E440900A. Poems (1844).
Ainsworth’s Magazine, September 1844, pp. 280 and 282.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 333.
If poems in these times, however impressive and beautiful in themselves, need the aid of names to attract to them the incredulous and objective reader, here are volumes which have at least this general advantage—each has a name associated with other efforts, and honoured so far in public estimation as to raise rather than repress expectation.
[Here follows a review of Walks in the Country by Lord Leigh, and Poems by Fanny Kemble Butler.] [p. 282→]
We re-open the lately read pages of Miss Barrett, with a feeling of admiration and respect too strong to be entrusted to such feeble and inadequate expressions of it as we could here employ. If these volumes do not place her (about which there may be some argument) in the highest class of our poets, most assuredly they do place her in the first rank of fine intellectual natures; of those who, now and then, in a great age, by their mental supremacy and universal sympathies, attain a station where admiration is not unmingled with reverence. If some of this poetry be not of the highest, it is so nearly allied to it, that the keenest sense of the exquisite essence in which the highest poetry consists, is requisite to detect and make palpable the distinction.
We merely profess to mention the appearance of this collection, and the feelings it awakens: to give the “why and because,” would demand a long dissertation; the very subjects forbid us to touch lightly. The great poem, the “Drama of Exile,” is the exile from Paradise, depicted in a form and with a power suited to the subject, grand and awful as it is. To discuss it adequately in a few sentences, is as impossible as the imaginative beauty and illustrative knowledge revealed in it is undoubted. The attempt to treat it so, remembering the sacredness of all the associations connected with it, would be “to do it wrong.” We can simply state, that, in something of the Greek tragic shape, this lofty drama presents the “new and strange experience of the fallen humanity,” as it went forth into the wilderness; and the subject is treated, in the author’s words, “with a peculiar reference to Eve’s allotted grief, which, considering that self-sacrifice belonged to her womanhood, and the consciousness of originating the Fall to her offence, appeared to me imperfectly apprehended hitherto, and more expressible by a woman than a man.” There was room, at least, it is remarked, “for lyrical emotion in those first steps into the wilderness.” Truly; and the aim has been accomplished with such a truthfulness of power, working to its purpose, that every modest doubt, which so long held back the poem, (as we here learn,) must for ever be banished from the author’s mind. The discourse of the Fallen Pair, under the reproaches of the spirits of the earth, animate and inanimate, are equally grand and pathetic. They excite tears, and they thrill us with awe, as the mournful, the compassionate, or the terrible predominates. Page after page would supply its proof; but all imperfectly, as this must necessarily do: it is Eve speaking:—
“________For was I not
At that last sunset seen in paradise,
When all the westering clouds flashed out in throngs
Of sudden angel faces, face by face,
All hushed and solemn, as a thought of God
Held them suspended—was I not that hour
The lady of the world, princess of life,
Mistress of feast and favour? Could I touch
A rose with my white hand, but it became
Redder at once? Could I walk leisurely
Along our swarded garden, but the grass
Tracked me with greenness? Could I stand aside
A moment underneath a cornel-tree,
But all the leaves did tremble, as alive,
With songs of fifty birds, who were made glad
Because I stood there? Could I turn to look
With these twain eyes of mine, now weeping fast,
Now good for only weeping—upon man,
Angel, or beast, or bird, but each rejoiced,
Because I looked on him? Alas, alas!
And is not this much woe, to cry ‘alas!’
Speaking of joy?”
The minor poems in the collection are only so in form and subject; few of them are without some weight of object, or touch of beauty. All that we can complain of is, that too many words are sometimes used—large words, not so full of meaning as of sound—that there is too much of what is called “eloquence” in the work. The introductory pages are full of interest; all is womanly, delicate, and unaffected.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
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