E380624A. The Seraphim.
The Examiner, 24 June 1838, pp. 387–388.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 373–375.
This book opens with a preface which is very remarkable for power and beauty of expression. After intimating that the subject of the principal poem in the volume was suggested by the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus, Miss Barrett proceeds—
“I thought, that, had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem where none had any pity; from the ‘faded white flower’ of the Titanic brow, to the ‘withered grass’ of a Heart trampled on by its own beloved; from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublimer meekness of the taster of death for every man; from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love! And I thought, how, ‘from the height of this great argument,’ the scenery of the Prometheus would have dwarfed itself even in the eyes of its poet,—how the fissures of his rocks and the innumerous smiles of this ocean would have closed and waned into blankness,—and his demigod stood confest, so human a conception as to fall below the aspiration of his own humanity. He would have turned from such to the rent rocks and darkened sun—rent and darkened by a sympathy thrilling through nature, but leaving man’s heart untouched—to the multitudes, whose victim was their Saviour—to the Victim, whose sustaining thought beneath an unexampled agony, was not the Titanic ‘I can revenge,’ but the celestial ‘I can forgive!’
* * * * * *
“I have worn no shoes upon this holy ground: I have stood there, but have not walked. I have drawn no copy of the statue of this Great Pan,—but have caught its shadow,—shortened in the dawn of my imperfect knowledge, and distorted and broken by the unevenness of our earthly ground. I have written no work, but a suggestion. Nor has even so little been attempted, without as deep a consciousness of weakness as the severest critic and the humblest Christian could desire to impress upon me. I have felt in the midst of my own thoughts upon my own theme, like Homer’s ‘children in a battle.’
“The agents in this poem of imperfect form—a dramatic lyric, rather than a lyrical drama—are those mystic beings who are designated in Scripture the Seraphim. The subject has thus assumed a character of exaggerated difficulty, the full sense of which I have tried to express in my Epilogue. But my desire was, to gather some vision of the supreme spectacle under a less usual aspect,—to glance at it, as dilated in seraphic eyes, and darkened and deepened by the near association with blessedness and Heaven. Are we not too apt to measure the depth of the Saviour’s humiliation from the common estate of man, instead of from His own peculiar and primeval one? To avoid which error, I have endeavoured to count some steps of the ladder at Bethel,—a very few steps, and as seen between the clouds.
“And thus I have endeavoured to mark in my two Seraphic personages, distinctly and predominantly, that shrinking from, and repugnance to, evil, which, in my weaker Seraph, is expressed by fear, and, in my stronger one, by a more complex passion; in order to contrast with such, the voluntary debasement of Him who became lower than the angels, and touched in His own sinless being, sin, and sorrow, and death. In my attempted production of such a contrast, I have been true to at least my own idea of angelic excellence, as well as to that of His perfection. For one holiness differs from another holiness in glory. To recoil from evil, is according to the stature of an angel; to subdue it, is according to the infinitude of a God.”
We should have done a great injustice to an extremely fine writer, had we attempted to describe her purpose in other words than these, her own.
Our readers will also be glad to receive from the poem itself, before any remarks of our’s which we may venture to think it calls for, a few of its striking and brilliant bursts of fancy and of passion.
The poem opens as the two Seraphim, Ador and Zerah, stand on the outer side of the shut heavenly gate, on the eve of their passage to the mid-air, above Judæa. Beneath them
sinks the pomp angelical—
The roar of whose descent hath died
To a still sound, as thunder into rain—
and as they arrive nearer and nearer earth, the fear of Zerah, so bright and yet so timid, increases more and more. “Well beloved! what fearest thou?” asks the strong and passionate Ador—
Zerah. I fear, I fear—
Ador. What fear?
Zerah. The fear of earth.
Ador. Of earth, the God-create, the beautiful?
From whence the sweet sea music hath its birth,
And vernal forests lift their leaves in tune,
Beneath the gracious, water-leading moon?
Where every night, the stars do put away
Meekly its darkness dull,
And look their spirit-light into the clay?
Where every day, the kingly sun doth bless
More lovingly than kings,
And stir to such harmonious happiness
All leafed and reeded things,
It seems as if the joyous shout which burst
From angel lips to see him first,
Had left a silent echo in his ray?
Still trembles Zerah as he thinks of the curse the earth has inherited, of Death, and the yet fearfuller Evil—
the cursed thing that moved
Its shadow of ill, long time ago,
Across our heaven’s own shining floor.
Then Ador tells to Zerah (from whom it has till now been concealed) the mission which had carried “peace on earth—goodwill to man,” and upon himself there falls, at the instant, the terrible thought of the human agonies then inflicting on the Divine One—
O heart of man—of God! which God hath ta’en
From out the dust, with its humanity
Mournful and weak and soft yet holy round it—
And bade its many pulses beating lie
Beside that incommunicable stir
Of Deity wherewith he interwound it!
With like thoughts, awakened thus by Ador, Zerah is then filled, and with the hope of seeing “His loving smile through his woeful clay,” becomes strong for earth—
Were I never to see my heaven again,
I would wheel to earth like the tempest-rain
Which sweeps there with exultant sound
To lose its life in the reachëd ground!
The second part sees the Seraphim in mid-air, above Judæa, somewhat apart from the visible angelic hosts. The opening is indeed masterly—
Ador. Belovëd! dost thou see?—
Zerah. Thee,—thee!
Thy burning eyes already are
Grown wild and mournful as a star,
Whose occupation is for aye
To look upon the place of clay,
Whereon thou lookest now!
The crown is fainting on thy brow
To the likeness of a cloud—
Thy forehead’s self, a little bowed
From its aspect high and holy,—
As it would in meekness meet
Some seraphic melancholy!
Thy very wings that lately flung
In heavenly airs, an outline clear,
Flicker in their glory here;
And wear to each a shadow hung,
Dropped across thy feet.
The weights of earth around us lying,
Our breath comes heavily like sighing;
And in these strange contrasting glooms,
Stagnant with the scent of tombs,
Seraph faces, O my brother,
Show awfully to one another!
Ador. Dost thou see? dost thou see?
Zerah. Yea! our heaven’s bright company—
Alone the memory of their brightness
Left in them, as in thee!
The circle upon circle, tier on tier—
The perpendicular sea whose rampant whiteness
Stands fixed, because the sudden wind drops low—
The sea of living Ones, afar, anear,
Above us, and around!
Their songful lips divorcëd from all sound;
A darkness gliding down their silvery glances,—
Bowing their steadfast solemn countenances,
As if they heard God speak, and could not glow!
Ador. Look downward! dost thou see?—
For Ador already looks upon what Zerah is not strong enough to see, and strives to prepare him for the sight—
Unto Him whose forming word
Gave to Nature flower and sward,
She hath given back again,
Instead of flowers, the thorn;
Instead of sylvan calms, the human scorn.
At last, straining downward, downward, Zerah beholds—
I see
Beyond the city, crosses three,
And mortals three that hang thereon,
’Ghast and silent to the sun!
And round about them sweep and press
Living multitudes.
We pass the descriptions which succeed, up to the coming on of the Supernatural Darkness—
Ador. The pathos hath the day undone!
The death-look of His eyes
Hath overcome the sun,
And made it sicken in its narrow skies—
But not to death!——
Zerah. He dieth! Through the dark,
He still, He only, is discernible—
The barëd hands and feet transfixëd stark,—
The countenance of patient anguish white,—
Do make, themselves, a light
More dreadful than the glooms which round them dwell,
And therein do they shine.
Who will deny to the writer of such verses as these (and they are not sparingly met with in the volume) the possession of many of the highest qualities of the divine art? We regret to have some restriction to add to an admission we make so gladly.
Miss Barrett is indeed a genuine poetess, of no common order; yet is she in danger of being spoiled by over-ambition, and of realising no greater or more final reputation than a hectical one, like Crashaw’s. She has fancy, feeling, imagination, expression; but [p. 388→] for want of some just equipoise or other between the material and spiritual, she aims at flights which have done no good to the strongest, and therefore falls infinitely short, except in such detached passages as we have extracted above, of what a proper exercise of her genius would infallibly reach. In a word, the subject of her present poem has been chosen with an unhappy want of judgment.
For, let us add, notwithstanding the sneer (a thing that never sits well on a woman’s face) in Miss Barrett’s admirable preface, at the unlucky critic who was “not Longinus” (Doctor Johnson, we presume), we venture to be of opinion that religion, or what is exclusively understood by “sacred subjects,” is not fit for poetry, except on very rare and brief occasions; and that such of the greatest poets as have thought otherwise, have proved themselves mistaken in the very midst of their greatness. Milton degraded the Deity, not only into a “school-divine,” but something worse; and the presumption of Dante is at least equal to his genius. How indeed can the Infinite, which Time itself can never arrive at,—the Ineffable, of which the visible stars do but express a few atoms,—be a proper subject for the faculties of the mere dwellers upon one of those atoms? The greatest do but show their littleness, and not a very humble littleness (for all their talk of humility), in approaching such themes, and the weakest (among whom we do not place Miss Barrett) are in danger, moth like, of doing worse than singe their wings.
We find that we must give one extract more. We had determined to resist the temptation of selecting from among the minor poems in the volume, but we cannot withstand this noble picture of the Poet in the “Poet’s Vow”—
Nor wore the dead a stiller face
Beneath the cerement’s roll:
His lip seemed carved to an endless thought
No language dared controul;
And his steadfast eye burnt inwardly,
As gazing on his soul.
You would not deem that brow could e’er
Ungentle moods express:
Yet seemed it in this troubled world,
Too calm for gentleness!
The very star that shines from far,
Shines trembling ne’ertheless.
Very various, and in the main beautiful and true, are these minor poems. But the entire volume deserves more than ordinary attention.
Reviewed:
The Seraphim, and Other Poems (EBB), London: Saunders & Otley, 1838.
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