Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Page 130
Ah, tears upon mine eyelids, sorrow on mine heart!
I bring thee soul-repentance, Creator as thou art.
Bounding joyous actions, deep as arrows go –
Pleasures self-revolving, issue into woe!
Creatures of our mortal, headlong rush to sin –
I have seen them; – of them – ah me, – I have been!
Duly pitying Spirits, from your spirit-frame,
Bring your cloud of weeping, – worthy of the same!
Else I would be bolder – If that light of thine,
Jesus, quell the evil, let it on me shine.
Fail me truth, is living, less than death forlorn,
When the sinner readeth – “better be unborn”?
God, I raise toward thee both eyes of my heart,
With a sharp cry – “Help me!” – while mine hopes depart.
Help me! Death is bitter, all hearts comprehend;
But I fear beyond it – end beyond the end!
Inwardly behold me, how my soul is black –
Sympathize in gazing, do not spurn me back!
Knowing that thy pleasure is not to destroy,
That thou fain wouldst save me – this is all my joy.
Lo, the lion, hunting spirits in their deep,
(Stand beside me!) roareth – (help me!) nears to leap!
May’st Thou help me, Master – Thou art pure alone –
Thou alone art sinless – one Christ on a throne.
Nightly deeds I loved them – hated day’s instead –
Hence this soul-involving darkness on mine head!
O Word, who constrainest things estranged and curst,
If thy hand can save me, that work were the first!
Pensive o’er my sinning, counting all its ways,
Terrors shake me, waiting adequate dismays.
Quenchless glories many, hast Thou – many a rod –
Thou, too, hast Thy measures – Can I bear, Thee, God?
Rend away my counting from my soul’s decline,
Show me of the portion of those saved of Thine!
Slow drops of my weeping to thy mercy run –
Let its rivers wash me, by that mercy won.
Tell me what is worthy, in our dreary now,
As the future glory? (madness!) what, as Tʜᴏu!
Union, oh, vouchsafe me to Thy fold beneath,
Lest the wolf across me gnash his gory teeth.
View me, judge me gently! spare me, Master bland, –
Brightly lift thine eyelids, kindly stretch thine hand!
Winged and choral angels! ‘twixt my spirit lone,
And all deathly visions, interpose your own!
Yea, my Soul, remember death and woe inwrought –
After-death affliction, wringing earth’s to nought.
Zone me, Lord, with graces! Be foundations built
Underneath me; save me! as thou know’st and wilt!
The omission of our X, (in any case too sullen a letter to be employed in the service of an acrostic,) has permitted us to write line for line with the Greek; and we are able to infer, to the honour of the Greek poet, that, although he did not live upon a column, he was not far below one, in the virtue of self-mortification. We are tempted to accord him some more gracious and serious justice, by breaking away a passage from his ‘Planctus Mariæ,’ the lament of Mary on embracing the Lord’s body; and giving a moment’s insight into a remarkable composition, which, however deprived of its poetical right of measure, is, in fact, nearer to a poem, both in purpose and achievement, than any versified matter we have looked upon from this metaphrastic hand: –
“O, uncovered corse, yet Word of the Living One! self-doomed to be uplifted on the cross for the drawing of all men unto thee, – what member of thine hath no wound? O, my blessed brows, embraced by the thorn-wreath which is pricking at my heart! O beautiful and priestly One, who hadst not where to lay thine head and rest, and now wilt lay it only in the tomb, resting there; – sleeping, as Jacob said, a lion’s sleep! O cheeks turned to the smiter! O lips, new hive for bees, yet fresh from the sharpness of vinegar and bitterness of gall! O mouth, wherein was no guile, yet betrayed by the traitor’s kiss! O hand, creative of man, yet nailed to the cross, and since, stretched out unto Hades, with help for the first transgressor! O feet, once walking on the deep to hallow the waters of nature! O me, my son! . . . Where is thy chorus of sick ones? – those whom thou didst cure of their diseases, and bring back from the dead? Is none here, but only Nicodemus, to draw the nails from those hands and feet? – none here but only Nicodemus, to lift thee from the cross, heavily, heavily, and lay thee in these mother-arms, which bore thee long ago, in thy babyhood, and were glad then? These hands, which swaddled thee then, let them bind thy grave-clothes now. And yet, – O, bitter funerals! – O, Giver of life from the dead, liest Thou dead before mine eyes? Must I, who said ‘hush’ beside thy cradle, wail this passion upon thy grave? I, who washed thee in thy first bath, must I drop on Thee these hotter tears? I, who raised thee high in my maternal arms, – but then thou leapedst, – then thou springedst up in thy child-play . . . .”
It is better to write so than to stand upon a column. And, although the passage does, both generally and specifically, in certain of its ideas, recall the antithetic eloquence of that Gregory Nazianzen before whom this Simeon must be dumb, we have touched his “oration,” so called, nearer than our subject could permit us to do any of Gregory’s, because the ‘Planctus’ involves an imagined situation, is poetical in its design. Moreover, we must prepare to look downwards; the poets were descending from the gorgeous majesty of the hexameter and the severe simplicity of iambics, down through the mediate “versus politici,” a loose metre, adapted to the popular ear, to the lowest deep of a “measured prose,” – which has been likened – but which we will not liken – to the blank verse of our times. Presently, we may offer an example from Psellus of a prose acrostic – the reader being delighted with the prospect! “A whole silver threepence, mistress.”
Michael Psellus lived midway in the eleventh century, and appears to have been a man of much aspiration towards the higher places of the earth. A senator of no ordinary influence, preceptor of the emperor Michael previous to that accession, he is supposed to have included in his instructions the advantages of sovereignty, and in his precepts the most subtle means of securing them. We were about to add, that his acquirements as a scholar were scarcely less imperial than those of his pupil as a prince – but the expression might have been inappropriate. There are cases not infrequent, not entirely opposite to the present case, and worthy always of all meditation by such intelligent men as affect extensive acquisition, – when acquirements are not ruled by the man, but rule him. Whatever originates from the mind cannot obstruct her individual faculty; nay, whatever she receives inwardly and marks her power over by creating out of it a tertium quid, according to the law of the perpetual generation of spiritual verities, is not obstructive but impulsive to the evolution of faculty; but the erudition, whether it be erudition as the world showed it formerly, or miscellaneous literature, as the world shows it now, the accumulated acquirement of whatever character, which remains extraneous to the mind, is and must be in the same degree an obstruction and deformity. How many are there from Psellus to Bayle, bound hand and foot intellectually with the rolls of their own papyrus – men whose erudition has grown stronger than their souls! How many whom we would gladly see washed in the clean waters of a little ignorance, and take our own part in their refreshment! Not that knowledge is bad, but that wisdom is better; and that it is better and wiser in the sight of the angels of knowledge to think out one true thought with a thrush’s song and a green light for all lexicon – or to think it without the light and without the song; – because truth is beautiful, where they are not seen or heard; – than to mummy our benumbed souls with the circumvolutions of twenty thousand books. And so Michael Psellus was a learned man.
We have sought earnes
tly, yet in vain, – and the fact may account for our ill-humour – a sight of certain iambics upon vices and virtues, and Tantalus and Sphinx, which are attributed to this writer, and cannot be in the moon after all – earnestly, yet with no fairer encouragement to our desire than what befals it from his poems (!) ‘On the Councils,’ the first of which, and only the first, through the softness of our charities, we bring to confront the reader: –
Know the holy councils, King, to their utmost number,
Such as roused the impious ones from their world-wide slumber!
Seven in all those councils were – Nice the first containing,
When the godly master-soul Constantine was reigning,
What time at Byzantium, hallowed with the hyssop,
In heart and word, Metrophanes presided as archbishop!
It cut away Arius’ tongue’s maniacal delusion,
Which cut off from the Trinity the blessed Homoousion –
Blasphemed (O miserable man!) the maker of the creature,
And low beneath the Father cast the equal Filial nature.
The prose acrostic, contained in an office written by Psellus to the honour of Simeon, is elaborated on the words “I sing thee who didst write the metaphrases;” every sentence being insulated, and beginning with a charmed letter.
“Say in a dance how we shall go,
Who never could a measure know?”
why thus – (and yet Psellus, who did know everything, wrote a synopsis of the metres!) – why thus:
“Inspire me, Word of God, with a rhythmetic chant, for I am borne onward to praise Simeon Metaphrastes, and Logothetes, as he is fitly called, the man worthy of admiration.
“Solemnly from the heavenly heights did the Blessed Ghost descend on thee, wise one, and finding thine heart pure, rested there, there verily in the body!”
Surely we need not write any more. But Michael Psellus was a very learned man.
John, of Euchaita, or Euchania, or Theodoropolis, – the three names do appear through the twilight to belong to one city – was a bishop, probably contemporary with Psellus – is only a poet now – we turn to see the voice which speaks to us. It is a voice with a soul in it, clear and sweet and living; and we who have walked long in the desert, leap up to its sound as to the dim flowing of a stream, and would take a deep breath by its side both for the weariness which is gone and the repose which is coming. But it is a rarer thing than a stream in the desert: it is a voice in the desert – the only voice of a city. The city may have three names, as we have said, or the three names may more fitly appertain to three cities – scholars knit their brows and wax doubtful as they talk; but a city, denuded of its multitudes it surely is, ruined even of its ruins it surely is; no exhalation arises from its tombs – the foxes have lost their way to it – the bittern’s cry is as dumb as the vanished population – only the Voice remains. John Mauropus, of Euchaita, Euchania, Theodoropolis! one living man among many dead, as the Arabian tale goes of the city of enchantment! – one speechful voice among the silent, sole survivor of the breath which maketh words, effluence of the soul replacing the bittern’s cry – speak to us! And thou shalt be to us as a poet – we will salute thee by that high name. For have we not stood face to face with Michael Psellus and him of the metaphrases? Surely as a poet may we salute thee?
His poetry has, as if in contrast to the scenery of circumstances in which we find it, or to the fatality of circumstances in which it has not been found, (and even Mr. Clarke in his learned work upon Sacred Literature, which is, however, incommunicative generally upon sacred poetry, appears unconscious of his being and his bishoprick) his poetry has a character singularly vital, fresh, and serene. There is nothing in it of the rapture of inspiration, little of the operativeness of art – nothing of imagination in a high sense, or of ear-service in any – he is not, he says, of those –
Who rain hard with redundancies of words,
And thunder and lighten out of eloquence.
His Greek being opposed to that of the Silentiarii and the Pisidæ by a peculiar simplicity and ease of collocation which the reader feels lightly in a moment, the thoughts move through its transparency with a certain calm nobleness and sweet living earnestness, with holy upturned eyes and human tears beneath the lids, till the reader feels lovingly too. We startle him from his reverie with an octave note on a favourite literary fashion of the living London, drawn from the voice of the lost city; discovering by that sound the first serial illustrator of pictures by poems, in the person of our Johannes. Here is a specimen from an annual of Euchaita, or Euchania, or Theodoropolis – we may say “annual” although the pictures were certainly not in a book, but were probably ornaments of the beautiful temple in the midst of the city, concerning which there is a tradition. Here is a specimen selected for love’s sake, because it “illustrates” a portrait of Gregory Nazianzen: –
What meditates thy thoughtful gaze, my father?
To tell me some new truth? Thou canst not so!
For all that mortal hands are weak to gather,
Thy blessed books unfolded long ago.
These are striking verses, upon the Blessed among women, weeping, –
O Lady of the passion, dost thou weep?
What help can we then through our tears survey,
If such as thou a cause for wailing keep?
What help, what hope, for us, sweet Lady, say?
“Good man, it doth befit thine heart to lay
More courage next it, having seen me so.
All other hearts find other balm to-day –
The whole world’s consolation is my woe!”
Would any hear what can be said of a Transfiguration before Raffael’s: –
Tremble, spectator, at the vision won thee –
Stand afar off, look downward from the height, –
Lest Christ too nearly seen should lighten on thee,
And from thy fleshly eye-balls strike the sight,
As Paul fell ruined by that glory white, –
Lo, the disciples prostrate, each apart,
Each impotent to bear the lamping light!
And all that Moses and Elias might,
The darkness caught the grace upon her heart
And gave them strength for! Thou, if evermore
A God-voice pierce thy dark, – rejoice – adore!
Our poet was as unwilling a bishop as the most sturdy of the “nolentes;” and there are poems written both in depreciation of, and in retrospective regret for, the ordaining dignity, marked by noble and holy beauties which we are unwilling to pass without extraction. Still we are constrained for space, and must come at last to his chief individual characteristic – to the gentle humanities which, strange to say, preponderate in the solitary voice – to the familiar smiles and sighs which go up and down in it to our ear. We will take the poem “To his old house,” and see how the house survives by his good help, when the sun shines no more on the golden statue of Constantine: –
Oh, be not angry with me, gentle house,
That I have left thee empty and deserted!
Since thou thyself that evil didst arouse,
In being to thy masters so false-hearted –