Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Page 37
Straight flags, and lilies just a few
Which sullen on the water sate
And leant their faces on the flat,
As weary of the starlight-state.
“Drink,” said the lady, grave and slow —
“World’s use behoveth thee to know.”
He drank the bitter wave below.
The third pool, girt with thorny bushes
And flaunting weeds and reeds and rushes
That winds sang through in mournful gushes,
Was whitely smeared in many a round
By a slow slime; the starlight swound
Over the ghastly light it found.
“Drink,” said the lady, sad and slow —
“World’s love behoveth thee to know.”
He looked to her commanding so;
Her brow was troubled, but her eye
Struck clear to his soul. For all reply
He drank the water suddenly, —
Then, with a deathly sickness, passed
Beside the fourth pool and the last,
Where weights of shadow were downcast
From yew and alder and rank trails
Of nightshade clasping the trunk-scales
And flung across the intervals
From yew to yew: who dares to stoop
Where those dank branches overdroop,
Into his heart the chill strikes up,
He hears a silent gliding coil,
The snakes strain hard against the soil,
His foot slips in their slimy oil,
And toads seem crawling on his hand,
And clinging bats but dimly scanned
Full in his face their wings expand.
A paleness took the poet’s cheek:
“Must I drink here?” he seemed to seek
The lady’s will with utterance meek:
“Ay, ay,” she said, “it so must be;”
(And this time she spake cheerfully)
“Behoves thee know World’s cruelty.”
He bowed his forehead till his mouth
Curved in the wave, and drank unloth
As if from rivers of the south;
His lips sobbed through the water rank,
His heart paused in him while he drank,
His brain beat heart-like, rose and sank,
And he swooned backward to a dream
Wherein he lay ‘twixt gloom and gleam,
With Death and Life at each extreme:
And spiritual thunders, born of soul
Not cloud, did leap from mystic pole
And o’er him roll and counter-roll,
Crushing their echoes reboant
With their own wheels. Did Heaven so grant
His spirit a sign of covenant?
At last came silence. A slow kiss
Did crown his forehead after this;
His eyelids flew back for the bliss —
The lady stood beside his head,
Smiling a thought, with hair dispread;
The moonshine seemed dishevelled
In her sleek tresses manifold
Like Danae’s in the rain of old
That dripped with melancholy gold:
But SHE was holy, pale and high
As one who saw an ecstasy
Beyond a foretold agony.
“Rise up!” said she with voice where song
Eddied through speech, “rise up; be strong:
And learn how right avenges wrong.”
The poet rose up on his feet:
He stood before an altar set
For sacrament with vessels meet
And mystic altar-lights which shine
As if their flames were crystalline
Carved flames that would not shrink or pine.
The altar filled the central place
Of a great church, and toward its face
Long aisles did shoot and interlace,
And from it a continuous mist
Of incense (round the edges kissed
By a yellow light of amethyst)
Wound upward slowly and throbbingly,
Cloud within cloud, right silverly,
Cloud above cloud, victoriously, —
Broke full against the arched roof
And thence refracting eddied off
And floated through the marble woof
Of many a fine-wrought architrave,
Then, poising its white masses brave,
Swept solemnly down aisle and nave
Where, now in dark and now in light,
The countless columns, glimmering white,
Seemed leading out to the Infinite:
Plunged halfway up the shaft, they showed
In that pale shifting incense-cloud
Which flowed them by and overflowed
Till mist and marble seemed to blend
And the whole temple, at the end,
With its own incense to distend, —
The arches like a giant’s bow
To bend and slacken, — and below,
The niched saints to come and go:
Alone amid the shifting scene
That central altar stood serene
In its clear steadfast taper-sheen.
Then first, the poet was aware
Of a chief angel standing there
Before that altar, in the glare.
His eyes were dreadful, for you saw
That they saw God; his lips and jaw
Grand-made and strong, as Sinai’s law
They could enunciate and refrain
From vibratory after-pain,
And his brow’s height was sovereign:
On the vast background of his wings
Rises his image, and he flings
From each plumed arc pale glitterings
And fiery flakes (as beateth, more
Or less, the angel-heart) before
And round him upon roof and floor,
Edging with fire the shifting fumes,
While at his side ‘twixt lights and glooms
The phantasm of an organ booms.
Extending from which instrument
And angel, right and left-way bent,
The poet’s sight grew sentient
Of a strange company around
And toward the altar, pale and bound
With bay above the eyes profound.
Deathful their faces were, and yet
The power of life was in them set —
Never forgot nor to forget:
Sublime significance of mouth,
Dilated nostril full of youth,
And forehead royal with the truth.
These faces were not multiplied
Beyond your count, but side by side
Did front the altar, glorified,
Still as a vision, yet exprest
Full as an action — look and geste
Of buried saint in risen rest.
The poet knew them. Faint and dim
His spirits seemed to sink in him —
Then, like a dolphin, change and swim
The current: these were poets true,
Who died for Beauty as martyrs do
For Truth — the ends being scarcely two.
God’s prophets of the Beautiful
These poets were; of iron rule,
The rugged cilix, serge of wool.
Here Homer, with the broad suspense
Of thunderous brows, and lips intense
Of garrulous god-innocence.
There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world: O eyes sublime
With tears and laughters for all time!
Here AEschylus, the women swooned
To see so awful when he frowned
As the gods did: he standeth crowned.
Euripides, with close and mild
Scholastic lips, that could be wild
And laugh or sob out like a child
Even in the classes. Sophocles,
Followed the dark effigies
Of the lost Theban. Hesiod old,
Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold,
Cared most for gods and bulls. And bold
Electric Pindar, quick as fear,
With race-dust on his cheeks, and clear
Slant startled eyes that seem to hear
The chariot rounding the last goal,
To hurtle past it in his soul.
And Sappho, with that gloriole
Of ebon hair on calmed brows —
O poet-woman! none forgoes
The leap, attaining the repose.
Theocritus, with glittering locks
Dropt sideway, as betwixt the rocks
He watched the visionary flocks.
And Aristophanes, who took
The world with mirth, and laughter-struck
The hollow caves of Thought and woke
The infinite echoes hid in each.
And Virgil: shade of Mantuan beech
Did help the shade of bay to reach
And knit around his forehead high:
For his gods wore less majesty
Than his brown bees hummed deathlessly.
Lucretius, nobler than his mood,
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe and said “No God— “
Finding no bottom: he denied
Divinely the divine, and died
Chief poet on the Tiber-side
By grace of God: his face is stern
As one compelled, in spite of scorn,
To teach a truth he would not learn.
And Ossian, dimly seen or guessed;
Once counted greater than the rest,
When mountain-winds blew out his vest.
And Spenser drooped his dreaming head
(With languid sleep-smile you had said
From his own verse engendered)
On Ariosto’s, till they ran
Their curls in one: the Italian
Shot nimbler heat of bolder man
From his fine lids. And Dante stern
And sweet, whose spirit was an urn
For wine and milk poured out in turn.
Hard-souled Alfieri; and fancy-willed
Boiardo, who with laughter filled
The pauses of the jostled shield.
And Berni, with a hand stretched out
To sleek that storm. And, not without
The wreath he died in and the doubt
He died by, Tasso, bard and lover,
Whose visions were too thin to cover
The face of a false woman over.
And soft Racine; and grave Corneille,
The orator of rhymes, whose wail
Scarce shook his purple. And Petrarch pale,
From whose brain-lighted heart were thrown
A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,
Each lucid with the name of One.
And Camoens, with that look he had,
Compelling India’s Genius sad
From the wave through the Lusiad, —
The murmurs of the storm-cape ocean
Indrawn in vibrative emotion
Along the verse. And, while devotion
In his wild eyes fantastic shone
Under the tonsure blown upon
By airs celestial, Calderon.
And bold De Vega, who breathed quick
Verse after verse, till death’s old trick
Put pause to life and rhetoric.
And Goethe, with that reaching eye
His soul reached out from, far and high,
And fell from inner entity.
And Schiller, with heroic front
Worthy of Plutarch’s kiss upon ‘t,
Too large for wreath of modern wont.
And Chaucer, with his infantine
Familiar clasp of things divine;
That mark upon his lip is wine.
Here, Milton’s eyes strike piercing-dim:
The shapes of suns and stars did swim
Like clouds from them, and granted him
God for sole vision. Cowley, there,
Whose active fancy debonair
Drew straws like amber — foul to fair.
Drayton and Browne, with smiles they drew
From outward nature, still kept new
From their own inward nature true.
And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben,
Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when
The world was worthy of such men.
And Burns, with pungent passionings
Set in his eyes: deep lyric springs
Are of the fire-mount’s issuings.
And Shelley, in his white ideal,
All statue-blind. And Keats the real
Adonis with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
His youthful curls, kissed straight and sheen
In his Rome-grave, by Venus queen.
And poor, proud Byron, sad as grave
And salt as life; forlornly brave,
And quivering with the dart he drave.
And visionary Coleridge, who
Did sweep his thoughts as angels do
Their wings with cadence up the Blue.
These poets faced (and many more)
The lighted altar looming o’er
The clouds of incense dim and hoar:
And all their faces, in the lull
Of natural things, looked wonderful
With life and death and deathless rule.
All, still as stone and yet intense;
As if by spirit’s vehemence
That stone were carved and not by sense.
But where the heart of each should beat,
There seemed a wound instead of it,
From whence the blood dropped to their feet
Drop after drop — dropped heavily
As century follows century
Into the deep eternity.
Then said the lady — and her word
Came distant, as wide waves were stirred
Between her and the ear that heard, —
“World’s use is cold, world’s love is vain,
World’s cruelty is bitter bane,
But pain is not the fruit of pain.
“Hearken, O poet, whom I led
From the dark wood: dismissing dread,
Now hear this angel in my stead.
“His organ’s clavier strikes along
These poets’ hearts, sonorous, strong,
They gave him without count of wrong, —
“A diapason whence to guide
Up to God’s feet, from these who died,
An anthem fully glorified —
“Whereat God’s blessing, IBARAK (=yivarech=)
Breathes back this music, folds it back
About the earth in vapoury rack,
“And men walk in it, crying ‘Lo
The world is wider, and we know
The very heavens look brighter so:
“‘The stars move statelier round the edge
Of the silver spheres, and give in pledge
Their light for nobler privilege:
“‘No little flower but joys or grieves,
Full life is rustling in the sheaves,
Full spirit sweeps the forest-leaves.’
“So works this music on the earth,
God so admits it, sends it forth
To add another worth to worth —
“A new creation-bloom that rounds
The old creation and expounds
His Beautiful in tuneful sounds.
“Now hearken!” Then the poet gazed
Upon the angel glorious-faced
Whose hand, majestically raised,
Floated across the organ-keys,
Like a pale moon o’er murmuring seas,
With no touch but with influences:
Then rose and fell
(with swell and swound
Of shapeless noises wandering round
A concord which at last they found)
Those mystic keys: the tones were mixed,
Dim, faint, and thrilled and throbbed betwixt
The incomplete and the unfixed:
And therein mighty minds were heard
In mighty musings, inly stirred,
And struggling outward for a word:
Until these surges, having run
This way and that, gave out as one
An Aphrodite of sweet tune,
A Harmony that, finding vent,
Upward in grand ascension went,
Winged to a heavenly argument,
Up, upward like a saint who strips
The shroud back from his eyes and lips,
And rises in apocalypse:
A harmony sublime and plain,
Which cleft (as flying swan, the rain, —
Throwing the drops off with a strain
Of her white wing) those undertones
Of perplext chords, and soared at once
And struck out from the starry thrones
Their several silver octaves as
It passed to God. The music was
Of divine stature; strong to pass:
And those who heard it, understood