E510501A. Review Essay.
The Christian Parlor Magazine, 1 May 1851, pp. 168–171.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 17.
gems from elizabeth barrett browning.
By an Admirer.
There is a fine gradation and procession in the things of nature, and many are the steps of the golden stair which leads up to the highest. The material forms with which we are conversant, are symbols enclosing a more transcendent beauty; and the life within us is, in its turn, a symbol or adumbration of the primal archetypes. To unfold it, therefore—to lay open its leaves and filaments, that the light which is congenial to it may fall upon it, as the light of the sun upon the opening flower—is the highest and noblest of endeavors, inasmuch as the result is the highest and noblest. The best poets of the day, and none of them more so that Mrs. Browning, dwell long and lovingly in the recesses of our nature, laying their hand upon human love, upon the household affections, upon sin and the counteracting aspirations, upon the tangled yarn of good and evil in the web of life; and as, with songs of wailing or exultation, as in sorrow or in joy, in shadow or in sunshine, they tread those deep recesses which lie so near, yet are such mysteries to us all, we feel that we are in the presence of great spirits, yet, withal, of our own nature and kindred; we feel an unwonted exaltation in their presence; harsh contradictions are smoothed down, and elements of affinity present themselves where previously we saw nothing but everlasting antagonism; we begin to be reconciled to loss and suffering, by perceiving, in another than the mere dogmatic light, that it is the only medium of perfecting an aberrant nature; and we go forth to the work and conflict of life purer in heart and stronger in spirit, in the strength of those mediating spirits who have taught us to know, and given us to feel, more than we knew before of what is meant by mediation.
We have indicated rather than defined the scope and spirit of Mrs. Browning’s poetry. Her poems are sermons, but such sermons! Reflect, that she is possessed of varied learning, and is deeply read in classic lore; that, to a masculine energy, attempered and sublimated by womanly affection, she adds a deep religious feeling, and you will have some conception as to what sort of sermons hers are. In listening to them, you are conscious of the double process of enlightenment and feeling. The mist rolls away, and the warm sunbeams fall upon you. While you know more, you love more, and the process of knowledge is the process of reconcilement. Her texts are chosen from both sides of nature, and from both sides of human life. Her aim is, to reconcile contrarieties; from sin and sorrow, from darkness and suffering, to rise to purity and joy, to the glory and brightness of the land where there is no need of the sun. Mere objective beauty glows at her touch, and you would confess her a true poet, though she had done no more; but this is only the tuning of her harp. It is but the wand she conjures with; the miracle by which she arrests attention. Her ultimate purpose lies far beyond; or, rather, without purpose at all, it is the necessity and tendency of her nature and genius to make the forms of things, the manifestations of natural grace and beauty, the stepping-stones to a temple, in which, when she leads you in, you find the unveiled presences of the outer shadows, and have a glimpse of the divine Schekinah.
But it is time we now proceed to illustrate these generalities by special reference to the poems whose titles we have prefixed to them. The incident of the “Lost Bower” is brief and simple. Once upon a summer’s day, a little girl wandered into a wood, and found in it a beautiful bower, which filled her child-heart with over-flowing gladness; but, when she returned next day, she could not find it, and never found it more. This is all. On this is built a poem of seventy-six stanzas; and we observe that a writer in one of our monthly magazines, of high reputation, makes merry at the disproportion between the basis and the superstructure. But on as narrow bases are built many things of larger proportions than a poem of this length. A like incident colors the poetry of every poetic life; and the prose of every prosaic life is rendered more prosaic, because every poor possessor of it, once upon a time, found and sported in a beautiful bower, and went back at another time, and missed it, and never found it more. It is a theme old as the expulsion from Eden, and wide as the human race. It appeals to universal sympathies, for all have to regret a lost bower in some wood or [p. 169→] other. It is a theme, therefore, which needed no inventive genius to find it out, and the poet who deals with it must be judged solely by the amount and nature of the new light which he sheds upon it.
In the pleasant orchard closes,
‘God bless all our gains,’ say we;
But ‘May God bless all our losses,’
Better suits with our degree.
On this key-note the song opens, and we feel at once that it is a plaintive minor. We have then a sketch of that pleasant mother-land of infancy and childhood, with its “summer snows of apple-blossoms running up from glade to glade,” which reposes among beauty and regrets in a quiet, sacred corner of every one’s memory. There is the childhood’s valley, and in the valley is the wood, and in the wood is the bower, and “over all, in choral silence, the hills look you their all hail!” The child’s solitary journey to the wood is described, and the first bursting of the bower upon the entranced vision:
As I enter’d, mosses hushing,
Stole all noises from my foot;
And a green elastic cushion,
Clasp’d within the linden’s root,
Took me in a chair of silence, very rare and absolute.
Questioning what and how it was, there “came a sound, a sense of music, which was rather felt than heard,”
Softly, finely, it inwound me,
From the world it shut me in,
Like a fountain falling round me,
Which, with silver waters thin,
Clips a little marble naiad, sitting smilingly within.
Here now was the perfection of communion with nature; the beauty without touched the sense of beauty within; and, for the moment, enjoyment was complete. It was the terminal and highest point of a series; but there was more beyond, and to the beyond the rapt enthusiast must go—
I rose up in exaltation,
And an inward trembling heat,
And (it seemed) in geste of passion,
Dropp’d the music to my feet,
Like a garment rustling downwards—such a silence follow’d it.
Heart and head beat through the quiet,
Full and heavily, though slower;
In the song, I think, and by it,
Mystic presences of power
Had upsnatch’d me to the timeless, then return’d me to the hour.
She left the bower, she left the wood, she left the sanctuary, and went out to the great temple, which yet, for a little while, was all a sanctuary.
Oh, the golden-hearted daisies
Witness’d there, before my youth,
To the truth of things, with praises
To the beauty of the truth.
And I woke to nature’s real, laughing joyfully for both.
Light-hearted, yet full-hearted, she vowed that every day she would return to the bower; and she kept her vow; but “next morning all had vanished, or my wandering missed the place,” and “I never more upon it turned my mortal countenance.” It was the beginning of her losses, a list or specimen of which she give us:
I have lost the dream of doing,
And the other dream of done—
The first spring in the pursuing,
The first pride in the begun;
First recoil from incompletion in the face of what is won.
Exaltations in the far light,
Where some cottage only is,
Mild dejections in the starlight,
Which the sadder-hearted miss,
And the child-cheek blushing scarlet, for the very shame of bliss.
I have lost the sound child-sleeping,
Which the thunder could not break;
Something, too, of the strong leaping
Of the stag-like heart awake,
Which the pale is low for keeping in the road it ought to take.
But the song must not close thus; at least, it must not, and will not, close thus to the spirit who has rightly undergone the discipline of the losses which the loss of the bower prefigured and necessitated. The time was long past, and the place far away; the discipline of life lay in the scene between the then and now; but, shutting her eyes, and calling upon “unchanging recollections,” the bower rose up before the spirit’s eye, fresh and fair as it first appeared to the child’s vision. Here is the exultant finale:
Is the bower lost then? Who sayeth
That the bower indeed is lost?
Hark! my spirit in it prayeth,
Through the solstice and the frost,
And the prayer preserves it greenly, to the last and uttermost—
Till another open for me,
In God’s Eden-land unknown;
With an angel at the doorway,
White with gazing at his throne,
And a saint’s voice in the palm-trees, singing, All is lost—and won!
The “Brown Rosary” is pitched on a higher key, and takes in a wider range of thought; but it also is a song of losses, and of gains through losses. In the “Lost Bower” we have delineated, under the guise of a child’s story, the disenchanting process through which nature passes, or seems to pass, as it presents itself day after day, and [p. 170→] year after year, to the eye and heart which are incessantly changed and modified by the ever-shifting phenomena and events of time. The theme and moral of the “Brown Rosary” are indicated in these lines:
Then breaking into tears—‘Dear God!’ she cried; ‘and must we see
All blissful things depart from us, or ere we go to Thee!’
It is a sermon on the text—“He that loveth father or mother, wife or children, more than me, is not worthy of me.” It has more of incident than the “Lost Bower,” and its structure and motion are more diversified. Orona was betrothed to a noble and generous lover, and both seemed to be well fitted for each other. This human love was all in all to Orona. She could not see beyond it; she could not live without it; and for it she was willing to sacrifice the love and hope of heaven. This mood of mind is brought out with admirable artistic skill by the machinery of a dream, in which Orona, her dead father, angels, and the ghost of a false nun, who, lost herself by earthly love, tempts Orona to a like ruin, and interlocutors. A little brother of Orona’s is also introduced, who is supposed to be conversant with the whole matter, and plays the explanatory part of the chorus in the Greek tragedies. Orona the betrothed, was doomed to die, as we learn from the dream. She says:
We heard, beside the heavenly gate, the angels murmuring:
We heard them say, ‘Put day to day, and count the days to seven,
And God will draw Orona up the golden stairs to heaven;
And yet the evil ones have leave that purpose to defer,
For if she has no need of Him, he has no need of her.’
Evil Spirit.
Speak out to me—speak bold and free.
Orona in sleep.
And then I heard thee say—
‘I count upon my rosary brown the hours thou hast to stay!
Yet God permits us evil ones to put by that decree,
For if thou hast no need of Him, he has no need of thee;
And if thou wilt forego the sight of angels, verily,
Thy true love, gazing on thy face, shall guess what angels be.’
Orona did not choose the better part. Poor girl! her human love overcame her:—
Love feareth death. I was no child; I was betrothed that day:
I wore a troth-kiss on my lips I could not give away.
How could I bear to lie content and still beneath a stone,
And feel mine own betrothed go by—alas, no more mine own!—
Go leading by, in wedding pomp, some lovely lady brave,
With cheeks that blush’d as red as rose, while mine were cold in grave?
How could I bear to sit in heaven, on e’er so high a throne,
And hear him say to her—to her!—that else he loveth none?
Though e’er so high I sate above, though e’er so low he spake,
As clear as thunder I should hear the new oath he might take—
That hers, forsooth, are heavenly eyes—ah, me! while very dim
Some heavenly eyes (indeed of heaven) would darken down to him.
Orona being thus overcome, she vowed this fearful vow, which had power to defer the purpose of the good angels. She addresses, in sleep, the ghost of the nun—
I vow’d upon thy rosary brown—and, till such vow should break,
A pledge always of living days ’twas hung around my neck—
I vow’d to thee on rosary (dead father, look not so!),
I would not thank God in my weal nor seek God in my wo!
The current of human love was now free to take its course. The bridal morn arrived. The little brother mixed in the joyous throng, but not as part of it, not as a happy heart. On the way to the church, and again in the church, he reproached his sister with wearing on her bosom a brown rosary. The mother frowned on her boy; the bridegroom laughed; the priest said the boy was wild, and approved the piety of the bride; and “the maiden’s lips trembled with smiles shut within.” The ceremony proceeded. A mocking laugh broke in upon it, but none could find out who the mockers were. The priest was perplexed. He could not name the great name—
And each saw the bride, as if no bride she were,
Gazing cold at the priest, without gesture of prayer,
As he read from the psalter.
At length the rite was finished, and “they who knelt down together, arise up as one.” Orona’s vow renouncing heaven has won for her human love. But only for a moment. The cup was lifted to her lips only to be dashed to the ground. The bridegroom glared blank and wide. He kissed his bride, but his lips stung her with cold. He called her his own wife, and “fell stark at her feet in the word he was saying:”—
She look’d in his face earnest long, as, in sooth,
There were hope of an answer, and then kiss’d his mouth;
And, with head on his bosom, wept, wept bitterly—
‘Now, O God, take pity, take pity on me!—
God, hear my beseeching!’
She was ’ware of a shadow that cross’d where she lay—
She was ’ware of a presence that wither’d the day;
Wild, she sprang to her feet—‘I surrender to Thee
The broken vow’s pledge, the accursed rosary:
I am ready for dying!’ [p. 171]
Time’s enchantments were now broken; and, in this total eclipse of human love and hope, Orona first beheld the day-spring of the love that is divine. We have the moral of the poem in these her last words:—
She spoke with passion after pause—‘And were it wisely done,
If we who cannot gaze above, should walk the earth alone?
If we whose virtue is so weak, should have a will so strong,
And stand blind on the rocks to choose the right path from the wrong?—
To choose, perhaps, a love-lit hearth instead of love and heaven;
A single rose for a rose-tree, which beareth seven times seven;
A rose that droppeth from the hand, that fadeth in the breast,
Until, in grieving for the worst, we learn what is the best.’
Then breaking into tears—‘Dear God!’ she cried; ‘and must we see
All blissful things depart from us, or ere we go to Thee?
We cannot guess thee in the wood, or hear thee in the wind:
Our cedars must fall round us ere we see the light behind.
Ay sooth, we feel too strong in weal to need thee on that road;
But wo being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on God.’
We have noticed these two poems together, because we think the one has it completeness in the other, and both are required to the full development of the leading thought which runs through them. In both we have an exhibition of beautiful and lovely things—lovely, and deserving to be loved, because they are beautiful and true. In both, we are taught that this beauty is not of the highest order; and that if, while loving it, we do not stretch forward to the love of a higher beauty, our idols will become dim, will cease to fill our hearts, or will be dashed to pieces before our eyes. Thus it is with nature, as she presents herself to the young, susceptible heart; and thus it is with that higher phase of the beautiful which comes in the fascinations of young affection. We cannot love the one or the other too well, if, at the same time, we keep open heart to a higher love. The “Lost Bower” is recovered; the “splendor in the grass, the glory in the flower,” are restored by the “prayer,” which “preserves them greenly to the last and uttermost;” an though, in the “Brown Rosary,” poor Orona’s human love was blighted beyond the power of prayer to revive it, her blighted earthly hopes were the soil in which sprung up for her the first heavenly flowers.
We have only further to express a hope, that the extracts we have laid before our readers will impress them with a favorable opinion of Mrs. Browning’s poetry. It is a source of high and pure delight to us, and we wish, therefore, that its gifted authoress were better known in this northern land. It bears the test of re-perusal better than most poetry with which we are acquainted; which comes, we presume, from the combination and fusion of strong thought with the finest feeling. It was not without reason, and Alfred Tennyson need not take it amiss, that Mrs. Browning was named in some quarters for the laureateship, on the death of Wordsworth.
Reviewed:
Review Essay (EBB).
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