E441005A. Poems (1844).
The Examiner, 5 October 1844, pp. 627–629.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 345–348.
The longest poem in this collection is a sacred drama, A Drama of Exile, on the Fall of Man. Its time is from the evening into the night of the day when Paradise was lost: its action, the first sad steps with which the banished wanderers passed into the wilderness. Among the persons are Christ and Lucifer; and between the two extremes of Loss and Redemption, we are shown the sorrow and the hope of the first human transgressors. It is the performance of a true poet, and we have but to regret that the subject was not more wisely chosen.
In a preface very beautifully written, some such objection is anticipated.
“The divine Saviour is represented in vision towards the close, speaking and transfigured; and it has been hinted to me that the introduction may give offence in quarters where I should be most reluctant to give any. A reproach of the same class, relating to the frequent recurrence of a Great Name in my pages, has already filled me with regret. How shall I answer these things? Frankly, in any case. When the old mysteries represented the Holiest Being in a rude familiar fashion, and the people gazed on, with the faith of children in their earnest eyes, the critics of a succeeding age, who rejoiced in Congreve, cried out, ‘Profane.’ Yet Andreini’s mystery suggested Milton’s epic; and Milton, the most reverent of poets, doubting whether to throw his work into the epic form or the dramatic, left, on the latter basis, a rough ground-plan, in which his intention of introducing the ‘Heavenly Love’ among the persons of his drama, is extant to the present day. But the tendency of the present day is to sunder the daily life from the spiritual creed,—to separate the worshipping from the acting man,—and by no means to ‘live by faith.’ There is a feeling abroad which appears to me (I say it with deference) nearer to superstition than to religion, that there should be no touching of holy vessels except by consecrated fingers, nor any naming of holy names except in consecrated places. As if life were not a continual sacrament to man, since Christ brake the daily bread of it in His hands! As if the name of God did not build a church, by the very naming of it! As if the word God were not, everywhere in His creation, and at every moment in His eternity, an appropriate word! As if it could be uttered unfitly, if devoutly! I appeal on these points which I will not argue, from the conventions of the Christian to his devout heart; and I beseech [p. 628→] him generously to believe of me, that I have done that in reverence, from which, through reverence, he might have abstained; and that where he might have been driven to silence by the principle of adoration, I, by the very same principle, have been hurried into speech.”
But with Miss Barrett’s leave, this is far from the entire question in issue. She may speak of these matters, and speak very devoutly too, without any leave of the clergy; and yet be as far from anything like a fitting, utterable sense of Deity, as finite is from infinite. There are more parties to such proprieties than those exclusively alluded to. We are free to confess, for ourselves, that with a view only to principles of art, we think the attempt to scrutinize the inscrutable and embody the spiritual and illimitable, anything but a right and proper exhibition of things sacred. Miss Barrett thinks differently, doubtless with great conscientiousness and no little eloquence of justification. But our opinion on this point is so strong, that we cannot with any satisfaction or pleasure dwell on even the most beautiful passages of her sacred poetry. In our opinion, full of unquestionable genius as they are, they are more suited to the aspirations of a Saint Theresa, than to the higher and deeper humility, the truer altitudes, of a mutely adoring Christianity.
Contenting ourselves with this protest against what we believe to be an erroneous, perhaps not thoroughly healthy predilection, we wish to speak of this writer’s genius with every admiration and respect. Miss Barrett is an undoubted poetess of a high and fine order as regards the first requisites of her art, imagination and expression. At the same time it seems to us that she wants strength to compress these into a poem of any great dimensions. She uses all her thoughts and feelings for whatever she does. The art of knowing what to keep and what to reject, she has not attained. But every deduction made she is a most remarkable writer, and her volumes contain not a little which the lovers of poetry will never willingly let die.
Before we give the reader an example of it, we take another eloquent passage from the preface. It is as beautiful as earnest, and might have estopped objections less sincere and strong than ours. We cannot doubt that the writer’s life is in a veritable portion of it here set down; and if circumstances, in depriving her of a sufficing body to her spirit, may have tended to make her a somewhat morbid, we must rejoice that they have happily left her a not melancholy devotee. She has made the most of her individual gifts, and done her best, according to her faith, in the work of help for all.
“If it were not presumptuous language on the lips of one to whom life is more than usually uncertain, my favourite wish for this work would be, that it be received by the public as a step in the right track, towards a future indication of more value and acceptability. I would fain do better,—and I feel as if I might do better: I aspire to do better. It is no new form of the nympholepsy of poetry, that my ideal should fly before me:—and if I cry out too hopefully at sight of the white vesture receding between the cypresses, let me be blamed gently if justly. In any case, while my poems are full of faults,—as I go forward to my critics and confess,—they have my heart and life in them,—they are not empty shells. If it must be said of me that I have contributed immemorable verses to the many rejected by the age, it cannot at least be said that I have done so in a light and irresponsible spirit. Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing: there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work,—not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being,—but as the completest expression of that being, to which I could attain,—and as work I offer it to the public,—feeling its short-comings more deeply than any of my readers, because measured from the height of my aspiration,—but feeling also that the reverence and sincerity with which the work was done, should give it some protection with the reverent and sincere.”
The next longest poem to the Drama of Exile is the Vision of Poets: in which she indicates what she believes to be the necessary relations of genius to suffering and self-sacrifice. From the sketches of great poets which occur in this striking piece, we take a brief portion.
Here, Homer, with the broad suspense
Of thunderous brows, and lips intense
Of garrulous god-innocence.
There, Shakspeare! on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world! Oh, eyes sublime—
With tears and laughters for all time!
Here, Æschylus,—the women swooned
To see so awful when he frowned
As the gods did,—he standeth crowned.
Euripides, with close and mild
Scholastic lips,—that could be wild,
And laugh or sob out like a child
Right in the classes. Sophocles,
With that king’s look which down the trees,
Followed the dark effigies
Of the lost Theban! Hesiod old,
Who somewhat blind, and deaf, and cold,
Cared most for gods and bulls! and bold
Electric Pindar, quick as fear,
With race-dust on his cheeks, and clear
Slant startled eyes that seem to hear
The chariot rounding the last goal,
To hurtle past it in his soul!
And Sappho crowned with aureole
Of ebon curls on calmed brows—
O poet-woman! none forgoes
The leap, attaining the repose!
Theocritus, with glittering locks,
Dropt sideway, as betwixt the rocks
He watched the visionary flocks!
If we did not know that in these fine lines Miss Barrett gives her own experience and not a commonplace repetition of the experience of others, we should hardly object to one or two expressions employed. But is the “king’s look” pathetic enough for Sophocles? Are the “calmed brows” appropriate to one who was all passion? And in the “glittering locks” of Theocritus have we not something too fine and affected for the great genial idyllist? There is afterwards a character of Lucretius very nobly expressed, and there are marvellous “pictures in little” of Petrarca, Schiller, and Goethe. But why should Spenser and Ariosto be made to run “their locks in one”? They were men as different as solitude and city. And why apply the word “infantine” to Chaucer? He was not infantine: though simple. He was a man in everything. But for every word that can be objected to in this poem, there are more than double the number most beautiful and masterly.
The next longest piece is Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, which is meant for exhibition of the romance of our own age, in its daily conflicts of the real and conventional. It is Mr Marston’s Patrician’s Daughter with a happier ending. And perhaps this is the best performance of the whole, because the most real, the most closely allied to the work-day world around us all. Here are some stanzas in which the poet is describing to his friend the course of his love for the Lady Geraldine. All of them are excellent, and we have ventured to mark what we think the finer touches. We must say at the same time that we do not think the art of this particular rhythm quite mastered.
After, when we were grown tired of books, the silence round us flinging
A slow arm of sweet compression, felt with beatings at the breast,—
She would break out, on a sudden, in a gush of woodland singing,
Like a child’s emotion in a god—a naiad tired of rest.
Oh, to see or hear her singing! scarce I know which is divinest,—
For her looks sing too—she modulates her gestures on the tune;
And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are finest,
’Tis the eyes that shoot out vocal light, and seem to swell them on.
Then we talked—oh, how we talked! her voice, so cadenced in the talking,
Made another singing—of the soul! a music without bars—
While the leafy sounds of woodlands, humming round where we were walking,
Brought interposition worthy-sweet,—as skies about the stars.
And she spake such good thoughts natural, as if she always thought them—
And had sympathies so ready, open, free as bird on branch,
Just as ready to fly east as west, whichever way besought them,
In the birchen wood a chirrup, or a cock-crow in the grange.
In her utmost lightness there is truth—and often she speaks lightly;
And she has a grace in being gay, which mourners even approve;
For the root of some grave earnest thought is under-struck so rightly,
As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above.
And she talked on—we talked truly! upon all things—substance—shadow—
Of the sheep that browsed the grasses—of the reapers in the corn—
Of the little children from the schools, seen winding through the meadow—
Of the poor rich world beyond them, still kept poorer by its scorn!
So of men, and so, of letters—books are men of higher stature,
And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear!
So, of mankind in the abstract, which grows slowly into nature,
Yet will lift the cry of “progress,” as it trod from sphere to sphere.
The same poem gives us this admirable portrait.
High straight forehead, nose of eagle, cold blue eyes, of less expression
Than resistance,—coldly casting off the looks of other men,
As steel, arrows,—unelastic lips, which seem to taste possession,
And be cautious lest the common air should injure or distrain.
For the rest, accomplished, upright,—ay, and standing by his order
With bearing not ungraceful; fond of arts, and letters too;
Just a good man, made a proud man,—as the sandy rocks that border
A wild coast, by circumstances, in a regnant ebb and flow.
And what a beautiful and true image of experience there is in the two opening lines of a sonnet called Perplexed Music; in which, we may mention by the way, Miss Barrett claims for angels only, the knowledge which, with a wiser purpose as it seems to us, is claimed for all very human men in a fine series of sonnets (The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit) by Leigh Hunt.
Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand.
Among the minor poems, the Romaunt of the Page, the Rhyme of the Duchess of May (a ballad in some respects comparable to Edom o’ Gordon in the Percy Collection, and with a most enchaining, breathless movement at the last), Bertha in the Lane, L.E.L.’s Last Question, the Romance of the Swan’s Nest, and the Dead Pan, are of great and various beauty.
But perhaps the most perfect of these is one which we will quote without abridgment. It is called the Mournful Mother (of the Dead Blind); and has an exquisite pathos in its beauty to which the comment which falls from the eye alone does justice.
Dost thou weep, mournful mother,
For thy blind boy in grave?
That no more with each other,
Sweet counsel ye can have?—
That he, left dark by nature,
Can never more be led
By thee, maternal creature,
Along smooth paths instead?
That thou canst no more show him
The sunshine, by the heat;
The river’s silver flowing,
By murmurs at his feet?
The foliage, by its coolness;
The roses, by their smell;
And all creation’s fulness,
By Love’s invisible?
Weepest thou to behold not
His meek blind eyes again,—
Closed doorways which were folded
And prayed against in vain—
And under which, sate smiling
The child-mouth evermore,
As one who watcheth, wiling
The time by, at a door?
And weepest thou to feel not
His clinging hand on thine—
Which now, at dream-time, will not
Its cold touch disentwine?
And weepest thou still ofter,
Oh, never more to mark
His low soft words, made softer
By speaking in the dark?
Weep on, thou mournful mother!
But since to him when living,
Thou wert both sun and moon,
Look o’er his grave, surviving,
From a high sphere alone
Sustain that exaltation—
Expand that tender light;
And hold in mother-passion,
Thy Blessed, in thy sight.
See how he went out straightway
From the dark world he knew,—
No twilight in the gateway
To mediate ’twixt the two,—
Into the sudden glory,
Out of the dark he trod,
Departing from before thee
At once to Light and God!—
For the first face, beholding
The Christ’s in its divine,—
For the first place, the golden
And tideless hyaline;
With trees at lasting summer,
That rock to songful sound,
While angels, the new-comer
Wrap a still smile around!
Oh, in the blessed psalm now,
His happy voice he tries,—
Spreading a thicker palm-bough,
Than others, o’er his eyes,—
Yet still, in all the singing,
Thinks haply of thy song
Which, in his life’s first springing,
Sang to him all night long,—
And wishes it beside him,
With kissing lips that cool
And soft did overglide him,—
To make the sweetness full.
Look up, O mournful mother;
Thy blind boy walks in light!
Ye wait for one another,
Before God’s infinite!
But thou art now the darkest,
Thou mother left below—
Thou, the sole blind,—thou markest,
Content that it be so;—
Until ye two give meeting
Where the great Heaven-gate is,
And he shall lead thy feet in,
As once thou leddest his!
Wait on, thou mournful mother.
Most lovely writing, too, is this opening of some stanzas called the Cry of the Children.
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,—
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west—
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
Nor can we forego the pleasure of a closing extract from the lines to Flush, my Dog. They have great sweetness of heart, and a most kind and tender humour.
Yet, my pretty sportive friend,
Little is ’t to such an end
That I praise thy rareness!
Other dogs may be thy peers
Haply in these drooping ears,
And this glossy fairness.
But of thee it shall be said,
This dog watched beside a bed [p. 629→]
Day and night unweary,—
Watched within a curtained room
Where no sunbeam brake the gloom
Round the sick and dreary.
Roses, gathered for a vase,
In that chamber died apace,
Beam and breeze resigning—
This dog only, waited on,
Knowing that when light is gone,
Love remains for shining.
Other dogs in thymy dew
Tracked the hares and followed through
Sunny moor or meadow—
This dog only, crept and crept
Next a languid cheek that slept,
Sharing in the shadow.
Other dogs of loyal cheer
Bounded at the whistle clear,
Up the woodside hieing—
This dog only, watched in reach
Of a faintly uttered speech
Or a louder sighing.
And if one or two quick tears
Dropped upon his glossy ears,
Or a sigh came double,—
Up he sprang in eager haste,
Fawning, fondling, breathing fast,
In a tender trouble.
Miss Barrett dedicates one of her poems to her relative, Mr Kenyon (himself a poet, with the rare fault of writing too little to please his friends), and she inscribes the collection of her poetry to her father, “to satisfy her heart while she sanctifies her ambition, by associating with the great pursuit of her life, its tenderest and holiest affection.”
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
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