E6204110A. Last Poems.
The Daily News, 10 April 1862, p. 2.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
It is in no critical spirit that most readers will be inclined to take up these last works of a great poetess, whose intense love of truth, whose passionate yet pure feeling, and whose profound spirit of devotion have done so much to adorn and elevate the literature of our own day. If occasionally we find that her peculiar forms of expression—always to many a stumbling block—are unaccompanied by the lofty poetic thought which gave them dignity in other years, our surprise is not that the flame of her genius should have waned ere it sunk from earth, but rather that it burned so clear and strong during a lifetime of pain and physical languor, and that its flashes were beautiful even to the end. There is more pathos for us in last broken words and faltering accents of those we love and revere, than in the fuller utterances of their stronger days; so those who have found profit and delight in Mrs. Browning’s other poems will treasure these last also, and with a more peculiar love.
It must not be imagined, however, that this small volume is not in itself, and apart from other considerations, far more than worthy of publication. It contains one poem, “Bianca among the Nightingales,” which is almost perfect as the expression of intense, impassioned love, driven to the verge of madness by the unfaithfulness of its object. This is a subject which has been taken up by most renowned poets, and in her treatment of it Mrs. Browning has shown that she could be a consummate artist when she chose. In the mood of mind which this poem expresses and pourtrays, the surrounding objects of nature obtain a new and strange life from the passion which they witnessed; and, viewed in that light, what can be more exquisite than these two stanzas:
The cypress stood up like a church
That night we felt our love would hold,
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
The olives crystallised the vales’
Broad slopes until the hills grew strong:
The fireflies and the nightingales
Throbbed each to either, flame and song.
The nightingales, the nightingales.
We paled with love, we shook with love,
We kissed so close we could not vow;
Till Giulio whispered, “Sweet, above
God’s Ever guaranties this Now.”
And through his words the nightingales
Drove straight and full their long clear call,
Like arrows through heroic mails,
And love was awful in it all.
The nightingales, the nightingales.
The poem entitled “De Profundis” is in a high strain. In some respects it resembles Tennyson’s “Two Voices,” but it is shorter, has much less reasoning, and expresses a more touching pain with a more devout resignation. In “Lord Walter’s Wife,” whose
Eyes were alive in their depth,
As the kraken beneath the sea-blue,
we have a spirited passage between a pure-minded lady and her husband’s friend, who feared that her beauty would be too much for him if he stayed beside her. The “Forced Recruit at Solferino,” and the one or two other admirable poems, have appeared very recently in English periodicals. To the last the political condition of Italy engaged Mrs. Browning’s warmest sympathies, and this volume contains some fine lyrics on Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel. She admits that Louis Napoleon is “corrupt as seven devils,” but cannot allow that to detract from the merit of his Italian campaign. The last poem of all we quote because it is the last, though far from being the best:-
“Now give us lands where the olives grow,”
Cried the North to the South,
“Where the sun with a golden mouth can blow
Blue bubbles of grapes down a vineyard row!”
Cried the North to the South.
“Now give us men from the sunless plain,”
Cried the South to the North.
“By need of work in the snow and the rain
Made strong, and brave by familiar pain!”
Cried the South to the North.
“Give lucider hills and intenser seas,”
Said the North to the South,
“Since ever by symbols and bright degrees,
Art, childlike, climbs to the dear Lord’s knees,”
Said the North to the South.
“Give strenuous souls for belief and prayer,”
Said the South to the North,
“That stand in the dark on the lowest stair,
While affirming of God ‘He is certainly there,’”
Said the South to the North.
“Yet oh, for the skies that are softer and higher!”
Sighed the North to the South;
“For the flowers that blaze, and the trees that aspire,
And the insects made of a song or a fire!”
Sighed the North to the South.
“And oh for a seer to discern the same!”
Sighed the South to the North;
“For a poet’s tongue of baptismal flame,
To call the tree or the flower by its name!”
Sighed the South to the North.
The North sent therefore a man of men
As a grace to the South;
And thus to Rome came Andersen.
“Alas, but must you take him again?”
Said the South to the North.
There is not much rythmical beauty in these last words of Mrs. Browning; but the meaning which struggles through is worthy of her who has now gone from the bright sunshine of Italy to the sunless land. If the South attracted her by its “lucider hills and intenser seas,” its balmier nights and its softier skies, she herself gave it an example of one
Made strong and brave by familiar pain,
and of a soul strenuous in belief and prayer. She has given a new interest and a deeper meaning to some of Italy’s loveliest scenes and most striking works of art; she sympathised deeply with it in its great struggle, and strained her genius to excite for it the sympathy of other lands. She there now sleeps the sleep for which she so often longed, and it is in connection with that country that her memory will be embalmed along with those great English poets who are either buried there beside her or who sung there their sweetest and loftiest songs.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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