E620329D. Last Poems.
The Examiner, 29 March 1862, p. 198.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 367.
Mrs Browning’s last heart-spoken lines full, as in the days when she was yet with us, of strong individuality expressed with the fervour of genius and keen womanly feeling, fall on our ears as a voice from the living. Of the occasional waywardness of her music, its frequent disdain of accuracy in rhyme, its over fondness for refrains, there is evidence here as in all that she wrote; but of her infinite superiority, by right of earnestness, by right of genius, to the English poetesses of all days, and to nearly all the English poets of her own day, the evidence is even more complete. In verses with so true a ring as these Mrs Browning lives and will ever live.
only a curl.
Friends of faces unknown and a land
Unvisited over the sea,
Who tell me how lonely you stand
With a single gold curl in the hand
Held up to be looked at by me,—
While you ask me to ponder and say
What a father and mother can do,
With the bright fellow-locks put away
Out of reach, beyond kiss, in the clay
Where the violets press nearer than you.
Shall I speak like a poet, or run
Into weak woman’s tears for relief?
Oh, children!—I never lost one,—
Yet my arm’s round my own little son,
And Love knows the secret of Grief.
And I feel what it must be and is,
When God draws a new angel so
Through the house of a man up to His,
With a murmur of music, you miss,
And a rapture of light, you forego.
How you think, staring on at the door,
Where the face of your angel flashed in,
That its brightness, familiar before,
Burns off from you ever the more
For the dark of your sorrow and sin.
God lent him and takes him,’ you sigh;
—Nay, there let me break with your pain:
God’s generous in giving, say I,—
And the thing which He gives, I deny
That He ever can take back again.
He gives what He gives. I appeal
To all who bear babes—in the hour
When the veil of the body we feel
Rent round us,—while torments reveal
The motherhood’s advent in power,
And the babe cries!—has each of us known
By apocalypse (God being there
Full in nature) the child is our own,
Life of life, love of love, moan of moan,
Through all changes, all times, everywhere.
He’s ours and for ever. Believe,
O father!—O mother, look back
To the first love’s assurance. To give
Means with God not to tempt or deceive
With a cup thrust in Benjamin’s sack.
He gives what he gives. Be content!
He resumes nothing given,—be sure!
God lend? Where the usurers lent
In His temple, indignant He went
And scourged away all those impure,
He lends not; but gives to the end,
As He loves to the end. If it seem
That He draws back a gift, comprehend
’Tis to add to it rather—amend,
And finish it up to your dream,—
Or keep,—as a mother will toys
Too costly, though given by herself,
Till the room shall be stiller from noise,
And the children more fit for such joys,
Kept over their heads on the shelf.
So look up, friends! you, who indeed
Have possessed in your house a sweet piece
Of the Heaven which men strive for, must need
Be more earnest than others are,—speed
Where they loiter, persist where they cease
You know how one angel smiles there.
Then weep not. ’Tis easy for you
To be drawn by a single gold hair
Of that curl, from earth’s storm and despair,
To the safe place above us. Adieu,
Very gracefully too is the thought that poets “learn in suffering what they teach in song,” here set in fable; true though it be that sorrow is common to all, and that it is a false sentiment which would have poetry to spring from an especial state of misery.
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 the 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 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 nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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