E500928A. Poems.
The Christian Register, 28 September 1850, p. 154.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 16.
This new volume contains all of Mrs. Browning’s poems, and among them several, of no great value however, which have not before been published in this country. The work is handsomely printed and makes a beautiful library edition.
Had she more artistic skill, a nicer sense of the beautiful in form, and a better judgment in regard to what ought to be rejected, we should without a moment’s hesitation place her, with the single exception of Tennyson, at the head of all living English poets. Her thoughts seem at once to be transformed into emotions. She describes Petrarch as possessing a “brain-lit heart.” We are not certain but that the words apply better to herself. Whatever she writes is irradiated with thought. But the great characteristics of her genius, are a passionate earnestness, a self-abandonment to emotions which have sprung from thought, and a penetrating insight which flashes into the concealments of things and reveals what is hid beneath the surface. There is a strange sadness in her writings, which magnetizes the reader. The great lesson which she inculcates may be found in two of her own lines:—
Knowledge by suffering entereth;
And life is perfected by death.
She seems to have written, as she describes the “Rhyme of the Duchess May” to have been read—seated in a church-yard, under the sound of the tolling bell,
In the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun,
Toll slowly!
And the oldest ringer said, “Ours is music for the Dead,
When the rebecks are all done.”
Then I sat beneath the tree, and the bell tolled solemnly,
Toll slowly!
While the trees and rivers’ voices, flowed between the solemn noises,—
Yet death seemed more loud to me.
There I read this ancient rhyme, while the bell did all the time
Toll slowly!
And the solemn knell fell in with the tale of life and sin,
Like a rhythmic fate sublime.
It seems amazing that the author of “Cowper’s Grave,” of “Bertha in the Lane,” “The Romance of the Swan’s nest,” “The City of the Children,” should be left to write as she sometimes does. She has a propensity, often seen in children, to catch and copy whatever is strange and fantastic. Her style is full of imitative affectations. One of her best pieces is called the “Cry of the Human;” and in it she talks of “God’s divine.” She insists on making the “ed” of the past participle a separate syllable. She writes “Ladye” instead of lady, and thinks “Margret” and “Isobel” more poetical than Margaret and Isabel. Affectations like these mar all but her best pieces, and worse than these are strange contortions of phrase which only half express their meaning. It is only when she is powerfully moved—when the up-bursting passion sweeps away these superficial fancies, that she is rid of these blemishes; and in her smaller poems, the excellence of which must always depend so much on the form, these defects are like a crack in a costly vase.
But in spite of all qualifications, she is a true poet. In her better productions, there is an earnestness, a passionate movement, a strength of imagination, and a penetrating quality of thought, which sets her quite apart from the other writers of the day.
Yet in saying this, we do not mean to class her among the highest order of poets. As compared with Wordsworth, for example, you feel that she is deficient in that weight and breadth of thought—that enlarged view of life, which is as essential to the highest poetry as to the highest philosophy. Wordsworth moves in a path of calm radiance along the summits of the hills, and from that high level looks with a commanding vision to the East and the West. Mrs. Browning is like one of the streams which plunges down the side of the mountain, now sinking into dark glens, and then flashing into the open sunlight, winding now through thickly verdured woods, over cool, moss covered rocks, and around the roots of ancient trees, and now gliding through fields and meadows and revealing itself by the richer herbage that bends over it,—but always confined within a narrow pathway.
The truth is, that since the time of Cowper, there has been no such dearth of poetry as now. The poets who have made the earlier part of the nineteenth century memorable, were men, not merely of poetical sensibility, but of large and commanding powers of mind, who would have been eminent in other walks, had they not chosen to give utterance to themselves through verse. Byron, Scott, Moore, Coleridge, Southey, Shelley, Campbell, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Keats, were men of great intellectual force and originality. They were creators. We have sunk to a lower strata. It is now an age of repetition, of imitation—a silver age of polish and refinement—which lives on the crumbs which have fallen from these rich men’s tables. Instead of the passion of Byron, we have the sentimentalisms of Milnes; instead of Wordsworth thoughts, we have Browning’s superficial, quiddling refinements of thought; instead of Scott’s absolute re-creation and embodiment of the past, we have Macaulay’s rhetorical description of the past. With one or two exceptions, there is no living English poets who can be placed above the third or fourth rank. The throne is vacant. The suns of song have gone down; and it is only because of the general darkness, that so many farthing candles as there are among our “modern poets,” are visible. Mrs. Browning, however, though by no means to be numbered among these few great names, would in any period of English literature, have been a marked and observable person.
It is impossible to give a just idea of her works by any brief extracts. Such extracts show her defects without revealing her power. Her great merit lies not in graceful terms of expression, not in melody of verse, nor in especial felicity of imagery, but in a vehement, self-abandoning intensity of emotion, which gives unity to her best pieces and which fails to express itself through a fragment. We quote the following sonnets not only because they possess something of her more remarkable characteristics, but because we presume that few of our readers have ever seen them.
TEARS.
Thank God, bless God, all ye who suffer not
More grief than ye can weep for. That is well—
That is light grieving! lighter, none befell,
Since Adam forfeited the primal lot.
Tears! what are tears? The babe weeps in its cot,
The mother singing: At her marriage-bell
The bride weeps: and before the oracle
Of high-faned hills, the poet hath forgot
That moisture on his cheeks. Commend for grace,
Mourners, who weep! Albeit, as some have done,
Ye grope tear-blinded, in a desert place
And touch but tombs,—look up! Those tears will run
Soon, in long rivers, down the lifted face,
And leave the vision clear for stars and sun.
GRIEF.
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless—
That only men incredulous of despair.
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air,
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls as countries, lieth silent—bare
Under the blenching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death;
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless wo [sic],
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath!
Touch it! the marble eylids [sic] are not wet.
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
SUBSTITUTION.
When some beloved voice that was to you
Both sound and sweetness, faileth suddenly,
And silence against which you dare not cry,
Aches round you like a strong disease and new—
What hope? What help? What music will undo
That silence to your sense? Not friendship’s sigh—
Not reason’s subtle count. Not melody
Of viols, nor of pipes that Faunus blew.
Not songs of poets, nor of nightingales,
Whose hearts leap upward through the cypress trees
To the clear moon; nor yet the spheric laws
Self-chanted—nor the angels’ sweet All hails,
Met in the smile of God. Nay, none of these.
Speak Thou, availing Christ!—and fill this pause.
COMFORT.
Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet
From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low,
Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so
Who are not missed by any that entreat.
Speak to me as to Mary at thy feet—
And if no precious gums my hands bestow,
Let my tears drop like amber, while I go
In reach of thy divinest voice complete
In humanest affection—thus, in sooth,
To lose the sense of losing! As a child,
Whose song-bird seeks the wood forevermore,
Is sung to in its stead by mother’s mouth;
Till, sinking on her breast, love-reconciled,
He sleeps the faster that he wept before.
There is very great inequality in Mrs. Browning’s poems; but any one who will read those to which we have particularly referred above, or the “Lay of the Brown Rosarie,” “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” or “A Vision of Poets,” can not doubt that she is gifted with a rare poetic genius. There are writers perhaps with a broader vision,—there are many who possess far more dexterity and taste in the management of their materials; in her tone of feeling there is something morbid, and her thoughts are shut within a somewhat confined horizon, yet after making all these abatements, and with a full sense of their magnitude, we should not hesitate to place her side by side with one or two others, as possessing the richest endowment of genius among all those poets who are now on the stage as candidates and competitors for the laurel crown.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis, 1850.
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