Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Ah, babe i’ the wood, without a brother-babe!

  My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,

  Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.

  Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,

  When any young wayfaring soul goes forth

  Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,

  The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,

  To thrust his own way, he an alien, through

  The world of books! Ah, you!–you think it fine,

  You clap hands–’A fair day!’–you cheer him on,

  As if the worst, could happen, were to rest

  Too long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,

  Behold!–the world of books is still the world;

  And worldlings in it are less merciful

  And more puissant. For the wicked there

  Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,

  Is edged from elemental fire to assail

  A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right

  By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong

  Because of weakness. Power is justified,

  Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crown

  Covers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,

  There’s no lack, neither, of God’s saints and kings,

  That shake the ashes of the grave aside

  From their calm locks, and undiscomfited

  Look stedfast truths against Time’s changing mask.

  True, many a prophet teaches in the roads;

  True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavens

  Upon his own head in strong martyrdom,

  In order to light men a moment’s space.

  But stay !–who judges?–who distinguishes

  ‘Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight,

  And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin,

  To serve king David? who discerns at once

  The sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blow

  For Alaric as well as Charlemagne ?

  Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers

  From conjurors ? The child, there ? Would you leave

  That child to wander in a battle-field

  And push his innocent smile against the guns?

  Or even in the catacombs, . . his torch

  Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all

  The dark a-mutter round him ? not a child !

  I read books bad and good–some bad and good

  At once: good aims not always make good books;

  Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soils

  In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove

  God’s being so definitely, that man’s doubt

  Grows self-defined the other side the line,

  Made Atheist by suggestion; moral books,

  Exasperating to license; genial books,

  Discounting from the human dignity;

  And merry books, which set you weeping when

  The sun shines,–ay, and melancholy books,

  Which make you laugh that any one should weep

  In this disjointed life, for one wrong more.

  The world of books is still the world, I write,

  And both worlds have God’s providence, thank God,

  To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,

  Among the breakers, some hard swimming through

  The deeps–I lost breath in my soul sometimes

  And cried ‘God save me if there’s any God.’

  But even so, God save me; and, being dashed

  From error on to error, every turn

  Still brought me nearer to the central truth.

  I thought so. All this anguish in the thick

  Of men’s opinions . . press and counterpress

  Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now

  Emergent . . all the best of it perhaps,

  But throws you back upon a noble trust

  And use of your own instinct,–merely proves

  Pure reason stronger than bare inference

  At strongest. Try it,–fix against heaven’s wall

  Your scaling ladders of high logic–mount

  Step by step!–Sight goes faster; that still ray

  Which strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell,

  And why, you know not–(did you eliminate,

  That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)

  Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.

  The cygnet finds the water: but the man

  Is born in ignorance of his element,

  And feels out blind at first, disorganised

  By sin i’ the blood,–his spirit-insight dulled

  And crossed by his sensations. Presently

  We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;

  Then mark, be reverent, be obedient,–

  For those dumb motions of imperfect life

  Are oracles of vital Deity

  Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says

  ‘The soul’s a clean white paper,’ rather say,

  A palimpsest, a prophets holograph

  Defiled, erased and covered by a monk’s,–

  The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on

  Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps

  Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,

  Some upstroke of an alpha and omega

  Expressing the old scripture.

  Books, books, books!

  I had found the secret of a garret-room

  Piled high with cases in my father’s name;

  Piled high, packed large,–where, creeping in and out

  Among the giant fossils of my past,

  Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs

  Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there

  At this or that box, pulling through the gap,

  In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,

  The first book first. And how I felt it beat

  Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,

  An hour before the sun would let me read!

  My books!

  At last, because the time was ripe,

  I chanced upon the poets.

  As the earth

  Plunges in fury, when the internal fires

  Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat

  The marts and temples, the triumphal gates

  And towers of observation, clears herself

  To elemental freedom–thus, my soul,

  At poetry’s divine first finger touch,

  Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,

  Convicted of the great eternities

  Before two worlds.

  What’s this, Aurora Leigh,

  You write so of the poets, and not laugh?

  Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,

  Exaggerators of the sun and moon,

  And soothsayers in a tea-cup?

  I write so

  Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,–

  The only speakers of essential truth,

  Posed to relative, comparative,

  And temporal truths; the only holders by

  His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;

  The only teachers who instruct mankind,

  From just a shadow on a charnel wall,

  To find man’s veritable stature out,

  Erect, sublime,–the measure of a man,

  And that’s the measure of an angel, says

  The apostle. Ay, and while your common men

  Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,

  And dust the flaunty carpets of the world

  For kings to walk on, or our senators,

  The poet suddenly will catch them up

  With his voice like a thunder. . ‘This is soul,

  This is life, this word is being said in heaven,

  Here’s God down on us! what are you about?

  How all those workers start amid their work,

 
Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,

  That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,

  Is not the imperative labour after all.

  My own best poets, am I one with you,

  That thus I love you,–or but one through love?

  Does all this smell of thyme about my feet

  Conclude my visit to your holy hill

  In personal presence, or but testify

  The rustling of your vesture through my dreams

  With influent odours? When my joy and pain,

  My thought and aspiration, like the stops

  Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb

  If not melodious, do you play on me,

  My pipers,–and if, sooth, you did not blow,

  Would not sound come? or is the music mine,

  As a man’s voice or breath is called his own,

  In breathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubt

  For cloudy seasons !

  But the sun was high

  When first I felt my pulses set themselves

  For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence

  Of blood and brain swept outward upon words,

  As wind upon the alders blanching them

  By turning up their under-natures till

  They trembled in dilation. O delight

  And triumph of the poet,–who would say

  A man’s mere ‘yes,’ a woman’s common ‘no,’

  A little human hope of that or this,

  And says the word so that it burns you through

  With a special revelation, shakes the heart

  Of all the men and women in the world,

  As if one came back from the dead and spoke,

  With eyes too happy, a familiar thing

  Become divine i’ the utterance! while for him

  The poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;

  The palpitating angel in his flesh

  Thrills inly with consenting fellowship

  To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves

  Outside of time.

  O life, O poetry,

  Which means life in life! cognisant of life

  Beyond this blood-beat,–passionate for truth

  Beyond these senses, –poetry, my life,–

  My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot

  From Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished me

  Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,

  And set me in the Olympian roar and round

  Of luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,

  To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist

  For everlasting laughters,–I, myself,

  Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!

  How those gods look!

  Enough so, Ganymede.

  We shall not bear above a round or two–

  We drop the golden cup at Heré’s foot

  And swoon back to the earth,–and find ourselves

  Face-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew,

  While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,

  ‘What’s come now to the youth?’ Such ups and downs

  Have poets.

  Am I such indeed? The name

  Is royal, and to sign it like a queen,

  Is what I dare not,–though some royal blood

  Would seem to tingle in me now and then,

  With sense of power and ache,–with imposthumes

  And manias usual to the race. Howbeit

  I dare not: ‘tis too easy to go mad,

  And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;

  The thing’s too common.

  Many fervent souls

  Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel

  If steel had offered, in a restless heat

  Of doing something. Many tender souls

  Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread.

  As children, cowslips:–the more pains they take,

  The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,

  Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse.

  Before they sit down under their own vine

  And live for use. Alas, near all the birds

  Will sing at dawn,–and yet we do not take

  The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.

  In those days, though, I never analysed

  Myself even. All analysis comes late.

  You catch a sight of Nature, earliest,

  In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink

  And drop before the wonder of ‘t; you miss

  The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days,

  And wrote because I lived–unlicensed else:

  My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent flood

  Abolished bounds,–and, which my neighbour’s field,

  Which mine, what mattered ? It is so in youth.

  We play at leap-frog over the god Term;

  The love within us and the love without

  Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,

  We scarce distinguish. So, with other power.

  Being acted on and acting seem the same:

  In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels,

  We know not if the forests move or we.

  And so, like most young poets, in a flush

  Of individual life, I poured myself

  Along the veins of others, and achieved

  Mere lifeless imitations of life verse,

  And made the living answer for the dead,

  Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste,

  Nor handle,’–we’re too legal, who write young:

  We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs,

  As if still ignorant of counterpoint;

  We call the Muse . . ‘O Muse, benignant Muse !’–

  As if we had seen her purple-braided head .

  With the eyes in it start between the boughs

  As often as a stag’s. What make-believe,

  With so much earnest! what effete results,

  From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes

  From such white heats!–bucolics, where the cows

  Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud

  In lashing off the flies,–didactics, driven

  Against the heels of what the master said;

  And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps

  A babe might blow between two straining cheeks

  Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh;

  And elegiac griefs, and songs of love,

  Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road,

  The worse for being warm: all these things, writ

  On happy mornings, with a morning heart,

  That leaps for love, is active for resolve,

  Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms

  Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood.

  The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped,

  Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in.

  Spare the old bottles!–spill not the new wine.

  By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped

  In gradual progress like another man,

  But, turning grandly on his central self,

  Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years

  And died, not young,–(the life of a long life,

  Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear

  Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn

  For ever;) by that strong excepted soul,

  I count it strange, and hard to understand,

  That nearly all young poets should write old;

  That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen,

  And beardless Byron academical,

  And so with others. It may be, perhaps,

  Such have not settled long and deep enough

  In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,–and still

  The memory mixes with the vision, spoils,

  And works it turbid.

  Or p
erhaps, again,

  In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx,

  The melancholy desert must sweep round,

  Behind you, as before.–

  For me, I wrote

  False poems, like the rest, and thought them true.

  Because myself was true in writing them.

  I, peradventure, have writ true ones since

  With less complacence.

  But I could not hide

  My quickening inner life from those at watch.

  They saw a light at a window now and then,

  They had not set there. Who had set it there?

  My father’s sister started when she caught

  My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say

  I had no business with a sort of soul,

  But plainly she objected,–and demurred,

  That souls were dangerous things to carry straight

  Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world.

  She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you done

  Your task this morning?–have you read that book?

  And are you ready for the crochet here?’–

  As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong,

  I know I have not ground you down enough

  To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust

  For household uses and proprieties,

  Before the rain has got into my barn

  And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re green

  With out-door impudence? you almost grow?’

  To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task,

  And verify my abstract of the book?

  And should I sit down to the crochet work?

  Was such her pleasure?’ . . Then I sate and teased

  The patient needle til it split the thread,

  Which oozed off from it in meandering lace

  From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad;

  My soul was singing at a work apart

  Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm

  As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,

  In vortices of glory and blue air.

  And so, through forced work and spontaneous work,

  The inner life informed the outer life,

  Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms,

  Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams,

  And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin

  Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks,

  Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across

  My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,

  And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong.

  The dogs are on us–but we will not die.’

  Whoever lives true life, will love true love.

  I learnt to love that England. Very oft,

  Before the day was born, or otherwise