Juliet of nations,” in the following passages, which form the exordium and inauguration of the poem:—
i.
I heard last night a little child go singing
’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
‘O bella libertà, O bella!’ stringing
The same words still on notes he went in search
So high for, you concluded the upspringing
Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch
Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green;
And that the heart of Italy must beat,
While such a voice had leave to rise serene
’Twixt church and palace of a Florence street!—
A little child, too, who not long had been
By mother’s finger steadied on his feet;
And still O bella libertà he sang.
ii.
Then I thought, musing, of the innumerous
Sweet songs which for this Italy outrang
From older singers’ lips, who sang not thus
Exultingly and purely, yet, with pang
Sheathed into music, touched the heart of us
So finely that the pity scarcely pained!
I thought how Filicaja led on others,
Bewailers for their Italy enchained,
And how they called her childless among mothers,
Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained
Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers
Might a shamed sister—‘Had she been less fair
She were less wretched’—how, evoking so
From congregated wrong and heaped despair
Of men and women writhing under blow,
Harrowed and hideous in their filthy lair,
A personating image, wherein woe
Was rapt in beauty from offending much,
They called it Cybele, or Niobe,
Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such,
Where the whole world might drop for Italy
Those cadenced tears which burn not where they touch—
‘Juliet of nations, canst thou die as we?
And was the violet crown that crowned thy head
So over large, though new buds made it rough,
It slipped down and across thine eyelids dead,
O sweet, fair Juliet?’—Of such songs enough;
Too many of such complaints! Behold, instead,
Void at Verona, Juliet’s marble trough!
And void as that is, are all images
Men set between themselves and actual wrong,
To catch the weight of pity, meet the stress
Of conscience; though ’tis easier to gaze long
On personations, masks, and effigies,
Than to see live weak creatures crushed by strong.
We thought at first that these lines and the whole poem were in the terza rima of Dante; but a puzzled state of the ear soon led us to investigate the metre. They are, indeed, in a kind of terza rima, but not Dante’s, whose measure opens and closes each canto with a couplet; thus properly distinguishing stanza from canto, and providing for the fine movement of the ternal verse in each stanza. There is nothing of the stanza form in Mrs. Browning’s verses, which are, with an accidental exception or two, a series of triplets flowing on and on, and in and out, in harmony with the thought and feeling sought to be expressed. There is, in fact, no superinduced form, properly speaking, at all, but the rhythm runs very much as it might in prose, only the need of rhyming sometimes produces a diversion—sound usurping upon sense.
After all, in her treatment of the subject, Mrs. Browning is more artistic and poetic than political. Her dreams of liberty are connected with Angelo, Raffael, Pergolese, Virgil, Cicero, Catullus, Cæsar, Boccacio, Dante, Petrarca—all excellent names to conjure with, but fatal to the conjuror if the living and the present be cast into oblivion by the shadows of the dead and the past. At length the poet wakes to this perception:—
vii.
We do not serve the dead—the past is past!
God lives, and lifts his glorious mornings up
Before the eyes of men, who wake at last,
And put away the meats they used to sup,
And on the dry dust of the ground outcast
The dregs remaining of the ancient cup,
And turn to wakeful prayer and worthy act,
The dead, upon their awful ’vantage ground—
The sun not in their faces—shall abstract
No more our strength: we will not be discrowned
Through treasuring their crowns, nor deign transact
A barter of the present, in a sound,
For what was counted good in foregone days.
O Dead, ye shall no longer cling to us
With your stiff hands of dessicating praise,
And hold us backward by the garment thus,
To stay and laud you in long virelays!
Still, no! we will not be oblivious
Of our own lives, because ye lived before,
Nor of our acts, because ye acted well—
We thank you that ye first unlatched the door—
We will not make it inaccessible
By thankings in the doorway any more,
But will go onward to extinguish hell
With our fresh souls, our younger hope, and God’s
Maturity of purpose. Soon shall we
Be the dead, too! and, that our periods
Of life may round themselves to memory,
As smoothly as on our graves the funeral-sods,
We must look to it to excel as ye,
And bear our age as far, unlimited
By the last sea-mark! so, to be invoked
By future generations, as the dead.
viii.
’Tis true that when the dust of death has choked
A great man’s voice, the common words he said
Turn oracles—the meanings which he yoked
Like horses, draw like griffins!—this is true
And acceptable. Also I desire,
When men make record, with the flowers they strew,
‘Savonarola’s soul went out in fire
Upon our grand-duke’s piazza, and burned through
A moment first, or ere he did expire,
The veil betwixt the right and wrong, and showed
How near God sate and judged the judges there’—
Desire, upon the pavement overstrewed,
To cast my violets with as reverent care,
And prove that all the winters which have snowed
Cannot snow out the scent, from stones and air,
Of a sincere man’s virtues. This was he,
Savonarola, who, while Peter sank
With his whole boat-load, called courageously
‘Wake Christ, wake Christ!’—who having tried the tank
Of the church-waters used for baptistry
Ere Luther lived to spill them, said they stank!
Who also, by a princely deathbed, cried
‘Loose Florence, or God will not loose thy soul,’
While the Magnificent fell back and died
Beneath the star-looks, shooting from the cowl,
Which turned to wormwood bitterness the wide
Deep sea of his ambition. It were foul
To grudge Savonarola and the rest
Their violets! rather pay them quick and fresh!
The emphasis of death makes manifest
The eloquence of action in our flesh;
And men who, living, were but dimly guessed,
When once free from their life’s entangled mesh,
Show their full length in graves, or even indeed
Exaggerate their stature, in the flat,
To noble admirations which exceed
Nobly, nor sin in such excess. For that
Is wise and righteous. We, who are the seed
Of buried creatures, if we turned and spate
Upon our antecedents, we were vile.
Bring violets rather! If these had not walked
Their furlong, could we hope to walk our mile?
Therefore bring violets! Yet if we, self-baulked,
Stand still a-strewing violets all the while,
These had as well not moved, ourselves not talked
Of these. So rise up with a cheerful smile,
And, having strewn the violets, reap the corn,
And, having reaped and garnered, bring the plough
And draw new furrows ’neath the healthy morn,
And plant the great Hereafter in this Now.
These citations will sufficiently characterise the quality and manner of this admirable poem. For spirited sketches of Pio Nono, Mazzini, Duke Leopold, and Charles Albert, we refer to the work itself, which for perfect enjoyment requires quiet study.
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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