E620405A. Last Poems.
The Critic, 5 April 1862, p. 340.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
It was said shortly before Mrs. Browning’s death that she had been engaged for some time upon a poem longer and more ambitious than any which we have in this volume. Its sad title, however, must take away this hope from those persons who may hitherto have cherished it. If there be any other relics of her muse in existence they can only be incomplete and fragmentary—faint snatches of a song, the notes of which have fallen unformed from the singer’s mouth.
These “last poems” which we have now before us are far easier reading than the “Seraphim,” the “Drama of Exile,” and “Aurora Leigh.” They have, indeed, little or none of that fantastic idealism about them, which, sufficiently complex in itself, became far more so when interpreted into the wild but ornate language of the poetess. There is, we think, somewhat less power in these “last poems” than in any of those which we have mentioned, but this absence of masculineness, often somewhat coarse, is in a great measure, if not entirely, compensated by the absence also of that grotesqueness, eccentricity, and distorted versification which unpleasantly marred so many of Mrs. Browning’s earlier writings. These “last poems” are likewise more even in excellence, and generally more harmonious than their predecessors.
It has been more than once remarked that, although Mrs. Browning had a strong and tasteful love for Greek literature, yet her “Aurora Leigh”—to say nothing of some of her earlier poems—is strangely deficient in that chastity and correctness of beauty so common to the best writers of Greece. That in these last poems there is at least one which is not amenable to this charge we can show by quoting:
What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading rain and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
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.
High on the shore sate 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 a leaf indeed,
To prove it fresh from the river.
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.
“This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sate 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.
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.
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.
These verses are probably known to many of our readers, but their rare excellence is such that, in our opinion, they cannot be too often quoted.
The following little poem is also in its way extremely graceful:
Sweet, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there’s a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
Thou only hast stepped unaware,—
Malice, not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman’s foot?
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
’Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet peradventure one day
Thou, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was.
And seeking around thee in vain
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as “Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, but more!”
Thou’lt sigh, very like, on thy part,
“Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that Heart
I tried upon ages ago!”
“Void in Law” is the prosaic title of one of the choicest poems in the volume. The theme is the old one, that
Men are deceivers ever;
One foot on land, and one on sea—
To one thing constant never:
and that women are sometimes only too prone to be deceived. Four stanzas are all we have space to quote:
Sleep, little child, his and mine!
Her throat has the antelope curve,
And her cheek just the colour and line
Which fade not before him nor swerve:
Yet she has no child!—the divine
Seal of right upon loves that deserve,
Sleep.
My child! though the world take her part,
Saying, “She was the woman to choose,
He had eyes, was a man in his heart,”—
We twain the decision refuse:
We … weak as I am, as thou art, …
Cling on to him, never to loose.
Sleep.
He thinks that, when done with this place
All’s ended? He’ll new-stamp the ore?
Yes, Cæsar’s—but not in our case.
Let him learn we are waiting before
The grave’s mouth, the heaven’s gate, God’s face,
With implacable love evermore.
Sleep.
He’s ours, though he kissed her but now
He’s ours, though she kissed in reply;
He’s ours, though himself disavow,
And God’s universe favour the lie;
Ours to claim, ours to clasp, ours below,
Ours above, … if we live, if we did.
Sleep.
“Bianca among the Nightingales” has a southern force and vehemence, tempered, however, with a taste not always found in Mrs. Browning’s earlier writings.
A worthless woman! mere cold clay
As all false things are! but so fair,
She takes the breath of men away
Who gaze upon her unaware.
I would not play her larcenous tricks
To have her looks! She lied and stole,
And spat into my love’s pure pyx
The rank saliva of her soul.
And still they sing, the nightingales.
I would not for her white and pink,
Though such he like—her grace of limb,
Though such he has praised—nor yet, I think,
For life itself, though spent with him,
Commit such sacrilege, affront
God’s nature, which is love, intrude
’Twixt two affianced souls, and hunt,
Like spiders, in the altar’s wood.
I cannot bear these nightingales.
If she chose sin, some gentler guise
She might have sinned in, so it seems:
She might have pricked out both my eyes,
And I still seen him in my dreams!
—Or drugged me in my soup or wine,
Nor left me angry afterward:
To die here with his hand in mine
His breath upon me, were not hard.
(Our Lady hush these nightingales!)
“A Song for the Ragged-schools of London,” written at Rome, though it contains some noble stanzas, and shows the usual devotedness and tenderness of Mrs. Browning for the weak and destitute, is by no means equal to that noblest and most thrilling of modern poems, “The Cry of the Children,”
Mrs. Browning has, of course, but scant sympathy with the political economist; in the little city wayfarers begging for pence she only sees
Ragged children with bare feet,
Whom the angels in white raiment
Know the names of, to repeat
When they come on you for payment.
There is a quaintness about the last part of this stanza which reminds us of some of Mr. Lowell’s lines in the “Biglow Papers.”
Perhaps the finest poem in the volume is that named “De Profundis.” A few stanzas are all we have space to quote:
I knock and cry,—Undone, undone!
Is there no help, no comfort—none?
No gleaning in the wide wheat-plains
Where others drive their loaded wains?
My vacant days go on, go on.
I ask less kindness to be done,—
Only to loose these pilgrim shoon,
(Too early worn and grimed) with sweet
Cool deathly touch to these tired feet,
Till days go out which now go on.
Only to life 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.”
What harm would that do? Green anon
The sward would quicken, overshone
By skies as blue; and crickets might
Have leave to chirp there day and night
While my new rest went on, went on.
From gracious Nature have I won
Such liberal bounty? may I run
So, lizard-like, within her side,
And there be safe, who now am tried
By days that painfully go on?
—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 creatures’ 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.
The political poems in this volume, though far from being as offensive as “Poems before Congress,” are not much to our taste. That Mrs. Browning should earnestly and passionately espouse any cause which she considered a righteous one was to be expected; that she should almost as passionately deal out curses and threats to all who differed from her was to be deplored. Nor can we acquiesce in the deification of such an idol of clay as Napoleon III.
Politically, however, the present poems are of far milder mood than their predecessors. The German princesses and Bourbonist ladies of Paris, to be sure, come in for a few left-handed compliments, as would, as we imagine, the English ladies who lately presented the gems to the ex-queen of Italy, had Mrs. Browning been yet alive:
What will ye give her, who could not deliver,
German Princesses! A laurel wreath
All over-scored with your signatures,
Graces, Serenities, Highnesses ever?
Mock her not, fresh from the truth of Death,
Conscious of dignities higher than yours.
What will ye put in your casket shut,
Ladies of Paris, in sympathy’s name?
Guizot’s daughter, what have you brought her?
Withered immortelles long ago cut,
For guilty dynasties perished in shame,
Putrid to memory, Guizot’s daughter.
Ah poor queen! so young and serene!
What shall we do for her now hope’s done,
Standing at Rome in these ruins old,
She too a ruin and no more a queen!
Leave her that diadem made by the sun
Turning her hair to an innocent gold.
An appendix contains a number of translations chiefly from Greek, many of which are remarkable for their beauty, though, perhaps, somewhat too free.
This volume convinces us that had Mrs. Browning continued to live and enjoy good health, she would have written poems much more likely to become popular than are any of those which she has now left behind her. There is a marked improvement in polish and taste in her “last poems;” and that wild, weird, irregular and extraordinary power which shocked many in “The Seraphim,” and even in “Aurora Leigh,” is now no longer in these pages suffered to take the same grotesque, eccentric course as before. Had Mrs. Browning’s muse, instead of poeticising Swedenborgianism, as in “Aurora Leigh,” or soaring to wilder heights of fantastic idealism in the “Essay on Mind,” or “The Seraphim,” taken a more earthly or rational course, the poetess’s fame would have been—and deservedly—infinitely greater than it is now ever likely to be. The turgid metaphors and extravagant conceits of her earlier works have frightened away or fatigued thousands of readers. What she had left us, though it bears the stamp of the truest genius, is after all but a proof of what she might have done,
Si quâ fata aspera rupisset.
Certes, she has left none of her own sex behind her like to herself, if indeed she has left behind her any English writer who really deserves the name of poetess.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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