E620922A. Last Poems.

The Evening Standard, 22 September 1862, p. 3.

Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.

This is the last gleaning of a noble vintage, when that vintage is over and done. “Last Poems” falls sadly on the ear whenever the writer is a true poet, and here we have unmistakeable genius of a high cast. Elizabeth Barrett Browning not only possessed genius, but genius of a very special and peculiar kind, marked and decided from the very first dawn of juvenile power. She, if any woman ever was, was born a poetess; and from the very first showed that creative power which mere learning, however profound, or skill over words, however masterly, can never give. The natural bent and cast of her mind was masculine. At twenty she had read books and acquired a store of intellectual knowledge which few men master until long past that age. She was even then Greek scholar enough to translate one of the stiffest plays of Æschylus, the profoundest and most difficult of Greek dramatists, and her translation is one of the best we have of what in reality is untranslateable. Her chief and most important works are too well known to need recapitulation, and too highly valued to need praise here; though her admirers are mainly among scholars, men of the broadest of Broad-Church opinions, freethinkers, and strong-minded women. She owes this motley band of admirers chiefly to the boldness of her religious views, the fierce vehemence with which she expresses them, as well as the power and beauty of her language. She has all her husband’s keen and delicate ear for rhythm and beauty of verse, all his recklessness in violating its known laws, all his subtle and refined skill in analysing thought and giving expression to the deepest and most lofty passion, without his obscurity. It is rare to meet with a single stanza in her writings which one cannot at least understand the meaning of after a moment’s thought. She is often abrupt, almost harsh from intense vehemence, sometimes reckless or defiant of womanly delicacy in alluding to or boldly touching on points from which most men shrink; and yet she has written many pages of exquisitely true and touching verse, full of all grace, tenderness, and womanly love, such as none but a true poetess could for a moment command. But the strangest mystery of all, in the mind of this gifted woman, is the apparent mixture of the profoundest and purest Christian faith with stray snatches or phases of the rankest materialism. This materialism peeps out, not only in her translations from that wild semi-infidel poet Heine, but here and there even in her own verses. So open, so entire is the contradiction between these two elements that we are at a loss how to reconcile them. All we can do is to note their existence, and leave the enigma for the reader’s own solution.

The poems in the volume before us are in kind most various, and most various in subject. Some are mere scraps of song, scarcely meant or worthy to be printed at all, especially some among the translations. Others are perfect and complete poems, of which no criticism can give the reader any true picture. Their tenderness, pure faith, and grace are scarcely to be exceeded in recent poetry; and of these extracts will furnish but a most imperfect idea. Like a bouquet of fair and sweet flowers, freshly gathered from a blooming garden, to enjoy all their beauty, fragrance and colour we must have them in our own hands and take them into our own hearts. Nowhere, indeed, is Mrs. Browning more happy, more tender, or more true than when out fairly among flowers and sunshine, the joys and sorrows of childhood, or other of the fairest things God has given to earth; and some of the most charming stanzas in these her last sweet songs have to do with such dainty themes, into which she pours her whole heart and soul. A few stanzas (we have no space for all) out of a little simple poem, entitled “Only a Curl,” will at once prove her power and tenderness of expression, as well as her living Christian belief. What can a mother say, she asks, to those who hold up the one single golden curl from some dear one’s head, when the bright fellow-locks are away, “out of reach, beyond kiss, in the clay!”

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.

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.

10.

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.

11.

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.

12.

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.

14.

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.

There is great tenderness, truth, and feeling in these verses, as there is in another little poem, entitled “My Kate,” in which a single stanza often contains a complete and dainty picture, though the words are the very simplest and the metre as old as Nursery Rhymes—

She never found fault with you, never implied

Your wrong by her right, and yet men at her side

Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town

The children were gladder that pulled at her gown—

My Kate.

My dear one!—when thou wast alive with the rest,

I held thee the sweetest and loved thee the best:

And now thou art dead, shall I not take thy part,

As thy smiles used to do for thyself, my sweet heart—

My Kate?

So elegant, pure, and graceful do these line[s] appear, that it is difficult to imagine the authoress writing in any other strain. It is hard to conceive how by contact with minds of a coarser or more masculine turn, or by dealing with coarser pictures in the worlds of books or men, she could ever have so lost sight of all grace and delicacy as to make “Lord Walter’s Wife” rebuke a too ardent lover for seeking her husband’s dishonour in words which would not be tolerated in decent society. No modest woman—no true woman (as she is drawn)—would have said to any man—

You did me the honour, perhaps, to be moved at my side now and then

In the senses—a vice, I have heard, which is common to beasts and some men.

It is no doubt quite right that things should be called by their right names, a spade be dubbed spade, and a villain have his true title of villain. But there is no need, in describing villany, to bring up to the brightest focus the one nastiest point in all its nastiness. Some points of evil are so rank and so intolerable that their site can easily be indicated by a mere finger point, without touching the corruption itself. But Mrs. Browning is not content with this. Evil must not only be dragged to the light and branded as it deserves, but its essential nastiness must be thrust under the reader’s nose that its full rancour may be tasted. Traces of this are found in some of her most striking pages, though we will but take one more example from a most brilliant poem, ”Bianca among the Nightingales.” The authoress is describing a worthless woman, at once false and fair—so fair that she takes away the breath of men who gaze upon her unaware. Much of the picture is painted with consummate skill. But what shall we say of such words as the following?—

I would not play her larcenous tricks

To have her looks. She lied, and stole,

And spat into my love’s pure pyx

The rank saliva of her soul.

The whole idea and the whole simile are needlessly coarse and offensive, and fail of all power in proportion to their very coarseness.

In other passages of great vigour there is a free use of strong language, which is mainly noticeable as appearing in the printed works of a lady. In her “Song for the Ragged Schools of London” there is an amusing specimen of this. The song itself is utterly unfit for any children to sing, but speaks out with remarkable vigour in some of the stanzas, as in the following:—

14.

Ragged children, hungry-eyed,

Huddled up out of the coldness

On your door step, side by side,

Till your footman damns their boldness.

15.

In the alleys, in the squares,

Begging, lying little rebels;

In the noisy thoroughfares,

Struggling on with piteous trebles.

16.

Wicked children, with peaked chins

And old foreheads! there are many,

With no pleasures except sins,

Gambling with a stolen penny.

It is obvious that one rehearsal of such a song as this at a Ragged School would set the whole establishment into a panic of the wildest uproar. The windows would be smashed, the master pelted with inkstands, and the gas turned out. But as a mere picture of what such children are, their crying need, their sorrows and their sins, and the duty of the nation towards all such perishing outcasts, the whole poem (about a hundred lines) is of singular power and beauty. But we gladly now turn to the pleasanter portion of our task, and point out some few of those passages which have given Mrs. Browning her high rank as a poetess, and will even add to her present high fame. A vein of tender sadness runs through many of her most pleasant. It is sad to find so gifted a woman, with such a wise and loving heart, writing thus but a short time before she was taken from those she loved so well:—

Tired out we are, my heart and I.

Suppose the world brought diadems

To tempt us, crusted with loose gems

Of power and pleasures? Let it try;

We scarcely care to look at even

A pretty child, or God’s blue heaven,

We feel so tired, my heart and I.

Yet who complains? My heart and I?

In this abundant earth no doubt

Is little room for things worn out:

Disdain them, break them, throw them by;

And if before the days grew rough

We once were loved, used—well enough,

I think, we’ve fared, my heart and I.

It seems as if the burden and the heat of the day had fallen on her heavily, and bowed down the brave and resolute spirit into a vein of solemn and tender sadness, for which the sunshine of her life was no match. This speaks to us again and again in others of the most touching and beautiful of her poems, but always to the same effect. It is this feeling of a desolate, darkened life which makes her break out in one place into that passionate exclamation—

What’s the best thing in the world?

——Something out of it I think.

This, too, was not the utterance of despair, but of strong, pure faith. If she found life thus far dark and disappointing she had fullest faith in a better land—a higher, purer, nobler existence, where the light dies not and love is immortal as well as pure. In many of her former poems she has given the world ample proof of how strong and true her trust was in God’s gift of that higher, truer life; but nowhere has she done so with greater depth of devotion, or beauty, and power of expression than in the volume before us—in a little poem entitled ”De Profundis,” of about thirty stanzas. It is apparently a lament for some near and dear friend, in a strain of noble and impassioned poetry such as has been rarely equalled and more rarely excelled. It is impossible, by any extracts, to give a just idea of its full beauty, but we must do the best we can, and send our readers to drink for themselves at the fountain head.

The face which, duly as the sun

Rose up for me with life begun,

To mark all bright hours of the day

With hourly love, is dimmed away,—

And yet my days go on, go on.

The past rolls forward on the sun

And makes all night. O dreams begun,

Not to be ended! Ended bliss,

And life that will not end in this!

My days go on, my days go on.

Thus roll by her days in darkened sorrow, slowly, and in gloom; but in the deepest shadow comes light, and never for a moment wavers her trust in Him whom she believes. She asks herself if to Nature she may turn for help or relief—but she adds:—

—A Voice reproves me thereupon,

More sweet than Nature’s when the drone

Of bees is sweetest, and more deep

Than when the rivers overleap

The shuddering pines, and thunder on.

16.

God’s Voice, not Nature’s! Night and noon

He sits upon the great white throne

And listens for the creatures’ praise:

Why babble we of days and days?

The day-spring He, whose days go on.

17.

He reigns below, He reigns alone,

And having life in love forgone

Beneath the crown of sovran thorns,

He reigns the jealous God. Who mourns

Or rules with Him while days go on?

20.

Take from my head the thorn-wreath brown!

No mortal grief deserves that crown.

O! supreme love, chief misery,

The sharp regalia are for Thee

Whose days eternally go on!

Having thus turned to the one great source of rest for the weary and peace for the sad in heart, a flood of rapturous light beams across her troubled vision, and her song takes yet a nobler flight—

23.

I praise Thee while my days go on;

I love Thee while my days go on;

Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,

With emptied arms and treasure lost,

I thank Thee while my days go on.

Of the political poems and songs in this volume all we need say is that they are marked by Mrs. Browning’s usual fiery dash and eloquence; and by some of her usual mysterious jargon, which besets her on all such topics, and often becomes mere empty rant. The translations from “Theocritus,” “Homer,” and some of those from “Apuleius,” are done with masterly skill and fidelity. A few scraps from “Heine,” too, possess the same merit of power; but power wasted on a worthless subject. What could induce such a woman to select for translation such poor stuff as this—a lover’s address to his mistress in her grave?—

The dead stand up, the midnight calls,

They dance in airy swarms—

We two keep still where the grave-shade falls,

And I lie on in thine arms.

The dead stand up, the judgment day

Bids such to weal or woe—

But nought shall trouble us where we stay,

Embraced and embracing below.

If this escapes the charge of blasphemy, it does so only by its intolerable and vulgar silliness. But on every ground we are amazed to find it among the printed works of such a woman as Mrs. Browning. Her sudden and premature death, in May, 1861, not only deprived us of a true poetess, but a woman of true Christian hope and life. Such trash as this, therefore, ought never to have been suffered to intrude on any page of hers.

Reviewed:

Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.

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