E450100A. A Drama of Exile.
The American Review: A Whig Journal, January 1845, pp. 38–48.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 333–342.
If we apply the Horatian requirement to poetry, and deny a place to mediocrity, there are but two poets in England who now belong to the new generation—Alfred Tennyson and Miss Barrett. There are many others who write agreeable verses; accomplished men and women who, by the liveliness of their talents, or their cultivation and refinement, may afford us many a delightful hour; popular echoers of popular topics; easy versifiers who reflect for us our personal opinions, in the creed of politics, history, or religion—but the sacred name of poet exacts higher requisitions before it can be rightfully appropriated. How long Tennyson is to remain in the ascendant, “the glass of fashion and the mould of form,” to be worshipped and imitated by inferior writers, is a matter upon which the hopes of some who reverence the manliness of the English character and the ruggedness of the English race, and the contentment of his admirers, may differ. He is certainly not as favorable a representative of the manly character as Miss Barrett is of the feminine, and Miss Barrett’s genius is of too subtle and elevated an order ever to become widely popular with the people. Yet with two such guests standing at the threshold of the temple in which still a few of the great bards of the last age linger, though the music of their cunning hands be still in the choir forever, we need not despair of the coming future. We too shall have our poets. Our lives shall be illustrated by the song of the bard. Great as were the events in our fathers’ lives, ours too are the gift of God; and in good time poets shall sing for us, and raise our existence from the dull life of earth-worms; and we, too, shall transmit an inheritance of genius to our sons. It would be a sad belief it we thought that the poets were dead, and that our cares were to be concluded in buying and selling, sowing and reaping, without partaking of that higher life which the poet teaches us to live. Heaven sends us poets. This act of Providence may not be included in the books which treat of the evidences of natural or revealed religion; but it is as great a blessing as that the sun shines or the grass grows. This is a reflection which may appear very simple, for it is very natural; but let us fancy our privation, for a moment, if that unconsidered, ill-rewarded being, the poet, together with all he brings to us of love and knowledge, were forever taken from the world. The language that we utter would begin to lose its harmony; we should find ourselves insensibly forgetting the mastery of that cunning instrument of speech which the poets have fashioned for all the finer relations of life, and talking in the jargon of the market and exchange; with our loss of happy words the occasion for them would have passed away, and instead of being friends and lovers by a thousand invisible ties which a refined imagination weaves for us, we should be coarse and treacherous, with no better impulses than desire and interest. Our religion would lose faith, that imaginative worship of the heart, and be driven back to stocks and stones. Our paintings and architecture, if they were suffered to exist, would be strange and idiotic; but they could not exist, for the sentiment that gives life to the color and harmony to the building would be withdrawn, and both would fall and perish by vulgar hands.
Let us, then, hail the new poet, and with the thousand voices of the press, utter the new-found fame wide over the land. This generation too has a poet, though Campbell be gathered to Westminster, and Burns be honored only at his monument, and Wordsworth shelter a quiet and revered age in silence.
Miss Barrett’s new book comes to us indeed with something of the interest of an American production. It is published simultaneously with the English edition, under the care of an American author;* and it has been preceded by the publication of a part of its contents, a [p. 39→] few of the shorter poems, in the American Magazines. These already directed the eyes of the public to this new star, shining with a pale, steady lustre, yet growing intense as we look upon it, and far unlike the brassy glare of some wandering and much-worshipped meteors.
________
*Mr. Mathews, to whom Miss Barrett pays a delicate compliment in her preface, and whose volume of Poems she pronounces in another part of her volume “as remarkable in thought and manner, for a vital sinewy vigor, as the right arm of Pathfinder.”
________
“My love and admiration have belonged to the great American people, as long as I have felt proud of being an Englishwoman, and almost as long as I have loved poetry itself. But it is only of late that I have been admitted to the privilege of personal gratitude to Americans, and only to-day that I am encouraged to offer to their hands an American edition of a new collection of my poems, about to be published in my own country. This edition precedes the English one by a step,—a step eagerly taken, and with a spring in it of pleasure and pride—suspended, however, for a moment, that by a cordial figure I may kiss the soil of America, and address my thanks to those sons of the soil, who, if strangers and foreigners, are yet kinsmen and friends, and who, if never seen, nor perhaps to be seen by eyes of mine, have already caused them to glisten by words of kindness and courtesy.”
There is much in this sentence to wash out the ignorance, flippancy, and contempt of British writers and travellers; who have, indeed, done themselves a greater wrong than us, by encouraging in themselves the practical infidelity and inhumanity of denying any goodness or virtue to so large a portion of the human race.
Miss Barrett is of too generous, too richly endowed and philosophical a turn of mind to favor such injustice. She confidently turns to this much-abused and ill-represented America, and pours out before us the wealth of her mind; and, as in all similar cases where the heart of man deals with man, she will receive in return the generosity she brings with her.
In claiming for Miss Barrett the rank of an original poet in English literature, we have of course implied that her merits, however distinct and unquestionable, are of a class that requires some study and preparation in the reader before he can fully appreciate them. This is a condition with every new writer, however it may be overlooked by the mass of readers who affect to understand metre, cadence, and reach of thought in a moment. Hence original authors are condemned, while imitators thrive. The great impulses in literature descend from the author, to whose sovereign height the people travel slowly up, getting partial glimpses by the way: critics should be Mentors to warn the public of mountebanks and pretenders, and ever renew the flagging attention by calling it upward to the pure eminences.
What are we to expect in this authoress? How are we to receive her? We must prepare our minds for poetry of a different school from that of Eliza Cook or Mrs. Ellis, and sharpen our eyesight to something of a finer texture than the warm and easily worn, though beautiful and graceful, drapery of Mrs. Hemans. And perhaps, with every disposition of the reader to admire and enjoy, he may lack the peculiar studies and discipline of thought and feeling to enter into the habits of mind of this writer, whose subtle style may always remain vague and dim to the popular apprehension. Miss Barrett “soaring in the high region of her fancies, with her singing robes about her,” will be found breathing too rare an atmosphere for those who are willing to look no further in a book than for amusement. We warn the readers at libraries, and the loungers at bookseller’s counters, against opening these volumes at random, and confidently pronouncing upon their worth. Let them be silent if they cannot understand.
There are two methods which that intellectual chemist, the critic, may apply as the tests of a new work of invention, the synthetic and the analytic; and though these different processes should in the end verify each other, yet there will generally be a greater apparent generosity in the use of the former than the latter. Perhaps the former should be reserved only for those authors in whom we have confidence of genius working with perfect truth and simplicity. In such cases we take the poet’s own word, and proceed with him in the development of his work, satisfied that while we are pursuing genius we are following nature. Here let the author teach the critic. In the mass of works this would be evidently a misapplied mode of criticism. The departure from any law of natural growth would soon be detected, and the reviewer and the author would have to part company. We may venture to decide dogmatically at a glance upon most new publications; but we ought to beware of treating in this way the work of genius. [p. 40→]
The most evident characteristic of Miss Barrett’s poetry is its subjectivity; but she possesses this quality in a different sense from that in which it is generally and unhappily known in modern philosophy. It is not the self-torturing or diseased spirit of a mind recoiling from the outer world of God, man, and nature, and painfully turned upon itself. There is no self-willed arrogance, or spiritual pride, or morbid consciousness, in this high metaphysical abstraction, but a lofty spirituality, purified from ordinary life and common thoughts by the discipline of study and sorrow.
’Till oft converse with heavenly habitants
Begins to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul’s essence
’Till all be made immortal.
No ordinary or grossly nurtured mind could long sustain such topics as the conversation of Seraphim, or venture to portray the sublimities of angels and the song of the morning stars. Miss Barrett has been educated by Æschylus and the Hebrew prophets.
But the prevalent trait of her mind, to which this pursuit of intellectual sublimity is secondary, is its truly feminine character. None of the diversified accomplishments of a muse learned, cultivated, various, pursuing ancient and modern art through the works of the masters of every land, and familiar with all, suffer us for a moment to be diverted from the happy gracefulness, the naturalness of movement, the easy, self-consciousness of womanhood. Learned women are notorious for becoming bold and masculine; but there are few men who could bear about them so many of the rich spoils of books and antiquity, without awkwardness and pedantry. The secret lies in this: what with most men and with other women is apt to be a mere matter of acquisition, something foreign and accidental hung upon the original framework of the mind, with her, by a long and natural process of assimilation, has become part of the texture of the mind itself. Milton’s stern grasp of the facts and images of poetical antiquity was not more his own, rightfully appropriated by his manly intellect, and the standing out firm, definite, colossal, than is the gentler spirit in which, as with a veil, this feminine mind wears the figure and countenance of an Athenian sybil. Miss Barrett is still young, but we may gather from the fact of a very early publication of a volume of poems, and the evidences in her translation of Prometheus, and the volume of the Seraphim, that she has long been patiently devoted to the calm and diligent pursuits of learning, “in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.” She has read Plato, Mr. Horne, in his Spirit of the Age, tells us, from beginning to end, and the Hebrew Bible from Genesis to Malachi. There are occasionally to be seen in a parenthesis of her prefaces, or by the side of a fine rhythmical line of her poems, a few of these Hebrew characters, which the reader passes by with reverence. There is nothing affected or disjointed in this. There is no impediment to the thought, which may indeed pursue a subtler current to task the mind, but never offends. How these studies were followed we may learn from certain graceful revelations in these volumes, in a poem commemorating some wine of Cyprus given to the poetess by H.S. Boyd, author of “Select Passages from the Greek and others,” from which she passes, by a very happy turn of sentiment, to the studies of which the fragrant draught is the symbol.
And I think of those long mornings
Which my Thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,
Solemn flow’d the rhythmic Greek.
Past the pane, the mountain spreading,
Swept the sheep-bell’s tinkling noise,
While a girlish voice was reading,—
Somewhat low for αι’s and οι’s!
Then what golden hours were for us!—
While we sat together there,
How the white vests of the chorus
Seem’d to wave up a live air!
How the cothurns trod majestic
Down the deep iambic lines!
And the rolling anapœstic
Curl’d, like vapor over shrines!
Oh, our Æschylus, the thundrous!
How he drove the bolted breath
Through the cloud, to wedge it ponderous
In the gnarled oak beneath.
Oh, our Sophocles, the royal!
Who was born to monarch’s place;
And who made the whole world loyal,
Less by kingly power than grace.
Our Euripides, the human—
With his droppings of warm tears;
And his touches of things common,
’Till they rose to touch the spheres!
Our Theocritus, our Bion,
And our Pindar’s shining goals!— [p. 41→]
These were cup-bearers undying,
Of the wine that’s meant for souls.
And my Plato, the divine one,—
If men know the gods aright
By their motions as they shine on
With a glorious trail of light!—
And your noble Christian bishops,
Who mouth’d grandly the last Greek!
Though the sponges on their hyssops
Were distent with wine—too weak!
Yet, your Chrysostom, you praised him,
With his glorious mouth of gold—
And your Basil, you upraised him
To the height of speakers old!
And we both praised Heliodorus
For his secret of pure lies!—
Who forged first his linked stories
In the heat of lady’s eyes.
And we both praised our Synesius,
For the fire shot up his odes!
Though the church was scarce propitious
As he whistled dogs and gods.—
And we both praised Nazianzen,
For the fervid heart and speech!
Only I eschew’d his glancing
At the lyre, hung out of reach[.]
Do you mind that deed of Até,
Which you bound me to, so fast,—
Reading “De Virginitate,”
From the first line to the last?
How I said at ending, solemn,
As I turn’d and look’d at you,
That St. Simeon on the column
Had had somewhat less to do?
For we sometimes gently wrangled;
Very gently, be it said,—
For our thoughts were disentangled
By no breaking of the thread!
And I charged you with extortions
On the nobler fames of old—
Ay, and sometimes thought your Porsons
Stain’d the purple they would fold.
The learning, then, of Miss Barrett does not stand in the way of her womanly nature, but is rather a severe discipline which refines, elevates that nature, and puts not a pebble in the way of its natural course.
By this plea, that she is a woman, a true, natural woman, albeit a learned one, yet one in whom the intellect has not burnt up the heart, Miss Barrett justifies herself in approaching the great theme of the Fall of Man. “My subject was the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity, as it went forth from Paradise into the wilderness; 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 for lyrical emotion in those first steps into the wilderness,—in that first sense of desolation after wrath,—in that first audible gathering of the recriminating ‘groan of the whole creation,’—in that first darkening of the hills from the recoiling feet of angels,—and in that first silence of the voice of God. And I took pleasure in driving in, like a pile, stroke upon stroke, the Idea of Exile, admitting Lucifer as an extreme Adam, to represent the ultimate tendencies of sin and loss,—that it might be strong to bear up to the contrary Idea of the Heavenly love and purity.”
The “Drama of Exile” is cast in a form resembling that of the Grecian tragedy, a form which allows great latitude to the lyrical portions and permits an argumentative metaphysical strain in the remaining passages. The ancient chorus has been the incentive to Miss Barrett’s lyrical poems, and not the old English song-writing.
The persons of the drama are Adam, Eve, Gabriel, Lucifer, Angels, Eden-Spirits, Earth-Spirits, and Phantasms, and the Saviour introduced in a vision. The scene is the outer side of the gate of Eden within the “sword glare,” and in the region immediately beyond. Gabriel, the good angel, and the malignant, sneering Lucifer, are first introduced.
Lucifer. Hail, Gabriel, the keeper of the gate!
Now that the fruit is pluck’d, prince Gabriel,
I hold that Eden is impregnable
Under thy keeping.
Gabriel. Angel of the sin,
Such as thou standest—pale in the drear light
Which rounds the rebel’s work with Maker’s wrath,—
Thou shalt be an Idea to all souls;—
A monumental melancholy gloom
Seen down all ages; whence to mark despair,
And measure out the distances from good!
Go from us straightway.
Lucifer. Wherefore?
Gabriel. Lucifer,
Thy last step in this place trod sorrow up.
Recoil before that sorrow, if not this sword.
Lucifer. Angels are in the world—wherefore not I? [p. 42→]
Exiles are in the world—wherefore not I?
The cursed are in the world—wherefore not I?
Gabriel. Depart.
Lucifer. And where’s the logic of “depart?”
Our lady Eve had half been satisfied
To obey her Maker, if I had not learnt
To fix my postulate better.
* * * * * *
Gabriel. Go . . . depart—
Enough is sinn’d and suffer’d.
Lucifer. By no means.
Here’s a brave earth to sin and suffer on!
It holds fast still—it cracks not under curse;
It holds, like mine immortal. Presently
We’ll sow it thick enough with graves as green
Or greener, certes, than its knowledge-tree;
We’ll have the cypress for the tree of life,
More eminent for shadow—for the rest
We’ll build it dark with towns and pyramids,
And temples, if it please you:—we’ll have feasts
And funerals also, merrymakes and wars,
Till blood and wine shall mix and run along
Right o’er the edges. And, good Gabriel,
(Ye like that word in Heaven!) I too have strength—
Strength to behold Him, and not worship Him;
Strength to fall from Him, and not cry on Him;
Strength to be in the universe, and yet
Neither God nor his servant. The red sign
Burnt on my forehead, which you taunt me with,
Is God’s sign that it bows not unto God;
The potter’s mark upon his work, to show
It rings well to the striker. I and the earth
Can bear more curse.
Gabriel. O miserable earth!
O ruin’d angel!
Lucifer. Well! and if it be,
I chose this ruin: I elected it
Of my will, not of service. What I do,
I do volitient, not obedient,
And overtop thy crown with my despair.
My sorrow crowns me. Get thee back to Heaven;
And leave me to the earth, which is mine own
In virtue of her misery, as I hers,
In virtue of my ruin! turn from both,
That bright impassive, passive angelhood
And spare to read us backward any more
Of your spent hallelujahs.
* * * * * *
Gabriel. Yet, thou discovered one, by the truth in me,
Which God keeps in me, I would give away
All,—save that truth, and His love over it:
To lead thee home again into the light,
And hear thy voice chant with the morning stars;
When their rays tremble round them with much song,
Sung in more gladness!
Lucifer. Sing, my morning star!
Last beautiful—last heavenly—that I loved!
If I could drench thy golden locks with tears,
What were it to this angel?
* * * * * *
Gabriel. Lucifer,
I charge thee by the solitude He kept
Ere he created,—leave the earth to God!
Lucifer. My foot is on the earth, firm as my sin!
Gabriel. I charge thee by the memory of Heaven,
Ere any sin was done,—leave earth to God!
* * * * * *
Lucifer. My wo is on the earth to curse thereby.
Gabriel. I charge thee by that mournful morning star
Which trembleth . . . .
Lucifer. Hush! I will not hear thee speak
Of such things. Enough spoken. As the pine
In norland forests, drops its weight of snows
By a night’s growth, so, growing toward my ends,
I drop thy counsels. Farewell, Gabriel!
A chorus of Eden Spirits succeeds, chanting from Paradise, while Adam and Eve fly across the sword-glare.
Hearken, oh hearken! let your souls behind you,
Lean, gently moved!
Our voices feel along the Dread to find you,
O lost, beloved!
Through the thick-shielded and strong-marshall’d angels,
They press and pierce:
Our requiems follow fast on our evangels,—
Voice throbs in verse!
We are but orphan’d spirits left in Eden,
A time ago—
God gave us golden cups; and we were bidden
To feed you so!
But now our right hand hath no cup remaining,
No work to do;
The mystic hydromel is spilt, and staining
The whole earth through;
And all those stains lie clearly round for showing
(Not interfused!)
That brighter colors were the world’s foregoing,
Than shall be used.
Hearken, oh hearken! ye shall hearken surely,
For years and years,
The noise beside you, dripping coldly, purely,
Of spirits’ tears! [p. 43→]
The yearning to a beautiful, denied you,
Shall strain your powers:—
Ideal sweetnesses shall over-glide you,
Resumed from ours!
In all your music our pathetic minor
Your ears shall cross;
And all fair sights shall mind you of diviner,
With sense of loss!
We shall be near in all your poet-languors
And wild extremes;
What time ye vex the desert with vain angers,
Or light with dreams!
And when upon you, weary after roaming,
Death’s seal is put,
By the foregone ye shall discern the coming,
Through eyelids shut.
The Spirits of the Trees utter their song in words borrowed from the musical winds that stir their leaves! These lines are extremely melodious.
Spirits of the Trees.
Hark! the Eden trees are stirring,
Slow and solemn to your hearing!
Plane and cedar, palm and fir,
Tamarisk and juniper,
Each is throbbing in vibration
Since that crowning of creation,
When the God-breath spake abroad,
Pealing down the depths of Godhead,
Let us make man like to God.
And the pine stood quivering
In the Eden-gorges wooded,
As the awful word went by;
Like a vibrant chorded string
Stretch’d from mountain peak to sky!
And the cyprus did expand,
Slow, and gradual, branch and head;
And the cedar’s strong black shade
Flutter’d brokenly and grand!
Grove and forest bow’d aslant
In emotion jubilant.
Voice of the same, but softer.
Which divine impulsion cleaves
In dim movements to the leaves
Dropt and lifted, dropt and lifted
In the sunlight greenly sifted,—
In the sunlight and the moonlight
Greenly sifted through the trees.
Ever wave the Eden trees
In the nightlight and the noonlight,
With a ruffling of green branches
Shaded off to resonances;
Never stirr’d by rain or breeze!
Fare ye well, farewell!
The sylvan sounds, no longer audible,
Expire at Eden’s door!
Each footstep of your treading
Treads out some murmur which ye heard before:
Farewell! the trees of Eden
Ye shall hear never more.
And the Flower Spirits sing their farewell to the lost inhabitants of Eden:
Farewell! the flowers of Eden
Ye shall smell never more.
There is silence. Adam and Eve fly on, and never look back. Only a colossal shadow, as of the dark Angel passing quickly, is cast upon the sword-glare.
At the extremity of the sword-glare Eve reposes upon Adam, reading a deeper dread in his face than in the glittering terror of the wall of angels.
Adam. Hast thou strength,
Beloved, to look behind us to the gate?
Eve. I have strength to look upward to thy face.
Adam. We need be strong: yon spectacle of cloud
Which seals the gate up to the final doom,
Is God’s seal in a cloud. There seem to lie
A hundred thunders in it, dark and dread;
The unmolten lightnings vein it motionless;
And, outward from its depth, the self-moved sword
Swings slow its awful gnomen of red fire
From side to side,—in pendulous horror slow.
* * * * * *
What is this, Eve? thou droppest heavily.
Eve. O Adam, Adam! by that name of Eve—
Thine Eve, thy life—which suits me little now,
I do adjure thee, put me straight away,
Together with my name. Sweet, punish me!
O Love, be just! and, ere we pass beyond
The light cast outward by the fiery sword,
Into the dark which earth must be to us,
Bruise my head with thy foot,—as the curse said
My seed shall the first tempter’s: strike with curse,
As God struck in the garden!
Adam. My beloved,
Mine Eve and life—I have no other name
For thee or for the sun than what ye are!—
* * * * * *
Shall I who had not virtue to stand straight
Among the hills of Eden, here assume
To mend the justice of the perfect God,
By piling up a curse upon His curse,
Against thee—thee—
Eve. For so, perchance, thy God
Might take thee into grace for scorning me;
And so, the blessed angels might come down
And walk with thee as erst,—I think they would,—
Because I was not near to make them sad,
Or soil the rustling of their innocence.
Adam. They know me. I am deepest in the guilt,
If last in the transgression.
* * * * * *
O my God! [p. 44→]
I, standing here between the glory and dark,—
Lift up to Thee the hands from whence hath fallen
Only creation’s sceptre,—thanking Thee
That rather Thou hast cast me out with her,
Than left me lorn of her in Paradise.
Music, “tender as a watering dew,” from a chorus of invisible angels follows. Lucifer appears tortured with metaphysical doubts and agonies, the Miltonic punishment of fallen angels, and the morning star, the beloved of Lucifer, takes his farewell in a song of fine imaginative power.
They go further on. A wild open country is seen vaguely in the approaching night.
Adam. How doth the wide and melancholy earth
Gather her hills around us, gray and ghast,
And stare with blank significance of loss
Right in our faces. Is the wind up?
Eve. Nay.
Adam. And yet the cedars and the junipers
Rock slowly through the mist, without a noise;
And shapes, which have no certainty of shape,
Drift duskly in and out between the pines,
And loom along the edges of the hills,
And lie flat, curdling in the open ground—
Shadows without a body, which contract
And lengthen as we gaze on them.
Eve. O Life,
Which is not man’s nor angels! What is this?
Adam wanders in terror with Eve till the surrounding phantasms figure themselves in the sign of the zodiac.
. . . . . . . . . . .That phantom, there,
Presents a lion,—albeit, twenty times
As large as any lion,—with a roar
Set soundless in his vibratory jaws,
And a strange horror stirring in his mane!
And there, a pendulous shadow seems to weigh—
Good against ill, perchance; and there, a crab
Puts coldly out its gradual shadow-claws,
Like a slow blot that spreads,—till all the ground,
Crawled over by it, seems to crawl itself;
A bull stands horned here with gibbous glooms;
And a ram likewise; and a scorpion writhes
Its tail in ghastly slime, and stings the dark!
This way a goat leaps, with wild blank of beard;
And here fantastic fishes duskly float,
Using the calm for waters, while their fins
Throb out slow rhythms along the shallow air!
The spirits of organic and inorganic nature arise from the ground, and, as in the bold figures of a Hebrew psalm, the beasts, rivers, birds “with viewless wings of harmonies,” the “calm cold fishes of a silver being,” witness against man. The pathetic appeal of Eve in reply is exceedingly beautiful:
. . . . Sweet, dreadful Spirits!
I pray you humbly in the name of God;
Not to say of these tears, which are impure—
Grant me such pardoning grace as can go forth
From clean volitions toward a spotted will,
From the wronged to the wronger; this and no more;
I do not ask more. I am ’ware, indeed,
That absolute pardon is impossible
From you to me, by reason of my sin,—
And that I cannot evermore, as once,
With worthy acceptation of pure joy,
Behold the trances of the holy hills
Beneath the leaning stars; or watch the vales,
Dew-pallid with their morning ecstasy;
Or hear the winds make pastoral peace between
Two grassy uplands,—and the river-wells
Work out their bubbling lengths beneath the ground—
And all the birds sing, till, for joy of song,
They lift their trembling wings, as if to heave
The too-much weight of music from their heart
And float it up the æther! I am ’ware
That these things I can no more apprehend,
With a pure organ, into a full delight;
The sense of beauty and of melody
Being no more aided in me by the sense
Of personal adjustment to those heights
Of what I see well-formed or hear well-tuned,—
But rather coupled darkly, and made ashamed,
By my percipiency of sin and fall,
And melancholy of humiliant thoughts.
But, oh! fair, dreadful Spirits—albeit this
Your accusation must confront my soul,
And your pathetic utterance and full gaze
Must evermore subdue me; be content—
Conquer me gently—as if pitying me,
Not to say loving! let my tears fall thick
As watering dews of Eden, unreproached;
And when your tongues reprove me, make me smooth,
Not ruffled—smooth and still with your reproof,
And peradventure better, while more sad.
For look to it, sweet Spirits—look well to it; [p. 45→]
It will not be amiss in you who kept
The law of your own righteousness, and keep
The right of your own griefs to mourn themselves,—
To pity me twice fallen,—from that, and this,—
From joy of place, and also right of wail,—
“I wail” being not for me—only “I sin.”
Look to it, O sweet Spirits!—
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 favor? 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 wo, to cry “alas!”
Speaking of joy! And is not this more shame,
To have made the wo myself, from all that joy?
To have stretch’d my hand, and pluck’d it from the tree,
And chosen it for fruit? Nay, is not this
Still most despair,—to have halved that bitter fruit,
And ruined, so, the sweetest friend I have,
Turning the Greatest to mine enemy?
The vision of Christ appears, and Adam blesses Eve in that Presence.
But, go to! thy love
Shall chant itself its own beatitudes,
After its own life-working. A child’s kiss,
Set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad:
A poor man, served by thee, shall make thee rich;
An old man, helped by thee, shall make thee strong;
Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense
Of service which thou renderest. Such a crown
I set upon thy head,—Christ witnessing
With looks of prompting love—to keep thee clear
Of all reproach against the sin foregone,
From all the generations which succeed.
Thy hand which plucked the apple, I clasp close;
Thy lips which spake wrong counsel, I kiss close,—
I bless thee in the name of Paradise,
And by the memory of Edenic joys
Forfeit and lost;—by that last cypress tree
Green at the gate, which thrilled as we came out;
And by the blessed nightingale, which threw
Its melancholy music after us;—
And by the flowers, whose spirits full of smells
Did follow softly, plucking us behind
Back to the gradual banks and vernal bowers
And fourfold river-courses:—by all these,
I bless thee to the contraries of these;
I bless thee to the desert and the thorns,
To the elemental change and turbulence,
And to the roar of the estranged beasts,
And to the solemn dignities of grief,—
To each one of these ends,—and to this end
Of death and the hereafter!
With the words of the Saviour, we close this remarkable Drama.
Look on me!
As I shall be uplifted on a cross
In darkness of eclipse and anguish dread,
So shall I lift up in my pierced hands,
Not into dark, but light—not unto death,
But life,—beyond the reach of guilt and grief,
The whole creation. Henceforth in my name
Take courage, O thou woman,—man, take hope!
Your graves shall be as smooth as Eden’s sward
Beneath the steps of your prospective thoughts;
And one step past them, a new Eden-gate
Shall open on a hinge of harmony,
And let you through to mercy. Ye shall fall
No more, within that Eden, nor pass out
Any more from it. In which hope, move on,
First sinners and first mourners. Live and love,—
Doing both nobly, because lowlily;
Live and work, strongly,—because patiently!
And, for the deed of death, trust it to God,
That it be well done, unrepented of,
And not to loss. And thence, with constant prayers
Fasten your souls so high, that constantly [p. 46→]
The smile of your heroic cheer may float
Above all floods of earthly agonies,
Purification being the joy of pain!
The Vision of Poets is the second elaborate poem in the collection. Its design is to show the mystery of the poetical character, by which genius is at war with society, and with itself; by which it pines in sorrow and neglect and suffering, both self-imposed and from without, while the rest of the world apparently lives on in joy and carelessness. Its object is the noblest that can employ the pens of poets, to “vindicate the ways of God to man,” to teach reconciliation and submission, to calm rebellion, to create smiles of happiness out of very unhappiness itself in the wounded breast of man. Miss Barrett may take for her shield the poet’s motto, “We learn in suffering what we teach in song.” In truth, this verse of divinest bards is no child’s play of the faculties, no elegant amusement of the boudoir penned on satin paper with crowquill for the admiration of taste and fashion, no accidental thing to be picked up by a man as he goes along the world, played with for a while and laid aside. It is the soul’s experience, wrung from the very depths of a noble nature, and of the noble nature only;—and the whole life—childhood, youth with its shadows, manhood with calm day-light—the son, the lover, the father—must form its completeness.
A poet in whom the inward light prevented sleep, goes forth into a wood, like early Chaucer when he saw the wonders of the Flower and Leaf, and there meets with a lady on a snow-white palfrey, who leads him over the moor, where he is bade to drink of three separate pools, which represent the poet’s dower, and tastes successively of the world’s use, a bitter draught; the world’s love bitter too, and of the world’s cruelty; upon which he swoons, and being purified by this earthly purgation, is admitted to the vision of poets, held in some vast hall of the imagination in dream-land, where a Hebrew angel, clad in Miltonic strength and splendor, ministers at an altar, surrounded by the great bards of time.
Then first, the poet was aware
Of a chief angel standing there
Before that altar, in the glare.
His eyes were dreadful, for you saw
That they saw God—his lips and jaw,
Grand-made and strong, as Sinai’s law.
On the vast background of his wings
Arose his image! and he flings,
From each plumed arc, pale glitterings
And fiery flakes (as beateth more
Or less, the angel-heart!) before,
And round him, upon roof and floor,
Edging with fire the shining fumes,
While at his side, ’twixt light and glooms,
The phantasm of an organ booms.
In a deep pool, nurtured by one of the eddies at the foot of Niagara, and shrouded forever by the clouds of mist, hid in a basin of rock aside from the steps of the careless traveller, a rainbow is literally burnt in with deep metallic dyes, an arc of gold and purple, fixed and immoveable as steel, and surrounded by half-illumined spray, fragile as air. Miss Barrett’s Wall of the Poets, with its massiveness and “air-drawn” grandeur, has recalled to us this image, showing that even in the poet’s cloud-land Nature has her omniscient prototypes, and that the highest invention cannot get beyond the actual.
Among the portraits hung up in these “chambers of imagery” we see Shakspeare and Dante, Goethe and Schiller,
Electric Pindar, quick as fear,
With race-dust on his cheeks
* * *
And Virgil! shade of Mantuan beech
Did help the shade of bay to reach
And curl around his forehead high!—
For his gods wore less majesty
Than his brown bees hummed deathlessly.
* * *
And Chaucer, with his infantine
Familiar clasp of things divine—
That mark upon his lip is wine.
Here Milton’s eyes strike piercing-dim!
The shapes of suns and stars did swim
Like clouds from them, and granted him
God for sole vision! Cowley, there,
Whose active fancy debonnaire
Drew straws to amber—foul to fair.
And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben—
Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows, when
The world was worthy of such men.
Before these good and great spirits a worldly crowd of those who take upon themselves unworthily the name of poets enter, and plead their cunning, their frivolity, their earthly-mindedness in their disguises—
But all the foreheads of those born
And dead true poets flashed with scorn
Betwixt the bay-leaves round them worn— [p. 47→]
Ay, jetted such brave fire, that they,
The new-come, shrank and paled away,
Like leaden ashes when the day
Strikes on the hearth.
The last expression is altogether Dantean.
To give the reader an idea of the variety of the poetical powers displayed in these volumes, we should have to follow in this way every separate poem, for each, with a fine under-current of the original mind of the authoress, is a new creation. These poems deserve to be studied as we study the minor poems of Goethe and Schiller. With the flexibility of language of the one, they have much of the moral significance of the other. The “Cry of the Children” is in the high lyrical German strain, beyond song-writing. A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress recalls to us the philosopher of Weimar. In The Dead Pan, Miss Barrett has written a reply, call it rather a supplement, to Schiller’s Gods of Greece. In felicity of language, in historical enthusiasm, in picturesque beauty, it is as certainly equal to Schiller’s poem, as in its Christian morality it is superior. In a certain massiveness of thought and expression no woman may equal his manliness.
Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,
Can ye listen in your silence?
Can your mystic voices tell us
Where ye hide? In floating islands,
With a wind that evermore
Keeps you out of sight of shore?
Pan, Pan is dead.
In what revels are ye sunken
In old Ethiopia?
Have the Pygmies made you drunken,
Bathing in mandragora
Your divine pale lips that shiver
Like the lotus in the river?
Pan, Pan is dead.
Or lie crush’d your stagnant corses
Where the silver spheres roll on,
Stung to life by centric forces
Thrown like rays out from the sun?—
While the smoke of your old altars
Is the shroud that round you welters?
Great Pan is dead.
* * * * * *
Do ye leave your rivers flowing
All alone, O Naiades,
While your drenched locks dry slow in
This cold feeble sun and breeze?
Not a word the Naiads say,
Though the rivers run for aye.
For Pan is dead.
From the gloaming of the oak wood,
O ye Dryads, could ye flee?
At the rushing thunderstroke would
No sob tremble through the tree?—
Not a word the Dryads say,
Though the forests wave for aye.
For Pan is dead.
Have ye left the mountain places,
Oreads wild, for other tryst?
Shall we see no sudden faces
Strike a glory through the mist?
Not a sound the silence thrills,
Of the everlasting hills.
Pan, Pan is dead.
O twelve gods of Plato’s vision,
Crown’d to starry wanderings,—
With your chariots in procession,
And your silver clash of wings!
Very pale ye seem to rise,
Ghosts of Grecian deities—
Now Pan is dead.
Jove, that right hand is unloaded,
Whence the thunder did prevail:
While in idiocy of godhead
Thou art staring the stars pale!
And thine eagle, blind and old,
Roughs his feather in the cold.
Pan, Pan is dead.
* * * * * *
Neptune lies beside his trident,
Dull and senseless as a stone:
And old Pluto deaf and silent
Is cast out into the sun.
Ceres smileth stern thereat,—
“We all now are desolate—”
Now Pan is dead.
Aphrodite! dead and driven
As thy native foam, thou art,
With the cestus long done heaving
On the white calm of thy heart!
Ai Adonis! At that shriek,
Not a tear runs down her cheek—
Pan, Pan is dead.
And the Loves we used to know from
One another,—huddled lie,
Frore as taken in a snow-storm,
Close beside her tenderly,—
As if each had weakly tried
Once to kiss her as he died.
Pan, Pan is dead.
* * * * * *
In the fiery-hearted centre
Of the solemn universe,
Ancient Vesta,—who could enter
To consume thee with this curse?
Drop thy gray chin on thy knee,
O thou palsied Mystery!
For Pan is dead.
* * * * * *
Gods bereaved, gods belated,—
With your purples rent asunder! [p. 48→]
Gods discrown’d and desecrated,
Disinherited of thunder!
Now, the goats may climb and crop
The soft grass on Ida’s top—
Now Pan is dead.
Calm at eve the bark went onward,
When a cry more loud than wind,
Rose up, deepen’d, and swept sunward,
From the piled Dark behind:
And the sun shrank and grew pale,
Breathed against by the great wail—
Pan, Pan is dead.
And the rowers from the benches
Fell,—each shuddering on his face—
While departing influences
Struck a cold back through the place:
And the shadow of the ship
Reel’d along the passive deep—
Pan, Pan is dead.
And that dismal cry rose slowly,
And sank slowly through the air;
Full of spirit’s melancholy
And eternity’s despair!
And they heard the words it said—
Pan is dead—Great Pan is dead—
Pan, Pan is dead.
’Twas the hour when One in Sion
Hung for love’s sake on the cross—
When his brow was chill with dying,
And His soul was faint with loss:
When his priestly blood dropp’d downward,
And his kingly eyes look’d throneward:
Then, Pan was dead.
By the love He stood alone in,
His sole Godhead stood complete:
And the false gods fell down moaning,
Each from off his golden seat—
All the false gods with a cry
Render’d up their deity—
Pan, Pan is dead.
* * * * * *
Truth is fair: should we forego it?
Can we sigh right for a wrong?
God himself is the best Poet,
And the Real is His song.
Sing His truth out fair and full,
And secure His beautiful.
Let Pan be dead.
* * * * * *
What is true and just and honest,
What is lovely, what is pure—
All of praise that hath admonish’d,—
All of virtue, shall endure,—
These are themes for poet’s uses,
Stirring nobler than the Muses,
Ere Pan was dead.
O brave poets, keep back nothing;
Nor mix falsehood with the whole!
Look up Godward! speak the truth in
Worthy song from earnest soul!
Hold, in high poetic duty,
Truest Truth the fairest Beauty!
Pan, Pan is dead.
In the poem on Victoria “Crowned and Wedded,” there is a passage worthy of a chant in old Westminster Abbey:
And so the Dead—who lie in rows beneath the minster floor,
There, verily an awful state maintaining evermore—
The statesman, whose clean palm will kiss no bribe whate’er it be—
The courtier, who for no fair queen will rise up to his knee—
The court-dame, who for no court-tire will leave her shroud behind—
The laureate, who no courtlier rhyme than “dust to dust” can find—
The kings and queens who having made that vow and worn that crown,
Descended unto lower thrones and darker deep adown!
The Lost Bower is a happy piece of ruralizing, founded upon the recollections from days of childhood of a woodland bower, which is very beautifully and delicately painted with the softness of a Claude, vanishing away on the burden of sweet lines into airy distance. She had seen the bower once, but could not find it again. Time passed on, and many joys of the outer world and from humankind were lost to the poetess, who, reclining on her couch of illness, sees through the fingers which press upon her eyelids this vision of the trees, and grass, and the birds of old. Is it not found again in the verse beyond any concealment or disaster—in verse simple, natural, fluent and affluent?
The Rhyme of the Duchess May is a most musical ballad of the olden song, related by a bell-ringer in a church tower ringing for the dead, with the burden in every verse, “Toll slowly!”
But we must pause somewhere. Miss Barrett’s book is now before the American reader, and we confidently appeal to the mind of the country, recommending its cordial reception as a book that is pure, genuine, honest, a book of sustained power, well suited no less by its high Christian sentiment, than as an example of genius without artifice, to be profitable to the intellect of the country.
[Evert A. Duyckinck]
Reviewed:
A Drama of Exile, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: Henry G. Langley, 1845.
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