E620329A. Last Poems.
The Athenæum, 29 March 1862, pp. 421–422.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 367.
“Last Poems” is the last title which any one could desire to read on a book which bears the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Those who recollect reading her first poems must recollect also the strong impression stamped from that moment on their minds, that, whether she was right or wrong, fair or unfair, their writer was, in sweep of thought, in richness of culture, in pertinence of language (if not always in smoothness of music), the greatest English poetess that has ever lived;—womanly, it is true, because prejudiced by her affections—womanly in the tender tones of her music—womanly in a certain incompleteness (shadowed forth by herself in those last three lines of her own “Duchess May”:— [p. 422→]
And I smiled to think His greatness
Was around our incompleteness,
Round our restlessness, His rest.)
But Mrs. Browning was manly in learning, in courage (a courage at times amounting to vehemence), in defence of the desolate and the wronged. Within her frail body, which held out like a marvel against languor and malady, were combined the heart of a lion, the soul of a martyr, and the voice of a battle-trumpet. Here was a great genius, nurtured alike on study of the ancients and instinct for the moderns,—a genius which had a will, and a way, and a heart of its own,—such as separated her, once for all, from the choir of old-established poetesses, and which placed her in many cases in the wrong, because of her haste and her sympathy, and her unwillingness to “hear the other side.” We repeat, as the greatest, most accomplished poetess of our English times, her name will live, if only by her “Last Poems,” though these are merely the sequel to her first ones.
The passion which Mrs. Browning could throw into her verse was shown from the first. “Margret’s” passion, “Eve’s” passion in “The Drama of Exile,” the passion in “Aurora Leigh” (with all the turbulence and all the prosaic mistakes of that story), has never been approached by any former poetess. One can name Joanna Baillie, one can name Felicia Hemans, one can name L. E. L. (of whom Mrs. Browning wrote so beautifully—
Love learned, she had sung of lover and love);
but there has been nothing comparable to her passion, controlled, as it was, by a commanding inner purity. Let this poem speak for her:—
lord walter’s wife.
“But why do you go?” said the lady, while both sate under the yew,
And her eyes were alive in their depth, as the kraken beneath the sea-blue.
“Because I fear you,” he answered;—“because you are far too fair,
And able to strangle my soul in a mesh of your gold-coloured hair.”
“Oh, that,” she said, “is no reason! Such knots are quickly undone,
And too much beauty, I reckon, is nothing but too much sun.”
“Yet farewell so,” he answered;—“the sun-stroke’s fatal at times.
I value your husband, Lord Walter, whose gallop rings still from the limes.”
“Oh, that,” she said, “is no reason. You smell a rose through a fence:
If two should smell it, what matter? who grumbles, and where’s the pretence?”
But I,” he replied, “have promised another, when love was free,
To love her alone, alone, who alone and afar loves me.”
“Why, that,” she said, “is no reason. Love’s always free, I am told.
Will you vow to be safe from the headache on Tuesday, and think it will hold?”
“But you,” he replied, “have a daughter, a young little child, who was laid
In your lap to be pure; so I leave you; the angels would make me afraid.”
“Oh, that,” she said, “is no reason. The angels keep out of the way;
And Dora, the child, observes nothing, although you should please me and stay.”
At which he rose up in his anger,—“Why, now, you no longer are fair!
Why, now, you no longer are fatal, but ugly and hateful, I swear.”
At which she laughed out in her scorn.—“These men! Oh, these men, overnice,
Who are shocked if a colour not virtuous, is frankly put on by a vice.”
Her eyes blazed upon him—“And you! You bring us your vices so near
That we smell them! You think in our presence a thought ’twould defame us to hear!
“What reason had you, and what right,—I appeal to your soul from my life,—
To find me too fair as a woman! Why, sir, I am pure, and a wife.
Is the day-star too fair up above you? It burns you not. Dare you imply
I brushed you more close than the star does, when Walter had set me as high?
If a man finds a woman too fair, he means simply adapted too much
To uses unlawful and fatal. The praise!—shall I thank you for such?
Too fair?—not unless you misuse us! and surely if, once in awhile,
You attain to it, straightway you call us no longer too fair, but too vile.
A moment,—I pray your attention!—I have a poor word in my head
I must utter, though womanly custom would set it down better unsaid.
You grew, sir, pale to impertinence, once when I showed you a ring.
You kissed my fan when I dropped it. No matter!—I’ve broken the thing.
You did me the honour, perhaps, to be moved at my side now and then
In the senses—a vice, I have heard, which is common to beasts and some men.
Love’s a virtue for heroes!—as white as the snow on high hills,
And immortal as every great soul is that struggles, endures, and fulfils.
I love my Walter profoundly,—you, Maude, though you faltered a week,
For the sake of .. what was it? an eyebrow? or, less still, a mole on a cheek?
And since, when all’s said, you’re too noble to stoop to the frivolous cant
About crimes irresistible, virtues that swindle, betray and supplant,
I determined to prove to yourself that, whate’er you might dream or avow
By illusion, you wanted precisely no more of me than you have now.
There! Look me full in the face!—in the face. Understand, if you can,
That the eyes of such women as I am, are clean as the palm of a man.
Drop his hand, you insult him. Avoid us for fear we should cost you a scar—
You take us for harlots, I tell you, and not for the women we are.
You wronged me: but then I considered .. there’s Walter! And so at the end,
I vowed that he should not be mulcted, by me, in the hand of a friend.
Have I hurt you indeed? We are quits then. Nay, friend of my Walter, be mine!
Come Dora, my darling, my angel, and help me to ask him to dine.”
The same passion was carried by the same poetess into her politics. How, on making her home in Italy, she flung herself into the depths and the intimacies of the cause of revolution, reform, re-construction—without ruth for those who differed from her, without allowance, save that of sarcasm, for doubt or forbearance, are to be seen in her “Casa Guidi Windows,” and her “Poems before Congress.” But here we have the politician, the woman, the poetess, and the mother combined in a lyric like to which the world has not too many:—
MOTHER AND POET.
Turin, after News from Gaeta, 1861.
Dead! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead! Both my boys! When you sit at the feast
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
Let none look at me!
Yet I was a poetess only last year,
And good at my art, for a woman, men said;
But this woman, this, who is agonized here,
—The east sea and west sea rhyme on in her head
For ever instead.
What art can a woman be good at? Oh, vain!
What art is she good at, but hurting her breast
With the milk-teeth of babes, and a smile at the pain?
Ah boys, how you hurt! you were strong as you pressed,
And I proud, by that test.
What art’s for a woman? To hold on her knees
Both darlings! to feel all their arms round her throat,
Cling! strangle a little! to sew by degrees
And ’broider the long-clothes and neat little coat;
To dream and to doat.
To teach them .. It stings there! I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That a country’s a thing men should die for at need.
I prated of liberty, rights, and about
The tyrant cast out.
And when their eyes flashed .. O my beautiful eyes! ..
I exulted; nay, let them go forth at the wheels
Of the guns, and denied not. But then the surprise,
When one sits quite alone! Then one weeps, then one kneels!
God, how the house feels!
At first, happy news came, in gay letters moiled
With my kisses,—of camp-life and glory, and how
They both loved me; and, soon coming home to be spoiled,
In return would fan off every fly from my brow
With their green laurel-bough.
Then was triumph at Turin: “Ancona was free!”
And some one came out of the cheers in the street,
With a face pale as stone, to say something to me.
My Guido was dead! I fall down at his feet,
While they cheered in the street.
I bore it; friends soothed me; my grief looked sublime
As the ransom of Italy. One boy remained
To be leant on and walked with, recalling the time
When the first grew immortal, while both of us strained
To the height he had gained.
And letters still came, shorter, sadder, more strong,
Writ now but in one hand, “I was not to faint,—
One loved me for two—would be with me ere long:
And Viva l’Italia!—he died for, our saint,
Who forbids our complaint.”
My Nanni would add, “He was safe, and aware
Of a presence that turned off the balls,—was imprest
It was Guido himself, who knew what I could bear,
And how ’twas impossible, quite dispossessed,
To live on for the rest.”
On which, without pause, up the telegraph-line
Swept smoothly the next news from Gaeta:—Shot.
Tell his mother. Ah, ah, “his,” “their” mother,—not “mine.”
No voice says “My mother” again to me. What?
You think Guido forgot?
Are souls straight so happy that, dizzy with Heaven,
They drop earth’s affections, conceive not of woe?
I think not. Themselves were too lately forgiven
Through That Love and Sorrow which reconciled so
The Above and Below.
O Christ of the five wounds, who look’dst through the dark
To the face of Thy mother! consider, I pray,
How we common mothers stand desolate, mark,
Whose sons, not being Christs, die with eyes turned away,
And no last word to say!
Both boys dead? but that’s out of nature. We all
Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one.
’Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall;
And, when Italy’s made, for what end is it done
If we have not a son?
Ah, ah, ah! when Gaeta’s taken, what then?
When the fair wicked queen sits no more at her sport
Of the fire-balls of death crushing souls out of men!
When the guns of Cavalli with final retort
Have cut the game short?
When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee,
When your flag takes all heaven for its white, green, and red.
When you have your country from mountain to sea,
When King Victor has Italy’s crown on his head,
(And I have my Dead)—
What then? Do not mock me. Ah, ring your bells low,
And burn your lights faintly! My country is there,
Above the star pricked by the last peak of snow:
My Italy’s there, with my brave civic Pair,
To disfranchise despair!
Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,
And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn;
But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length
Into wail such as this—and we sit on forlorn
When the man-child is born.
Dead! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Both! both my boys! If in keeping the feast
You want a great song for your Italy free,
Let none look at me!
“[This was Laura Savio, of Turin, a poetess and patriot, whose sons were killed at Ancona and Gaeta.]”
Few, we conceive, will read the above unmoved, though many will be fretted by the lawless inequality of the versification. Other extracts, verses, thoughts, touches of character and glories of fancy, could be gathered by the score from these “Last Poems,” which may neither be taken up nor parted from without emotion.
[Henry Fothergill Chorley]
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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