E620324A. Last Poems.
The Globe and Traveller, 24 March 1862, p. 1.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 367.
With a mournful welcome England will receive these few last poems by her greatest poetess—whom, but for gentle memories of much feebler lyres, we should call her only poetess. England’s welcome of this little book is doubly mournful. It is sad because the sweet, passionate singer is no more—sadder because, in her latter days, she turned the light of her countenance away from her native land. To some ardent admirers of England and of her poetess, too, this assertion will sound like an accusation, which they will refute by saying, “Not that she loved England less, but that she loved Italy more.” But we are bound to say (judging solely from her works) that she did “love England less.” The cause of the oppressed—the cause of liberty and the cause of beauty, are causes for a true poet’s pleading, with all the might of his heart. Feelings of anger and scorn against lukewarm friends of such causes—against the cowardice of mammon-worship and self-worship, naturally break forth in words of fire. The true poet as well as the true prophet will denounce his own land if the spirit move him thereto. He must hate its sins with a burning sorrowful hatred;—such hatred, we take it, is in the nature of the loftiest patriotism; that patriotism De Quincey has in his mind when he speaks of it as one of the best and noblest human feelings, as opposed to nationality, which he describes as mean and narrow-minded. The poet cries “anathema!” on the sins of a great country; the less enthusiastic and more practical politician murmurs “amen,” and strives to do his stroke of work towards reformation and expiation, or, if of an abstract philosophical turn, he ponders on the great terrestrial truth that there is no good without evil, no light without shadow—and that England’s sins may be partly inseparable from her greatness, such as it is. We who grow up and live amidst its influence for good and evil cannot see what those can see who go out from among us—nor can they see what we see. This poet has seen and known both; but of late years she had become more Italian than English. England has not grudged her only poetess to that awakening land. The singer who watched by “Casa Guidi Windows” has turned the hearts of thousands towards a free and united Italy. She has helped to strike off the chains from that captive land. But thanks are due to England’s free institutions and fine vigorous breeding that Mrs. Browning became the poet and the friend of Italian freedom.
The contents of this little volume are marked by her peculiar characteristics as a poet. None of the poems are long. They are, as the preface informs us, “given as they occur on a list drawn up last June. A few had already been printed in periodicals.” Among these poems are some on Italian matters, written since the “Poems before Congress,” and in a somewhat disappointed tone, as may be supposed. In “First News from Villafranca” she cries:—
Peace, peace, peace do you say?
What uncontested undenied?
Because we triumph we succumb?
A pair of Emperors stand in the way,
(One of whom is a man beside)
To sign and seal our cannon dumb,
No not Napoleon—he, who mused
At Paris and at Milan spake,
And at Solferino led the fight
Not he we trusted, honoured, used
Our hopes and hearts for—till they break—
Even so you tell us—in his sight.
Leaving the poems on the Italian Renovation, which are full of fire and a certain vehement abruptness which belongs rather to the politician than to the poet, we select for our readers a short poem which will remind them of other quaint fancies with which Mrs. Browning has adorned a deep truth. It is by no means faultless in execution, but its very faults remind one of her peculiar poetic genius. No one else could have written
A Musical Instrument.
i.
What was he doing, the great God Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
ii.
He tore out a reed, the great God Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river;
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away
Ere he brought it out of the river.
iii.
High on the shore sat the great God Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
iv.
He cut it short did the great God Pan
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring
And notched the poor, dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
v.
“This is the way,” laughed the great God Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river!)
“The only way since Gods began
To make sweet music they could succeed.”
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
vi.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river,
Blinding sweet, O great God Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
vii.
Yet half a beast is the great God Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a Poet out of a man;
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—
For the reed which grows never more again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
There are some paraphrastic translations from the Greek at the end of the volume, which by some scholarly readers will be preferred to the original poems. This little volume we may take as the last utterance of a rare genius who has passed away bodily from us, but whose spirit will live with us while England lives—even in the memory of men of far future ages.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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