Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

XIX.

  In that ancient hall of Wycombe thronged the numerous guests invited,

  And the lovely London ladies trod the floors with gliding feet;

  And their voices low with fashion, not with feeling, softly freighted

  All the air about the windows with elastic laughters sweet.

  XX.

  For at eve the open windows flung their light out on the terrace

  Which the floating orbs of curtains did with gradual shadow sweep,

  While the swans upon the river, fed at morning by the heiress,

  Trembled downward through their snowy wings at music in their sleep.

  XXI.

  And there evermore was music, both of instrument and singing,

  Till the finches of the shrubberies grew restless in the dark;

  But the cedars stood up motionless, each in a moonlight’s ringing,

  And the deer, half in the glimmer, strewed the hollows of the park.

  XXII.

  And though sometimes she would bind me with her silver-corded speeches

  To commix my words and laughter with the converse and the jest,

  Oft I sat apart and, gazing on the river through the beeches,

  Heard, as pure the swans swam down it, her pure voice o’erfloat the

  rest.

  XXIII.

  In the morning, horn of huntsman, hoof of steed and laugh of rider,

  Spread out cheery from the courtyard till we lost them in the hills,

  While herself and other ladies, and her suitors left beside her,

  Went a-wandering up the gardens through the laurels and abeles.

  XXIV.

  Thus, her foot upon the new-mown grass, bareheaded, with the flowing

  Of the virginal white vesture gathered closely to her throat,

  And the golden ringlets in her neck just quickened by her going,

  And appearing to breathe sun for air, and doubting if to float, —

  XXV.

  With a bunch of dewy maple, which her right hand held above her,

  And which trembled a green shadow in betwixt her and the skies,

  As she turned her face in going, thus, she drew me on to love her,

  And to worship the divineness of the smile hid in her eyes.

  XXVI.

  For her eyes alone smile constantly; her lips have serious sweetness,

  And her front is calm, the dimple rarely ripples on the cheek;

  But her deep blue eyes smile constantly, as if they in discreetness

  Kept the secret of a happy dream she did not care to speak.

  XXVII.

  Thus she drew me the first morning, out across into the garden,

  And I walked among her noble friends and could not keep behind.

  Spake she unto all and unto me— “Behold, I am the warden

  Of the song-birds in these lindens, which are cages to their mind.

  XXVIII.

  “But within this swarded circle into which the lime-walk brings us,

  Whence the beeches, rounded greenly, stand away in reverent fear,

  I will let no music enter, saving what the fountain sings us

  Which the lilies round the basin may seem pure enough to hear.

  XXIX.

  “The live air that waves the lilies waves the slender jet of water

  Like a holy thought sent feebly up from soul of fasting saint:

  Whereby lies a marble Silence, sleeping (Lough the sculptor wrought

  her),

  So asleep she is forgetting to say Hush! — a fancy quaint.

  XXX.

  “Mark how heavy white her eyelids! not a dream between them lingers;

  And the left hand’s index droppeth from the lips upon the cheek:

  While the right hand, — with the symbol-rose held slack within the

  fingers, —

  Has fallen backward in the basin — yet this Silence will not speak!

  XXXI.

  “That the essential meaning growing may exceed the special symbol,

  Is the thought as I conceive it: it applies more high and low.

  Our true noblemen will often through right nobleness grow humble,

  And assert an inward honour by denying outward show.”

  XXXII.

  “Nay, your Silence,” said I, “truly, holds her symbol-rose but slackly,

  Yet she holds it, or would scarcely be a Silence to our ken:

  And your nobles wear their ermine on the outside, or walk blackly

  In the presence of the social law as mere ignoble men.

  XXXIII.

  “Let the poets dream such dreaming! madam, in these British islands

  ‘T is the substance that wanes ever, ‘t is the symbol that exceeds.

  Soon we shall have nought but symbol: and, for statues like this

  Silence,

  Shall accept the rose’s image — in another case, the weed’s.”

  XXXIV.

  “Not so quickly,” she retorted,— “I confess, where’er you go, you

  Find for things, names — shows for actions, and pure gold for honour

  clear:

  But when all is run to symbol in the Social, I will throw you

  The world’s book which now reads dryly, and sit down with Silence

  here.”

  XXXV.

  Half in playfulness she spoke, I thought, and half in indignation;

  Friends, who listened, laughed her words off, while her lovers deemed

  her fair:

  A fair woman, flushed with feeling, in her noble-lighted station

  Near the statue’s white reposing — and both bathed in sunny air!

  XXXVI.

  With the trees round, not so distant but you heard their vernal murmur,

  And beheld in light and shadow the leaves in and outward move,

  And the little fountain leaping toward the sun-heart to be warmer,

  Then recoiling in a tremble from the too much light above.

  XXXVII.

  ‘T is a picture for remembrance. And thus, morning after morning,

  Did I follow as she drew me by the spirit to her feet.

  Why, her greyhound followed also! dogs — we both were dogs for

  scorning —

  To be sent back when she pleased it and her path lay through the wheat.

  XXXVIII.

  And thus, morning after morning, spite of vows and spite of sorrow,

  Did I follow at her drawing, while the week-days passed along, —

  Just to feed the swans this noontide, or to see the fawns to-morrow,

  Or to teach the hill-side echo some sweet Tuscan in a song.

  XXXIX.

  Ay, for sometimes on the hill-side, while we sate down in the gowans,

  With the forest green behind us and its shadow cast before,

  And the river running under, and across it from the rowans

  A brown partridge whirring near us till we felt the air it bore, —

  XL.

  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!

  XLI.

  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.

  XLII.

  Or at times I read there, hoarsely, some new poem of my making:

  Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth,

  For the echo in you breaks upon the words which you are speaking,

  And the chariot wheels jar in the gate through which you drive them

&nb
sp; forth.

  XLIII.

  After, when we were grown tired of books, the silence round us flinging

  A slow arm of sweet compression, felt with beatings at the breast

  She would break out on a sudden in a gush of woodland singing,

  Like a child’s emotion in a god — a naiad tired of rest.

  XLIV.

  Oh, to see or hear her singing! scarce I know which is divinest,

  For her looks sing too — she modulates her gestures on the tune,

  And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are

  finest,

  ‘T is the eyes that shoot out vocal light and seem to swell them on.

  XLV.

  Then we talked — oh, how we talked! her voice, so cadenced in the

  talking,

  Made another singing — of the soul! a music without bars:

  While the leafy sounds of woodlands, humming round where we were

  walking,

  Brought interposition worthy-sweet, — as skies about the stars.

  XLVI.

  And she spake such good thoughts natural, as if she always thought

  them;

  She had sympathies so rapid, open, free as bird on branch,

  Just as ready to fly east as west, whichever way besought them,

  In the birchen-wood a chirrup, or a cock-crow in the grange.

  XLVII.

  In her utmost lightness there is truth — and often she speaks lightly,

  Has a grace in being gay which even mournful souls approve,

  For the root of some grave earnest thought is understruck so rightly

  As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above.

  XLVIII.

  And she talked on — we talked, rather! upon all things, substance,

  shadow,

  Of the sheep that browsed the grasses, of the reapers in the corn,

  Of the little children from the schools, seen winding through the

  meadow,

  Of the poor rich world beyond them, still kept poorer by its scorn.

  XLIX.

  So, of men, and so, of letters — books are men of higher stature,

  And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear;

  So, of mankind in the abstract, which grows slowly into nature,

  Yet will lift the cry of “progress,” as it trod from sphere to sphere.

  L.

  And her custom was to praise me when I said,— “The Age culls simples,

  With a broad clown’s back turned broadly to the glory of the stars.

  We are gods by our own reck’ning, and may well shut up the temples,

  And wield on, amid the incense-steam, the thunder of our cars.

  LI.

  “For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self admiring,

  With, at every mile run faster,— ‘O the wondrous wondrous age!’

  Little thinking if we work our SOULS as nobly as our iron,

  Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.

  LII.

  “Why, what is this patient entrance into nature’s deep resources

  But the child’s most gradual learning to walk upright without bane?

  When we drive out, from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses,

  Are we greater than the first men who led black ones by the mane?

  LIII.

  “If we trod the deeps of ocean, if we struck the stars in rising,

  If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath,

  ‘T were but power within our tether, no new spirit-power comprising,

  And in life we were not greater men, nor bolder men in death.”

  LIV.

  She was patient with my talking; and I loved her, loved her certes

  As I loved all heavenly objects, with uplifted eyes and hands;

  As I loved pure inspirations, loved the graces, loved the virtues,

  In a Love content with writing his own name on desert sands.

  LV.

  Or at least I thought so, purely; thought no idiot Hope was raising

  Any crown to crown Love’s silence, silent Love that sate alone:

  Out, alas! the stag is like me, he that tries to go on grazing

  With the great deep gun-wound in his neck, then reels with sudden moan.

  LVI.

  It was thus I reeled. I told you that her hand had many suitors;

  But she smiles them down imperially as Venus did the waves,

  And with such a gracious coldness that they cannot press their futures

  On the present of her courtesy, which yieldingly enslaves.

  LVII.

  And this morning as I sat alone within the inner chamber

  With the great saloon beyond it, lost in pleasant thought serene,

  For I had been reading Camoens, that poem you remember,

  Which his lady’s eyes are praised in as the sweetest ever seen.

  LVIII.

  And the book lay open, and my thought flew from it, taking from it

  A vibration and impulsion to an end beyond its own,

  As the branch of a green osier, when a child would overcome it,

  Springs up freely from his claspings and goes swinging in the sun.

  LIX.

  As I mused I heard a murmur; it grew deep as it grew longer,

  Speakers using earnest language— “Lady Geraldine, you would!”

  And I heard a voice that pleaded, ever on in accents stronger,

  As a sense of reason gave it power to make its rhetoric good.

  LX.

  Well I knew that voice; it was an earl’s, of soul that matched his

  station,

  Soul completed into lordship, might and right read on his brow;

  Very finely courteous; far too proud to doubt his domination

  Of the common people, he atones for grandeur by a bow.

  LXI.

  High straight forehead, nose of eagle, cold blue eyes of less

  expression

  Than resistance, coldly casting off the looks of other men,

  As steel, arrows; unelastic lips which seem to taste possession

  And be cautious lest the common air should injure or distrain.

  LXII.

  For the rest, accomplished, upright, — ay, and standing by his order

  With a bearing not ungraceful; fond of art and letters too;

  Just a good man made a proud man, — as the sandy rocks that border

  A wild coast, by circumstances, in a regnant ebb and flow.

  LXIII.

  Thus, I knew that voice, I heard it, and I could not help the

  hearkening:

  In the room I stood up blindly, and my burning heart within

  Seemed to seethe and fuse my senses till they ran on all sides

  darkening,

  And scorched, weighed like melted metal round my feet that stood

  therein.

  LXIV.

  And that voice, I heard it pleading, for love’s sake, for wealth,

  position,

  For the sake of liberal uses and great actions to be done:

  And she interrupted gently, “Nay, my lord, the old tradition

  Of your Normans, by some worthier hand than mine is, should be won.”

  LXV.

  “Ah, that white hand!” he said quickly, — and in his he either drew it

  Or attempted — for with gravity and instance she replied,

  “Nay, indeed, my lord, this talk is vain, and we had best eschew it

  And pass on, like friends, to other points less easy to decide.”

  LXVI.

  What he said again, I know not: it is likely that his trouble

  Worked his pride up to the surface, for she answered in slow scorn,

  “And your lordship judges rightly. Whom I marry shall be noble,

  Ay, and wealthy. I shall never blush to think how he was bo
rn.”

  LXVII.

  There, I maddened! her words stung me. Life swept through me into

  fever,

  And my soul sprang up astonished, sprang full-statured in an hour.

  Know you what it is when anguish, with apocalyptic NEVER,

  To a Pythian height dilates you, and despair sublimes to power?

  LXVIII.

  From my brain the soul-wings budded, waved a flame about my body,

  Whence conventions coiled to ashes. I felt self-drawn out, as man,

  From amalgamate false natures, and I saw the skies grow ruddy

  With the deepening feet of angels, and I knew what spirits can.

  LXIX.

  I was mad, inspired — say either! (anguish worketh inspiration)

  Was a man or beast — perhaps so, for the tiger roars when speared;

  And I walked on, step by step along the level of my passion —

  Oh my soul! and passed the doorway to her face, and never feared.

  LXX.

  He had left her, peradventure, when my footstep proved my coming,

  But for her — she half arose, then sate, grew scarlet and grew pale.

  Oh, she trembled! ‘t is so always with a worldly man or woman

  In the presence of true spirits; what else can they do but quail?