Poetry By English Women
Page 18
The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: OUP, 1910); Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1932); Alethea Hayter, Mrs. Browning. A Poet’s Work and Its Setting (London: Faber; NY: Barnes and Noble, 1963); Peter Dally, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Psychological Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1989).
from Sonnets from the Portuguese*
V
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,
As once Electra her sepulchral urn,
And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn
The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,
And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn
Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn
Could tread them out to darkness utterly,
It might be well perhaps. But if instead
Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow [10]
The grey dust up, … those laurels on thy head,
O my Beloved, will not shield thee so,
That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred
The hair beneath. Stand farther off then! go.
XXIX
I think of thee! – my thoughts do twine and bud
About thee, as wild vines, about a tree,
Put out broad leaves, and soon there’s nought to see
Except the straggling green which hides the wood.
Yet, O my palm-tree, be it understood
I will not have my thoughts instead of thee
Who art dearer, better! Rather, instantly
Renew thy presence; as a strong tree should,
Rustle thy boughs and set thy trunk all bare,
And let those bands of greenery which insphere thee
Drop heavily down, – burst, shattered, everywhere!
Because, in this deep joy to see and hear thee
And breathe within thy shadow a new air,
I do not think of thee – I am too near thee.
To George Sand: A Recognition*
True genius, but true woman! dost deny
Thy woman’s nature with a manly scorn,
And break away the gauds and armlets worn
By weaker women in captivity?
Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry
Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn! –
Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn,
Floats back dishevelled strength in agony,
Disproving thy man’s name! and while before
The world thou burnest in a poet-fire, [10]
We see thy woman-heart beat evermore
Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,
Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore,
Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire.
from Casa Guidi Windows*
from PART I
I heard last night a little child go singing
’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
O bella libertà, O bella! – stringing
The same words still on notes he went in search
So high for, you concluded the upspringing
Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch
Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green,
And that the heart of Italy must beat,
While such a voice had leave to rise serene
’Twixt church and palace of a Florence street: [10]
A little child, too, who not long had been
By mother’s finger steadied on his feet,
And still O bella libertà he sang […]
from PART II
Long live the people! How they lived! and boiled
And bubbled in the cauldron of the street:
How the young blustered, nor the old recoiled,
And what a thunderous stir of tongues and feet
Trod flat the palpitating bells and foiled
The joy-guns of their echo, shattering it!
How down they pulled the Duke’s arms everywhere!
How up they set new cafe-signs, to show
Where patriots might sip ices in pure air –
(The fresh paint smelling somewhat)! To and fro [10]
How marched the Civil Guard, and stopped to stare
When boys broke windows in a civic glow!
How rebel songs were sung to loyal tunes,
And bishops cursed in ecclesiastic metres […]
… How all the nobles fled, and would not wait,
Because they were most noble, – which being so,
How Liberals vowed to burn their palaces,
Because free Tuscans were not free to go!
How grown men raged at Austria’s wickedness,
And smoked, – while fifty striplings in a row [20]
Marched straight to Piedmont for the wrong’s redress!
You say we failed in duty, we who wore
Black velvet like Italian democrats,
Who slashed our sleeves like patriots, nor forswore
The true republic in the form of hats?
We chased the archbishop from the Duomo door,
We chalked the walls with bloody caveats
Against all tyrants. If we did not fight
Exactly, we fired muskets up the air
To show that victory was ours of right. [30]
We met, had free discussion everywhere
(Except perhaps i’the Chambers) day and night.
We proved the poor should be employed, … that’s fair, –
And yet the rich not worked for anywise, –
Pay certified, yet prayers abrogated, –
Full work secured, yet liabilities
To overwork excluded, – not one bated
Of all our holidays, that still, at twice
Or thrice a week, are moderately rated […]
from Aurora Leigh
from FIRST BOOK: YOUNG AURORA’S FOSTERMOTHER
I think I see my father’s sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country-house
To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey
By frigid use of life (she was not old,
Although my father’s elder by a year),
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about [10]
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves
Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;
Eyes of no colour, – once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling; cheeks, in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure, – if past bloom,
Past fading also.
She had lived, we’ll say,
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, [20]
A quiet life, which was not life at all
(But that, she had not lived enough to know),
Between the vicar and the country squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyrean to assure their souls
Against chance vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,
The apothecary, looked on once a year
To prove the soundness of humility.
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats, [30]
Because we are of one flesh, after all,
And need one flannel (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality) – and still
The book-club, guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions from the cream,
Preserved her intellectual. She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perc
h to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live [40]
In thickets, and eat berries!
I, alas,
A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,
And she was there to meet me. Very kind.
Bring the clean water, give out the fresh seed. […]
from FIFTH BOOK
Nay, if there’s room for poets in this world
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s, – this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.
To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,
Cry out for togas and the picturesque, [10]
Is fatal, – foolish too. King Arthur’s self
Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat
As Fleet Street to our poets.
Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say [20]
‘Behold, – behold the paps we all have sucked!
This bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating: this is living art,
Which thus presents and thus records true life.’
What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make the form;
For otherwise we only imprison spirit
And not embody. Inward evermore
To outward, – so in life, and so in art [30]
Which still is life […]
A Musical Instrument
I
What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
II
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay, [10]
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
III
High on the shore sate the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
IV
He cut it short, did the great god Pan
(How tall it stood in the river!), [20]
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sate by the river.
V
‘This is the way,’ laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sate by the river),
‘The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.’
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river. [30]
VI
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
VII
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain, – [40]
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
THE BRONTË SISTERS
Although grouped together here, they do not constitute some triple-headed monster, the Brontësaurus, but display marked individualities. Very important as Romantic novelists, they are not negligible as poets. Generally they share a Gothick-Romantic sensibility of emotional extremism, exploring imagination, liberty and solitude, in verse of some technical limitation (verse-forms deriving from hymns and ballads, with somewhat repetitive vocabulary and ideas). Respectively the third, fifth and sixth children of Revd Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell (d.1821) of Thornton, Yorkshire, they were educated mostly at home in Haworth, where they wrote profusely. In 1831, Charlotte began teaching, and in 1842 went with Emily to Belgium, where she fell unhappily in love with the school proprietor’s husband; returned in 1846. In that year published, with her sisters, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (two copies sold); in 1847, Jane Eyre; in 1848, brother Branwell and Emily died, in 1849, Anne. In 1854, married father’s curate Arthur Bell Nicholls, and died nine months later. Emily, the most notably passionate and violent nature, wrote copiously from an early age; she and Anne occupied themselves with prose (now lost) and verse fantasies on the imaginary realm of Gondal. Despite brief teaching experiences away, lived mostly at home; most of her poems written 1844–6; Wuthering Heights published 1847; died of tuberculosis. Anne, the least forceful of the three, was not happy away from home; possible romance with father’s curate; Agnes Grey published 1847; poems remarkable for general extreme misery, for some of which Calvinism was responsible.
A selection: E. Chitham and T. Winnifrith (eds.), Selected Brontë Poems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); C.W. Hatfield (ed.), The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (NY: Columbia UP, 1941); E. Chitham (ed.), The Poems of Anne Brontë (London: Macmillan, 1979); Edith Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London, 1857); T. Winnifrith, The Brontës and their background: romance and reality (London: Macmillan, 1973).
CHARLOTTE BRONTË 1816–1855
‘Again I find myself alone’
Again I find myself alone, and ever
The same voice like an oracle begins
Its vague and mystic strain, forgetting never
Reproaches for a hundred hidden sins,
And setting mournful penances in sight,
Terrors and tears for many a watchful night.
Fast change the scenes upon me all the same,
In hue and drift the regions of a land
Peopled with phantoms, and how dark their aim
As each dim guest lifts up its shadowy hand [10]
And parts its veil to show one withering look,
That mortal eye may scarce unblighted brook.
I try to find a pleasant path to guide
To fairer scenes – but still they end in gloom;
The wilderness will open dark and wide
As the sole vista to a vale of bloom,
Of rose and elm and verdure – as these fade
Their sere leaves fall on yonder sandy shade.
My dreams, the Gods of my religion, linger
In foreign lands, each sundered from his own, [20]
And there has passed a cold destroying finger
O’er every image, and each sacred tone
Sounds low and at a distance, sometimes dying
Like an uncertain sob, or smothered sighing.
Sea-locked, a cliff surrounded, or afar
Asleep upon a fountain’s marble brim –
Asleep in heart, though yonder early star,
The first that lit its taper soft and dim
By the great shrine of heaven
, has fixed its eye
Unsmiling though unsealed on that blue sky. [30]
Left by the sun, as he is left by hope:
Bowed in dark, placid cloudlessness above,
As silent as the Island’s palmy slope,
All beach untrodden, all unpeopled grove,
A spot to catch each moonbeam as it smiled
Towards that thankless deep so wide and wild.
Thankless he too looks up, no grateful bliss
Stirs him to feel the twilight-breeze diffuse
Its balm that bears in every spicy kiss
The mingled breath of southern flowers and dews, [40]
Cool and delicious as the fountain’s spray
Showered on the shining pavement where he lay.
‘What does she dream of’
What does she dream of, lingering all alone
On the vast terrace, o’er the stream impending?
Through all the still, dim night no life-like tone
With the soft rush of wind and wave is blending.
Her fairy step upon the marble falls
With startling echo through those silent halls.
Chill is the night, though glorious, and she folds
Her robe upon her breast to meet that blast
Coming down from the barren Northern wolds.
There, how she shuddered as the breeze blew past [10]
And died on yonder track of foam, with shiver
Of giant reed and flag fringing the river.
Full, brilliant shines the moon – lifted on high