But, like a wind-exposed distorted tree,
We are blown against for ever by the curse
Which breathes through Nature. Oh, the world is weak!
The effluence of each is false to all,
And what we best conceive we fail to speak.
Wait, soul, until thine ashen garments fall,
And then resume thy broken strains, and seek
Fit peroration without let or thrall.
TWO SKETCHES.
I. H. B.
The shadow of her face upon the wall
May take your memory to the perfect Greek,
But when you front her, you would call the cheek
Too full, sir, for your models, if withal
That bloom it wears could leave you critical,
And that smile reaching toward the rosy streak;
For one who smiles so has no need to speak
To lead your thoughts along, as steed to stall.
A smile that turns the sunny side o’ the heart
On all the world, as if herself did win
By what she lavished on an open mart!
Let no man call the liberal sweetness, sin, —
For friends may whisper as they stand apart,
“Methinks there’s still some warmer place within.”
II. A. B.
Her azure eyes, dark lashes hold in fee;
Her fair superfluous ringlets without check
Drop after one another down her neck,
As many to each cheek as you might see
Green leaves to a wild rose; this sign outwardly,
And a like woman-covering seems to deck
Her inner nature, for she will not fleck
World’s sunshine with a finger. Sympathy
Must call her in Love’s name! and then, I know,
She rises up, and brightens as she should,
And lights her smile for comfort, and is slow
In nothing of high-hearted fortitude.
To smell this flower, come near it! such can grow
In that sole garden where Christ’s brow dropped blood.
MOUNTAINEER AND POET.
The simple goatherd between Alp and sky,
Seeing his shadow, in that awful tryst,
Dilated to a giant’s on the mist,
Esteems not his own stature larger by
The apparent image, but more patiently
Strikes his staff down beneath his clenching fist,
While the snow-mountains lift their amethyst
And sapphire crowns of splendour, far and nigh,
Into the air around him. Learn from hence
Meek morals, all ye poets that pursue
Your way still onward up to eminence!
Ye are not great because creation drew
Large revelations round your earliest sense,
Nor bright because God’s glory shines for you.
THE POET.
The poet hath the child’s sight in his breast
And sees all new . What oftenest he has viewed
He views with the first glory. Fair and good
Pall never on him, at the fairest, best,
But stand before him holy and undressed
In week-day false conventions, such as would
Drag other men down from the altitude
Of primal types, too early dispossessed.
Why, God would tire of all His heavens, as soon
As thou, O godlike, childlike poet, didst
Of daily and nightly sights of sun and moon!
And therefore hath He set thee in the midst
Where men may hear thy wonder’s ceaseless tune
And praise His world for ever, as thou bidst.
HIRAM POWERS’ “GREEK SLAVE.”
They say Ideal beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with enshackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave! as if the artist meant her
(That passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed not darkened where the sill expands)
To so confront man’s crimes in different lands
With man’s ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
Art’s fiery finger, and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone,
From God’s pure heights of beauty against man’s wrong!
Catch up in thy divine face, not alone
East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown.
LIFE.
Each creature holds an insular point in space;
Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound,
But all the multitudinous beings round
In all the countless worlds with time and place
For their conditions, down to the central base,
Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound,
Life answering life across the vast profound,
In full antiphony, by a common grace?
I think this sudden joyaunce which illumes
A child’s mouth sleeping, unaware may run
From some soul newly loosened from earth’s tombs:
I think this passionate sigh, which half-begun
I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes
Of God’s calm angel standing in the sun.
LOVE.
We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life: and when we bear
Our virtue outward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellant, certes there
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea.
But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both
Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As Nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.
HEAVEN AND EARTH.
“And there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.”
God , who with thunders and great voices kept
Beneath Thy throne, and stars most silver-paced
Along the inferior gyres, and open-faced
Melodious angels round, canst intercept
Music with music, — yet, at will, has swept
All back, all back (said he in Patmos placed,)
To fill the heavens with silence of the waste
Which lasted half an hour! Lo, I who have wept
All day and night, beseech Thee by my tears,
And by that dread response of curse and groan
Men alternate across these hemispheres,
Vouchsafe us such a half-hour’s hush alone,
In compensation for our stormy years:
As heaven has paused from song, let earth from moan!
THE PROSPECT.
Methinks we do as fretful children do,
Leaning their faces on the window-pane
To sigh the glass dim with their own breath’s stain,
And shut the sky and landscape from their view:
And thus, alas, since God the maker drew
A mystic separation ‘twixt those twain, —
The life beyond us, and our souls in pain, —
We miss the prospect which we are called unto
By grief we are fools to use. Be still and strong,
O man, my brother! Hold thy sobbing breath,
And keep thy soul’s large window pure from wrong!
That so, as life’s appointment issueth,
Thy vision may be clear to watch along
The sunset consummation-lights of death.
HUGH STUART BOYD.
HIS BLINDNESS.
God would not let t
he spheric lights accost
This God-loved man, and bade the earth stand off
With all her beckoning hills whose golden stuff
Under the feet of the royal sun is crossed.
Yet such things were to him not wholly lost, —
Permitted, with his wandering eyes light-proof,
To catch fair visions rendered full enough
By many a ministrant accomplished ghost, —
Still seeing, to sounds of softly-turned book-leaves,
Sappho’s crown-rose, and Meleager’s Spring,
And Gregory’s starlight on Greek-burnished eves:
Till Sensuous and Unsensuous seemed one thing,
Viewed from one level, — earth’s reapers at the sheaves
Scarce plainer than Heaven’s angels on the wing.
HUGH STUART BOYD.
HIS DEATH, 1848.
Belovèd friend, who living many years
With sightless eyes raised vainly to the sun,
Didst learn to keep thy patient soul in tune
To visible nature’s elemental cheers!
God has not caught thee to new hemispheres
Because thou wast aweary of this one; —
I think thine angel’s patience first was done,
And that he spake out with celestial tears,
“Is it enough, dear God? then lighten so
This soul that smiles in darkness!”
Steadfast friend,
Who never didst my heart or life misknow,
Nor either’s faults too keenly apprehend, —
How can I wonder when I see thee go
To join the Dead found faithful to the end?
HUGH STUART BOYD.
LEGACIES.
Three gifts the Dying left me, — Æschylus,
And Gregory Nazianzen, and a clock
Chiming the gradual hours out like a flock
Of stars whose motion is melodious.
The books were those I used to read from, thus
Assisting my dear teacher’s soul to unlock
The darkness of his eyes; now, mine they mock,
Blinded in turn by tears; now, murmurous
Sad echoes of my young voice, years agone
Intoning from these leaves the Grecian phrase,
Return and choke my utterance. Books, lie down
In silence on the shelf there, within gaze;
And thou, clock, striking the hour’s pulses on,
Chime in the day which ends these parting-days!
Casa Guidi Windows
This poem was composed in two parts and published respectively in 1848 and 1851. In the poem Barrett Browning expresses her thoughts on and reactions to events at the time of the protests in Florence, where she was living with her husband in Palazzo Guidi. The title refers to the windows from which she observed events, as she was forced to stay indoors due to her precarious health. The poem reveals her heated loyalty for Italy, although not Italian by birth. Casa Guidi Windows opens with a description of the city of Florence and its past glories, but the poet rejects the vision of an Italy that looks only to the past, believing the country should look to the present, defining an ideal Unification of Italy.
The house in the Palazzo Guidi, Florence, where the Brownings stayed. The building now functions as a museum commemorating the residence of the two poets.
Inside the museum
CONTENTS
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS. PART I.
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS. PART II.
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS
A POEM IN TWO PARTS
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION.
This poem contains the impressions of the writer upon events in Tuscany of which she was a witness. “From a window,” the critic may demur. She bows to the objection in the very title of her work. No continuous narrative nor exposition of political philosophy is attempted by her. It is a simple story of personal impressions, whose only value is in the intensity with which they were received, as proving her warm affection for a beautiful and unfortunate country, and the sincerity with which they are related, as indicating her own good faith and freedom from partisanship.
Of the two parts of this poem, the first was written nearly three years ago, while the second resumes the actual situation of 1851. The discrepancy between the two parts is a sufficient guarantee to the public of the truthfulness of the writer, who, though she certainly escaped the epidemic “falling sickness” of enthusiasm for Pio Nono, takes shame upon herself that she believed, like a woman, some royal oaths, and lost sight of the probable consequences of some obvious popular defects. If the discrepancy should be painful to the reader, let him understand that to the writer it has been more so. But such discrepancies we are called upon to accept at every hour by the conditions of our nature, implying the interval between aspiration and performance, between faith and disillusion, between hope and fact.
“O trusted broken prophecy,
O richest fortune sourly crost,
Born for the future, to the future lost!”
Nay, not lost to the future in this case. The future of Italy shall
not be disinherited.
FLORENCE, 1851.
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS. PART I.
I heard last night a little child go singing
‘Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
O bella liberta, 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:
A little child, too, who not long had been
By mother’s finger steadied on his feet,
And still O bella liberta he sang.
Then I thought, musing, of the innumerous
Sweet songs which still for Italy outrang
From older singers’ lips who sang not thus
Exultingly and purely, yet, with pang
Fast sheathed in music, touched the heart of us
So finely that the pity scarcely pained.
I thought how Filicaja led on others,
Bewailers for their Italy enchained,
And how they called her childless among mothers,
Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained
Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers
Might a shamed sister’s,— “Had she been less fair
She were less wretched;” — how, evoking so
From congregated wrong and heaped despair
Of men and women writhing under blow,
Harrowed and hideous in a filthy lair,
Some personating Image wherein woe
Was wrapt in beauty from offending much,
They called it Cybele, or Niobe,
Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such,
Where all the world might drop for Italy
Those cadenced tears which burn not where they touch, —
“Juliet of nations, canst thou die as we?
And was the violet crown that crowned thy head
So over-large, though new buds made it rough,
It slipped down and across thine eyelids dead,
O sweet, fair Juliet?” Of such songs enough,
Too many of such complaints! behold, instead,
Void at Verona, Juliet’s marble trough:[2]
As void as that is, are all images
Men set between themselves and actual wrong,
To catch the weight of pity, meet the stress
Of conscience, — since ‘t is easier to gaze long
On mournful masks and sad effigies
Than on real, live, weak creatures crushed by strong.
For me who stand in Italy to-day
Where worthier poets stood and sang before,
>
I kiss their footsteps yet their words gainsay.
I can but muse in hope upon this shore
Of golden Arno as it shoots away
Through Florence’ heart beneath her bridges four:
Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows,
And tremble while the arrowy undertide
Shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes,
And strikes up palace-walls on either side,
And froths the cornice out in glittering rows,
With doors and windows quaintly multiplied,
And terrace-sweeps, and gazers upon all,
By whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out
From any lattice there, the same would fall
Into the river underneath, no doubt,
It runs so close and fast ‘twixt wall and wall.
How beautiful! the mountains from without
In silence listen for the word said next.
What word will men say, — here where Giotto planted
His campanile like an unperplexed
Fine question Heavenward, touching the things granted
A noble people who, being greatly vexed
In act, in aspiration keep undaunted?
What word will God say? Michel’s Night and Day
And Dawn and Twilight wait in marble scorn[3]
Like dogs upon a dunghill, couched on clay
From whence the Medicean stamp’s outworn,
The final putting off of all such sway
By all such hands, and freeing of the unborn
In Florence and the great world outside Florence.
Three hundred years his patient statues wait
In that small chapel of the dim Saint Lawrence:
Day’s eyes are breaking bold and passionate
Over his shoulder, and will flash abhorrence
On darkness and with level looks meet fate,
When once loose from that marble film of theirs;
The Night has wild dreams in her sleep, the Dawn
Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Page 73