E551200A. The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York, 1854).
Peterson’s Magazine, December 1855, pp. 377–382.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 277–282.
The first of English female poets, living or dead, is Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her handling of the language is masterly. Her imagination is pure and high. Her descriptions paint the scene so vividly that the reader actually seems to behold it. The affluence of her learning is such, that the most ordinary objects become transfigured by it, as in the “Paradise Lost” of Milton. Her skill as an artist is wonderful. Nor is she deficient in the more obvious qualities of the poet. Her perception of melody, though less fine than that of Tennyson, is unusually delicate. When the occasion demands it, she can melt with tenderness, glow with indignation, or prostrate herself in the fervor of religious adoration. She is eminently thoughtful. So masculine, indeed, is she in this particular, that some critics have considered her cold and statuesque. But it is the coldness, if coldness there is, of colossal strength. What Michael Angelo was among painters, that she is among the female poets. In proportion to the intellectual development of the reader, will be his or her pleasure in the perusal of Mrs. Browning. Praise like this may seem exaggerated to some. But a few of her best poems will show that we are justified in our commendation.
We open the volume at “Cowpers Grave.” In this poem there is a depth of feeling, as profound as in the most passionate of Byron’s. Yet, even in its heart-wrung tones, good taste is never offended; as is too often the case with the latter. She never sinks into bombast, all is real emotion. As a masterly exposition of Cowper’s peculiar kind of insanity, the poem has a psychological value apart from its other merits. It offers as clear an elucidation of his condition as any, or all of the essays which have been multiplied upon the subject. It brings up before us the actual Cowper, tossing on his fevered bed in the harrowing visions of insanity, or haunted by the terror of coming madness, from which he seeks in vain to flee. The poem has the melancholy cadence of wind among the pines, in a hillside grave-yard, as the winter night shuts in.
It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart’s decaying—
It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying:
Yet let the grief and humbleness, as low as silence, languish!
Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish.
Oh, poets! from a maniac’s tongue, was poured the deathless singing!
Oh, Christians! at your cross of hope, a hopeless hand was clinging!
Oh, men! this man in brotherhood, your weary paths beguiling,
Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!
And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory,
And how, when one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He wore no less a loving face because so broken hearted;
He shall be strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation,
And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration;
Nor ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken;
Named softly, as the household name of one whom God hath taken.
With quiet sadness and no gloom, I learn to think upon him,
With meekness, that is gratefulness to God whose Heaven had won him—
Who suffered once the madness-cloud, to His own love to blind him;
But gently led the blind along where breath and bird could find him;
And wrought within his shattered brain, such quick poetic senses,
As hills have language for, and stars, harmonious influences!
The pulse of dew upon the grass, kept his within its number;
And silent shadows from the trees refreshed him like a slumber.
Wild timid hares were drawn from woods to share his home-caresses,
Uplooking to his human eyes with sylvan tendernesses:
The very world, by God’s constraint, from falsehood’s ways removing,
Its women and its men became beside him, true and loving.
But while, in blindness he remained unconscious of the guiding,
And things provided came without the sweet sense of providing,
He testified this solemn truth, though phrenzy desolated—
Nor man, nor Nature satisfy, whom only God created!
Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother while she blesses [p. 378→]
And drops upon his burning brow, the coolness of her kisses;
That turns his fevered eyes around—“My mother! where’s my mother?”—
As if such tender words and looks could come from any other!
The fever gone, with leaps of heart, he sees her bending o’er him;
Her face all pale from watchful love, the unweary love she bore him!—
Thus, woke the poet from the dream, his life’s long fever gave him,
Beneath these deep pathetic Eyes, which closed in death, to save him!
Thus? oh, not thus! no type of earth could image that awaking,
Wherein he scarcely heard the chant of seraphs, round him breaking,
Or felt the new immortal throb of soul from body parted;
But felt those eyes alone, and knew “My Saviour! not deserted!”
Deserted! who hath dreamt that when the cross in darkness rested,
Upon the Victim’s hidden face, no love was manifested?
What frantic hands outstretched have e’er the atoning drops averted,
What tears have washed them from the soul, that one should be deserted?
Deserted! God could separate from His own essence rather:
And Adam’s sins have swept between the righteous Son and Father;
Yea, once, Immanuel’s orphaned cry, his universe hath shaken—
It went up single, echoless, ‘My God, I am forsaken!’
It went up from the Holy’s lips amid his lost creation,
That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation;
That earth’s worst phrenzies, marring hope, should mar not hope’s fruition,
And I, on Cowper’s grave, should see his rapture, in a vision!
We pass next to “The Cry of the Children.” This grand poem, which alternates from the blast of a trumpet to the hopeless cry of despair, has the factory and mining children of England for its theme. It is a passionate protest against the Mammon-worship of the age, or rather the systematic cruelties to which that worship leads. There is the instinct of true art, in Mrs. Browning’s contrast between a spring morning in the fields, and the same morning as it appears to the weary children, imprisoned within the droning, stifling factory. We quote these portions.
Do ye hear the children weeping, oh, my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers—
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows:
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the West—
But the young, young children, oh, my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!—
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
* * * * * * * *
“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,
Oh, ye wheels,” (breaking out in a mad moaning)—
“Stop! be silent for to-day!”
The conclusion is mournful as the moan of the sea, on a starless night, when the tempest begins to mutter. It is interpenetrated also by a deep philosophy. Parts of it seem to be actually written with blood, wrung from the anguished hearts of children.
And well may the children weep before you;
They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun:
They know the grief of man, but not the wisdom;
They sink in man’s despair, without its calm—
Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom—
Are martyrs, by the pang without the pain—
Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly
No dear remembrance keep—
Are orphans of the earthly love and Heavenly:
Let them weep! let them weep!
They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see,
For they mind you of their angels in their places,
With eyes meant for Deity;
“How long,” they say, “how long, oh, cruel Nation,
Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart—
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, oh, our tyrants,
And your purple shows your path;
But the child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence
Than the strong man in his wrath!”
Those who deny to Mrs. Browning the “pathos of tears,” who say she is cold and intellectual, should read her poem, “A Child Asleep.” It is not, we know, as intensely emotional as Mrs. Norton’s address to the children from whom she had been parted. But that too sad poem is [p. 379→] full of the aroma of a broken heart; a heart, which has been trodden upon, and crushed, and whose agony rises up to make the verse immortal; and God forbid that any other woman, from now to the end of Time, should become a poet by such a living martyrdom! Mrs. Browning’s “A Child Asleep,” does not rise to such a climax of agony. The subject, indeed, forbids it. Its sadness is more suggestive than real. Even when its allusions are of death, they come to us, like a sunset landscape in November, brimming through golden mist. We do not see the grave, we do not think of the coffined face, but instead we hear angels in the air, and see, far off, celestial visions.
How he sleepeth! having drunken
Weary childhood’s mandragore,
From his pretty eyes have sunken
Pleasures, to make room for more—
Sleeping near the withered nosegay, which he pulled the day before.
Nosegays! leave them for the waking:
Throw them earthward where they grow:
Dim are such beside the breaking
Amaranths he looks unto—
Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.
Heaven-flowers, rayed by shadows golden
From the palms they sprang beneath
Now perhaps divinely holden,
Swing against him in a wreath—
We may think so from the quickening of his bloom and of his breath.
Vision unto vision calleth,
While the young child dreameth on:
Fair, oh, dreamer, thee befalleth
With the glory thou hast won!
Darker wert thou in the garden, yestermorn, by Summer sun.
We should see the spirits ringing
Round thee—were the clouds away
’Tis the child-heart draws them, singing
In the silent-seeming clay—
Singing?—Stars that seem the mutest, go in music all the way.
As the moths around a taper,
As the bees around a rose,
As the gnats around a vapor—
So the spirits group and close
Round about a holy childhood, as if drinking its repose.
Shapes of brightness overlean thee,
With their diadems of youth
On the ringlets which half screen thee
While thou smilest—not in sooth
Thy smile—but the overfair one, dropt from some ethereal mouth.
Haply it is angels’ duty,
During slumber, shade by shade
To fine down this childish beauty,
To the thing it must be made,
Ere the world shall bring it praises, or the tomb shall see it fade.
Softly, softly! make no noises!
Now he lieth dead and dumb—
Now he hears the angels’ voices
Folding silence in the room—
Now he muses deep the meaning of the Heaven-words as they come.
Speak not! he is consecrated—
Breathe no breath across his eyes:
Lifted up and separated
On the hand of God he lies,
In a sweetness beyond touching—held in cloistral sanctities.
Could ye bless him—father—mother?
Bless the dimple in his cheek?
Dare ye look at one another,
And the benediction speak?
Would ye not break out in weeping, and confess yourselves too weak?
He is harmless—ye are sinful—
Ye are troubled—he, at ease:
From his slumber, virtue winful
Floweth outward with increase—
Dare not bless him! but be blessed by his peace—and go in peace.
“The Cry of the Human” is pervaded with a deep religious philosophy. We owe this noble strain to the Christian as much as to the woman or the poet. The very spirit of the gospels breathes in its every line. Never before, out of Holy Writ, has the lesson been more forcibly told, that, while in prosperity we forget our Maker, in adversity we fly to him. Alas! that it should be so true, that the lips which cry, “God be pitiful,” rarely say, “God be praised.” But to the poem .
“There is no God,” the foolish saith—
But none, “There is no sorrow;”
And Nature oft, the cry of faith,
In bitter need will borrow:
Eyes which the preacher could not school,
By wayside graves are raised;
And lips say, “God be pitiful,”
Who ne’er said, “God be praised.”
Be pitiful, oh, God!
The tempest stretches from the steep
The shadow of its coming;
The beasts grow tame, and near us creep,
As help were in the human:
Yet, while the cloud-wheels roll and grind,
We spirits tremble under!—
The hills have echoes; but we find
No answer for the thunder.
Be pitiful, oh, God!
The battle hurtles on the plains—
Earth feels new scythes upon her:
We reap our brothers for the wains,
And call the harvest—honor—
Draw face to face, front line to line,
One image all inherit—
Then kill, curse on, by that same sign,
Clay, clay—and spirit, spirit.
Be pitiful, oh, God!
The plague runs festering through the town—
And never a bell is tolling;
And corpses jostled ’neath the moon,
Not to the dead-cart’s rolling:
The young child calleth for the cup—
The strong man brings it weeping;
The mother from her babe looks up,
And shrieks away in sleeping.
Be pitiful, oh, God! [-p. 380→]
The plague of gold strikes far and near—
And deep and strong it enters:
This purple chimar which we wear,
Makes madder than the centaur’s.
Our thoughts grow blank, our words grow strange;
We cheer the pale gold-diggers—
Each soul is worth so much on ’Change,
And marked, like sheep, with figures.
Be pitiful, oh, God!
The curse of gold upon the land,
The lack of bread enforces—
The rail-cars snort from strand to strand,
Like more of Death’s White Horses!
The rich preach “rights” and future days,
And hear no angel scoffing:
The poor die mute—with starving gaze
On corn-ships in the offing.
Be pitiful, oh, God!
We meet together at the feast—
To private mirth betake us—
We stare down in the wine-cup, lest
Some vacant chair should shake us!
We name delight, and pledge it round—
“It shall be ours to-morrow!”
God’s seraphs! do your voices sound
As sad in naming sorrow?
Be pitiful, oh, God!
We sit together, with the skies,
The steadfast skies, above us:
We look into each other’s eyes—
“And how long will you love us?”
The eyes grow dim with prophecy,
The voices, low and breathless—
“Till death us part!”—oh, words to be
Our best for love the deathless!
Be pitiful, dear God!
We tremble by the harmless bed
Of one loved and departed—
Our tears drop on the lips that said
Last night, “Be stronger hearted![”]
Oh, God—to clasp those fingers close,
And yet to feel so lonely!—
To see a light on dearest brows,
Which is the daylight only!
Be pitiful, oh, God!
The happy children come to us,
And look up in our faces:
They ask us—was it thus, and thus,
When we were in their places?
We cannot speak:—we see anew
The hills we used to live in;
And feel our mother’s smile press through
The kisses she is giving.
Be pitiful, oh, God!
We pray together at the kirk,
For mercy, mercy, solely—
Hands weary with the evil work,
We lift them to the Holy!
The corpse is calm below our knee—
Its spirit, bright before Thee—
Between them, worse than either, we—
Without the rest or glory!
Be pitiful, oh, God!
We leave the communing of men,
The murmur of the passions;
And live alone, to live again
With endless generations.
Are we so brave? The sea and sky
In silence lift their mirrors;
And, glassed therein, our spirits high
Recoil from their own terrors.
Be pitiful, oh, God!
We sit on hills our childhood wist,
Woods, hamlets, streams, beholding:
The sun strikes, through the farthest mist,
The city’s spire to golden.
The city’s golden spire it was,
When hope and health were strongest,
But now it is the church-yard grass,
We look upon the longest.
Be pitiful, oh, God!
And soon all vision waxeth dull—
Men whisper, “He is dying:”
We cry no more, “Be pitiful!”
We have no strength for crying:
No strength, no need! Then, Soul of mine,
Look up and triumph rather—
Lo! in the depth of God’s Divine,
The Son adjures the Father—
Be pitiful, oh, God!
We have alluded to the descriptive power of Mrs. Browning. In one of her longer poems, the “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” there is a scene, in which a horse and rider leaps from a castle wall; and so graphically is it delineated, that we hear the very snorting of the steed, and see his affrighted, blood-shot eye, as he is spurred to his death. The story of the poem is this. The Duchess May, a heroine of old feudal times, is sought by her guardian’s son, but loves another, with whom she finally elopes. The rejected suitor, with the grim baron, his father, gives pursuit, but being too late to prevent the marriage, sits down to beleaguer the successful rival in his castle. Cooped up, week after week, in the narrow walls, the garrison at last begins to suffer from famine, Moved by the sight of innocent women and babes, the wives and children of his retainers, dying before his eyes, the husband resolves to sacrifice himself, in order to save their lives: and accordingly directs the steed, on which he had borne off the Duchess May, to be led up to the highest tower, intending to leap, with him, down below. The young wife, praying in her closet, hears the noise of the hoofs, and going out, learns, from the unwilling groom, her lord’s intention. The tale is rehearsed, while a chapel bell is tolling, and the “toll slowly,” coming in between the narrator’s words, fore-shadows, from the first, the tragedy.
Low she dropt her head, and lower, till her hair coiled on the floor—
Toll slowly.
And tear after tear you heard, fall distinct at any word
Which you might be listening for.
“Get thee in, thou soft ladie!—here is never a place for thee!
Toll slowly.
Braid thy hair and clasp thy gown, that thy beauty in its moan
May find grace with Leigh of Leigh.”
She stood up in bitter case, with a pale yet steady face—
Toll slowly.
Like a statue thunderstruck, which, though quivering, seems to look
Right against the thunder-place. [p. 381→]
And she does not go in. She takes the rein herself, and leads the horse up the stair, the sagacious steed following, “meek as a hound.” Attaining the battlement, her husband, who suspects her purpose, beseeches her to return; but she will not. Meekly, she says, she has done all his biddings; but this she cannot. If he dies, she will die. He leaps into “the selle,” or saddle, to escape from her; but she clings to his knee. She had ridden with him, she declares, as a happy, triumphant bride, when he came through the castle-gate; and she will ride with him now, when he leaps from the castle wall. The crisis of the siege arrives, while he is still pleading; and she still refusing, with the heroic abnegation of a true woman.
Ho! the breach yawns into ruin, and roars up against her suing—
Toll slowly.
With the inarticulate din, and the dreadful falling in—
Shrieks of doing and undoing!
Twice he wrung her hands in twain; but the small hands closed again—
Toll slowly.
Back he reined the steed—back, back! but she trailed along his track,
With a frantic clasp and strain!
Evermore the foeman pour through the crash of windows and door—
Toll slowly.
And the shouts of Leigh and Leigh, and the shrieks of “kill!” and “flee!”
Strike up clear the general roar.
Thrice he wrung her hands in twain—but they closed and clung again—
Toll slowly.
Wild she clung, as one, withstood, clasps a Christ upon the rood,
In a spasm of deathly pain.
She clung wild and she clung mute—with her shuddering lips half-shut—
Toll slowly.
Her head fallen as in swound—hair and knee swept on the ground—
She clung wild to stirrup and foot.
Back he reined his steed, back-thrown on the slippery coping stone—
Toll slowly.
Back the iron hoofs did grind, on the battlement behind,
Whence a hundred feet went down.
And his heel did press and goad on the quivering flank bestrode,
Toll slowly.
“Friends, and brothers! save my wife! Pardon, sweet, in change for life—
Toll slowly.
But I ride alone to God!”
Straight as if the Holy name did upbreathe her as a flame—
Toll slowly.
She upsprang, she rose upright!—in his selle she sat in sight;
By her love she overcame.
And her head was on his breast, where she smiled as one at rest—
Toll slowly.
“Ring,” she cried, “oh, vesper-bell, in the beechwood’s old chapelle!
But the passing bell rings best.”
They have caught out at the rein, which Sir Guy threw loose—in vain—
Toll slowly.
For the horse in stark despair, with his front hoofs poised in air,
On the last verge, rears amain.
And he hangs, he rocks between—and his nostrils curdle in—
Toll slowly.
And he shivers head and hoof—and the flakes of foam fall off;
And his face grows fierce and thin!
And a look of human woe, from his staring eyes did go—
Toll slowly.
And a sharp cry uttered he, in a foretold agony
Of the headlong death below——
And, “Ring, ring—thou passing-bell,” still she cried, “i’ the old chapelle!”
Toll slowly.
Then back toppling, a crashing back—a dead weight flung out to wrack,
Horse and riders overfell!
Keats’ “Ode To A Grecian Urn” has more of the true antique feeling, than any other, perhaps, in the English language. If there is a poem that rivals it, it is “The Dead Pan” of Mrs. Browning. This poem is founded on a tradition, mentioned in Plutarch, that, at the hour of the Saviour’s agony, a cry of “Great Pan is Dead,” swept across the waters in hearing of certain mariners, and simultaneously the Pagan oracles ceased, and were dumb forever after, while all their divinities perished. In a strain of high-wrought eloquence, mingled with irony, the poet invokes the gods of Greece; and such a gallery of classic portraits is to be found nowhere else in English verse. What grand scorn in the description of Jupiter’s Eagle, old and blind and desolate, and shivering in the cold! What sensuous beauty in proud Juno on her golden bed! What a picture is that of the dead Venus, lying with the dead Loves huddled about her, “frore as taken in a snow-storm!” We have not space for the entire poem, but quote its opening stanzas.
Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,
Can ye listen in your silence?
Can your mystic voices tell us
Where ye hide? In floating islands
With a wind that evermore
Keeps you out of sight of shore?
Pan, Pan is dead.
In what revels are ye sunken,
In old Ethiopia?
Have the Pygmies made you drunken,
Bathing in mandragora,
Your divine pale lips that shiver,
Like the lotus in the river?
Pan, Pan is dead.
Do ye sit there still in slumber,
In gigantic Alpine rows?
The black poppies out of number
Nodding, dripping from your brows
To the red lees of your wine—
And so kept alive and fine?
Pan, Pan is dead.
Or lie crushed your stagnant corses,
Where the silver spheres roll on, [p. 382→]
Stung to life by centric forces
Thrown like rays out from the sun?—
While the smoke of your old altars
Is the shroud that round you welters?
Great Pan is dead.
* * * * * * * *
Jove, that right hand is unloaded,
Whence the thunder did prevail;
While in idiocy of godhead,
Thou art staring the stars pale!
And thine eagle, blind and old,
Roughs his feathers in the cold.
Pan, Pan is dead.
Where, oh, Juno, is the glory
Of thy regal look and tread!
Will they lay, for evermore, thee,
On thy dim, straight golden bed?
Will thy queendom all lie hid
Meekly under either lid?
Pan, Pan is dead.
Ha, Apollo! Floats his golden
Hair, all mist-like where he stands;
While the Muses hang enfolding
Knee and foot with faint wild hands?
’Neath the clanging of thy bow,
Niobe looked lost as thou!
Pan, Pan is dead.
Shall the casque with its brown iron,
Pallas’ broad blue eyes, eclipse—
And no hero take inspiring
From the God-Greek of her lips?
’Neath her olive dost thou sit,
Mars the mighty, cursing it?
Pan, Pan is dead.
Bacchus, Bacchus! on the panther
He swoons—bound with his own vines!
And his Mænads slowly saunter,
Head aside, among the pines,
While they murmur dreamingly—
“Evohe—ah—evohe—!”
Ah, Pan is dead.
Neptune lies beside the trident,
Dull and senseless as a stone:
And old Pluto deaf and silent
Is cast out into the sun.
Ceres smileth stern thereat—
“We all now are desolate——”
Now Pan is dead.
Aphrodite! dead and driven
As thy native foam, thou art,
With the cestus long done heaving
On the white calm of thy heart!
Ai Adonis! At that shriek,
Not a tear runs down her cheek—
Pan, Pan is dead.
And the Loves we used to know from
One another—huddled lie,
Frore as taken in a snow-storm,
Close beside her tenderly—
As if each had weakly tried
Once to kiss her as he died.
Pan, Pan is dead.
Mrs. Browning is not without faults. The metres she sometimes uses are so artificial that the reader’s attention is distracted from the thought. Her rhymes are frequently so far-fetched as to produce a similar result. She sometimes forgets the poet in the dialectician. She is, perhaps, too uniformly sad. But, nevertheless, her superiority cannot be disputed over other female poets in the language. Her “Casa Guidi Windows,” alone, would render her immortal. We regret that our space does not allow us, at present, to consider that grand poem. But it deserves a paper by itself.
Charles J. Peterson.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 2 vols., New York: C.S. Francis, 1854.
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