R500406C. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.
The Spectator, 6 April 1850, p. 329.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 366–367.
This poem is in the form of visions. On a Christmas-eve, the poet was caught in a storm in the vicinity of a low Dissenting chapel on the outskirts of a town. He entered to escape the rain; fell asleep (as it turns out) under the soporific influence of the preacher, and dreamed a dream. He thought that the weather had cleared up, and that he had taken a path across a common which adjoined the chapel; when, suddenly, he saw before him the form of Christ.
All at once I looked up with terror.
He was there,
He Himself with His human air,
On the narrow pathway just before:
I saw the back of Him, no more—
He had left the chapel, then, as I.
l forgot all about the sky.
No face: only the sight
Of a sweepy garment, vast and white,
With a hem that I could recognize.
I felt terror, no surprise:
My mind filled with the cataract,
At one bound, of the mighty fact.
I remembered He did say
Doubtless, that, to this world’s end,
Where two or three should meet and pray,
He would be in the midst, their friend:
Certainly He was there with them.
And my pulses leaped for joy
Of the golden thought without alloy,
That I saw His very vesture’s hem.
Then rushed the blood back, cold and clear,
With a fresh enhancing shiver of fear;
And I hastened, cried out while I pressed
To the salvation of the vest.
* * * *
Less or more,
I suppose that I spoke thus.
When,—have mercy, Lord, on us!
The whole face turned upon me full.
And I spread myself beneath it,
As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it
In the cleansing sun, his wool,
Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness
Some defiled, discoloured web—
So lay I, saturate with brightness.
And when the flood appeared to ebb,
Lo, I was walking, light and swift,
With my senses settling fast and steadying.
But my body caught up in the whirl and drift
Of the vesture’s amplitude, still eddying
On, just before me, still to be followed,
As it carried me after with its motion:
What shall I say? as a path were hollowed
And a man went weltering through the ocean,
Sucked along in the flying wake
Of the luminous water-snake.
Darkness and cold were cloven, as through
I passed, upborne yet walking too.
In this way the poet is carried to St. Peter’s, and thence to the lecture-room of a German Rationalist; the action or narrative closing with his awakening in the Methodist chapel. So far as we can form a conclusion from what is too purely Browninglike to be very intelligible, “Christmas-Eve” points the moral that love, not opinion, is the main characteristic of Christianity, and that the mercy of God is infinite.
“Easter-Day” has less story than “Christmas-Eve.” It opens with a dialogue between the poet and a friend on belief, and soon other essentials of Christianity as connected therewith. A story is then told of another vision which takes place on the selfsame common; but the subject on this occasion is the Day of Judgment. It leads to another dialogue between the poet and a Voice, in which all worldly gifts are passed in review, and found to be nought, till we reach at last (as we understand) the former theory of heavenly love. The practical conclusion of the poet himself is expressed in the closing lines.
When I lived again,
The day was breaking, the grey plain
I rose from, silvered thick with dew.
Was this a vision? False or true?
Since then, three varied years are spent;
And commonly my mind is bent
To think it was a dream—be sure
A mere dream and distemperature—
The last day’s watching: then the night,—
The shock of that strange Northern Light
Set my head swimming, bred in me
A dream. And so I live, you see,
Go through the world, try, prove, reject,
Prefer, still struggling to effect
My warfare; happy that I can
Be crossed and thwarted as a man,
Not left in God’s contempt apart,
With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart,
Tame in earth’s paddock as her prize.
Thank God she still each method tries
To catch me, who may yet escape,
She knows, the fiend in angel’s shape!
Thank God, no paradise stands barred
To entry, and I find it hard
To be a Christian, as I said!
Still every now and then my head
Raised glad, sinks mournful—all grows drear
Spite of the sunshine, while I fear
And think, “How dreadful to be grudged
No ease henceforth, as one that’s judged,
Condemned to earth for ever, shut
From Heaven.”
But Easter-day breaks! But
Christ rises! Mercy every way
Is infinite,—and who can say?
It requires esoteric knowledge to speak of a peculiar faith. We cannot tell what those may think who see originality in strangeness; but it does not strike us that Mr. Browning has at all advanced himself by this new poem. There is not such dreary lengths of obscurity as in some of his former pieces; but the cause of that improvement appears mechanical. It arises from the choice of metre whose nature compels brevity; and brevity avoids the obscurity of length and involution, though there is still the obscurity of hazy thought and indistinct expression. In other respects, it seems to us that Mr. Browning is much the same. His every-day subjects are commonplace in their images; though an affected quaintness may give them an air of novelty. His loftier themes are rather shrouded than presented; they pass for anything to the eye of faith, they are nothing in the eye of reason. Passages of merit, though perhaps scarcely equal to the theme, may be picked out; but the whole is strange as poetry, and mystical as Christianity.
Reviewed:
Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
___________________
