E440824B. Poems (1844).
The Spectator, 24 August 1844, pp. 809–810.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 324–326.
Miss Barrett is of the school to which Mr. Coventry Patmore belongs, but with a happier choice in the selection of her subjects, more of skill in the use of her materials, a healthier moral tone, and less affectation, unless in her style and the occasional choice of her metre. A higher poetical spirit than young Patmore she may not possess, but she has more of it, and of a robuster character.
The author whom Miss Barrett immediately resembles is Tennyson—the best of this school of poets, if he is not to be called the head. There are also traces in her productions of Keats and Coleridge; but these are transient, and perhaps derived through Tennyson himself. In point of finish and felicity, Miss Barrett falls below her prototype—she has nothing equal to “The May Queen,” or “Lady Clara Vere De Vere,” or several other poems of Tennyson; nor has she that writer’s easy strength. In other respects the characteristics of one poet will describe the other: they both produce their effects by representing things not as they really are, or as they are supposed to be, but with a peculiarity derived from the writer’s mind; and both excel in a species of quaint description, which is sometimes more effective than a natural style unless in the hands of a first-rate master.
The largest and most ambitious poem in the volume is called “A Drama of Exile.” The subject is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise immediately after the Fall. Miss Barrett’s object appears to have been, to exhibit the feelings of angelic and demoniac beings upon that event, as well as to display the sufferings of Adam and Eve and the condition of animate and inanimate creation. Her plan, for this object, exhibits a good deal of judgment and felicity. The Drama of Exile opens with Lucifer and Gabriel discoursing at the gates of Paradise: the next scene represents Adam and Eve retiring across the plain, accompanied by a chorus of Eden Spirits, followed by chants from the Spirits of the Woods, Waters, Flowers, and Birds. The two progenitors of the human race are then introduced, and display their sorrows and affections in a dialogue, which is more than once interrupted by Lucifer, and is varied by apparitions appropriate to the great natural change that has taken place. Among these, the most striking are the Spirits of Organic and Inorganic Nature, which rise to reproach Adam and Eve with the effects their sin has produced, and will continue to produce, on the sections of creation these Spirits represent. Finally, a vision of Christ appears, to still the contention, assign to the human race the superiority over the powers of Nature, and comfort Adam and Eve with a dim foreshadowing of the Christian dispensation.
Most of this is exceedingly well designed; especially the sadness of the inferior creation of Paradise at the departure of Adam, and the apparition of the embodied representatives of Organic Life and Inorganic Nature, as well as their angry sorrow. The execution of parts is also powerful, striking, or graceful, and sometimes with a mixture of human truth, that well relieves the necessarily remote character of the subject. The Drama of Exile is deficient as a whole, partly because the writer cannot rise
“To the height of this great argument,”
partly from a verboseness which almost becomes verbiage. The angelic and spiritual natures are neither angelical nor spiritual—they are only poets of the Tennyson school. Lucifer is more especially a failure. All the “original brightness” has vanished; [p. 810→] he is no longer an “archangel ruined,” he is not an angel at all. He has even lost his
“Dauntless courage, and considerate pride,
Waiting revenge.”
Miss Barrett pictures him as a mere talker, and rather a long-winded one, who is more given to railing and reverie than to practical speech. Byron’s Lucifer in Cain appears to have been her model rather than Milton’s Satan; in triumph her Devil looks much like an insulting brawler; and in his moments of remorse he resembles a gentlemanly sort of outcast with a speculative mind and an “university education.”
The lower natures are better; but their excellence is shown in parts and passages rather than anything complete. This general failure does not, we think, arise from an incapacity to handle the subjects, so much as from affectation, and a diffusive verboseness. Sometimes the style, sometimes the metre, and sometimes the images, are so quaint and peculiar that the attention is fixed upon mere secondary objects; and these peculiarities are not of a pleasing kind. But the main source of defect is what we pointed out in Mr. Vaughan’s Witch of Endor—an undue expansion, or rather an undue addition. Miss Barrett, like Mr. Vaughan, can seize the essential sentiment of the situation; but she is not satisfied with that—she must do more, and run down the inferior topics.
A feature Miss Barrett has striven to depict is the feminine nature of Eve; which, in her preface, she says seems more appropriately apprehended by a woman. Submissive, humble, and self-sacrificing traits of character, are delicately marked throughout; but we think there are parts in the poem of greater force and truth. This, for instance—the first approach of night in the drear and desolate world our progenitors had exchanged for Eden.
Scene.—Farther on. A wild open country seen vaguely in the approaching night.
Adam. How doth the wide and melancholy earth
Gather her hills around us, gray and ghast,
And stare with blank significance of loss
Right in our faces! Is the wind up?
Eve. Nay.
Adam. And yet the cedars and the junipers
Rock slowly through the mist, without a noise;
And shapes, which have no certainty of shape,
Drift duskly in and out between the pines,
And loom along the edges of the hills,
And lie flat, curdling in the open ground—
Shadows without a body, which contract
And lengthen as we gaze on them.
There is also a powerful and distinct delineation in this accompaniment to the curse after sin, though its character is rather melodramatic.
Lucifer. (After a pause.) Dost thou remember, Adam, when the curse
Took us in Eden? On a mountain-peak
Half-sheathed in primal woods, and glittering
In spasms of awful sunshine, at that hour
A lion couched,—part raised upon his paws,
With his calm, massive face turned full on thine,
And his mane listening. When the ended curse
Left silence in the world, right suddenly
He sprang up rampant, and stood straight and stiff,
As if the new reality of death
Were dashed against his eyes; and roared so fierce,
(Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat
Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear)—
And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills
Such fast, keen echoes crumbling down the vales
To distant silence, that the forest beasts,
One after one, did mutter a response
In savage and in sorrowful complaint,
Which trail’d along the gorges. Then, at once,
He fell back, and rolled crashing from the height,
Hid by the dark-orb’d pines.
Adam. It might have been.
I heard the curse alone.
The following farewell chant of the Flowers of Paradise to the departing Parents of Mankind is not very patriarchal or Scriptural, but it is very pretty.
Flower-Spirits.
We linger, we linger,
The last of the throng,
Like the tones of a singer
Who loves his own song.
We are spirit-aromas
Of blossom and bloom:
We call your thoughts home, as
Ye breathe our perfume—
To the amaranth’s splendour
Afire on the slopes;
To the lily-bells tender,
And grey heliotropes;
To the poppy-plains, keeping
Such dream-breath and blé,
That the angels there stepping
Grew whiter to see;
To the nook, set with moly,
Ye jested one day in,
Till your smile waxed too holy,
And left your lips praying;
To the rose in the bower-place,
That dripp’d o’er you sleeping;
To the asphodel flower-place,
Ye walk’d ankle-deep in:
We pluck at your raiment,
We stroke down your hair,—
We faint in our lament,
And pine into air.
Fare ye well, farewell!
The Eden scents, no longer sensible,
Expire at Eden’s door!
Each footstep of your treading
Treads out some fragrance which ye knew before:
Farewell! the flowers of Eden
Ye shall smell nevermore.
Though the loftiest attempt, “A Drama of Exile” does not occupy above one-fifth of the volumes. The remainder consists of poems of all sorts,—sonnets, occasional verses, resemblances to old ballads, allegories, and tales of various kinds. Of these we prefer “The Romaunt of the Page,” “The Lay of the Brown Rosary,” and “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”; not because they are free from the affectations and peculiarities of this school, but because they exhibit less of them, and the poetical power of the writer better overcomes her defects of mannerism. But we have entered so fully into the chief poem, that we cannot pursue into detail the respective merits and defects of the remainder. Before parting with Miss Barrett, however, we will take a passage of pleasing sadness from one of her minor poems.
the mournful mother.
(Of the Dead Blind.)
Dost thou weep, mournful mother,
For thy blind boy in grave?
That no more with each other
Sweet counsel ye can have?—
That he, left dark by nature,
Can never more be led
By thee, maternal creature,
Along smooth paths instead?
That thou canst no more show him
The sunshine, by the heat;
The river’s silver flowing,
By murmurs at his feet?
The foliage, by its coolness;
The roses, by their smell;
And all creation’s fulness,
By Love’s invisible?
Weepest thou to behold not
His meek blind eyes again,—
Closed doorways which were folded,
And prayed against in vain;
And under which sat smiling
The child-mouth evermore,
As one who watcheth, wiling
The time by, at a door?
And weepest thou to feel not
His clinging hand on thine—
Which now, at dream-time, will not
Its cold touch disentwine?
And weepest thou still ofter,
Oh, never more to mark
His low soft words, made softer
By speaking in the dark?
Weep on, thou mournful mother!
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
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