E620505A. Last Poems.
The Scotsman, 5 May 1862, p. 5.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
There is only a short advertisement prefacing this little volume, and any expression of feeling, or allusion to the loss her friends and the world have sustained in the death of the author, is “conspicuous by its absence.” The title of the book—this same advertisement, simply stating when and how these “Last Poems” were collected and published—two sentences in brackets above the specified verses, “The Last Poem”—“The Last Translation”—these seem to us to possess a pathos transcending that of an eulogium the most comprehensive, or an expression of grief the most eloquent. The death of a poet, or of any great thinker, strikes us always with a shock of surprise, as well as of sharp regret—of incredulity almost; it seems hardly possible that death should have so little “respect for persons”—that these finer brains should cease from their labour, and moulder in the dust, like those of nameless men, when their high thoughts and noble music live to delight future generations, and “the world is wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not,” when the heart that conceived, and the lips that uttered them are long dead—“Their echoes roll from soul to soul, and grow for ever and for ever.” As in Mrs. Browning’s first volumes, and in her “splendid failure,” “Aurora Leigh,” so in these “Last Poems” there is, as well as great versatility, extreme inequality of beauty and merit. In one—“A Musical Instrument”—her genius seems to culminate; while in others, the old faults, and the influence of Mr Browning’s style, are but too apparent. The impression derived from many of her poems, and which adds to the sadness of her death, is, that she had never herself perfectly recognised the true bent of her genius and the fullest extent of her powers; she often made choice of subjects and of modes of expression that were unworthy of her, and with which she should not have been satisfied—the severity and correctness of her taste seem hardly to have corresponded with the greatness of her genius. In the poems on Italy, or rather on various incidents in the late Italian war, in this volume, Mrs Browning’s passionate love for, and sympathy with, her adopted country, throb, so to speak, in a manner almost painful; as in the “Poems before Congress,” the enthusiasm is at the degree of white-heat, and the result is often fervid eloquence; but even when in passion and force it reaches the height of eloquence, it is something perfectly distinct from true poetry, and the effect is like what might be produced by setting one of the foreign letters in the Times to music. No one has better defined the difference between eloquence and poetry than Mr J. S. Mill; in his essay on “Poetry and its Varieties,” he says:—“Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.” It is strange that Mrs Browning should have so often mistaken unfinished roughness and harshness, prosaic and sometimes affected expression, for strength—strange that one so gifted should not have recognised the greater strength that lies in sweetness and perfection of melody, and of style, no one having illustrated the truth more clearly than herself. Try to compare for a moment any of her turbid and spasmodic declamations, political or social, with the power, the pathos, and the finished beauty of “A Musical Instrument”—it is as impossible as to attempt comparison between the repose, the calm and perfect grace of a piece of antique sculpture, with a glaring and modern specimen of modern pre-Raphaelite art. The cruel, terrible process of “making a poet out of a man” was surely never so forcibly and exquisitely described as in these verses:—
a musical instrument.
What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin 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 sat 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 sate by the river.
“This is the way, laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat 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.
The change in the melody from the fifth to the sixth verse is exceedingly artistic and beautiful, as also the culminating pathos of the three last lines; the torture is represented with extraordinary power in the fourth verse. What a contrast to this reading of the poet’s destiny is Goethe’s in “Faust” and “Wilhelm Meister!” arising no doubt from the difference in the physical organisation of the poets—while to Goethe existence was for the most part enjoyment, to Mrs Browning it was suffering, more or less intense. With the exception of “A Musical Instrument,” there is nothing in this volume at all equal to the poetic height of the more perfect passages in her long poems, nor is there anything to compare with the lyrical sweetness of “He giveth his beloved sleep.” In the “Drama of Exile,” for instance, that has been criticised as a whole with just severity, there is a passage that can hardly be surpassed in its peculiar beauty and poetry; the divine, or perhaps it would be more correct to say the diabolic jealousy, is so finely rendered that the heart is moved to tenderest sympathy with Lucifer. Consider “the pity of it!”
First Voice. Gabriel, O Gabriel!
Second Voice. What woulds’t thou with me?
First Voice. Is it true, O thou Gabriel, that the crown
Of sorrow which I claimed another claims?
That he claims that too?
Second Voice. Lost one, it is true.
First Voice. That he will be an exile from his Heaven,
To lead these exiles homeward?
Second Voice. It is true.
First Voice. That he will be an exile by his will,
As I by mine election?
Second Voice. It is true.
First Voice. That I shall stand sole exile finally—
Made desolate for fruition?
Second Voice. It is true.
First Voice. Gabriel!
Second Voice. I hearken.
First Voice. Is it true besides—
Aright true—that mine orient star will give
Her name of ‘bright and morning star’ to him,
And take the fairness of his virtue back
To cover loss and sadness?
Second Voice. It is true.
First Voice. Untrue, untrue! O morning star! O mine
Who sittest secret in a veil of light
Far up the starry spaces, say untrue!
Speak but so loud as doth a wasted moon
To Tyrrhene waters! I am Lucifer—
(A pause. Silence in the stars.)
All things grow sadder to me, one by one.
There is much beauty in “the last poem,” “The North and the South,” especially in these verses:—
Yet, oh, for the skies that are softer and higher!
Sighed the North to the South;
For the flowers that blaze, and the trees that aspire,
And the insects made of a song or a fire!
Sighed the North to the South.
And, oh, for a star to discern the same!
Sighed the South to the North;
For a poet’s tongue of baptismal flame,
To call the tree or the flower by its name!
Sighed the South to the North.
But most persons will consider the last verse “a lame and impotent conclusion”:—
The North sent therefore a man of men
As a grace to the South;
And thus to Rome came Andersen—
“Alas! but must you take him again?”
Said the South to the North.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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