E441200B. Poems (1844).
The Westminster Review, December 1844, pp. 381–392.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 374–378.
A poem should tell its own story, without need of preface; but if ever there were excuse for a formal explanation of the motive, plan, and intention of an author, it is in the instance of Miss Barrett’s introductory remarks to her “Drama of Exile.” From the internal evidence in her books—at all times of more value than outward report—Miss Barrett is herself an exile;—one secluded from society by long-continued ill health. This, [p. 382→] while an excuse for some garrulity of pen, also accounts for faults which, under different circumstances, might have substantiated against her a charge of pedantry; her style, not unfrequently, wanting the ease of colloquial expression. Books her only companions, she has been led to adopt their language, and hence many of the terms she has employed, more erudite than familiar, may seem to some critics the result of affectation, while they have weakened instead of assisting the development of real power.
The most sensible part of Miss Barrett’s preface is its conclusion, in which she touches upon her own poetical experiences.
“Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself. 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 or 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 shortcomings 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.”
Perhaps even these few words need not have been written. There is the stamp of being as well as of saying in all Miss Barrett’s poems; we esteem her for herself, and thank her for her works; the impassioned religious woman, and the productions of true genius.
In introducing both to the reader, it is not, however, to the “Drama of Exile” we should appeal in confirmation of our judgment. Miss Barrett must forgive us for saying that we rank the “Drama of Exile” among the least successful of her efforts. Although the poem for which she has professed the most partiality, we think it will scarcely gain the acceptation in any quarter for which her preface eloquently but humbly pleads. While fullest of her peculiar faults, it has the fewest of her surpassing beauties. She writes with sincerity, and as sincerely as she writes do we believe that in no one reader will it produce the impression she desires;—less as she tells us for her own fame than for their spiritual progress. We regret the misadventure of so excellent an intent,—but the public are too much indebted to the rich bounteousness of her genius in other poems to justify a single reproach for incompleteness or failure.
In the extracts we are about to give as specimens of her works, we shall not pause to comment upon defects the result of rapidity of composition, rather than deficiency of taste, in deference to readers who prefer detecting small faults to enjoying great beauties; readers whose requirements of verbal exactness are a [p. 383→] chevaux-de-frise against a poetical thought gaining entrance beyond the bottom of the ear, when there to be turned back, though “every inch a king,” for want of better clothing. No doubt good rhymes are better than bad ones, and obsolete or antiquated words come less happily for the sense, than those of younger usage. But we would not compromise one poetical idea for the time given to improve diction.
Philanthropy with the power of individualizing passion—freedom of fancy—intensity of affection—qualities too rare ever met singly, rarer still to be met with united in the same person, appear united in Miss Barrett, and it is a pleasant task to paint her portrait from the impression made upon us by her writings. Take the following stanzas as some evidence of the characteristics we have described, from 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.
For oh, say the children, we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap,
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping—
We fall upon our faces trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring,
Through the coal-dark, underground—
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning,—
Their wind comes in our faces,—
Till our hearts turn,—our heads, with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places—
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling—
Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall—
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling—
All are turning, all the day, and we with all!— [p. 384]
And, all day, the iron wheels are droning;
And sometimes we could pray,
“O ye wheels” (breaking out in a mad moaning),
“Stop! be silent for to-day!”
Ay! be silent! let them hear each other breathing
For a moment, mouth to mouth—
Let them touch each other’s hands, in a fresh wreathing
Of their tender human youth!
Let them feel that this cold metallic motion
Is not all the life God fashions or reveals—
Let them prove their inward souls against the notion
That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!
Still, all day, the iron w[h]eels go onward,
As if Fate in each were stark;
And the children’s souls, which God is calling sunward,
Spin on blindly in the dark.
The sympathy of a philanthropist, in its most powerful forms of expression. The “Cry of the Children” is a cry with them and for them. We know of nothing in the English language, of the same kind precisely equal to it, unless it be Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” which is somewhat too monotonous in its wail; or an essay of Charles Lamb upon the homes of the poor. We fear only lest such vivid imagery as the above should give a one-sided direction to the public interest in the welfare of the rising generation, which may aggravate rather than diminish the evils sought to be removed. The legislature has put a stop to the employment of very young children in coal mines, and restricted the hours of labour for children in factories. In many of the latter, where the labour is light and the children work by relays, with proper intervals for rest and recreation, we might try in vain to realize Miss Barrett’s picture, but it does not yet appear to be understood that misery is to be sought less among the occupations of industry, however repulsive their form, than in the abodes of destitution. The children, shut up in the wretched cellars and garrets of a London alley, under fed, thinly clad, and left in dark rooms without fire in winter, from the poverty of their parents, are, although not factory children, more entitled to commiseration than any class that has yet occupied public attention.
But yet humbler objects of sympathy may share a poet’s regard. We turn to a subject in a less serious vein:—
flush, my dog.
Yet, my pretty sportive friend,
Little is’t to such an end [p. 385→]
That I should praise thy rareness!
Other dogs may be thy peers
Haply in these drooping ears,
And in this glossy fairness.
But of thee it shall be said,
This dog watched beside a bed
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
Dropt upon his glossy ears,
Or a sigh came double—
Up he sprang in eager haste,
Fawning, fondling, breathing fast,
In a tender trouble.
And this dog was satisfied,
If a pale thin hand would glide,
Down his dewlaps sloping—
Which he pushed his nose within,
After,—platforming his chin
On the palm left open.
This dog, if a friendly voice
Call him now to blither choice [p. 386→]
Than such chamber keeping,
“Come out!” praying from the door,
Presseth backward as before,
Up against me leaping.
Therefore to this dog will I,
Tenderly, not scornfully,
Render praise and favour!
With my hand upon his head,
Is my benediction said,
Therefore and for ever.
Miss Barrett may share the honours with Landseer. Every verse in the above is a study for the painter.
For the power of individualizing passion, we might quote the “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” “Catarina to Camoens,” “Bertha in the Lane,” and many others. The first of these, as a ballad and for merit of various kinds, may rank with the highest of the class. It has all the rapidity of action of “Leonore,” the descriptive power of Scott and Campbell, united with the deep pathos of the earlier Scottish ballads, and by the nicest dexterity in construction, or rather the innate prompting of a heart that beats time to truth and beauty,—the catastrophe is brought about without involving the least possible reproach to those who fearfully precipitate an inevitable fate. The burden, “Toll slowly,” quaint as it may appear, is essential as a relief to the intensity of the action. The story is of two lovers and their marriage and flight; the husband stormed in his castle by a rival with an outnumbering host. After a vain resistance the horse that had borne the pair safe from the former pursuit is led up the turret stairs, and together mounted as then, the lovers leap from the battlements—to death. It is too long to give entire, too rapid to touch; nor without being run down by hosts of stanzas all equally deserving the place of those we might select. And one can but say of this as of many others whose length prevents their being taken as extracts, that none we can give are equal to those that are of necessity kept back.
“Bertha in the Lane,” though abounding with beauties, and one of the most highly-finished of Miss Barrett’s productions, yet fails in the peculiar charm of the “Duchess May,” the absence of all repining or regret, though the catastrophe is certain [p. 387→] to be fatal. It is the old story of a transfer of affection from one sister to another. The benediction of the heart-broken dying sister falls on the one last loved with the heavy weight of a funeral pall; and Bertha’s reference to “the little ring” on her finger that she wishes to be buried with her, is a cruel coincidence.—Her blessings meant for dew congeal like icicles.
We notice with pleasure in Miss Barrett the possession of moral courage. At a time when it has become a fashion to declaim against French novels with a virulence that at once puts all criticism hors-de-combat, Miss Barrett, in her sonnets to George Sand, shows that the pulses of one strong and warm woman’s heart are unchecked by the fear of opinion.
Madame Dudevant reminds us of a strong swimmer: her ocean,—Life: her sun in the horizon, Truth. The latter she pursues with uncompromising energy, even when failing in self-sustainment she has mistaken rocks of offence for rocks of rest. But let Miss Barrett speak for her in better language than our own:—
Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man,
Self-called George Sand! whose soul amid the lions
Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance,
And answers roar for roar, as spirits can:
I would some wild miraculous thunder ran:
Above the applauded circus, in appliance
Of thine own nobler nature’s strength and science,
Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan,
From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place
With holier light! That thou, to woman’s claim,
And man’s, might join beside the angel’s grace
Of a pure genius sanctified from blame;
’Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace,
To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame.
We cannot resist, now we are amongst the Sonnets, two others,—“Irreparableness,” and “Patience taught by Nature”:—
I have been in the meadows all the day,
And gathered there the nosegay that you see;
Singing within myself, as bird or bee,
When such do field-work on a morn of May:
But now I look upon my flowers,—decay
Hath met them in my hands, more fatally,
Because more warmly clasped; and sobs are free
To come instead of songs. What do you say,
Sweet counsellors, dear friends? that I should go
Back straightway to the fields, and gather more? [p. 388→]
Another, sooth, may do it,—but not I!
My heart is very tired,—my strength is low—
My hands are full of blossoms plucked before,
Held dead within them till myself shall die.
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patience taught by nature.
“O dreary life!” we cry, “O dreary life!”
And still the generations of the birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live, while we are keeping strife
With Heaven’s true purpose in us, as a knife
Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land: savannah swards
Unweary sweep: hills watch, unworn; and rife
Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest trees,
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass
In their old glory. O, thou God of old!
Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these;
But so much patience, as a blade of grass
Grows by, contented through the heat and cold.
Miss Barrett’s moral and political tendencies may be gathered from the “Cry of the Human,” which bears upon two of the leading topics of the day—War and Monopoly:—
The battle hurtles on the plains,—
Earth feels new scythes upon her:
We reap our brothers for the wains,
And call the harvest, .. honor,—
Draw face to face, front line to line,
One image all inherit,—
Then kill, curse on, by that same sign,
Clay, clay,—and spirit, spirit.
The rich preach “rights,” and future days,
And hear no angel scoffing,
The poor die mute,—with starving gaze
On corn-ships in the offing.
Among the various features of character depicted in these volumes, as belonging to their authoress, we find no trace of humour, that bright playfellow of genius. Some have imagined humour to be a misapplication of intellectual power,—a sort of Will-o’-the-wisp, tempting the steady traveller from his proper route—say rather that it is a portion of the heavenly flame that, like the rainless summer lightning, charms and brightens while it plays. The Creator did not endow us with risible muscles—(the one extra that anatomists detect in man as compared with [p. 389→] monkey)—in vain. We suspect it is the absence of this capacity, this relief to the pressure of strong thought and intense emotion, that gives, occasionally, a shade of melancholy too deep, and an aspect of life too depressing, in Miss Barrett’s pages. At times there is a leap of the blood current that sets all melancholy at defiance, as in the “Rhapsody of Life’s Progress,” where there are obstacles described that, in another mood, might have brought her to the earth to remain with her head pillowed weeping upon them.
We wish Pan, whom Miss Barrett puts out of life so unmercifully, had been made the protecting genius of little Ellie’s treasure, in the ballad of “Ellie and the Swan’s Nest;” he would have kept the gnawing rat away. The spiritual existence of Pan—God in the natural world—was recognised by Christ, when he bade us “consider the lilies of the field,” and himself chose the mountains for his sanctuary of prayer. Earth now entirely out-grows mythic fancies. Mythic of what? Of some Truth; and all Truth is eternal. And there was one brave poet, who “kept back nothing,”—not even “Pan,”—who, in his “Hymn to the Nativity,” incorporates the old with the new; not divorcing it as a dead corpse, but to be made instinct with a holier life by the contact. We would refer Miss Barrett to herself, in her “Loved once,” where the continuity which we miss in “The Dead Pan” is full to satisfaction:
I classed, appraising once,
Earth’s lamentable sounds; the well-a-day,
The jarring yea and nay,
The peal of kisses on unanswering clay,
The sobbed farewell, the welcome mournfuller;—
But all did leaven the air
With a less bitter leaven of sure despair,
Than these words—“I loved once!”
And who saith, “I loved once?”
Not angels, whose clear eyes love, love foresee,
Love through eternity!
Who, by To Love, do apprehend To Be.
Not God, called Love, his noble crown-name,—casting
A light too broad for blasting!
*The great God changing not from everlasting,
Saith never,—“I loved once!” [p. 390→]
Say never, ye loved once!
God is too near above, the grave, below,
And all our moments go
Too quickly past our souls for saying so!
The mysteries of life and death avenge
Affections light of range.
There comes no change to justify that change—
(Whatever comes)—Loved once!
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*We cannot avoid remarking in the two latter lines of this stanza the fault so injurious to the favourable impression of the ‘Drama of Exile,’ that of suggesting the human and familiar in too close approximation with what is above both. This, unfortunately, has the tendency to render passages written with a truly reverential spirit by Miss Barrett such as to shock the pious feelings of some, and touch the sense of the ludicrous in others.
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One other fault—but to be quickly put out of sight by the brightness that eclipses—is the addition of “more last words,” in a concluding verse, as “moral” to what has gone before. This, without exception, weakens the impression instead of deepening it. “The House of Clouds,” and “The Lost Bower,” two of the best of Miss Barrett’s productions, are instances of this; and we will again make reference to herself. In the latter poem, to the ear of the child, first penetrating its fairy mystery, comes “a sound, a sense of music, which was rather felt than heard.” So is it with poetry;—it is no true poetry if it lacks the subtlety which is its most influential element, and tells its own moral.—“Came a sound, a sense of music, which was rather felt than heard.” We repeat the line, to introduce the reader to the image that follows:—
Softly, finely, it inwound me—
From the world it shut me in,—
Like a fountain falling round me,
Which with silver waters thin
Clips a little marble Naiad, sitting smilingly within.
We must not omit the closing stanzas (except the last), helping the reader so far as to explain that the story gone before is of the authoress once, as a child, finding a bower in a wood, never to find it again.
On this couch I weakly lie on,
While I count my memories,—
Through the fingers which, still sighing,
I press closely on mine eyes,—
Clear as once beneath the sunshine, I beheld the bower arise.
Springs the linden-tree as greenly,
Stroked with light adown its rind,
And the ivy-leaves serenely
Each in either intertwined,
And the rose-trees at the doorway, they have neither grown nor pined.
From those overblown faint roses
Not a leaf appeareth shed;
And that little bud discloses [p. 391→]
Not a thorn’s-breadth more of red,
For the winters and the summers which have passed me over head.
And that music overfloweth,
Sudden sweet, the sylvan eaves;
Thrush or nightingale—who knoweth?
Fay or faunees—who believes?
But my heart still trembles in me, to the trembling of the leaves.
Is the bower lost, then? Who sayeth
That the bower indeed is lost?
Hark! my spirit in it prayeth,
Through the solstice and the frost,—
And the prayer preserves it greenly to the last and uttermost.
One further quotation, and we must bid Miss Barrett farewell. We take it from the “Vision of the Poets,” a poem filled with noble thoughts.
“By the chief poet—‘God!’ he cried,
‘Be praised for anguish which has tried;
For beauty which has satisfied.—
For this world’s presence, half within
And half without me—sound and scene—
This sense of Being and Having been.
I thank Thee that my soul hath room
For Thy grand world! Both guests may come—
Beauty, to soul—Body to tomb!
I am content to be so weak,—
Put strength into the words I speak,
And I am strong in what I seek.
I am content to be so bare
Before the archers! everywhere!
My wounds being stroked by heavenly air.*
I laid my soul before Thy feet,
That images of fair and sweet
Should walk to other men on it.
I am content to feel the step
Of each pure image! Let those keep
To mandragore, who care to sleep.
I am content to touch the brink
Of the other goblet, and I think
My bitter drink a wholesome drink. [p. 392→]
Because my portion was assigned
Wholesome and bitter,—Thou art kind,
And I am blessed to my mind.
Gifted for giving, I receive
The May-thorn, and its scent out-give!
I grieve not that I once did grieve.
In my large joy of sight and touch,
Beyond what others count for such,
I am content to suffer much.
I know—is all the mourner saith—
Knowledge by suffering entereth;
And Life is perfected by Death!’”
We close with the strange-sounding, but, we hope, not too selfish wish, that the time when Miss Barrett’s life shall be so perfected may be long deferred.
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*A pendant to the immortal “St Sebastian,” of Guido, in the Dulwich Gallery.
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S[arah] F[lower] A[dams]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
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