This emptying out of each constituent
And natural force, by which I come to be.
Pray for me, O my friends; a visitant
Is knocking his dire summons at my door,
The like of whom, to scare me and to daunt,
Has never, never come to me before.
[’Tis death, – O loving friends, your prayers! –’tis he! …
As though my very being had given way,
As though I was no more a substance now,
And could fall back on nought to be my stay,
(Help, loving Lord! Thou my sole Refuge, Thou,)
And turn no whither, but must needs decay
And drop from out the universal frame
Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss,
That utter nothingness, of which I came:
This is it that has come to pass in me;
Oh, horror! this it is, my dearest, this;]
So pray for me, my friends, who have not strength to pray.
Angel
Softly and gently, dearly-ransom’d soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,
And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.
And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,
Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.
Angels, to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;
And Masses on the earth, and prayers in heaven,
Shall aid thee at the Throne of the Most Highest.
Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
ARVO PÄRT
from the sermon ‘Wisdom and Innocence’
[Littlemore Tractus] for mixed choir and organ (2000)
May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last1.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
(1803–49)
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Could never walk through meadows
Without getting the glooms
And thinking of tombs.
W. H. AUDEN: Academic Graffiti
His father was a doctor whose patients included Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, with all of whom he was on friendly terms. His mother’s sister was the prolific novelist Maria Edgeworth – small wonder, therefore, that Thomas turned to literature. Like his idol, Shelley (‘Song: Old Adam the carrion crow’ from Death’s Jest-Book is his undergraduate reaction to Shelley’s death), he was adept at writing songs. Having studied medicine at Pembroke College, Oxford, Beddoes published his first volume of verse and drama, The Improvisatore (1821) while still a freshman. The Brides’ Tragedy, a play, followed in 1822, and Death’s Jest-Book, or The Fool’s Tragedy was begun in 1825, though not published until 1850, a year after his death by suicide. He spent much of his short life abroad in Germany and Switzerland, attending various universities, reading German poetry and involving himself in revolutionary politics. Death’s Jest-Book shows Beddoes’s interest in the macabre, his obsession with the supernatural – a tendency that prompted Symons to compare him with Baudelaire and Poe: ‘there is not a page without its sad, grotesque, gay or abhorrent imagery of the tomb …’ ‘Dream-pedlary’ was written in 1829–30 and first published in The Poems, Posthumous and Collected, of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1851), edited by his lifelong friend and literary executor Thomas Kelsall. Edmund Gosse, in his edition of the poems, calls it the ‘most exquisite’ of Beddoes’s poems: ‘for once Beddoes speaks with the voice of the living who yearn for the dead, rather than that of the dead yearning toward life.’ Having attempted suicide in 1848 by slashing an artery in his leg with a razor – an injury which necessitated amputation below the knee – the lonely, brilliant, gay Beddoes, with an imagination as haunting as Baudelaire’s and Poe’s, finally poisoned himself at the age of forty-five. The suicide took place in Basel – something he had perhaps predicted in the lines ‘Down from the Alps Paracelsus came,/To dance with death at Basel’. He left a suicide note resting on his breast that betrays his own ghoulishness and gift for self-parody: ‘I am food for what I am good for – worms […] Love […] to Kelsall whom I beg to look at my MSS – and print or not as he thinks fit. I ought to have been among other things a good poet; Life was too great a bore on one peg & that a bad one.’
HUBERT PARRY: from English Lyrics XII (1920)
Dream-pedlary
[Dream pedlary]
I
If there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell;
Some a light sigh,
That shakes from Life’s fresh crown
Only a rose-leaf down.
If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?
II
A cottage lone and still,
With bowers nigh,
Shadowy, my woes to still,
Until I die.
Such pearl from Life’s fresh crown
Fain would I shake me down.
Were dreams to have at will,
This would best heal my ill,
This would I buy.
[III
But there were dreams to sell
Ill didst thou buy;
Life is a dream, they tell,
Waking, to die.
Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried well,
Which one would I?
IV
If there are ghosts to raise,
What shall I call,
Out of hell’s murky haze,
Heaven’s blue pall?
Raise my loved long-lost boy
To lead me to his joy. –
There are no ghosts to raise;
Out of death lead no ways;
Vain is the call.
V
Know’st thou not ghosts to sue
No love thou hast.
Else lie, as I will do,
And breathe thy last.
So out of Life’s fresh crown
Fall like a rose-leaf down.
Thus are the ghosts to woo;
Thus are all dreams made true,
Ever to last!]
(Busch, Crist, van Dieren, Gibbs, Ireland)
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
(1806–61)
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 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 voices that did not falter. Enough, that what is in my heart when I write this, will be fully known to yours.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: ‘Dedication. To my Father.’ Printed on the first page of The Poetical Works (1844)
Elizabeth Barrett was one of twelve children, all of whom suffered from their tyrannical father, who forbade them to marry. His wealth derived from Jamaican plantations, and she spent her childhood at Hope End, an imposing house in Herefordshire. With the freeing of the slaves, however, her father had to sell the mansion, and the family came to live in Wimpole Street in London. Influenced by the cruelty of the slave trade, Elizabeth displayed a reforming ze
al in much of her writing. Her poem ‘The cry of the children’ (1843) influenced legislation to protect working children and was read in the House of Lords; ‘The runaway slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (1848) spoke out against slavery in the United States; Casa Guidi Windows (1851) fulminated against the oppression of Italy by foreign powers; and Aurora Leigh (1856), a novel in blank verse, called for an end to the oppression of women and children. A woman of intense and profound feeling, she was so affected by the death of her brother, Edward Moulton, who drowned in the sea off Torbay in 1840, that she wore black for the rest of her life. She also suffered from an undiagnosed ailment, which confined her to bed in a darkened room. She accepted Mary Russell Mitford’s gift of a spaniel pup, Flush (which led to her poem and Virginia Woolf’s novel of that name), to help her in her grief. She lived the life of a recluse, before being eventually rescued by Robert Browning. He had read her latest collection of poems, which included ‘Lady Geraldine’s courtship’, one stanza of which must have caught his eye:
There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems
Made to Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own;
Read the pastoral parts of Spenser – or the subtle interflowings
Found in Petrarch’s sonnets – here’s the book – the leaf is folded down! –
Or at times a modern volume, – Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyl,
Howitt’s ballad-verse, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie, –
Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’, which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
He wrote to her on 10 January 1845, confessing: ‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, – and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write. […] I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart – and I love you too.’ She resolutely declined to receive Browning (‘There is nothing to see in me […] If my poetry is worth anything to any eyes, it is the flower of me’), but eventually allowed him to visit her in Wimpole Street on 20 May 1845. They were married secretly on 12 September 1846 at St Marylebone Church; Elizabeth was dressed in nun-like black and wore a gold ring, which she took off after the ceremony and hid on the return journey to Wimpole Street. At the age of forty, she eloped with Robert on Saturday, 19 September, for the milder climate of Italy. They settled at Casa Guidi in Florence, where she gave birth to a son (Robert Wiedemann, known as Penini or Pen) in 1849.
She is best known today for Sonnets from the Portuguese (wonderfully translated into German by Rainer Maria Rilke). The title was chosen by Robert Browning, whose pet-name for Elizabeth was ‘My Portuguese’. To veil their highly personal nature, Elizabeth had originally called the sequence of forty-four love poems Sonnets Translated from the Bosnian, the last of which was written two days before the lovers’ wedding. Elizabeth did not show them to her husband until three years after their marriage. Browning had deprecated women novelists and writers of sonnets during their courtship, and it was only after the birth of Pen that she presented the sonnets to Robert. Having hurriedly thrust the volume into his pocket one morning at Bagni di Lucca, she immediately left the room. He was astonished at their quality and wrote a letter to his sister, describing how he and Elizabeth now knew each other better than ever before. He also told Edmund Gosse: ‘I dared not reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s.’ Published in 1850 through the efforts of Browning, they were followed by Casa Guidi Windows (1851), but it was the publication of Aurora Leigh (1856) that made her name as the finest woman poet in English. Her Last Poems (1861) were published posthumously by her husband. The rift with her father lasted till his death: although she wrote him hundreds of letters (which he returned unopened) and frequently visited the family home when she returned to England, he remained intransigent. When he died some eleven years after her elopement, she turned to spiritualism in an attempt to establish contact. She was buried in Florence’s Protestant Cemetery.
EDWARD ELGAR: from Sea Pictures, Op. 37, a cycle of five songs for contralto and orchestra (1899/1900)
A sabbath morning at sea
[Sabbath morning at sea]1
The ship went on with solemn face;
To meet the darkness on the deep,
The solemn ship went onward.
I bowed down weary in the place,
For parting tears and present sleep
Had weighed mine eyelids downward. […]
The new sight, the new wondrous sight!
The waters round me, turbulent, –
The skies impassive o’er me,
Calm, in a moonless, sunless light,
Half glorified by that intent
Of holding the day-glory! […]
Love me, sweet friends, this sabbath day!
The sea sings round me while ye roll
Afar the hymn unaltered,
And kneel, where once I knelt to pray,
And bless me deeper in the soul,
Because the voice has faltered.
And though this sabbath comes to me
Without the stolèd minister
Or chanting congregation,
God’s Spirit brings communion, He
Who brooded soft on waters drear,
Creator on creation.
Himself, I think, shall draw me higher,
Where keep the saints with harp and song
An endless sabbath morning,
And on that sea commixed with fire
Oft drop their eyelids, raised too long
To the full Godhead’s burning.
LIBBY LARSEN: Sonnets from the Portuguese, for soprano, string quartet, bass, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, percussion and harp (1989/1991)
1 [I]
I thought once how Theocritus1 had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young =
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, . .
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery while I strove,
‘Guess now who holds thee!’ ‘Death’ I said = but, there,
The silver answer rang . . ‘Not Death, but Love.’
(Castelnuovo-Tedesco)
2 [XXVIII]
My letters!1 – all dead paper, . . mute and white! –
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string
And let them drop down on my knee tonight.
This said, . . he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend = this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand . . a simple thing, . .
Yet I wept for it! – This … the paper’s light …
Said, Dear, I love thee! – and I sank & quailed
As if God’s future thundered on my past =
This said, ‘I am thine’ – and so, its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beats too fast =
And this … . O love, thy words have ill availed,
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last! –
(Castelnuovo-Tedesco)
3 [XXXIV]
With the same heart, I said, I’ll answer thee
As those, when thou shalt call me by my name! –
Lo, the vain promise! Is the same, the same,
Perplexed and ruffled by Life’s strategy?
When called before, I told how certainly
I dropped my flowers, or brake off from a game,
To run and answer with the smile that came
At pl
ay last moment, and went on with me
Through my obedience. When I answer now,
I drop a sad thought: – break from solitude –
Yet still my heart goes to thee … ponder how . .
Not as to a single good, but as to all my good! –
Lay thy hand on it, best One! . . and allow
That no child’s foot could run fast as this blood.
4 [XXXV]
If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? – Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
Which comes to each in turn? nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors . . another home than this? –
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change? –
That’s hardest! – If to conquer Love has tried . .
To conquer grief, tries more; as all things prove! –
For Grief indeed is Love … and grief beside! –
Alas! – I have grieved so, I am hard to love –
Yet love me – wilt thou? open thine heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove, –
5 [XL]
Oh, yes! – they love through all this world of ours! –
I will not gainsay love, called love forsooth! –
I have heard love talked in my dawning youth,
And since, not so long back but that the flowers
Then gathered, smell still! – Mussulmans1 and Giaours2
Throw kerchiefs at a smile, & have no ruth
For any weeping! – Polypheme’s3 white tooth
Slips on the nut, if after frequent showers
The shell is oversmooth, and not so much
Will turn the thing called love, aside to hate,
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 37