E620412A. Last Poems.
John Bull, 12 April 1862, p. 235.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
These poems come to us across the sea like the far-off sound of tolling bells. The very name of “Last Poems” speaks of a song whose singer will never sing again. The fitful poet-fever of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life is calmed to rest in her beloved Italy, and this volume is the last memorial of glorious gifts which are passed away. As such it will be mournfully welcome, although we may at once warn our readers that there is nothing in this book to add to the fame of the Poet-woman. The palsying hand of coming death would seem to have been traceable in these final warblings of Mrs. Browning. All the sweetness and pensiveness that belonged to her earlier moods may be found here also; but the fire and the energy and the passion that ever and anon used to burst on her versatile spirit, can no longer be discerned. Even her imaginative power seems to decrease with her physical strength. We do not know why it should be so, but so it generally has been. Poets are not like swans—impelled to sing in their dying moments. The moral senses are generally quickened and purified by the approach of death; religious devotion is oftentimes excited into a kind of rapture; but the imagination, though so kindred a faculty, seems to require the support of some amount at least of bodily vigour.
Nevertheless, there are verses of rare beauty included among these poems, and none of them indeed are in any sense unworthy of Elizabeth Browning. There was ever something morbid about the most active dreams of her fancy, and we should not believe that her voice would wholly fail her till she was actually prostrated. And in fact her last poem, the last of the “Last Poems,” was written in May, 1861, in honour of Andersen’s visit to Rome; and she died on the 29th of June following. The poem which immediately precedes this could not have been written very long before it, from the events to which it alludes. It is interesting, as shewing to how late a period she retained that skill in the harmonious manipulation of words which used to be such a wonderful power in her hands. It is still more interesting, as indicating a greater gentleness stealing over her spirit, in reference to the persons and events about her. We all know how vehement and intolerant her partisanship was on the “Italian question,” how completely she surrendered herself to the belief that the nationality of Italy was synonymous with Piedmontese usurpation, and how bitterly she was disposed to feel towards all those who were in any way opposed to the realization of her darling dreams. Nevertheless we find that in one of her latest poems she is pouring out the wealth of her sympathizing womanhood towards the beautiful and unfortunate Queen of Naples, against whom, by the way, the viler vermin of the Piedmontese party were at that very moment concocting their dastardly calumnies. We must forgive Mrs. Browning’s prejudice which prompts her to give utterance to a very common assumption, that namely by which we look on all those who are born in a stratum of society higher than our own, as “starched” out of those natural emotions to which, of course, our blessed selves are so freely surrendered. Thus she sings of the Queen of Naples:—
Her soul was bred by a throne, and fed
From the sucking-bottle used in her race
On starch and water (for mother’s milk
Which gives a larger growth instead),
And out of the natural liberal grace,
Was swaddled away in violet silk.
And young and kind, and royally blind,
Forth she stepped from her palace-door
On three-piled carpet of compliments,
Curtains of Incense drawn by the wind
In between her for evermore
And daylight issues of events.
On she drew, as a queen might do,
To meet a Dream of Italy,—
Of magical town and musical wave,
Where even a god, his amulet blue
Of shining sea, in an ecstasy
Dropt and forgot in a nereid’s cave.
Down she goes, as the soft wind blows,
To live more smoothly than mortals can,
To love and to reign as queen and wife,
To wear a crown that smells of a rose,
And still, with a sceptre as light as a fan,
Beat sweet time to the song of life.
So she goes on to speak of the catastrophe which broke up that dream; and how “her high heart overtopped the royal part she had come to play:”—
And twice a wife by her ravaged life,
And twice a queen by her kingdom lost,
She braved the shock and the counter-shock
Of hero and traitor, bullet and knife,
While Italy pushed, like a vengeful ghost,
That son of the Cursed from Gaeta’s rock.
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.
Ay! bring close to her, as ’twere a rose, to her,
Yon free child from an Apennine city
Singing for Italy,—dumb in the place!
Something like solace, let us suppose, to her
Given, in that homage of wonder and pity,
By his pure eyes to her beautiful face.
Nature, excluded, savagely brooded,
Ruined all queendom and dogmas of state,—
Then in reaction remorseful and mild,
Rescues the womanhood, nearly eluded,
Shows her what’s sweetest in womanly fate—
Sunshine from Heaven, and the eyes of a child.
Mrs. Browning’s best verses are not certainly those which chime to the hackneyed political strain which so deeply fascinated her. But she has some spirited verses on the Roman question, in which she ingeniously likens the Pontiff in his present difficulties to St. Peter in his storm-tossed boat when Christ called him to walk on the waters:—
Over the dumb Campagna-sea,
Out in the offing through mist and rain,
Saint Peter’s Church heaves silently
Like a mighty ship in pain,
Facing the tempest with struggle and strain.
Motionless waifs of ruined towers,
Soundless breakers of desolate land:
The sullen surf of the mist devours
That mountain-range upon either hand,
Eaten away from its outline grand.
And over the dumb Campagna-sea
Where the ship of the Church heaves on to wreck,
Alone and silent as God must be,
The Christ walks. Ay, but Peter’s neck
Is stiff to turn on the foundering deck.
Peter, Peter! if such be thy name,
Now leave the ship for another to steer,
And proving thy faith evermore the same,
Come forth, tread out through the dark and drear,
Since He who walks on the sea is here.
Peter, Peter! He does not speak;
He is not as rash as in old Galilee:
Safer a ship, though it toss and leak,
Than a reeling foot on a rolling sea!
And he’s got to be round in the girth, thinks he.
* * * *
Peter, Peter! thou fisher of men,
Fisher of fish wouldst thou live instead?
Haggling for pence with the other Ten,
Cheating the market at so much a head,
Griping the Bag of the traitor Dead?
The comparison is vividly carried out; but after all, the ideas which it embodies are nothing more than the stale attacks on Church temporalities which have been current for centuries.
It is perhaps fortunate for Mrs. Browning that she did not live to see the miserable and ignominious conclusion of her enthusiastic visions; the pretence of a great and free Italy suddenly collapsing to the realities of the story told by Curletti, of Cialdini’s butcheries and Fantoni’s “humanity.” Or would she not rather, let us say, have learned a lesson of better hope for Italy in the explosion of the Piedmontese imposture, and have attained a conviction that Italian nationality is too great and true a thing to be associated with the mean treachery and pillage that have marked the progress of the revolution hitherto?
One of the most beautiful among these poems is “Bianca among the Nightingales.” We wish we could give the reader some specimen of the passionate grief which throbs through its stanzas; but it is too long to quote entire, and it would be impossible to convey a conception of its deep pathetic power by an extract. We must, however, quote some verses from the “Song for the Ragged Schools,” for the sake of the strong simple earnestness which breathes through it, and as showing how sternly Mrs. Browning could take her soaring muse to the most practical purpose:—
I am listening here in Rome.
“England’s strong,” say many speakers,
“If she winks, the Czar must come,
Prow and topsail, to the breakers.”
“England’s rich in coal and oak,”
Adds a Roman, getting moody,
“If she shakes a travelling cloak,
Down our Appian roll the scudi.”
* * * *
Let others shout,
Other poets praise my land here:
I am sadly sitting out,
Praying, “God forgive her grandeur.”
Shall we boast of empire, where
Time with ruin sits commissioned?
In God’s liberal blue air
Peter’s dome itself looks wizened;
And the mountains, in disdain,
Gather back their lights of opal
From the dumb, despondent plain,
Heaped with jawbones of a people.
Lordly English, think it o’er,
Cæsar’s doing is all undone!
You have cannons on your shore,
And free Parliaments in London,
Princes’ parks, and merchants’ homes,
Tents for soldiers, ships for seamen—
Ay, but ruins worse than Rome’s
In your pauper men and women.
Women leering through the gas,
(Just such bosoms used to nurse you)
Men, turned wolves by famine—pass!
Those can speak themselves, and curse you.
But these others—children small,
Spilt like blots about the city,
Quay, and street, and palace-wall—
Take them up into your pity!
Ragged children with bare feet
Whom the angels in white raiment
Know the names of, to repeat
When they come on you for payment.
Ragged children, hungry-eyed,
Huddled up out of the coldness
On your doorsteps, side by side,
Till your footman damns their boldness.
In the alleys, in the squares,
Begging, lying little rebels;
In the noisy thoroughfares,
Struggling on with piteous trebles.
Patient children—think what pain
Makes a young child patient—ponder!
Wronged too commonly to strain
After right, or wish, or wonder.
* * * *
“Is it our fault?” you reply,
“When, throughout civilization,
Every nation’s empery
Is asserted by starvation?
‘All these mouths we cannot feed,
And we cannot clothe these bodies.’
Well, if man’s so hard indeed,
Let them learn at least what God is!
Little outcasts from life’s fold,
The grave’s hope they may be joined in,
By Christ’s covenant consoled
For our social contract’s grinding.
If no better can be done,
Let us do but this—endeavour
That the sun behind the sun
Shine upon them while they shiver!
On the dismal London flags,
Through the cruel social juggle,
Put a thought beneath their rags
To ennoble the heart’s struggle.
And so we sorrowfully close the leaves that bring us the last wailing music from Elizabeth Browning’s harp. These and their kindred lyrics will long live in English literature and keep for us the fame of the greatest women-poet that the world has known.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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