E450400B. A Drama of Exile.
The Southern Quarterly Review, April 1845, pp. 300–312.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 384–389.
The first knowledge we had of Miss Barrett, was from an article that appeared in the London Quarterly Review, a few years since, where her claims as a poet were discussed at the same time with seven or eight other “modern English poetesses.” An exquisitely beautiful lyric, on Cowper’s Grave, quoted from her, remained in our memory, after the unfamiliar name was forgotten, till recalled afterwards by association with a poem of striking originality, published in one of the Ladies’ Magazines of Philadelphia. We rejoice now that a collection of many poems, from her pen, is likely to extend her reputation widely through this land; to make her known and loved among that American people, to whom, she says, her love and admiration have belonged, as long as she has felt proud of being an English-woman, and almost as long as she has loved poetry itself. The American edition of “The Drama of Exile,” etc., precedes the English one by a step,—a step suspended for a moment, that the author, “by a cordial figure, may kiss the soil of America, and address her thanks to those sons of the soil, who, if strangers and foreigners, are yet kinsmen and friends.” It may be hoped that this cordial spirit will be reciprocated by every American reader, in the reception of these interesting volumes.
The time has passed when prejudices existed against learning in women; any “elderly objections” on that score would subject the cavillers themselves to contempt; but the reader of Miss Barrett’s productions may well be startled at the demand she makes continually on his learning, to understand her allusions and analogies. A long continuance of ill health having rendered her a prisoner in her own apartment for years, she has solaced her pain, and sweetened her seclusion, by the most unwearied devotion to study. Probably she owes it, in part, to these circumstances, that she is the most erudite poetess living; that her attainments in the classics are extraordinary; that she has written elegant Latin verses, and made fine translations from Æschylus, besides being the author of sundry criticisms on the Greek poets; that she is familiar with Hebrew, and is even suspected of [p. 301→] an acquaintance with other and less known tongues. Besides all this, her knowledge of the literature of the day is said to be extensive and complete. A mind thus richly stored and cultivated, and all these varied acquirements, she brings to her work,—the poetic utterance of religious feeling, and the aspirations of a deeply religious spirit. With her, poetry is sublimed into devotion.
The subject of the longest poem in these volumes,—“The Drama of Exile,”—may seem at first sight to be singularly chosen, considering by whom it has been appropriated. But we can easily understand how the author’s daily habits of thought might fasten it upon her; how the struggles of her own spirit with a sense of physical weakness,—the laboring of a soul that apprehended truth, and aspired to lift itself into union with etherial natures, yet felt itself weighed down by the realities of life,—would lead her thoughts back to the sad beginning of human exile. Separated from the world, in daily companionship with high contemplation, she could feel almost in its freshness, the desolation of that first spiritual bereavement, when aspiration failed to reach, and the “soul, all mournfully, sate down among the senses.”—The form of the drama approaches the model of the Greek tragedy. Its object is to express “the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity,” newly driven forth from Paradise into the wilderness. The suffering of Eve particularly, bearing the consciousness of having been the tempter of her husband and the organ of the Fall, and taking, in all humility, her lot of self-sacrifice and submission,—could be expressed, she thought, better by a female heart and pen. The scene of the drama, or mystery it might be called, is without the gates of Eden, which are shut fast with clouds. This, the writer thought, would be a barrier between herself and Milton, so that none might say she dared to walk in his footsteps. But her precaution is ineffectual. The subject, and the great poet’s glory covering it, swept through the gates, and she stood full in it against her will. There she must be content to stand. The grandeur of Milton’s genius has strode to the utmost limit where human intellect could tread; the step of any other must be prescribed and narrow, and fettered wherever he turns by a perpetual vision of the surrounding majesty. Andreini, whose work suggested Paradise Lost, went before Milton; none can come after him, and fail to be lost in the shadow of his greatness. Ne- [p. 302→] vertheless, as Miss Barrett deprecatingly observes, there is room 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 reproachful groan of the whole creation,—in that first darkening of the hills from the withdrawing footsteps of angels,—and in that first silence of the voice of God.”—Exile is her great idea; and it is carried through to its utmost extent, ending with Lucifer, who is but an Adam borne out to the extreme, representing the ultimate tendencies of sin and loss.
Although this drama has nothing of the grandeur of conception, the epic majesty we have been accustomed to associate with the subject, the truth and tenderness of its lyrical spirit entitle it to the highest praise. We enter with sympathy into the desolation and remorse of the exiled pair; and the plaint of the spirits of earth and air, jarred from the harmony of their existence by the shock of man’s sin, and feeling the wrong he has done them in their strife and sorrow, appeals, with its mournful melody, to our hearts. In the foreground of the picture stands the angel of the sin, pale in the drear light, to 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.
But Gabriel is there to dispute his claim over this ruined world, and even amidst the rumor of the vexed and discordant powers of nature, even while the echo of the curse still sounds, to assert that God has not wholly abandoned earth. While the eager malice of the Arch Tempter anticipates the completion of the destruction he has wrought,—boasting that
“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,”—
Gabriel charges him to depart and “leave earth to God,” so [p. 303→] solemnly, that the evil one becomes aware of a divine purpose of restoration.
One of the many beautiful passages, is a part of the dialogue between Adam and Eve, when they have fled to the extremity of the sword-glare shooting from the closed gate of Eden out into the dreary wilderness, and come upon the wild open country. The first evening of their expulsion is darkening around them; but the shadows are not only of the night:
Adam. How doth the wide and melancholy earth
Gather her hills around us, grey 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 angel’s! What is this?
Adam. No cause for fear. The circle of God’s life
Contains all life beside.
Eve. I think the earth
Is crazed with curse, and wanders from the sense
Of those first laws affixed to form and space,
Or ever she knew sin!
Adam. We will not fear;
We were brave sinning.
Eve. Yea, I plucked the fruit
With eyes upturned to heaven, and seeing there
Our god-thrones, as the tempter said, not God.
My heart, which beat then, sinks. The sun hath sunk
Out of sight with our Eden.
Adam. Night is near.
Eve. And God’s curse, nearest. Let us travel back
And stand within the sword-glare till we die;
Believing it is better to meet death
Than suffer desolation.
Adam. Nay, beloved!
We must not pluck death from the Maker’s hand,
As erst we plucked the apple; we must wait
Until He gives death, as He gave us life;
Nor murmur faintly o’er the primal gift,
Because we spoiled its sweetness with our sin.
Eve. Ah! ah! dost thou discern what I behold? [p. 304→]
Adam. I see all. How the spirits in thine eyes,
From their dilated orbits, bound before
To meet the spectral dead!
Eve. I am afraid,—
Ah—ah! the twilight bristles wild with shapes
Of intermittent motion, aspect vague
And mystic bearings, which o’ercreep the earth,
Keeping slow time with horrors in the blood.
How near they reach,—and far! how gray they move,
Treading upon the darkness without feet,—
And fluttering on the darkness without wings!
Some run like dogs, with noses to the ground,—
Some keep one path like sheep; some rock like trees;
Some glide like a fallen leaf; and some flow on,
Copious as rivers.
Adam. Some spring up like fire,—
And some coil——
Eve. Ah—ah! dost thou pause to say
Like what?—coil like the serpent when he fell
From all the emerald splendor of his height,
And writhed, and could not climb against the curse,
Not a ring’s length. I am afraid—afraid—
I think it is God’s will to make me afraid;
Permitting these to haunt us in the place
Of His beloved angels, gone from us
Because we are not pure. Dear Pity of God,
That didst permit the angels to go home,
And live no more with us who are not pure,—
Save us, too, from a loathly company,—
Almost as loathly in our eyes, perhaps,
As we are in the purest!
Adam. ————the throng
Of shapeless spectra merge into a few
Distinguishable phantasms, vague and grand,
Which sweep out and around us vastily,
And hold us in a circle and a calm.
Eve. Strange phantasms of pale shadow! there are twelve.
These are the twelve figures of the zodiac, and are exhibited as dim exponents of the creature life contained in the earth. It is thus that the powers of organic and inorganic nature, represented by spirits with an aspect of individuality, “and by one voice expressing many griefs,” rise up against the fallen pair, and complain that the curse has sorely wounded their innocent life! The bitter and wide-extending consequence of their transgression is made known to Adam and Eve, by anticipations of coming wo, to be felt through the great heart of Nature!
The song of the morning-star to Lucifer, and the love borne towards her by the fallen spirit, though exquisitely [p. 305→] poetical, are embellishments, where departure from simplicity is dangerous, and out of keeping with the scriptural tone of the piece. We object, also, to the frequent introduction of conceits, intended to heighten the effect of the picture, or give force to the idea, but unworthy the sublimity of the subject. Thus Lucifer, describing his fall from heaven:
When countless angel faces, still and stern,
Pressed out upon me from the level heavens,
Adown the abysmal spaces; and I fell
Trampled down by your stillness, and struck blind
By the sight in your eyes.
Here the awful beauty of the picture is entirely marred by the image in the first two lines.
Again, in Gabriel’s reply to Lucifer’s question, if man is destined to fill the thrones left vacant in heaven:
Glory and life
Fulfil their own depletions; and if God
Sighed you far from Him, His next breath drew in
A compensative splendor up the skies,
Flushing the starry arteries!
Not less puerile is the following image:
Gabriel. I charge thee by the choral song we sang,
When up against the white shore of our feet,
The depths of the creation swelled and broke,—
And the new worlds, the beaded foam and flower
Of all that coil, roared outward into space
On thunder edges.
But these defects are only occasional, and there is so much to admire that we lose sight of them.—The author vindicates her introduction of the divine Saviour in a vision, towards the close, speaking and transfigured into humanity and suffering, by the example of other poets, and by Milton’s design, when he thought of writing a drama on the subject of Paradise Lost, of introducing the “Heavenly Love” among his personages. We cannot help thinking, however, she would have done better by not attempting that to which no human conception could possibly rise. We like much better the passage, where the hope in the future of the exiles is faintly shadowed forth in the brief converse between Ga- [p. 306→] briel and the Spirit of Evil; the response being given from heaven to the questioning from the depths of despair:
First Voice. Is it true, O thou Gabriel, that the crown
Of sorrow which I claimed, another claims?
That He claims that too?
Second Voice. Lost one, it is true.
First Voice. That He will be an exile from His heaven,
To lead those exiles homeward?
Second Voice. It is true.
First Voice. That He will be an exile by His will,
As I by mine election?
Second Voice. It is true.
First Voice. That I shall stand sole exile finally,
Made desolate for fruition?
Second Voice. It is true, etc.
Next to the “Drama of Exile,” we come upon a series of sonnets,—if such they may be called, being not more irregular in structure than many English poems that are called by courtesy—sonnets. These abound in beautiful and truthful thoughts. The two best are those entitled “Work” and “Patience taught by Nature,”—of which we extract the first as a specimen:
What are we set on earth? Say, to toil,—
Nor seek to leave thy tending of the vines,
For all the heat o’ the day, till it declines,
And death’s mild curfew shall from work assoil.
God did anoint thee with his odorous oil,
To wrestle, not to reign; and He assigns
All thy tears over, like pure crystallines,
For younger fellow-workers of the soil
To wear for amulets. So others shall
Take patience, labor, to their heart and hands
From thy hands, and thy heart, and thy brave cheer,
And God’s grace fructify through thee to all.
The least flower, with a brimming cup, may stand,
And share its dew-drop with another near.
“The Romaunt of the Page” is a ballad, breathing of chivalrous honor and woman’s love, stronger than death. “The Lay of the Brown Rosarie,” is a moral story told in ballad style, and adorned with rich graces of poetry. It was the first ballad we ever saw of Miss Barrett’s, and reminded us somewhat of Tennyson; abounding, moreover, in startling yet natural imagery, and expressions that more than paint the thought. It seems to belong to a strong conception, intuitively to combine words for its own use, far more power- [p. 307→] ful than mere study or research could have devised. In no one respect does our author show more convincingly the strength of her poetic faculty;—her words are vivid pictures. To illustrate by a random instance or two; how distinct is the idea conveyed to the mind by the following figure in one of her sonnets, asserting that hopeless grief is passionless:
Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent, bare,
Under the blenching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute heavens.
And the line in the sonnet on Wordsworth:
And very meek with inspirations proud,—
how much does it express! Again, in the poem upon Exaggeration:
We walk upon
The shadow of hills across a level thrown,
And pant like climbers.
But the reader of these volumes will find abundant illustrations more striking than these.
“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is a “Romance of the Age;” in fact a capital magazine story thrown into singular but harmonious measure. In lively prose it would rival some of the novellettes of Mr. Willis, and be much in his own style. The story is the old one, of a fair, noble and wealthy lady, receiving the homage of numerous noble suitors, and wedding, to please herself, one lowly born, but belonging to the aristocracy of mind. Fain would we find room for the “Mournful Mother,” a lament over a dead blind boy; one of the most finished and exquisite of the shorter pieces.
The second volume opens with “A Vision of Poets,” the next longest to “The Drama of Exile,” in the collection. In this the author has vindicated the necessary relations of genius to suffering and self-sacrifice. In the eyes of a true poet, his mission is a solemn one. The self-denial it enjoins may not be put off; the sorrow it implies must be accepted; the great work must be wrought out with pain; he must have an abiding sense of what Balzac has beautifully and truly called, “la patience angélique du génie.” “We learn in suffering what we teach in song,” is a truth our author has made her maxim; and from all her saddened experience, [p. 308→] she aspires to draw lessons profitable to others. Poetry is to her “as serious a thing as life itself.”
In this piece, the poet, simply conscious of his own power, without a clear view of its uses, tortured with vague restlessness:
For his soul kept too much light
Under his eyelids for the night;
is taught the true end of his being, in a vision of all the great poets that have been. The bards of old time are mentioned, and ranged in order; the peculiar genius and characteristics of each being pointed out with critical accuracy. A world of learning is here, yet without pedantry. The extraordinary attainments of Miss Barrett are brought into requisition, to show the noblest end of human wisdom. We forbear remark, except a passing notice, upon the poetic beauty of the scene depicted; the great church, with its long interlacing aisles and mystic altar-lights; its countless columns plunged half-way in the pale shifting incense-cloud; the angel ministering, and the strange company,—
pale and crowned
With sovran eyes of depth profound:
who were “poets true, who died for Beauty, as martyrs do for Truth,”——and leave this magnificent poem to be read entire.
The “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” is a fine ballad of olden days, thrown into a measure remarkably musical, from the frequent recurrence of the rhyme. The interruption of every stanza by the slow tolling bell, has a solemn effect.—Several minor pieces that follow are in the same meekly moralizing spirit. “The cry of the children,” is full of feeling and pathos. What heart but must beat with sympathy, in reading it, with the noble indignation of the poet’s soul, for the wrongs of these hapless factory children? This “cry”—this supplication,—full of terrible energy as it is,—is but the articulate utterance of that childish wo, and ought to wring redress even from the hands of tyrants:
They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their looks are sad to see;
For man’s grief abhorrent, draws and presses
Down the cheeks of infancy,— [p. 309→]
“Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary;
Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak!
Few paces have we taken, yet are weary,—
Our grave rest is very far to seek!
Ask the old why they weep, and not the children,
For the outside earth is cold,—
And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,
And the graves are for the old!”
* * * * * *
“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!
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!”
* * * * * *
And well may the children weep before you;
They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun;
They know the grief of men, but not the wisdom;
Are bitter with despairing, but not calm,—
Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom,—
Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm,—
Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly
No dear remembrance keep,—
Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly;
Let them weep! let them weep!
They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see; [p. 310→]
For you think you see their angels in their places,
With eyes meant for Deity;
“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,—
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upwards, O our tyrants,
And your purple shows your path;
But the child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence
Than the strong man in his wrath!”
Many of the remaining poems in the volume deserve especial notice; but we can only mention the names of such gems as “Loved Once,” “Bertha in the Lane,” “The House of Clouds,” “A Portrait;” leaving others unnoticed. “The Cry of the Human,” and “A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress,” record in melancholy harmony the changes of human life, and its “mild mystery,”—all tending towards the life beyond. In “The Dead Pan,” the author has once more placed herself, and this time not favorably, in association with Milton. This lyric is founded on a tradition mentioned by Plutarch, “according to which, at the hour of the Saviour’s agony, a cry of ‘Great Pan is dead!’ swept across the waves in the hearing of certain mariners,—and the oracles ceased.” The verses of Miss Barrett, breathing a gorgeous lament for the “gray old gods” of heathen story, instantly remind us of the poem of the bard of Paradise Lost, celebrating the departure of these pretended deities, on the eve of the blessed Nativity. The spirit and tone of Milton’s lines are scarce surpassed by any thing even in his later works:
The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving;
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale.
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn,
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn,” etc. [p. 311→]
But we condemn not the poem of our author, because it does not equal Milton’s! It has much beauty of imagery and thought, in spite of the measure, which we cannot but regard as peculiarly unsuitable to a stately subject.
“Crowned and Wedded,” is a piece on the subject of Victoria; “Crowned and Buried,” of Napoleon; and of this we need say no more than that it is well sustained, and worthy a place among the lyrics of other poets who have chosen the same theme; even though of these are Byron and Manzoni.
In glancing over the poems of Miss Barrett, we are struck by her frequent and abrupt mention of the great name of Deity. The same fault was charged on her first published work; she has replied by a vindication in her preface to the present: and it is but fair to refer the reader to this defence, as otherwise an unfavorable impression might be produced in the minds of devout persons. Certainly, no one can suppose Miss Barrett guilty of want of reverence; but, secluded from the world, and having her daily life inwoven with her spiritual creed, she obeys the impulse of her own feelings, unconscious that those of others may be startled.
To conclude; it cannot be doubted that Miss Barrett is a woman of high and original genius. Her manner of thought, her style of writing, are altogether her own. Her boldness is sustained by a consciousness of power. Her poems have her heart and life in them. If she is sometimes wanting in the faculty of construction, it is because her conception is vaster and higher than can readily be expressed. She is inspired with the love of Truth; and she loves Nature because she associates it with spiritual truth. All the force of her powerful imagination, all the treasures of her intellect, are employed to this end. The things unseen, which are eternal, fill her mental vision. Yet her poetry does not want true and deep human feeling; that exists in earnestness and strength, though colored always with that profound religious sense, which pervades her whole poetic being.
The distinctness of character belonging to these poems, gives promise that they will not be the last we may expect from the author’s pen. She herself announces her intention of going forward. It is our interest to hope that she may be enabled to do so; and that sufficient measure of health and enjoyment may be granted to her, to fulfil her own idea of duty. Should that be the case, what treasures of poetry [p. 312→] may we not expect in future, from one who has already proved herself
strong to sanctify
The poet’s high vocation.
E.
Reviewed:
A Drama of Exile, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: Henry G. Langley, 1845.
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