E620402A. Last Poems.
The Guardian, 2 April 1862, p. 330.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
At the close of Dean Ellicott’s valuable contribution to Aids to Faith we find a few words of poetry. The divine, whose forte is literal and grammatical commentary, when concluding an essay on Holy Writ composed with a special purpose, uses not his own words, but another’s, to express the sense of Infinity which has poured itself into his soul from the sacred volume. When he reminded himself and his readers that
God’s greatness flows around our incompleteness—
Round our restlessness his rest,
he quoted the last lines of the “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” in which Elizabeth Barrett had described herself as listening to the slow toll of a death-bell, and the song of the little birds in the east and west, while, in wondering yet meek submission, she sat by the grave of a child three years old, and smiled.
When Elizabeth Barrett became Mrs. Browning, a change came over some parts of her nature, but not over this. She threw herself more decidedly into the interests of national life and politics, she touched more frequently and more boldly, though not always more pleasantly, the depths of human passion; she gave more study to the outward aspects of being, and to language, as the outward aspect of thought but she did not forget the immensities of the invisible world in which she moved like a shadow. She never lost a child; yet with her arms round her little son, she felt and wrote like one who might any day lose him, and declared that her love knew the secret of grief. When little Mattie dies, aged but thirteen a month ago, a poor gay child, who had not caught “the octave-stretch forlorn” of a matured and larger wisdom (it is in these “last poems” that we read of her), how is her place altered in the thoughts of the deep-thinking woman:—
Just so young but yesternight,
Now she is old as death.
Meek, obedient in your sight,
Gentle to a beck or breath
Only on last Monday! Yours,
Answering you like silver bells
Lightly touched! An hour matures:
You can teach her nothing else.
She has seen the mystery hid
Under Egypt’s pyramid:
By these eyelids pale and close
Now she knows what Rhamses knows.
But these reflections come from no cold philosophy. The change is recognised as being painful and even dreadful, because it is so great. If suddenly we feel
Some dear child we used to scold,
Praise, love both ways, kiss and tease,
Teach and tumble as our own,
All its curls about our knees,
Rise up suddenly full-grown—
Who could wonder such a sight
Made a woman mad outright?
Show me Michael with the sword
Rather than such angels, Lord!
Yet all the angels of God are good, to those whose hearts accept His dispensations, even after a struggle. We might look far for a picture of that inward combat with sorrow, which issues in the perfect work of patience, more profound and pathetic than that which is contained in the following extracts from “De Profundis.” The sufferer at first knocks at the door of Nature; and asks her
Only to loose those pilgrim shoon,
(Too early worn and grimed) with sweet
Cold deathly touch to these tired feet,
Till days go out which now go on;
Only to lift the turf unmown
From off the earth where it has grown,
Some cubit space, and say, “Behold,
Creep in, poor heart, beneath that fold,
Forgetting how the days go on.”
This is to ask of Nature more than she will always grant; but it is far too little to ask of God:—
A voice reproves me thereupon,
More sweet than Nature’s when the drone
Of bees is sweetest, and more deep
Than when the rivers overleap
The shuddering pines, and thunder on.
God’s voice, not Nature’s! Night and noon
He sits upon the great white throne
And listens for the Creature’s praise.
What babble we of days and days?
The Day-Spring He, whose days go on.
He reigns above, He reigns alone:
Systems burn out and leave His throne:
Fair mists of Seraphs melt and fall
Around Him, changeless amid all,—
Ancient of Days, whose days go on.
He reigns below, He reigns alone,
And, having life in love forgone,
Beneath the crown of sovran thorns,
He reigns the Jealous God. Who mourns
Or rules with Him, while days go on?
By anguish which made pale the sun,
I hear Him charge His saints that none
Among His creatures anywhere
Blaspheme against Him with despair,
However darkly days go on.
Take from my head the thorn-wreath brown!
No mortal grief deserves that crown.
O supreme Love, chief Misery,
The sharp regalia are for Thee
Whose days eternally go on.
For us, whatever’s undergone,
Thou knowest, willest, what is done.
Grief may be joy misunderstood;
Only the Good discerns the good.
I trust Thee while my days go on.
Whatever’s lost, it first was won:
We will not struggle nor impugn.
Perhaps the cup was broken here,
That Heaven’s new wine might show more clear.
I praise Thee while my days go on.
I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on:
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on.
And having in Thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As child drops his pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall,
Smiling—So I. Thy Days go on.
The child, dropping its bright pebble down the well, and listening with a smile to its sound in falling, comes worthily from the same mind as the picture of
Lucretius, nobler than his mood;
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said, “No God,”
Finding no bottom.
Happily, there is no doubting with which of these two figures, each from her own hand, Mrs. Browning had the deeper sympathy. Her “last poems” are bound to her first by the strong tie of religion. A true poet, and a good man, when not thirty years old, declared his belief, we might almost say his faith, that Nature never betrayed the heart that loved her, and that, through all the years of life, she led on from joy to joy. He had a better stay than Nature during his long course of more than eighty years; but, if we divide the eighty years into two periods of forty, we shall see that the current of poetic vigour was exhausting itself before the expiration of the earlier period. The brook trickled on, and greened its banks still; but it had lost the volume of the forest stream, the roar of the mountain cataract. He had found deep springs among the lakes and hills; but poetry has deeper sources still. A weak woman, long frail in body and shaken in mind, impelled her thoughts in search of them with all the excited vigour of a suffering nature, and the stream, though bearing with it from to time incongruous fragments of the lower strata, never ceased to spring vigorously upwards, and to sparkle with the true light of heaven.
Mrs. Browning has sometimes been accused of estimating too highly her own powers. We think the accusation mistaken. She believed in the power of poetry, and was certain of her own sincere devotion to it. She thought (and rightly) that her own poetic faculties would repay assiduous cultivation; and that cultivation she gave. The roughnesses of her earlier works (of which some traces remain to the last) are to not be ascribed to want of pains. She did her best to produce her ideas in their fulness; and, this done, she declined to tamper with their force by stippling them. In consequence of this genuine way of working, her style was always improving, though never at the expense of her feelings and thoughts. She continued to grow in polish without decreasing in power. But yet she never wholly lost her distinctive mannerism. Those who only know her by chance extracts or occasional verses in a magazine must not expect to appreciate her. Her poems must be loved as a whole, before it will be seen how worthy they are of love. And she would much sooner have had them loved than admired. Yet they claim admiration, and will gain it. We know of no living English poetess who can fill her chair. Her harp is not silent, though her fingers have ceased to touch it. Its chords will still answer to a vast compass of true and genuine emotion. They will respond to the tough, or even to the voice of a child; and if the storm of deeper feeling sweeps over them, they will murmur forth a stern yet pathetic symphony, which will mingle readily with the deeds of earnest men.
This posthumous volume of her poems contains many beauties, and some eccentricities. It is idle to say that her writings would not be complete without it. They will be incomplete with it; for her ideas and aspirations were too great to be moulded smoothly off in the compass of one mortal life. But, in poetry and in life alike, if the general aim be true and noble, a grand incompleteness is better than a small perfection.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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