E620500D. Last Poems.
Macmillan’s Magazine, May 1862, pp. 79–87.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
It is no wonder that so many great poets have fled from the busy life and dull skies of England to Italy, with its brighter stars and deeper blue, its darker sea and whiter waves, its wilder mountains and more perfect valleys, its exquisite paintings, its grand ruins, its dread memories, its mingled loveliness and isolation. Ever the imagination of the poet seeks after
More pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams:
ever it seeks to escape from ordinary environment to the scenes of an intenser life, where there are darker shades and more dazzling light, where instead of the grotesque there appears romance, and mean cares are displaced by grave tragedies.
The relationship between Italy and English poetry has sometimes been very powerful and strikingly characteristic of the times in which it existed. In the earlier part of the middle ages, the experts who went from this country to the [p. 80→] Italian schools could scarcely be called bards, though they often expounded their theses with a vehement, impassioned logic. We soon find, however, a first great link in the person of the father of English poetry himself—
Chaucer, of all admired—
Than whom, said Francis Beaumont,
A poet never went
More famous yet ’twixt Po and silver Trent.
Little is known about his visits to Genoa, Lombardy, and Florence, except that they were made specially for diplomatico-commercial purposes; but it was on these states of Northern Italy that the dawn of letters first broke; and Chaucer could not fail to be moved by the poems of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, which were then in all Italian mouths. The rhythm, as well as the subject-matter, of many of the Canterbury Tales was taken from Italy, and much also of their bantering hostility to the clergy.
When Milton, in his prime of youthful man hood, visited Italy, he had already written the noble lines—
Yet some there be that with due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that golden key
Which opes the palace of eternity.
It was in the spirit of that aspiration, with the full consciousness of genius, with his highly trained powers under complete control, and with all the resources of a ripe scholarship, that he sought its august ruins, and mingled with its living celebrities. No passionate poetic fervour drew him thither, as was the case with Byron and Shelley, but the deliberate resolve of a calm majestic mind, desirous of completing the culture which was necessary to the just possession of the golden key. It was in Italy that Milton perfected himself for his great twofold work. That “stranger from the shores of the farthest ocean,” with his calm English eyes and great white brow, required to mingle with Italian nobles, and learn something of the subtlety of Machiavelli, in order to carry out the designs of the English ruler who made every court of Europe tremble. It was well that he whose own days were to close in poverty and darkness had the opportunity of meeting blind Galileo, and so anticipating the woes which form part of a starry fate. He could never have given such distinct visible form to the beings who dwell in the “regions of sorrow,” and those who knew the “sanctities of heaven,” had he not seen and loved the creations of Italy’s poet-painters.
The English poets who visited Italy in the last century were scarcely able to bring back anything from that country. Addison was lucky, having obtained “a yearly pension of three hundred pounds from the Crown to assist him in his travels;” but his letters on Italy are simply those of a scholar and graceful writer. It is a wonder that no modern traveller has availed himself of them in order to make a classical reputation for himself. Goldsmith was supposed to have taken his medical degree at Padua, and seems to have thoroughly understood the political state of Italy in his day; but, in all likelihood, his extreme poverty prevented him from enjoying its more poetical aspects. How admirably he hits off the Italian character of that time in the lines:—
Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain;
Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue;
And even in penance planning sins anew!
He saw Italy in its very worst state, suffering from all the evils
That opulence departed leaves behind;
and the miserable spectacle appears to have made a profound impression on his mind; for the most powerful passages of his verse are employed in denouncing the “plethoric ill” which commerce brings, and pointing out
How wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.
The author of “Roderick Random” also visited Italy, and was buried at Leghorn, where the inscription on his monument declares that he was an example of the virtue of former times. It was not likely that such an example [p. 81→] could see much to admire in Italy; and, besides, poor Smollett was wretchedly ill when there, and his “Travels” provoked the satire of Sterne, who said that “the learned Smelfungus” did not so much describe the objects he saw as give an account of his own miserable feelings.
Coleridge, though, as Mr. Mill says, one of the great seminal minds of his age, appears to be in a fair way of enjoying the blessed privilege of “no biography,” and it is difficult to discover how far his Italian travels extended. Once in Malta, where he was secretary to Sir Alexander Ball in 1804 and 1805, I tried to hunt up recollections of him, and found an elderly gentleman in a Government office who had known him, and described him as of a dead-white complexion, with flowing hair, large brow and dreamy eyes. This Maltese mentioned that on one occasion, when a frigate called for despatches and Coleridge was instructed to write them, Sir Alexander Ball sent several messages for them, without getting any satisfactory reply. At last my informant went, and he found the dreamer with his coat off, and a huge peacock’s feather in his hand, writing in a great heat—but poetry and not despatches. Hardly could the message be delivered; for the bard, excited by the presence of an auditor, started up, waved the paper and cleared his throat. “But the despatches, sir?” faltered out the horrified Maltese. “Oh! never mind the despatches,” said Coleridge; “just listen to this poetry I have been writing;” so he waved the paper again, advanced a step, and had just commenced with a rotund voice, when the door opened, and Sir Alexander himself entered. Scenes such as these soon led to the resignation of Coleridge’s secretaryship, and it was then that he visited Italy. It is extremely unlikely, however, that he got any farther than Naples. I should like to have seen “the rapt one of the godlike forehead” in the hands of the Neapolitan doganieri, guides, beggars and thieves of that corrupt time. Fancy Coleridge, with his dreamy eyes and classical recollections, sauntering through the narrow streets of the city disinterred, with the crowd that would follow him as surely as sharks gather round a dilapidated ship! We know that in a short time he found himself friendless and moneyless in Naples, and was taken to England by an American captain, who gave him a free passage for the sake of his marvellous conversation.
When Wordsworth was afloat on the Italian lakes, his deeper thoughts still remained by the side of Grasmere, and his “Memorials” of Italy are scarcely worthy of himself or of the subjects on which he touched. For a moment his fancy was awakened by Milan’s lofty spire, and he stood with earnest reverence by the Sasso di Dante; but the poetry which he produced in Italy might, with the exception of a few local colours, have been suggested by almost any other land. It is not among the ruins of Rome or the galleries of art that we can best conceive his presence; but reclining in Vallombrosa’s shadiest wood, remembering Milton’s lonely vigils, or wandering with elastic steps among the higher Apennines, himself as sunburnt and healthy as the athletic contadini whom he met, trotting down the steepest paths on their sure-footed steeds.
Passing over Sir Walter Scott’s visit to Italy in his dying months; the graceful, fastidious, but rather pale sketches of Rogers; Leigh Hunt’s exquisite tale of Rimini; and Landor’s masculine but classic productions; we come to the three great poets by whom Italy and England have been indissolubly connected. Of Keats in Rome, it can only be said that he there became subject to the dread king, who
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay;
but his grave would always have been dear to the many travellers from this country, even had it not been for the other and more precious tomb beside it, where the ashes of Shelley repose. All his poems breathe the spirit of “the warm South;” and his “languishment for skies Italian” indicated a necessity of his nature, which was gratified too late to save him. In [p. 82→] Byron and Shelley we have two English poets, of the very highest order, intimately connected with Italy by their residence there, their sympathy with its political movement, their love of its scenery, their descriptions of its works of art, the melancholy which consumed their souls, and the sudden fate by which they were early overtaken. In both there was that intensity of thought, feeling, and passion, which finds in Italy a congenial environment, and which exhausts the vital powers before the term of middle life. Shelley, it is said, could not have lived for two years more, had he not been lost in the gulf of Spezzia; and some time before Byron expired at Missolonghi, the rising mists of death had “veiled the lightnings of his song.” “Che non arde, non incende,” says an Italian proverb. If the one poet stood in closer relation to absolute truth and was robed in purer and more dazzling light, the other realized better the fierce passions of humanity, and lit up the facts of past history with the wild flame of his imagination. Shelley, who was incapable of an envious thought, expressed his extreme admiration for Byron, and associated him with Venice, in the wonderful burst of music;—
Perish! let there only be
Floating o’er thy breathless sea,
As the garment of thy sky
Clothes the world immortally,
One remembrance more sublime
Than the tattered pall of time
Which scarce hides thy visage wan;
That a tempest-cleaving swan,
Of the songs of Albion,
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee, and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and sprung
From his lips like music flung
In a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror. What though yet
Poesy’s unfailing river,
Which through Albion winds for ever,
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred poet’s grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled;
What though those, with all thy dead,
Scarce can for this fame repay
Ought thine own—oh, rather say,
Though thy sins and sorceries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul,
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander’s wasting springs;
As divinest Shakspeare’s might
Fills Avon and the world with light,
Like omniscient power, which he
Imaged ’mid mortality;
As the love from Petrarch’s urn
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp by which the heart
Sees things unearthly; so thou art,
Mighty spirit! so shall be
The city that did refuge thee.
It is questionable whether Byron ever understood the celestial younger brother who flitted round him like a being from some more spiritual world; and no fit requiem can be sung for Alastor till another messenger like himself comes to earth from afar; for—
Silence, too, enamoured of that voice,
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.
As Shelley and Byron fitly found a home, and one a grave, in Italy in its darkest hour, so was it also well that the poetical connexion between that country and England was continued in recent years by a poetess who had much of their earnestness and grief without their despair, who believed in God, who trusted the people, and who was allowed to see Italia in great part delivered and ennobled. Italy has had not a few celebrated women of its own, who united the attainments of the scholar with the heart of the poet; and the burning pages of Corinne and Consuelo have shown how it has inspired the imagination of the most richly endowed of the daughters of France; but the English poetess who has now found there “a grave among the eternal,” brought to it a purer and a loftier fame.
It would be easy to take exception to the poems of Mrs. Barrett Browning; but no work is more unprofitable than that kind of criticism, and no poet is raised above it. It may be safely left to those writers—always themselves barren—who have taken upon themselves to improve the race by finding fault with the children of their neighbours. After all reasonable, and not a few unreasonable exceptions are taken, there indubitably remain, in witness of Mrs. Browning’s powers, a few compositions almost perfect [p. 83→] in themselves, and much high poetry in which tender feeling and profound thought are expressed in glowing, impassioned imagery. Nor is any great effort of criticism required to see that the defects of her poetry are almost necessarily associated with its most striking beauties. Her readers will not forget the touching references which occur throughout her works to the suffering and languor of her life, great part of which was passed on beds of almost fatal sickness. She literally had to live “shouldering weights of pain,” and described herself as—
A poor tired wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree.
In her dedication to her father many years ago, she desires him to bear witness that, if the art of poetry had been a less earnest object to her, it must have fallen from her exhausted hands. Again, she exclaims—
I count the dismal time by months and years
Since last I felt the green sward under foot.
With truthful pathos she addresses a child—
And God knows, who sees us twain,
Child at childish leisure,
I am near as tired of pain
As you seem of pleasure.
And she recorded some of the deepest longings of her heart, when she penned the exquisite lines commencing—
Of all the thoughts of God that are
Borne inward unto souls afar,
Along the Psalmist’s music deep,
Now tell me if that any is
For gift or grace surpassing this—
“He giveth His beloved sleep?”
Forbid that I should recall these passages in apology for Mrs. Browning’s poetry. She herself would never have done so; but they may serve to indicate wherein the peculiar charm of that poetry lies, and how far that was necessarily associated with what may be considered its defects. Shakspeare understood that those speak truth “who breathe their thoughts in pain;” and it was because Mrs. Browning suffered so much, and was cut off from so many of the enjoyments of life, that she penetrated so deeply into the inner, essential meaning of the subjects on which she touched, and expressed her thoughts regarding them with so much compression, force, and fervour. On her bed of pain and languor she turned with intenser longing and stronger faith towards the great ideas which underlie and support the efforts of humanity. The soul, love, faith, nationality, man, the sacrifice of Christ, the mystic power of the Holy Spirit, and the benign but awful presence of the unseen Father, became revealed to her as great living realities, redeeming the troubled life of earth, vindicating the ways of providence, and giving assurance of a more perfect future. I do not mean to say that Mrs. Browning was at all perfect as an artist, or, as a poetic thinker, occupied the highest points of view. Her works are wanting in that deep calm which floats like the blue of eternity over the masterpieces of Homer, Shakspeare, and Goethe. Her mind was ever on the strain, to use a familiar term; there may have been in it even a strong tinge of false romance; and the effort to express her conceptions may have been at times spasmodic and unequal. But these are characteritics of all earnest poets of her class; for, in the dim and perilous region of ideas, thought can light up the darkness only by flashes of intense light.
It is not my design, however, to undertake any general criticism of Mrs. Browning’s powers and poetical position, much less to attempt to discriminate between what is true and false in her views of earth and heaven. Like the “Little Mattie” of one of the Last Poems—
She has seen the mystery hid
Under Egypt’s pyramid:
By those eyelids pale and close
Now she knows what Rhamses knows.
Here the last products of her genius lie before us, and I desire to speak of them neither as a critic nor as a worshipper, but yet, I trust, with something of that love which it is always well to feel for the last touch of a vanished hand, and the last sound of a voice that is still. If Mrs. Browning’s Last Poems had [p. 84→] been like the broken words and faltering accents that usually come from those who stand in the shadow of the greater night, they would still have been dear; but the truth is, that shadow hung so over her whole life, that it does not seem to have specially affected her powers at the last. There is one poem in this volume, called “My Heart and I,” which may, perhaps, though not uttered in her own person, be understood as confessing to a feeling of exhaustion, and may have been called forth by the reception which was accorded to her Poems before Congress. One stanza runs—
How tired we feel, my heart and I!
We seem of no use in the world;
Our fancies hang grey and uncurled
About men’s eyes indifferently;
Our voice, which thrilled you so, will let
You sleep; our tears are only wet:
What do we here, my heart and I?
A poet, however, is always liable to be occasionally misunderstood or disregarded; and these last verses by Mrs. Browning are not likely to meet with such a fate, they contain so much true poetry, and yet are often so clear and simple. Who has not known a girl like “My Kate,” who is thus tenderly portrayed?—
She was not as pretty as women I know,
And yet all your best made of sunshine and snow
Drop to shade, melt to nought in the long-trodden ways,
While she’s still remembered on warm and cold days—
My Kate.
Her air had a meaning, her movements a grace;
You turned from the fairest to gaze on her face:
And when you had once seen her forehead and mouth,
You saw as distinctly her soul and her truth—
My Kate.
Such a blue inner light from her eyelids outbroke,
You looked at her silence and fancied she spoke:
When she did, so peculiar, yet soft, was the tone,
Though the loudest spoke also, you heard her alone—
My Kate.
She never found fault with you, never implied
Your wrong by her right, and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown—
My Kate.
None knelt at her feet confessed lovers in thrall:
They knelt more to God than they used—that was all:
If you praised her as charming, some asked what you meant,
But the charm of her presence was felt as she went—
My Kate.
The poem entitled “De Profundis” is in Mrs. Browning’s highest devotional strain, and may compare favourably with any passages in her “Drama of Exile,” and also with Tennyson’s “Two Voices,” of which it sometimes recalls the cadence, and to which it bears a very distant resemblance. The speaker has suffered one of those great losses which make earth no longer our home; for—
The face which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love, is dimmed away—
And yet my days go on, go on.
Thus deprived of what alone made life dear, she exclaims, in her great agony—
The world goes whispering to its own,
“This anguish pierces to the bone;”
And tender friends go sighing round,
“What love can ever cure this wound?”
My days go on, my days go on.
The past rolls forward on the sun
And makes all night. O dreams begun,
Not to be ended! Ended bliss,
And life that will not end in this!
My days go on, my days go on.
Breath freezes on my lips to moan:
As one alone, once not alone,
I sit and knock at Nature’s door,
Heart-bare, heart-hungry, very poor,
Whose desolated days go on.
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.
Only the thought of Divine suffering and love can relieve such woe— [p. 85→]
—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 amidst all—
Ancient of Days, whose days go on.
By that anguish which made pale the sun, His creatures are charged never to blaspheme against Him with despair; and before His supreme love and chief misery, the widowed sufferer is enabled to cry—
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.
“Bianca among the Nightingales,” the most perfectly artistic poem in the volume, is in a very different strain from the two just referred to. It treats of impassioned love, driven to madness by the unfaithfulness of its object, and casting the dreadful light of that grief and passion on all the surrounding objects of nature. This subject has had a singular fascination for many great poets, and is naturally treated in a lyric form, as in the mad rhymes of Ophelia, Margaret’s pathetic songs in Faust, and Tennyson’s “Mariana in the Moated Grange.” In her expression of it Mrs. Browning may compare, not disadvantageously, even with the masters; and the following opening stanzas could scarcely be surpassed—
The cypress stood up like a church
That night we felt our love would hold,
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
The olives crystallized the vales’
Broad slopes until the hills grew strong;
The fire-flies and the nightingales
Throbbed each to either, flame and song,
The nightingales, the nightingales.
Upon the angle of its shade
The cypress stood, self-balanced high;
Half up, half down, as double-made,
Along the ground, against the sky.
And we, too! from such soul height, went
Such leaps of blood, so blindly driven,
We scarce knew if our nature meant
Most passionate earth or intense heaven.
The nightingales, the nightingales.
We paled with love, we shook with love,
We kissed so close, we could not vow;
Till Giulio whispered, “Sweet, above
God’s ever guaranties this now.”
And through His words the nightingales
Drove straight and full their long clear call,
Like arrows through heroic mails,
And love was awful in it all.
The nightingales, the nightingales.
O cold white moonlight of the North,
Refresh these pulses, quench this hell!
O coverture of death drawn forth
Across this garden-chamber … well!
But what have nightingales to do
In gloomy England, called the free…
(Yes, free to die in!) when we two
Are sundered, singing still to me?
The nightingales, the nightingales.
Bianca fondly believed that, as man has only one soul, so it is intended he should only have one love; but then “souls are damned and love’s profaned” occasionally; and an English lady, with white and pink, gold ringlets and grace of limb, enters into her sorrowful dream—
My native Florence! dear, foregone!
I see across the Alpine ridge
How the last feast-day of Saint John
Shot rockets from Carraia bridge.
The luminous city, tall with fire,
Trod deep down in that river of ours,
While many a boat with lamp and choir
Skimmed bird-like over glittering towers.
I will not hear these nightingales.
I seem to float, we seem to float
Down Arno’s stream in festive guise;
A boat strikes flame into our boat,
And up that lady seems to rise
As then she rose. The shock had flashed
A vision on us! What a head,
What leaping eyeballs! beauty dashed
To splendour by a sudden dread.
And still they sing, the nightingales.
As the song goes on Bianca becomes wilder, but in the end her voice rises faint and sick, while the nightingales still follow her into the tomb—
Giulio, my Giulio! sing they so,
And you be silent? Do I speak,
And you not hear? An arm you throw
Round some one, and I feel so weak?
—Oh owl-like birds! They sing for spite,
They sing for hate, they sing for doom! [p. 86→]
They’ll sing through death who sing through night,
They’ll sing and stun me in the tomb—
The nightingales, the nightingales.
It is so long since the bark of St. Peter has been heaving in troubled seas, that one gets hopeless of seeing either any end to it, or any improvement in its condition. Mrs. Browning in 1861, like Vittoria Colonna early in the sixteenth century, saw that bark on a “mare turbato,” but how grand was this vision which loomed in her imagination over the Roman Campagna!—
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 wreck.
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.
To the last the political state of Italy engaged Mrs. Browning’s warmest sypathies; and some of these poems refer to it in stirring language. We have Garibaldi hesitating after the cession of Nice, Victor Emmanuel entering Florence, an Italian girl parting with her lover who goes to the national war, and Laurio Savio, an Italian poetess, mourning over her two sons—
One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Victor Emmanuel is excused from keeping the graves of his fathers because he quailed not from his own; and the argument against him is well thrown back upon his more common-place detractors in the apostrophe—
For thee—through the dim Hades-portal
The dream of a voice—“Blessed thou
Who hast made all thy race twice immortal!
No need of the sepulchres now!
Left to Bourbons and Hapsburgs, who fester
Above ground with worm-eaten souls,
While the ghost of some pale feudal jester
Before them strews treaties in holes.”
Mrs. Browning’s “Poems before Congress” may be considered as among her last efforts, and contain some exquisite passages. It has ever been the aspiration of the world that those who think high thoughts, and are actuated by lofty feelings, should be in unison with those who direct material power; and an approach to this consummation has always been made in those periods of the world’s history which have been most beneficial to the human race. Mrs. Browning believed that she saw some indication of a desire for this union in Louis Napoleon’s Italian movement, and that it was only checked by the suspicion and outcry with which it was met throughout Europe. With the trust of a woman, the imagination of a poet, and sharing the enthusiasm which filled the Italian mind, she hastened to meet the Emperor upon the level of the Mount of Song. If she erred in this matter, she erred along with Cavour, who had the best opportunities of knowing Napoleon’s sentiments towards Italy, who did not like him, and who admitted, even after the peace of Villafranca, that he sincerely and warmly desired to benefit that country. There may be difficulties in the way of this view; but, whether Mrs. Browning’s cautious estimate of Napoleon III. be accepted or not, it was and is entitled to respect; and those who have any sense of poetry must admire her picture of him entering Milan:—
Ay, it is He,
Who rides at the king’s right hand!
Leave room to his horse and draw to the side,
Nor press too near in the ecstasy
Of a newly delivered impassioned land;
He is moved, you see,
He who has done it all.
They call it a cold stern face;
But this is Italy,
Who rises up to her place!
For this he fought in his youth,
Of this he dreamed in the past; [p. 87→]
The lines of the resolute mouth
Tremble a little at last.
Cry, he has done it all.
Emperor
Evermore!
The strength of Napoleon does not lie in those who praise him, but in those who fear him. If all his admirers were as noble as Mrs. Browning, he could do no evil, but only good.
In these “Poems before Congress” there is one, entitled “A Court Lady,” which is equal to almost any of Mrs. Browning’s earlier productions, and it is distinguished by much more realism than she usually displays. The following extracts will give some idea of this, the greatest of her Last Poems:—
Her hair was tawny with gold, her eyes with purple were dark,
Her cheeks pale opal burned with a red and restless spark.
Never was lady of Milan nobler in name and in race;
Never was lady of Italy fairer to see in the face.
Never was lady on earth more true as woman and wife,
Larger in judgment and instinct, prouder in manners and life.
* * * * * *
Gorgeous she entered the sunlight, which gathered her up in a flame,
While, straight in her open carriage, she to the hospital came.
In she went at the door, and gazing from end to end,
“Many and low are the pallets, but each is the place of a friend.”
Up she passed through the wards, and stood at a young man’s bed:
Bloody the band on his brow, and livid the droop of his head.
“Art thou a Lombard, my brother? Happy art thou,” she cried,
And smiled like Italy on him: he dreamed in her face and died.
Pale with his passing soul, she went on still to a second:
He was a grave hard man, whose years by dungeons were reckoned.
Wounds in his body were sore, wounds in his life were sorer.
“Art thou a Romagnole?” Her eyes drove lightnings before her.
* * * * * *
Down she stepped to a pallet where lay a face like a girl’s,
Young and pathetic with dying—a deep black hole in the curls.
“Art thou from Tuscany, brother? and seest thou, dreaming in pain,
Thy mother stand in the piazza, searching the list of the slain?”
Kind as a mother herself, she touched his cheeks with her hands;
“Blessed is she who has borne thee, although she should weep as she stands.”
On she passed to a Frenchman, his arm carried off by a ball:
Kneeling—“O more than my brother! how shall I thank thee for all!
“Each of the heroes around us has fought for his land and line,
But thou hast fought for a stranger, in hate of a wrong not thine.
“Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed,
But blessed are those among nations, who dare to be strong for the rest.”
The connexion between English poetry and Italy began with Chaucer of the serene, self-possessed mind, and it ends for the present with Mrs. Browning, and with the great English poet whose name is associated with hers, and who so strikingly resembles Chaucer in masculine strength, and the dramatic power in which his own individuality is lost, though Chaucer would doubtless have stood aghast at the psychological subtleties with which he loves to bewilder most of his readers. Mrs. Browning lived to see Italia all but unita and regenerate. We are so close to that event, that we can scarcely as yet appreciate its magnitude, or fully enjoy its poetical aspects. Perhaps it may be that Italy independent, prosperous, and happy, will lose somewhat of its poetic charm; but the realization of its hopes, and its fulfilment of the aspiration of so many great minds should only encourage the poet to wander still farther east, and find other lands, whose ideas are still unfulfilled, that will afford him an external life typifying that of his own soul. He may penetrate to the sublime spectacles of the East, and find repose in the conflict of man with the wild-beast world—in the great tragedies which, even in this age, there assert the existence of unmeasured powers—and in the beneficent sway of social organization over teeming myriads of people.
A[ndrew]. Wilson
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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