Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series
Page 208
What most she loathes and leaps from, — elf from gnome
No gladlier, — finds that safest of retreats
Bubbles about a treacherous hand wide ope
To grasp her — (divers who pick pearls so grope) —
So lay this Maid-Moon clasped around and caught
By rough red Pan, the god of all that tract:
He it was schemed the snare thus subtly wrought
With simulated earth-breath, — wool-tufts packed
Into a billowy wrappage. Sheep far-sought
For spotless shearings yield such: take the fact
As learned Virgil gives it, — how the breed
Whitens itself forever: yes, indeed!
If one forefather ram, though pure as chalk
From tinge on fleece, should still display a tongue
Black ‘neath the beast’s moist palate, prompt men baulk
The propagating plague: he gets no young:
They rather slay him, — sell his hide to caulk
Ships with, first steeped in pitch, — nor hands are wrung
In sorrow for his fate: protected thus,
The purity we love is gained for us.
So did Girl-Moon, by just her attribute
Of unmatched modesty betrayed, lie trapped,
Bruised to the breast of Pan, half god half brute,
Raked by his bristly boar-sward while he lapped
— Never say, kissed her! that were to pollute
Love’s language — which moreover proves unapt
To tell how she recoiled — as who finds thorns
Where she sought flowers — when, feeling, she touched — horns!
Then — does the legend say? — first moon-eclipse
Happened, first swooning-fit which puzzled sore
The early sages? Is that why she dips
Into the dark, a minute and no more,
Only so long as serves her while she rips
The cloud’s womb through and, faultless as before,
Pursues her way? No lesson for a maid
Left she, a maid herself thus trapped, betrayed?
Ha, Virgil? Tell the rest, you! “To the deep
Of his domain the wildwood, Pan forthwith
Called her, and so she followed” — in her sleep,
Surely? — “by no means spurning him.” The myth
Explain who may! Let all else go, I keep
— As of a ruin just a monolith —
Thus much, one verse of five words, each a boon:
Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon.
Touch him ne’er so lightly
Epilogue to Dramatic Idyls, Second Series
“Touch him ne’er so lightly, into song he broke:
Soil so quick-receptive, — not one feather-seed,
Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke
Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous — prove a poet-soul!”
Indeed?
Rock’s the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend, — few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods — what the after-age
Knows and names a pine, a nation’s heritage.
JOCOSERIA
First published in 1883, this collection of short poems was not well received by critics at the time and has continued to be considered one of the poet’s least effective works, although it does contain a now famous prologue, “Wanting is — what?”. The title of the collection originates from a 1598 collection of jokes and anecdotes, referring to its ‘jocose’ and serious contents. Surpisingly, in spite of the negative critical response, the collection was popular and its sequel Ferishtah’s Fancies had to be delayed to allow more time for sales of Jocoseria.
CONTENTS
Wanting is — what?
Donald
Solomon and Balkis
Cristina and Monaldeschi
Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli
Adam, Lilith, and Eve
Ixion
Jochanan Hakkadosh
Note
Never the Time and the Place
Pambo
Wanting is — what?
Wanting is — what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant,
— Where is the blot?
Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same
— Framework which waits for a picture to frame:
What of the leafage, what of the flower?
Roses embowering with nought they embower!
Come then, complete incompletion, O comer,
Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!
Breathe but one breath
Rose-beauty above,
And all that was death
Grows life, grows love,
Grows love!
Donald
“Will you hear my story also,
— Huge Sport, brave adventure in plenty?”
The boys were a band from Oxford,
The oldest of whom was twenty.
The bothy we held carouse in
Was bright with fire and candle;
Tale followed tale like a merry-go-round
Whereof Sport turned the handle.
In our eyes and noses — turf-smoke:
In our ears a tune from the trivet, 10
Whence “Boiling, boiling,” the kettle sang,
”And ready for fresh Glenlivet.”
So, feat capped feat, with a vengeance:
Truths, though, — the lads were loyal:
“Grouse, five score brace to the bag!
Deer, ten hours’ stalk of the Royal!”
Of boasting, not one bit, boys!
Only there seemed to settle
Somehow above your curly heads,
— Plain through the singing kettle, 20
Palpable through the cloud,
As each new-puffed Havanna
Rewarded the teller’s well-told tale,
This vaunt “To Sport — Hosanna!
“Hunt, fish, shoot,
Would a man fulfil life’s duty!
Not to the bodily frame alone
Does Sport give strength and beauty,
“But character gains in — courage?
Ay, Sir, and much beside it! 30
You don’t sport, more’s the pity:
You soon would find, if you tried it,
“Good sportsman means good fellow,
Sound-hearted he, to the centre;
Your mealy-mouthed mild milksops
— There’s where the rot can enter!
“There’s where the dirt will breed.
The shabbiness Sport would banish!
Oh no, Sir, no! In your honoured case
All such objections vanish. 40
“‘T is known how hard you studied:
A Double-First — what, the jigger!
Give me but half your Latin and Greek,
I’ll never again touch trigger!
“Still, tastes are tastes, allow me!
Allow, too, where there’s keenness
For Sport, there’s little likelihood
Of a man’s displaying meanness!”
So, put on my mettle, I interposed.
”Will you hear my story?” quoth I. 50
“Never mind how long since it happed,
I sat, as we sit, in a bothy;
“With as merry a band of mates, too,
Undergrads all on a level:
(One’s a Bishop, one’s gone to the Bench,
And one’s gone — well, to the Devil.)
“When, lo, a scratching and tapping!
In hobbled a ghastly visitor.
Listen to just what he told us himself
— No need of our playing inquisitor!” 60
— — —
Do you happen to know in Ross-shire
Of the naked fact I am sure enough,
Though I clothe it in rags and tatters.
You may recognise Ben by description;
Behind him — a moor’s immenseness;
Up goes the middle mount of a range,
Fringed with its firs in denseness.
Rimming the edge, its fir-fringe, mind!
For an edge there is, though narrow; 70
From end to end of the range, a stripe
Of path runs straight as an arrow.
And the mountaineer who takes that path
Saves himself miles of journey
He has to plod if he crosses the moor
Through heather, peat and burnie.
But a mountaineer he needs must be,
For, look you, right in the middle
Projects bluff Ben — with an end in ich —
Why planted there, is a riddle: 80
Since all Ben’s brothers little and big
Keep rank, set shoulder to shoulder,
And only this burliest out must bulge
Till it seems — to the beholder
From down in the gully, — as if Ben’s breast,
To a sudden spike diminished,
Would signify to the boldest foot
”All further passage finished!”
Yet the mountaineer who sidles on
And on to the very bending, 90
Discovers, if heart and brain be proof,
No necessary ending.
Foot up, foot down, to the turn abrupt
Having trod, he, there arriving.
Finds — what he took for a point was breadth,
A mercy of Nature’s contriving.
So, he rounds what, when ‘tis reached, proves straight,
From one side gains the other:
The wee path widens — resume the march,
And he foils you, Ben my brother! 100
But Donald — (that name, I hope, will do) —
I wrong him if I call “foiling”
The tramp of the callant, whistling the while
As blithe as our kettle’s boiling.
He had dared the danger from boyhood up,
And now, — when perchance was waiting
A lass at the brig below, — ‘twixt mount
And moor would he stand debating?
Moreover this Donald was twenty-five,
A glory of bone and muscle: 110
Did a fiend dispute the right of way,
Donald would try a tussle.
Lightsomely marched he out of the broad
On to the narrow and narrow;
A step more, rounding the angular rock,
Reached the front straight as an arrow.
He stepped it, safe on the ledge he stood,
When — whom found he full-facing?
What fellow in courage and wariness too,
Had scouted ignoble pacing, 120
And left low safety to timid mates,
And made for the dread dear danger,
And gained the height where — who could guess
He would meet with a rival ranger?
‘Twas a gold-red stag that stood and stared,
Gigantic and magnific,
By the wonder — ay, and the peril — struck
Intelligent and pacific:
For a red deer is no fallow deer
Grown cowardly through park-feeding; 130
He batters you like a thunderbolt
If you brave his haunts unheeding.
I doubt he could hardly perform volte-face
Had valour advised discretion:
You may walk on a rope, but to turn on a rope
No Blondin makes profession.
Yet Donald must turn, would pride permit,
Though pride ill brooks retiring:
Each eyed each — mute man, motionless beast —
Less fearing than admiring. 140
These are the moments when quite new sense,
To meet some need as novel,
Springs up in the brain: it inspired resource:
— “Nor advance nor retreat but — grovel!”
And slowly, surely, never a whit
Relaxing the steady tension
Of eye-stare which binds man to beast, —
By an inch and inch declension,
Sank Donald sidewise down and down:
Till flat, breast upwards, lying 150
At his six-foot length, no corpse more still,
— “If he cross me! The trick’s worth trying.”
Minutes were an eternity;
But a new sense was created
In the stag’s brain too; he resolves! Slow, sure,
With eye-stare unabated,
Feelingly he extends a foot
Which tastes the way ere it touches
Earth’s solid and just escapes man’s soft,
Nor hold of the same unclutches 160
Till its fellow foot, light as a feather whisk,
Lands itself no less finely:
So a mother removes a fly from the face
Of her babe asleep supinely.
And now ‘tis the haunch and hind foot’s turn
— That’s hard: can the beast quite raise it?
Yes, traversing half the prostrate length,
His hoof-tip does not graze it.
Just one more lift! But Donald, you see,
Was sportsman first, man after: 170
A fancy lightened his caution through,
— He well-nigh broke into laughter.
“It were nothing short of a miracle!
Unrivalled, unexampled —
All sporting feats with this feat matched
Were down and dead and trampled!”
The last of the legs as tenderly
Follows the rest: or never
Or now is the time! His knife in reach,
And his right-hand loose — how clever! 180
For this can stab up the stomach’s soft,
While the left-hand grasps the pastern.
A rise on the elbow, and — now’s the time
Or never: this turn’s the last turn!
I shall dare to place myself by God
Who scanned — for He does — each feature
Of the face thrown up in appeal to Him
By the agonizing creature.
Nay, I hear plain words: “Thy gift brings this!”
Up he sprang, back he staggered, 190
Over he fell, and with him our friend
— At following game no laggard.
Yet he was not dead when they picked next day
From the gully’s depth the wreck of him;
His fall had been stayed by the stag beneath
Who cushioned and saved the neck of him.
But the rest of his body — why, doctors said,
Whatever could break was broken;
Legs, arms, ribs, all of him looked like a toast
In a tumbler of port-wine soaken. 200
“That your life is left you, thank the stag!”
Said they when — the slow cure ended —
They opened the hospital-door, and thence
— Strapped, spliced, main fractures mended,
And minor damage left wisely alone, —
Like an old shoe clouted and cobbled,
Out — what went in a Goliath well-nigh, —
Some half of a David hobbled.
“You must ask an alms from house to house:
Sell the stag’s head for a bracket, 210
With its grand twelve tines — I’d buy it myself —
And use the skin for a jacket!”
He was wiser, made both head and hide
His win-penny: hands and knees on,
Would manage to crawl — poor crab — by the roads
In the misty stalking-season.
And if he discovered a bothy like this,
Why, harvest was sure: folks listened.
He told his tale to the lovers of Sport:
Lips twitched, cheeks glowed, eyes glistened. 220
And when he had come to the close, and spread
His spoils for the gazers’ wonder,
With “Gentlemen, here’s the skull of the stag
I was over, thank God, not under!” —
The company broke out in applause;
”By Jingo, a lucky cripple!
Have a munch of grouse and a hunk of bread.
And a tug, besides, at our tipple!”
And “There’s my pay for your pluck!” cried This,
”And mine for your jolly story!” 230
Cried That, while T’other — but he was drunk —
Hicupped “A trump, a Tory!”
I hope I gave twice as much as the rest;
For, as Homer would say, “within grate
Though teeth kept tongue,” my whole soul growled
”Rightly rewarded, — Ingrate!”
Solomon and Balkis
Solomon King of the Jews and the Queen of Sheba, Balkis,
Talk on the ivory throne, and we well may conjecture their talk is
Solely of things sublime: why else has she sought Mount Zion,
Climbed the six golden steps, and sat betwixt lion and lion?
She proves him with hard questions: before she has reached the middle
He smiling supplies the end, straight solves them riddle by riddle;
Until, dead-beaten at last, there is left no spirit in her,
And thus would she close the game whereof she was first beginner:
“O wisest thou of the wise, world’s marvel and well-nigh monster,
One crabbed question more to construe or vulgo conster!
Who are those, of all mankind, a monarch of perfect wisdom
Should open to, when they knock at spheteron do — that’s his dome?”
The King makes tart reply: “Whom else but the wise his equals
Should he welcome with heart and voice? — since, king though he be, such weak walls
Of circumstance — power and pomp — divide souls each from other
That whoso proves kingly in craft I needs must acknowledge my brother.
“Come poet, come painter, come sculptor, come builder — whate’er his condition,
Is he prime in his art? We are peers! My insight has pierced the partition
And hails — for the poem, the picture, the statue, the building — my fellow!
Gold’s gold though dim in the dust: court-polish soon turns it yellow.
“But tell me in turn, O thou to thy weakling sex superior,
That for knowledge hast travelled so far yet seemest no whit the wearier, —
Who are those, of all mankind, a queen like thyself, consummate