E620804A. Last Poems.
The Bristol Daily Post, 4 August 1862, p. 3.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
A year ago we took occasion to point out some of the varied excellences of Mrs. Browning’s works, while giving a sketch of the life that had just drawn to a close. The publication of her last poems affords us another opportunity to pay a tribute to her memory, and to notice these her latest productions.
They are strange and beautiful enough, but we might not have spoken of them had they not been her last. We would forgive their faults, if such they have, for they are the last faults of her’s we shall ever have to know. We would remember only her surpassing talent, and the noble heart that directed it.
In this book as in all her others we may perceive her high originality, the force of her genius, and her disregard of the formality, perhaps the prudery, of thought and expression adopted by modern society. This disregard of the world’s ways has been called coarseness, but everything vulgar or impure was far removed from her nature, and she rose stainless from the depths into which as a poetess she sometimes descended. The Last Poems consist principally of domestic subjects, and verses suggested by the momentous events that have been passing in Italy: added to these are a few translations which will be of much greater interest to the scholar than to the general public, the general public getting in these days rather tired of Cupid and Venus, Psyche and Pan, and wishing to find gods and beauties among the living. And Mrs. Browning has sounded the heart of a beauty in her poem entitled Lord Walter’s Wife.
“But why do you go,” said the lady, while both sate under the yew,
And her eyes were alive in their depth, as the kraken beneath the sea-blue.
“Because I fear you,” he answered;—“because you are far too fair,
And able to strangle my soul in a mesh of your gold-coloured hair.”
“Oh, that,” she said, “is no reason! Such knots are quickly undone,
And too much beauty, I reckon, is nothing but too much sun.”
“Yet farewell so,” he answered;—“the sunstroke is fatal at times.
I value your husband, Lord Walter, whose gallop rings still from the limes.”
“Oh, that,” she said, “is no reason. You smell a rose through a fence:
If two should smell it, what matter? who grumbles, and where’s the pretence?”
“But you,” he replied, “have a daughter, a young little child, who was laid
In your lap to be pure; so I leave you: the angels would make me afraid.”
“Oh, that,” she said, “is no reason. The angels keep out of the way;
And Dora, the child, observes nothing, although you should please me and stay.”
Bianca among the Nightingales tells of the infidelity of a young Italian, who, after having pledged himself to one of his own countrywomen, was led away by the charms of an English girl. Having heard “the Grazie tanto bruised to sweetness by her English mouth,” he was caught by her loosed gold ringlets, and induced to desert his first love, and to go “to gloomy England, called the free.” This poem shows clearly enough that Mrs. Browning’s power of true pathetic writing was possessed to the end, and it stands out in strange contrast to that feeble sentimentality which is too often mistaken for pathos. Weakness, indeed, is not among the faults of this poetess: she is wonderfully powerful, without bearing the slightest resemblance to those strong-minded women who spring up at every Social Science Congress, and look as if they tried to be men, but could not.
Familiar with the name of the Most High Mrs. Browning certainly was, but surely not irreverent: when she talks of “God’s liberal blue air,” she is doing no worse than that most unfettered of clergymen, Professor Kingsley.
She writes from Rome a song for the London Ragged Schools; she pleads boldly and eloquently for the outcast and forlorn; she sees something in the well cared-for children of the rich to remind her of the starving poor,
With those blue
English eyes, fresh from their Maker,
Fierce and ravenous, staring through
At the brown loaves of the baker.
Mrs. Browning’s strong sympathies were enlisted on behalf of the Italian cause during the campaign of 1859, and the succeeding events, in which Garibaldi played so prominent a part. She was carried away by the enthusiasm of the people, and she may not have thoroughly understood the difficulties of the case. She was therefore much incensed against the two emperors who made peace at Villafranca, and gave vent to her anger in the most passionate exclamations. Italy has of a truth worked wonders; but who shall say that they are not attributable in some degree to the wisdom of that temporary peace! It is cause for gratulation that Europe was spared the general war that must almost inevitably have followed upon a long struggle between France and Austria. How disproportionate to the interests at stake would have been the horrors of a continued war between some of the greatest of nations!—almost as disproportionate, it seems to us, as are the sacrifices now being made in America to the paltry love of dominion, for which the North is ruthlessly fighting.
Let us listen for a moment to Mrs. Browning’s vehement remarks:—
Peace, peace, peace, do you say?
What!—uncontested, undenied?
Because we triumph, we succumb?
A pair of Emperors stand in the way
(One of whom is a man, beside).
To sign and seal our cannons dumb?
Peace you say?—yes, peace, in truth!
But such a peace as the ear can achieve
’Twixt the rifle’s click and the rush of the ball,
’Twixt the tiger’s spring and the crunch of the tooth,
’Twixt the dying atheist’s negative
And God’s face—waiting after all!
In looking over our own feeble comments on Mrs. Browning’s last work, we feel how inadequately we have expressed our sense of its beauty. We can say no more. We close the book, trusting that the reader of these words will open it.
G. Winthrop Webster.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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