Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.

  All men are possible heroes: every age,

  Heroic in proportions, double-faced,

  Looks backward and before, expects a morn

  And claims an epos.

  Ay, but every age

  Appears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)

  Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!

  The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound

  Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:

  A pewter age,–mixed metal, silver-washed;

  An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;

  An age of patches for old gabardines;

  An age of mere transition, meaning nought,

  Except that what succeeds must shame it quite,

  If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind,

  And wrong thoughts make poor poems.

  Every age,

  Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned

  By those who have not lived past it. We’ll suppose

  Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,

  To some colossal statue of a man:

  The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,

  Had guessed as little of any human form

  Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.

  They’d have, in fact, to travel ten miles off

  Or ere the giant image broke on them,

  Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,

  Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,

  And fed at evening with the blood of suns;

  Grand torso,–hand, that flung perpetually

  The largesse of a silver river down

  To all the country pastures. ‘Tis even thus

  With times we live in,–evermore too great

  To be apprehended near.

  But poets should

  Exert a double vision; should have eyes

  To see near things as comprehensibly

  As if afar they took their point of sight,

  And distant things, as intimately deep,

  As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.

  I do distrust the poet who discerns

  No character or glory in his times,

  And trundles back his soul five hundred years,

  Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,

  Oh not to sing of lizards or of toads

  Alive i’ the ditch there!–’twere excusable;

  But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter

  Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,

  As dead as must be, for the greater part,

  The poems made on their chivalric bones.

  And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.

  Nay, if there’s room for poets in the world

  A little overgrown, (I think there is)

  Their sole work is to represent the age,

  Their age, not Charlemagne’s,–this live, throbbing age,

  That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,

  And spends more passion, more heroic heat,

  Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,

  Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.

  To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,

  Cry out for togas and the picturesque,

  Is fatal,–foolish too. King Arthur’s self

  Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;

  And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat,

  As Regent street to poets.

  Never flinch,

  But still, unscrupulously epic, catch

  Upon a burning lava of a song,

  The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:

  That, when the next shall come, the men of that

  May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say

  ‘Behold,–behold the paps we all have sucked!

  That bosom seems to beat still, or at least

  It sets ours beating. This is living art,

  Which thus presents, and thus records true life.’

  What form is best for poems ? Let me think

  Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,

  As sovran nature does, to make the form;

  For otherwise we only imprison spirit,

  And not embody. Inward evermore

  To outward,–so in life, and so in art,

  Which still is life.

  Five acts to make a play.

  And why not fifteen? Why not ten? or seven?

  What matter for the number of the leaves,

  Supposing the tree lives and grows ? exact

  The literal unities of time and place,

  When ‘tis the essence of passion to ignore

  Both time and place ? Absurd. Keep up the fire

  And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.

  ‘Tis true the stage requires obsequiousness

  To this or that convention; ‘exit’ here

  And ‘enter’ there; the points for clapping, fixed,

  Like Jacob’s white-peeled rods before the rams;

  And all the close-curled imagery clipped

  In manner of their fleece at shearing time.

  Forget to prick the galleries to the heart

  Precisely at the fourth act,–culminate

  Our five pyramidal acts with one act more,–

  We’re lost so! Shakspeare’s ghost could scarcely plead

  Against our just damnation. Stand aside;

  We’ll muse for comfort that, last century,

  On this same tragic stage on which we have failed,

  A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.

  And whosoever writes good poetry,

  Looks just to art. He does not write for you

  Or me,–for London or for Edinburgh;

  He will not suffer the best critic known

  To step into his sunshine of free thought

  And self-absorbed conception, and exact

  An inch-long swerving of the holy lines.

  If virtue done for popularity

  Defiles like vice, can art for praise or hire

  Still keep its splendour, and remain pure art?

  Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,

  He writes: mankind accepts it, if it suits,

  And that’s success: if not, the poem’s passed

  From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,

  Until the unborn snatch it, crying out

  In pity on their fathers’ being so dull,

  And that’s success too.

  I will write no plays.

  Because the drama, less sublime in this,

  Makes lower appeals, defends more menially,

  Adopts the standard of the public taste

  To chalk its height on, wears a dog chain round

  Its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch

  The fashions of the day to please the day;

  Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands,

  Commending chiefly its docility

  And humour in stage-tricks; or else indeed

  Gets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog,

  Or worse, we’ll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked,

  Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist

  (Being wronged by some five hundred nobodies

  Because their grosser brains most naturally

  Misjudge the fineness of his subtle wit)

  Shows teeth an almond’s breath, protests the length

  Of a.modest phrase,–’ My gentle countrymen,

  ‘There’s something in it, haply of your fault,’–

  Why then, besides five hundred nobodies,

  He’ll have five thousand, and five thousand more,

  Against him,–the whole public,–all the hoofs

  Of King Saul’s father’s asses, in full drove,–

  And obviously deserve it. He appealed

  To these,–and why say more if they
condemn,

  Than if they praised him ?–Weep, my Æschylus,

  But low and far, upon Sicilian shores!

  For since ‘twas Athens (so I read the myth)

  Who gave commission to that fatal weight,

  The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on thee

  And crush thee,–better cover thy bald head;

  She’ll hear the softest hum of Hyblan bee

  Before thy loud’st protesting.–For the rest,

  The risk’s still worse upon the modern stage;

  I could not, in so little, accept success,

  Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm,

  For manifester gains; let those who prize,

  Pursue them: I stand off.

  And yet, forbid,

  That any irreverent fancy or conceit

  Should litter in the Drama’s throne-room, where

  The rulers of our art, in whose full veins

  Dynastic glories mingle, sit in strength

  And do their kingly work,–conceive, command,

  And, from the imagination’s crucial heat,

  Catch up their men and women all a-flame

  For action all alive, and forced to prove

  Their life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,

  Until mankind makes witness, ‘These be men

  As we are,’ and vouchsafes the kiss that’s due

  To Imogen and Juliet–sweetest kin

  On art’s side.

  ‘Tis that, honouring to its worth

  The drama, I would fear to keep it down

  To the level of the footlights. Dies no more

  The sacrificial goat, for Bacchus slain,–

  His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling white

  Of choral vestures,–troubled in his blood

  While tragic voices that clanged keen as swords,

  Leapt high together with the altar-flame,

  And made the blue air wink. The waxen mask,

  Which set the grand still front of Themis’ son

  Upon the puckered visage of a player;–

  The buskin, which he rose upon and moved,

  As some tall ship, first conscious of the wind,

  Sweeps slowly past the piers;–the mouthpiece,where

  The mere man’s voice with all its breaths and breaks

  Went sheathed in brass, and clashed on even heights

  Its phrasèd thunders;–these things are no more,

  Which once were. And concluding, which is clear,

  The growing drama has outgrown such toys

  Of simulated stature, faces and speech,

  It also, peradventure, may outgrow

  The simulation of the painted scene,

  Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;

  And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,

  Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,

  With all its grand orchestral silences

  To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.

  Alas, I still see something to be done,

  And what I do falls short of what I see,

  Though I waste myself on doing. Long green days,

  Worn bare of grass and sunshine,–long calm nights,

  From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,–

  Be witness for me, with no amateur’s

  Irreverent haste and busy idleness

  I’ve set myself to art ! What then? what’s done?

  What’s done, at last?

  Behold, at last, a book.

  If life-blood’s necessary,–which it is,

  (By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet’s brow,

  Each prophet-poet’s book must show man’s blood!)

  If life-blood’s fertilising, I wrung mine

  On every leaf of this,–unless the drops

  Slid heavily on one side and left it dry.

  That chances often: many a fervid man

  Writes books as cold and flat as grave-yard stones

  From which the lichen’s scraped; and if St. Preux

  Had written his own letters, as he might,

  We had never wept to think of the little mole

  ‘Neath Julie’s drooping eyelid. Passion is

  But something suffered, after all.

  While art

  Sets action on the top of suffering:

  The artist’s part is both to be and do,

  Transfixing with a special, central power

  The flat experience of the common man,

  And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,

  Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing

  He feels the inmost: never felt the less

  Because he sings it. Does a torch less burn

  For burning next reflectors of blue steel,

  That he should be the colder for his place

  ‘Twixt two incessant fires,–his personal life’s,

  And that intense refraction which burns back

  Perpetually against him from the round

  Of crystal conscience he was born into

  If artist born? O sorrowful great gift

  Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,

  When one life has been found enough for pain!

  We staggering ‘neath our burden as mere men,

  Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,

  Support the intolerable strain and stress

  Of the universal, and send clearly up

  With voices broken by the human sob,

  Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!

  But soft!–a ‘poet’ is a word soon said;

  A book’s a thing soon written. Nay, indeed,

  The more the poet shall be questionable,

  The more unquestionably comes his book!

  And this of mine,–well, granting to myself

  Some passion in it, furrowing up the flats,

  Mere passion will not prove a volume worth

  Its gall and rags even. Bubbles round a keel

  Mean nought, excepting that the vessel moves.

  There’s more than passion goes to make a man,

  Or book, which is a man too.

  I am sad:

  I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts,

  And, feeling the hard marble first relent,

  Grow supple to the straining of his arms,

  And tingle through its cold to his burning lip,

  Supposed his senses mocked, and that the toil

  Of stretching past the known and seen, to reach

  The archetypal Beauty out of sight,

  Had made his heart beat fast enough for two,

  And with his own life dazed and blinded him!

  Not so; Pygmalion loved,–and whoso loves

  Believes the impossible.

  And I am sad:

  I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine,

  Since none seems worthy of my thought and hope

  More highly mated. He has shot them down,

  My Phoebus Apollo, soul within my soul,

  Who judges by the attempted, what’s attained,

  And with the silver arrow from his height,

  Has struck down all my works before my face,

  While I say nothing. Is there aught to say ?

  I called the artist but a greatened man:

  He may be childless also, like a man.

  I laboured on alone. The wind and dust

  And sun of the world beat blistering in my face;

  And hope, now for me, now against me, dragged

  My spirits onward,–as some fallen balloon,

  Which, whether caught by blossoming tree or bare,

  Is torn alike. I sometimes touched my aim,

  Or seemed,–and generous souls cried out, ‘Be strong,

  Take courage; now you’re on our level,–now!

  The next step saves you!’ I was flushed with praise,

  But, pausing just a moment to draw breath,

  I could not choose but murmur to myself

&
nbsp; ‘Is this all? all that’s done? and all that’s gained?

  If this then be success, ‘tis dismaller

  Than any failure.’

  O my God, my God,

  O supreme Artist, who as sole return

  For all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,

  Demandest of us just a word . . a name,

  ‘My Father!’–thou hast knowledge, only thou,

  How dreary ‘tis for women to sit still

  On winter nights by solitary fires,

  And hear the nations praising them far off;

  Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,

  Our very heart of passionate womanhood,

  Which could not beat so in the verse without

  Being present also in the unkissed lips,

  And eyes undried because there’s none to ask

  The reason they grew moist.

  To sit alone,

  And think, for comfort, how, that very night,

  Affianced lovers, leaning face to face

  With sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath,

  Are reading haply from some page of ours,

  To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,

  When such a stanza, level to their mood,

  Seems floating their own thoughts out–’So I feel

  For thee,’–’And I, for thee: this poet knows

  What everlasting love is!’–how, that night.

  A father, issuing from the misty roads

  Upon the luminous round of lamp and hearth

  And happy children, having caught up first

  The youngest there until it shrunk and shrieked

  To feel the cold chin prick its dimple through

  With winter from the hills, may throw i’ the lap

  Of the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lids

  To hide some sweetness newer than last year’s)

  Our book and cry, . . ‘Ah you, you care for rhymes;

  So here be rhymes to pore on under trees,

  When April comes to let you! I’ve been told

  They are not idle as so many are,

  But set hearts beating pure as well as fast:

  It’s yours, the book: I’ll write your name in it,–

  That so you may not lose, however lost

  In poet’s lore and charming reverie,

  The thought of how your father thought of you

  In riding from the town.’

  To have our books

  Appraised by love, associated with love,

  While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think?

  At least ‘tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ‘twas said,

  Means simply love. It was a man said that.

  And then there’s love and love: the love of all

  (To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,)

  Is but a small thing to the love of one.

  You bid a hungry child be satisfied