E450800A. Poems (1844).
The Prospective Review, August 1845, pp. 445–464.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 337–344.
Some of our readers will at once feel an interest in the Writer of these volumes, and anything she may produce, from the rumour which has singled her out as the amie inconnue to whom Miss Martineau dedicated her impressive revelations of Life in the Sick-room. And we could easily imagine that Miss Martineau’s unrivalled power of realizing the life and experience of another, had indeed imparted to her volume a kind of reflex character; and that we heard the deep-toned notes of Miss Barrett’s solemn and pain-perfected voice moving among the vigorous utterances of the authoress proper. But for this belief there is no other foundation than popular conjecture.
Nevertheless, Miss Barrett is a sufferer worthy of having much sympathy and admiration dedicated to her. There is nothing perhaps to all cultivated human nature more impressive than the spectacle of man, beat upon by pain and misfortune, rising higher and higher on the very bosom of their waves. Time makes no difference to us in the majesty of this sight. Whether it be the Stoic, crying out to the anguish and calamity of life, “Rex Sum”—“I am your master;”—or the Æschilean Prometheus, lying beneath his chains, wracked by the eternal vulture at his heart, but defying the power of the tyrant, and glorying to the last that he has given gifts unto men; or the Miltonic Satan, rallying his hosts to perseverance in the midst of the tartaric bed of fire; or a greater and higher than he, his Conqueror and Destroyer, wiping away the drops of Gethsemane, and calmly avowing, “Thou hast said,” in the palace of judgment; or whether it be some tender woman-nature, refusing to allow that the partnership in life between soul and body is equal, determined to assert her spiritual superiority over all material ill, and thus attaining a reach of the faculties and a heroism of the moral nature, that without this tremendous conflict of powers she never could have known, and becoming far more than simply a conquerer over her outward ills, through the Christ that strengthened [p. 446→] her—the spectacle, whether representing to us a blind but brave battle with fate, or the deliberate conflict of a soul, which feels that it is to be made perfect through suffering—is still the same—the same in its relative effects, and challenges the same tribute of exalted sympathy from all surrounding manhood.
In the annals of public men of our own time, we do not remember any more striking illustration of this victory of the moral and intellectual nature over bodily disease, than a fact that is recorded of the late Robert Hall. An intimate friend of his declares that for twenty years he never passed a whole night in bed—that his sufferings rendered perpetual change of posture necessary—that sometimes he lay upon the floor, sometimes upon chairs, but never the night through in bed—that in the vestry of his chapel was a sofa, from which the eloquent sufferer went forth to preach, and to which he retired to alleviate his agonies, when his sermon was concluded. And yet this man persevered in his public duties, we believe, to the last, refusing to shrink from the battle of life, though he could only take to it an exposed and wounded bosom and lacerated hands.
We dwell upon this subject because no reader must hope to get at the full worth or the inmost soul of Miss Barrett’s writings, without taking with him this remembrance. She is a sufferer and a labourer of the highest class—a labourer of the class mental, and a sufferer of the class Christian. The fixed eye of interest with which our nature gazes on the conflict with pain and adverse circumstances, even as understood by the ancients, is here transferred to an example of the same conflict, in its latest and highest form—we mean that upon which Christ has thrown the broad interpreting light of his own life and death. But there is no reason that we should formally, and in many words, introduce to our readers one who can introduce herself with the exquisite and moving grace of this Dedication.
“To my Father
“When your eyes fall upon this page of dedication, and you start to see to whom it is inscribed, your first thought will be of the time far off when I was a child and wrote verses; and when I dedicated them to you, who were my public and my critic. Of all that such a recollection implies of saddest and sweetest to both of [p. 447→] us, it would become neither of us to speak before the world: nor would it be possible for us to speak of it to one another, with voice that did not falter. Enough, that what is my heart when I write thus will be fully known to yours.
“And my desire is that you, who are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day,—that you, who have shared with me in things bitter and sweet, softening or enhancing them, every day—that you who hold with me over all sense of loss and transiency, one hope by one Name—may accept from me the inscription of these volumes, the experiments of a few years of an existence, which has been sustained and comforted by you, as well as given. Somewhat more faint-hearted than I used to be, it is my fancy thus to seem to return to a visible personal dependence on you, as if indeed I were a child again: to conjure your beloved image between myself and the public, so as to be sure of one smile—and to satisfy my heart while I sanctify my ambition, by associating with the great pursuit of my life its tenderest and holiest affection.”
The pièces de resistance in the volumes thus commended to our reverent reception, are the Drama of Exile, and a Vision of Poets. These are supported by numerous shorter poems and sonnets, among the best of which we find Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, the Cry of the Human, the Romaunt of the Page, Rhyme of the Duchess May, Loved once, and L.E.L.’s last question. They are of very various merit; but what is a rarer thing, they are also of various character—though the minor, as one might anticipate, is the predominating key.
Miss Barrett’s affinities connect her with Milton, Goethe, and John Keats, more closely than with any other of her Poet-Predecessors. The religious element in her character brings her into alliance with the first—her intimacy with the spirit-world is eminently Goethean—and the Greek and classic model on which much of her imagery of life is formed continually reminds us of poor Keats. Such a combination of resemblances at once absolves our authoress from any charge of imitation at our hands. It is her nature, her personal history, and the spontaneous direction of her studies, we imagine, that have created the peculiar characteristics of her poetry; and she is, as she trusts, too “sincere a thinker” to be justly subject to the imputation of plagiarism. We confess, however, that although advancing [p. 448→] no such unworthy charge as this against our authoress, we felt, on a first perusal of these volumes, that she was most successful in the humblest form of her three-fold school. Except in the Vision of Poets—where she is especially herself, and in which she reaches perfection, because she has reached it through suffering, and in those smaller pieces which are the offspring of a spirit cognate with that which produced the Vision—we thought that she was most at home, and most delightful in that charming iambic, dithyrambic, porphyry-like, palatial (how shall we describe it?) style—Greek life and imagery and passion and dignity depicted on the canvass of an English heart—which lays so potent a spell on the reader of Keats, and which we trace and welcome once again in such pieces as the “Wine of Cyprus,” “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” and the “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” in the present volumes. But coming again after a few months to the Drama of Exile, we are impressed with a new, and we are persuaded a juster, sense of its power. It must be with the reader perhaps as it was with the writer—“I had promised my own prudence,” (says Miss Barrett in prose, whose poetry rivals that of her verse,) “to shut close the gates of Eden between Milton and myself, so that none might say I dared to walk in his footsteps. He should be within, I thought, with his Adam and Eve unfallen or falling—and I, without, with my Exiles—I also an exile! It would not do. The subject, and his glory covering it, swept through the gates, and I stood full in it, against my will, and contrary to my vow—till I shrank back, fearing, almost desponding—hesitating to venture even a passing association with our great poet before the face of the public.” And so as we pursued the Drama, the “ultra vires” rang mournfully in our ears, and we ceased to turn the pages, with no diminution of respect for her that had made the bold attempt, but with a sorrowful regret, that, like Icarus, she had gone too near the Sun; and we withdrew our eyes from gazing on her further progress, that we might be spared the pain of witnessing her fall into the deep Ægean. But something of the same feeling which induced a return to the subject in the authoress, induced a return to the Poem in ourselves—a growing sense of the reality and extent of her powers, and of the penetration alike of head [p. 449→] and heart, with which she had learnt to read some of the darkest and most tear-dimmed pages of the human soul. Her “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.”
We pass over the introductory scene—in which Gabriel and Lucifer are brought face to face, (and in which the traditional Mephistophelian character of Satan is sustained with a vigour and success that almost startle us in the hands of so pious a Lady)—to the Chorus of Eden Spirits, from which we shall select a few passages, without regard (in this or subsequent quotations) to intervening verses, which we may, for space’ sake, omit.
chorus of eden spirits.
(Chanting from Paradise, while Adam and Eve fly across the sword-glare.)
Harken, oh harken! 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-marshalled angels,
They press and pierce:
Our requiems follow fast on our evangels,—
Voice throbs in verse!
We are but orphaned 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 colours were the world’s foregoing,
Than shall be used.
The yearning to a beautiful, denied you,
Shall strain your powers:— [p. 450→]
Ideal sweetnessess shall over-glide you,
Resumed from ours!
In all your music, our pathetic minor
Your ear shall cross;
And all fair sights shall mind you of diviner,
With sense of loss!
When each band of Spirits has taken its sorrowful farewell, Adam and Eve are discovered to us in the extremity of the sword-glare. And here Miss Barrett gets upon ground which led her to say, and her own treatment of which justifies her in saying, that part at least of the exile-feelings had been hitherto imperfectly apprehended, and was more expressible by a woman than a man. We do not indeed know what to do with Miss Barrett’s theology in the peculiar emergency, in which a treatment of the subject so close to the truth of Nature places her—but let that pass. Certainly we have long been convinced that the first curse pronounced upon man, “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” was in truth the first blessing conferred upon him; and in like manner now that we read Miss Barrett’s delineation of the remorse, and sorrows, and efforts and hopes which grow out of the First Sin—how calamity creates a tenfold stringency of love—how transgression gives the sense of weakness and frailty—how these teach the sweet lesson of reliance on God—how remorse begets repentance, and repentance humility, and humility trust, and trust hope—and all combined create desire and effort and struggle, and point out the path leading to the Rock that is higher than we—and when we contrast this devious thicket of thorns and flowers, with the circling row of goodliest trees laden with fairest fruit—the thoughtful experiences and mutual confidences of this love-in-woe companionship, with the somewhat too unruffled and Arcadian beds and bowers of Eden, where we have need of all our better feelings and all Milton’s genius to prevent the occasional suspicion that Paradise would, if very long-lived, become rather dull, and our interest in it fall asleep in the sameness of splendour—we cannot resist the idea that the Serpent was perhaps not so much mistaken, when he spoke of the knowledge of good and ill turning us into gods, and that the life of temptation and struggling, victory and defeat, which we of [p. 451→] this day lead, was most probably, in spite of divines, the kind of life that the Omniscient Creator designed that we should lead, and that the first sin was one of the first steps—a solemn and heart-impressing one indeed—in the rugged path of this educationary discipline. But on these subjects we are about to wage no war with our authoress. We take the august mythology as it stands—content that it holds, as within a shell, a mournful truth, to which in one form or other all humanity must bear its attestation—the truth, that our nature hath a fall.
To turn to our exiles. They are already to our minds far more interesting than when we left them in Eden—and if we do wrong to say so, the fault is Miss Barrett’s, who has made them so.
Adam.—Pausing a moment on this outer edge,
Where the supernal sword-glare cuts in light
The dark exterior desert—hast thou strength,
Beloved, to look behind us to the gate?
Eve.—I have strength to look upward to thy face.
* * * * *
O Adam, Adam! by that name of Eve—
Thine Eve, thy life—which suits me little now,
Seeing that I confess myself thy death
And thine undoer, as the Snake was mine,—
I do adjure thee, put me straight away,
Together with my name—
Strike, my lord!
Adam.— My beloved,
Mine Eve and life—I have no other name
For thee or for the Sun than what ye are,
My blessed life and light! If we have fallen,
It is that we have sinned,—we: God is just;
And since his curse doth comprehend us both,
It must be that his balance holds the weights
Of first and last sin on a level. What!
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;
Thy wrath against the sinner giving proof
Of inward abrogation of the sin! [p. 452→]
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.— O my God!
I, standing here between the glory and dark—
The glory of thy wrath projected forth
From Eden’s wall: the dark of our distress,
Which settles a step off in that drear world—
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;—
With angel looks and angel songs around,
To show the absence of her eyes and voice,
And make society full desertness,
Without the uses of her comforting.
Eve, beginning to feel cheered by this right loyal love, tells him of a prayer that in her anguish she had made—“an ill prayer”—that should be “prayed no more.”
O Lord God,
(’Twas so I prayed) I ask Thee by my sin,
And by thy curse, and by thy blameless heavens,
Make dreadful haste to hide me from thy face,
And from the face of my beloved here,
For whom I am no helpmate, quick away
Into the new dark mystery of death!
I will lie still there; I will make no plaint;
I will not sigh, nor sob, nor speak a word,—
Nor struggle to come back beneath the Sun,
Where peradventure I might sin anew
Against thy mercy and his pleasure. Death,
Oh! Death, whate’er it be, is good enough
For such as I.—For Adam—there’s no voice
Shall ever say again, in heaven or earth,
It is not good for him to be alone.
They have an interview with Lucifer. They conjecture who he is. Adam says—
Perhaps a fallen angel. Who shall say?
Lucifer.—Who told thee, Adam?
Adam.— Thou! The prodigy
Of thy vast brows and melancholy eyes, [p. 453→]
Which comprehend the heights of some great fall.
I think that thou hast one day worn a crown
Under the eyes of God.
Lucifer taunts him in his reply: and Adam says—
Now I know thou art fallen below hope
Of final re-ascent.
Lucifer.— Because?
Adam.— Because
A Spirit who expected to see God,
Though at the last point of a million years,
Could dare no mockery of a ruined man
Such as this Adam.
With no less sublimity does Eve express herself as Lucifer fades away—
The precipice of ill
Down this colossal nature, dizzies me—
And, hark! the starry harmony remote
Seems measuring the heights from which he fell.
The Spirits of the various forms of earthly good and beauty take leave of the human pair, but no farewell is so affecting, because none is so hopeless, as the farewell of his Morning Star to Lucifer:—
Mine orbed image sinks
Back from thee, back from thee,
As thou art fallen, methinks,
Back from me, back from me.
O my light-bearer,
Could another fairer
Lack, to thee, lack to thee?
Ai, ai, Heosphoros!
* * * * *
I cannot kindle underneath the brow
Of this new angel here who is not Thou:
All things are altered since that time ago,—
And if I shine at eve, I shall not now—
I am strange—I am slow!
Ai, ai, Heosphoros!
Henceforward, human eyes of lovers be
The only sweetest sight that I shall see,
With tears between the looks raised up to me.
Ai, ai! [p. 454→]
When, having wept all night, at break of day,
Above the folded hills, they shall survey
My light, a little trembling, in the grey.
Ai, ai!
And gazing on me, such shall comprehend,
Through all my piteous pomp at morn or even,
And melancholy beaming out of Heaven,
That love, their own divine, may change or end,
That love may close in loss!
Ai, ai, Heosphoros!
When the Spirits of lost good have taken their slow and wailing departure, the hopes and prophecies of future good assume shape—a chorus of invisible angels is heard, as the Poem nears its close, and Christ himself appears and speaks,—the great Comforter.
There is only one other passage, which the latitude of quotation, indulged to its extreme, will allow us to quote from the Drama. It is from the mouth of Adam:—
woman’s griefs and rewards.
Be satisfied;
Something thou has to bear through womanhood—
Peculiar suffering answering to the sin;
Some pang paid down for each new human life;
Some weariness in guarding such a life—
Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrust
From those thou hast too well served; from those beloved
Too loyally, some treason; feebleness
Within thy heart, and cruelty without;
And pressures of an alien tyranny,
With its dynastic reasons of larger bones,
And stronger sinews. 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.
It would seem from passages in the Preface that Miss Barrett has not escaped the annoyance of certain small criticisms on her introduction of divine personages into her Poem. From such criticisms we implore her to avert her eye, [p. 455→] never to turn it to them again. Those who offer such objections are not in a position to understand her. The life of a person of genius might be spent in apologies, if he were to endeavour to explain his course to such minds as these. Our authoress has risen above their horizon, and she must on no account stoop to lift up into it those whom she has left behind: they could not breathe in it, were she to place them within its limits. She must remember that she has to address those who have ears to hear; and to those who have not ears, no explanations of hers can give them. Let her rather fit audience find though few, nor let her reverent heart consent, from the very spirit of its reverence, to be dragged down to the level of these people’s comprehension. But whatever Miss Barrett does, she does with such an unspeakable refinement that we can scarcely regret any charge, however founded upon ignorance, which gives rise to the few paragraphs of defence such as these:—
“When the old mysteries represented the Holiest Being in a rude familiar fashion, and the people gazed on, with the faith of children in their earnest eyes, the critics of a succeeding age, who rejoiced in Congreve, cried out ‘Profane.’ Yet Andreini’s mystery suggested Milton’s Epic; and Milton, the most reverent of poets, doubting whether to throw his work into the epic form or the dramatic, left, on the latter basis, a rough ground-plan, in which the intention of introducing the ‘Heavenly Love’ among the persons of his drama, is extant to the present day. But the tendency of the present day is to sunder the daily life from the spiritual creed,—to separate the worshipping from the acting man,—and by no means to ‘live by faith.’ There is a feeling abroad which appears to me (I say it with deference) nearer to superstition than to religion, that there should be no touching of holy vessels except by consecrated fingers, nor any naming of holy names except in consecrated places. As if life were not a continual sacrament to man, since Christ brake the daily bread of it in His hands! As if the name of God did not build a Church, by the very naming of it! As if the word God were not every where in His creation, and at every moment in His eternity, an appropriate word. As if it could be uttered unfitly, if devoutly! I appeal on these points, which I will not argue, from the conventions of the Christian to his devout heart; and I beseech him generously to believe of me, that I have done that in reverence, from which, through reverence, he might have abstained; and that, where he might have been driven to silence by the principle of [p. 456→] adoration, I, by the very same principle, have been hurried into speech.”
We cannot pass from the Drama of Exile without expressing our belief, although it is of the class called Unacted—one in which the Dramatis Personæ are Thoughts, not Persons—yet that as a poetic utterance, and disregarding its technical defects of form, it stands well, between the Paradise Lost and the Paradise Regained: that Miss Barrett has filled up the interval worthily and movingly: that if there be a difference in the notes of her Drama and those of the great Epic (and of course there is), it is such a difference as should subsist between Milton and his Daughter, and that if her Poem has not the strong majesty of the Lost, or the serene beauty of the Regained, it has the appropriate character of an exile’s lament, who lays his harp upon the willow, and only weeps when he remembers Zion.
From the Miltonic aspect of Miss Barrett’s genius we turn to that which we consider distinctively her own: and this is imaged forth to us, principally in the “Vision of Poets,” and subordinately in such of the minor pieces as “Loved once”—and “Do ye think of me, as I think of you?” and “Wine of Cyprus,”—for in these are exhibited extensive and thoughtful reading, a deep and fervent spirit of love, and the traces of a strong suffering, that has worked its work of beautiful faith and patience on a thoroughly religious mind.
The Poet of the Vision, not finding sleep, wanders forth into a forest, meets with an apparition fair, who leads him through such preparatory discipline as the ancient Poets lay on their venturous inquirers who were ambitious of a visit to Tartarus, or as Egyptian Priests insisted on in their candidate for the mysteries,—modified of course in the present instance according to Miss Barrett’s idiosyncracy,—and then comes on before him the great array of the Poet-Spirits, from among whom as they pass, we stop, first, Pindar, for, we are sure, the quick and pleased recognition of the reader—
Electric Pindar, quick as fear,
With race dust on his cheeks, and clear,
Slant startled eyes that seem to hear
The chariot, rounding the last goal,
To hurtle past it in his soul! [p. 457→]
Then Lucretius and Ossian:
Lucretius—nobler than his mood!
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said, “No God,”
Finding no bottom! he denied
Divinely the divine, and died
Chief poet on the Tiber side,
By grace of God! his face is stern
As one compelled, in spite of scorn,
To teach a truth he could not learn.
And Ossian, dimly seen or guessed!
Once counted greater than the rest,
When mountain-winds blew out his vest.
Byron:
And poor, proud Byron! sad as grave,
And salt as life! forlornly brave,
And quivering with the dart he drave.
The most impressive part, as well as the moral pith and marrow of the Poem, is contained in the Angel’s address to the Poet-Shades assembled before him.
The sovran angel lifted high
His hand, and spake out sovranly,
“Tried poets, hearken and reply!
Give me true answers. If we grant
That not to suffer is to want
The conscience of the Jubilant,—
If ignorance of anguish is
But ignorance; and mortals miss
Far prospects, by a level bliss,—
If as two colours must be viewed
In a seen image, mortal should
Need good and evil, to see good,—
If to speak nobly, comprehends
To feel profoundly—if the ends
Of power and suffering, Nature blends,— [p. 458→]
If poets on the tripod must
Writhe like the Pythian, to make just
Their oracles, and merit trust,—
If every vatic word that sweeps
To change the world, must pale their lips,
And leave their own souls in eclipse,—
If to search deep the universe
Must pierce the searcher with the curse,—
Because that bolt (in man’s reverse)
Was shot to the heart o’ the wood, and lies
Wedged deepest in the best
* * * * *
If all the crowns of earth must wound
With pricklings of the thorns He found,—
If saddest sighs swell sweetest sound—
What say ye unto this? refuse
This baptism in salt water? choose
Calm breasts, mute lips, and labour loose?
Or, oh ye gifted givers! ye
Who give your liberal hearts to me,
To make the world this harmony,—
Are ye resigned that they be spent
To such world’s help?”
The Spirits bent
Their awful brows and said—“Content!”
Content! it sounded like Amen,
Said by a choir of mourning men—
An affirmation full of pain
And patience!—ay, of glorying,
And adoration,—as a king
Might seal an oath for governing.
We waste no words of criticism on these stanzas. We attempt no explanation of their power. They tell a truth, which the epicurean principle, that regulates our lives and efforts, makes the hardest and saddest for us to learn—that faith comes by darkness, and strength by suffering. So true are the Lord’s words, as yet unexhausted of their meaning, that he that findeth his life shall lose it, and he [p. 459→] that loseth his life for truth and knowledge’ sake, alone knows how to find it. If the reader wants criticism on these lines, let him read them again and again.
It must not be hastily concluded from the course of the above quotations and remarks that the genius of our authoress is all decked in sable, and that her muse is ever of an Æolian plaintiveness. Even the array of mocking-bird poets, which, with merry sarcasm, she makes to follow the martyr-band, would, to go no further, correct such a misconception. But there is another and a last characteristic of her poetry which we must conclude by pointing out. We have called it Keats-like, because it throws the common material of modern life into that Grecian marble-halled type, which we see in Keats, and almost in him only. How far the original elements of her nature, modified by her evident love of classic lore, or how far a distinct study and admiration of Keats may have led to the resemblance—entirely removed as it is from plagiarism—we know not: but we know no other style under which we can class the Anglo-Greek peculiarity of some of these pieces. From Lady Geraldine’s Courtship we have not now room to quote. But every one will recognize in it, the amiable reverse of Tennyson’s sarcastic “Lady Clara Vere de Vere.” It is immensely to our liking. It embodies Tennyson’s satire—but turns it into a sweet. But what says the reader to this beaker of our Poetess’s own joyous filling, from her own treasury of cheerful brilliants?
wine of cyprus.
Given to me by H.S. Boyd, Esq., Author of “Select Passages from the Greek Fathers,” &c., to whom these Stanzas are addressed.
If old Bacchus were the speaker
He would tell you with a sigh,
Of the Cyprus in this beaker,
I am sipping like a fly,—
Like a fly or gnat on Ida
At the hour of goblet pledge,
By Queen Juno brushed aside, a
Full white arm-sweep, from the edge! [p. 460→]
Sooth, the drinking should be ampler,
When the drink is so divine!
And some deep-mouthed Greek exampler
Would become your Cyprian wine!
Cyclops’ mouth might plunge aright in,
While his one eye over-leered—
Nor too large were mouth of Titan,
Drinking rivers down his beard.
* * * * *
But for me, I am not worthy
After gods and Greeks to drink;
And my lips are pale and earthy,
To go bathing from this brink!
Since you heard them speak the last time,
They have faded from their blooms—
And the laughter of my pastime
Has learnt silence at the tombs.
Ah! my friend! the antique drinkers
Crowned the cup and crowned the brow!
Can I answer the old thinkers
In the forms they thought of, now?
Who will fetch from garden-closes
Some new garlands while I speak,
That the forehead, crowned with roses,
May strike scarlet down the cheek?
Do not mock me! with my mortal,
Suits no wreath again, indeed!
I am sad-voiced as the turtle
Which Anacreon used to feed;
Yet as that same bird demurely
Wet her beak in cup of his,—
So without a garland, surely
I may touch the brim of this.
Go!—let others praise the Chian!—
This is soft as Muses’ string—
This is tawny as Rhea’s lion,
This is rapid as its spring,—
Bright as Paphia’s eyes e’er met us,
Light as ever trod her feet!
And the brown bees of Hymettus
Make their honey, not so sweet. [p. 461→]
Very copious are my praises,
Though I sip it like a fly!—
Ah!—but, sipping,—times and places
Change before me suddenly—
As Ulysses’ old libation
Drew the ghosts from every part,
So your Cyprian wine, dear Græcian,
Stirs the Hades of my heart.
And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,
Solemn flowed 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᾽ς and οι᾽ς!
Then what golden hours were for us!
While we sat together there,
How the white vests of the Chorus
Seemed to wave up a live air!
How the Cothurns trod majestic
Down the deep Iambic lines!
And the rolling anapæstic
Curled, like vapour 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!
These were cup-bearers undying
Of the wine that’s meant for souls. [p. 462→]
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 mouthed 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 speaker 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.
* * * * *
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 turned and looked at you,
That St. Simeon on the column
Had had somewhat less to do?
* * * * *
Ah, my gossip! you were older,
And more learned, and a man!
Yet that shadow,—the unfolder
Of your quiet eyelids,—ran
Both our spirits to one level;
And I turned from hill and lea
And the summer-sun’s green revel,—
To your eyes that could not see.
Now Christ bless you with the one light
Which goes shining night and day!
May the flowers which grow in sunlight
Shed their fragrance in your way!
Is it not right to remember
All your kindness, friend of mine—
When we too sat in the chamber,
And the poets found us wine! [p. 463→]
So, to come back to the drinking
Of this Cyprus!—it is well—
But those memories, to my thinking,
Make a better œnomel!
And whoever be the speaker,
None can murmur with a sigh—
That, in drinking from that beaker,
I am sipping like a fly!
The revel of these lines is surpassingly delicious, and the mixture with their festive recollections of hints of contrast between time past and time present—which ever cover with a mellowed sadness all happy recollections—imparts the last finish of perfection to them. It will be perceived that we have omitted a few stanzas, not that there is one too many, but that their presence is not indispensable to giving the reader the spirit of the whole. But this reminds us of the only grave charge we have to bring against Miss Barrett—she is too often diffuse. She does not always gird up the loins of her thought, to make a stalwart journey, without pause or retrogression. Her garments are sometimes seen floating or dragging. She has sometimes given out the idea, before she has given up her verse. She requires to know when she has done with her thought. And yet we speak all this most hesitatingly. For what a loss it were, if in getting rid of what we may fancy to be her defects, she were to lose any of what we know to be her beauties! And perhaps what we think we see amiss in her is only that dross which forms part of every ore in which lies the pure metal, and she may in this respect only resemble, after all, Milton, and Shakespeare, and—Nature. Of her phraseology we have nothing to say but in praise. It is choice beyond all criticism. Her Greek derivatives always bear their own justification with them; and the rarity with which she has introduced them argues an untold amount of self-restraint. There is one word which we could wish away—not that it comes from Greece, but that it comes from America— “grand.” People inhabiting so large a continent may want a word wherewith to express a new sense of vastness—but let us of the little island always be content with Great Britain. [p. 464→]
We scarcely know how to leave our authoress. We have lived through all Poetic Loves from Walter Scott to Chaucer—and from Ovid to Æschylus. We have ceased to be susceptible, and are unwilling readers of all new poetry. But we confess our blood circles rapidly again as we hold these volumes in our hands; and oh! rare commendation for these latter days, we turn to them after the interval of months, with renewed delight and increasing satisfaction. Miss Barrett should be greeted with an unmixed acclamation of gratitude and praise from all who rejoice every time that they behold the Phœnix of true Poetry rise again from its ashes.
[Charles Wicksteed]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
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