(001) AURORA LEIGH, be humble. Shall I hope
(002) To speak my poems in mysterious
tune
(003) With man and nature?—with the
lava-lymph
1
(004) That trickles from successive
galaxies
(005) Still drop by drop adown the
finger of God
2
(006) In still new worlds?—with
summer-days in this
(007) That scarce dare breathe they are
so beautiful?
(008) With spring’s delicious trouble
in the ground,
(009) Tormented by the quickened blood
of roots,
(010) And softly pricked by golden
crocus-sheaves
(011) In token of the harvest-time of
flowers?
(012) With winters and with
autumns,—and beyond
(013) With the human heart’s large
seasons, when it hopes
(014) And fears, joys, grieves, and
loves?—with all that strain
(015) Of sexual passion, which devours
the flesh
(016) In a sacrament of souls? with
mother’s breasts
(017) Which, round the new-made
creatures hanging there,
(018) Throb luminous and harmonious
like pure spheres?—
(019) With multitudinous life, and
finally
(020) With the great escapings of
ecstatic souls,
(021) Who, in a rush of too long
prisoned flame,
(022) Their radiant faces upward, burn
away
(023) This dark of the body, issuing on
a world
(024) Beyond our mortal?—can I speak my
verse
(025) So plainly in tune to these
things and the rest,
(026) That men shall feel it catch them
on the quick,
(027) As having the same warrant over
them
(028) To hold and move them if they
will or no,
(029) Alike imperious as the primal
rhythm
(030) Of that theurgic
3nature?—I must fail,
(031) Who fail at the beginning to hold
and move
(032) One man,—and he my cousin, and he
my friend,
(033) And he born tender, made
intelligent,
(034) Inclined to ponder the
precipitous sides
(035) Of difficult questions; yet,
obtuse to me,
(036) Of me, incurious! likes me very
well,
(037) And wishes me a paradise of
good,
(038) Good looks, good means, and good
digestion,—ay,
(039) But otherwise evades me, puts me
off
(040) With kindness, with a tolerant
gentleness,—
(041) Too light a book for a grave
man’s reading! Go,
(042) Aurora Leigh: be
humble.
(042) There
it is,
(043) We women are too apt to look to
One,
4
(044) Which proves a certain impotence
in art.
(045) We strain our natures at doing
something great,
(046) Far less because it’s something
great to do,
(047) Than haply that we, so, commend
ourselves
(048) As being not small, and more
appreciable
(049) To some one friend. We must have
mediators
(050) Betwixt our highest conscience
and the judge;
(051) Some sweet saint’s blood must
quicken in our palms,
5
(052) Or all the life in heaven seems
slow and cold:
(053) Good only being perceived as the
end of good,
(054) And God alone pleased,—that’s too
poor, we think,
(055) And not enough for us by any
means.
(056) Ay—Romney, I remember, told me
once
(057) We miss the abstract when we
comprehend.
(058) We miss it most when we
aspire,—and fail.
(059) Yet, so, I will not.—This vile
woman’s way
(060) Of trailing garments, shall not
trip me up:
(061) I’ll have no traffic with the
personal thought
(062) In art’s pure temple. Must I work
in vain,
(063) Without the approbation of a
man?
(064) It cannot be; it shall not. Fame
itself,
(065) That approbation of the general
race,
(066) Presents a poor end, (though the
arrow speed,
(067) Shot straight with vigorous
finger to the white,)
6
(068) And the highest fame was never
reached except
(069) By what was aimed above it.
7 Art for art,
(070) And good for God Himself, the
essential Good!
(071) We’ll keep our aims sublime, our
eyes erect,
(072) Although our woman-hands should
shake and fail;
(073) And if we fail . . But must
we?—
(074) Shall I
fail?
(074) The Greeks said grandly in their
tragic phrase,
(075) “Let no one be called happy till
his death.”
8
(076) To which I add,—Let no one till
his death
(077) Be called unhappy. Measure not
the work
(078) Until the day’s out and the
labour done,
(079) Then bring your gauges. If the
day’s work’s scant,
(080) Why, call it scant; affect no
compromise;
(081) And, in that we have nobly
striven at least,
(082) Deal with us nobly, women though
we be,
(083) And honour us with truth if not
with praise.
(084) My ballads prospered;
9 but the ballad’s race
(085) Is rapid for a poet who bears
weights
(086) Of thought and golden image. He
can stand
(087) Like Atlas, in the sonnet,
10 —and support
(088) His own heavens pregnant with
dynastic stars;
(089) But then he must stand still, nor
take a step.
(090) In that descriptive poem called
“The Hills,”
11
(091) The prospects were too far and
indistinct.
(092) ’T is true my critics said, “A
fine view, that!”
(093) The public scarcely cared to
climb my book
(094) For even the finest, and the
public’s right;
(095) A tree’s mere firewood, unless
humanised,—
(096) Which well the Greeks knew when
they stirred its bark
(097) With close-pressed bosoms of
subsiding nymphs,
12
(098) And made the forest-rivers
garrulous
(099) With babble of gods.
13 For us, we are called to
mark
(100) A still more intimate
humanity
(101) In this inferior nature, or
ourselves
(102) Must fall like dead leaves
trodden underfoot
(103) By veritable artists. Earth (shut
up
(104) By Adam, like a fakir in a
box
(105) Left too long buried)
14 remained stiff and
dry,
(106) A mere dumb corpse, till Christ
the Lord came down,
(107) Unlocked the doors, forced open
the blank eyes,
(108) And used his kingly chrism
15 to straighten out
(109) The leathery tongue turned back
into the throat;
(110) Since when, she lives, remembers,
palpitates
(111) In every limb, aspires in every
breath,
(112) Embraces infinite relations.
Now
(113) We want no half-gods, Panomphæan
Joves,
16
(114) Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads
and the rest,
17
(115) To take possession of a senseless
world
(116) To unnatural vampire-uses. See
the earth,
(117) The body of our body, the green
earth,
(118) Indubitably human like this
flesh
(119) And these articulated veins
through which
(120) Our heart drives blood. There’s
not a flower of spring
(121) That dies ere June, but vaunts
itself allied
(122) By issue and symbol, by
significance
(123) And correspondence, to that
spirit-world
18
(124) Outside the limits of our space
and time,
(125) Whereto we are bound. Let poets
give it voice
(126) With human meanings,—else they
miss the thought,
(127) And henceforth step down lower,
stand confessed
(128) Instructed poorly for
interpreters,
(129) Thrown out by an easy cowslip in
the text.
(130) Even so my pastoral failed: it
was a book
(131) Of surface-pictures—pretty, cold,
and false
(132) With literal transcript,—the
worse done, I think,
(133) For being not ill-done: let me
set my mark
(134) Against such doings, and do
otherwise.
(135) This strikes me.—If the public
whom we know 135
(136) Could catch me at such
admissions, I should pass
(137) For being right modest. Yet how
proud we are,
(138) In daring to look down upon
ourselves!
(139) The critics say that epics have
died out
19
(140) With Agamemnon
20 and the goat-nursed
gods;
21
(141) I’ll not believe it. I could
never deem
(142) As Payne Knight
22 did, (the mythic
mountaineer
(143) Who travelled higher than he was
born to live,
(144) And showed sometimes the goitre
in his throat
(145) Discoursing of an image seen
through fog,)
(146) That Homer’s heroes measured
twelve feet high.
(147) They were but men:—his Helen’s
hair turned gray
(148) Like any plain Miss Smith’s who
wears a front;
(149) And Hector’s
23 infant whimpered at a
plume
(150) As yours last Friday at a
turkey-cock.
(151) All actual heroes are essential
men,
(152) And all men possible heroes:
every age,
(153) Heroic in proportions,
double-faced,
(154) Looks backward and before,
expects a morn
(155) And claims an epos.
24 (155) Ay, but every age
(156) Appears to souls who live in ’t
(ask Carlyle)
(157) Most unheroic.
25 Ours, for instance,
ours:
(158) The thinkers scout it, and the
poets abound
(159) Who scorn to touch it with a
finger-tip:
(160) A pewter age,—mixed metal,
silver-washed;
(161) An age of scum, spooned off the
richer past,
(162) An age of patches for old
gaberdines,
26
(163) An age of mere transition,
27 meaning nought
(164) Except that what succeeds must
shame it quite
(165) If God please. That’s wrong
thinking, to my mind,
(166) And wrong thoughts make poor
poems.
(166) Every
age,
(167) Through being beheld too close,
is ill-discerned
(168) By those who have not lived past
it. We’ll suppose
(169) Mount Athos carved, as Alexander
schemed,
(170) To some colossal statue of a
man.
28
(171) The peasants, gathering brushwood
in his ear,
(172) Had guessed as little as the
browsing goats
(173) Of form or feature of
humanity
(174) Up there,—in fact, had travelled
five miles off
(175) Or ere the giant image broke on
them,
(176) Full human profile, nose and chin
distinct,
(177) Mouth, muttering rhythms of
silence up the sky
(178) And fed at evening with the blood
of suns;
(179) Grand torso,—hand, that flung
perpetually
(180) The largesse of a silver river
down
(181) To all the country pastures. ’T
is even thus
(182) With times we live in,—evermore
too great
(183) To be apprehended near.
(183) But poets should
(184) Exert a double vision; should
have eyes
(185) To see near things as
comprehensively
(186) As if afar they took their point
of sight,
(187) And distant things as intimately
deep
(188) As if they touched them. Let us
strive for this.
(189) I do distrust the poet who
discerns
(190) No character or glory in his
times,
(191) And trundles back his soul five
hundred years,
(192) Past moat and drawbridge, into a
castle-court,
29
(193) To sing—oh, not of lizard or of
toad
(194) Alive i’ the ditch there,—’t were
excusable,
(195) But of some black chief, half
knight, half sheep-lifter,
(196) Some beauteous dame, half chattel
and half queen,
(197) As dead as must be, for the
greater part,
(198) The poems made on their chivalric
bones;
(199) And that’s no wonder: death
inherits death.
(200) Nay, if there’s room for poets in
this world
(201) A little overgrown, (I think
there is)
(202) Their sole work is to represent
the age,
(203) Their age, not Charlemagne’s
30, —this live, throbbing age,
(204) That brawls, cheats, maddens,
calculates, aspires,
(205) And spends more passion, more
heroic heat,
(206) Betwixt the mirrors of its
drawing-rooms,
31
(207) Than Roland with his knights at
Roncesvalles.
32
(208) To flinch from modern varnish,
coat or flounce,
(209) Cry out for togas and the
picturesque,
(210) Is fatal,—foolish too. King
Arthur’s self
(211) Was commonplace to Lady
Guenever;
33
(212) And Camelot to minstrels seemed
as flat
(210) As Fleet Street
34 to our poets.
(213) Never flinch,
(214) But still, unscrupulously epic,
catch
(215) Upon the burning lava of a
song
(216) The full-veined, heaving,
double-breasted Age:
35
(217) That, when the next shall come,
the men of that
(218) May touch the impress with
reverent hand, and say
(219) ‘Behold,—behold the paps we all
have sucked!
(220) This bosom seems to beat still,
or at least
(221) It sets ours beating: this is
living art,
(222) Which thus presents and thus
records true life.’
(223) What form is best for poems? Let
me think
(224) Of forms less, and the external.
Trust the spirit,
(225) As sovran nature does, to make
the form;
(226) For otherwise we only imprison
spirit
(227) And not embody. Inward
evermore
(228) To outward,—so in life, and so in
art
(229) Which still is life.
36 (229) Five acts to make a play.
(230) And why not fifteen? why not
ten? or seven?
(231) What matter for the number of the
leaves,
(232) Supposing the tree lives and
grows? exact
(233) The literal unities of time and
place,
37
(234) When ’t is the essence of passion
to ignore
(235) Both time and place? Absurd. Keep
up the fire,
(236) And leave the generous flames to
shape themselves.
(237) ’T is true the stage requires
obsequiousness
(238) To this or that convention;
‘exit’ herev
(239) And ‘enter’ there; the points for
clapping, fixed,
(240) Like Jacob’s white-peeled rods
before the rams,
38
(241) And all the close-curled imagery
clipped
(242) In manner of their fleece at
shearing-time.
(243) Forget to prick the
galleries
39 to the heart
(244) Precisely at the fourth
act,—culminate
(245) Our five pyramidal acts with one
act more,—
(246) We’re lost so: Shakspeare’s ghost
could scarcely plead
(247) Against our just damnation. Stand
aside;
(248) We’ll muse for comfort that, last
century,
(249) On this same tragic stage on
which we have failed,
(250) A wigless Hamlet
40 would have failed the
same.
(251) And whosoever writes good
poetry,
(252) Looks just to art. He does not
write for you
(253) Or me,—for London or for
Edinburgh;
41
(254) He will not suffer the best
critic known
(255) To step into his sunshine of free
thought
(256) And self-absorbed conception and
exact
(257) An inch-long swerving of the holy
lines.
(258) If virtue done for
popularity
(259) Defiles like vice, can art, for
praise or hire,
(260) Still keep its splendor and
remain pure art?
(261) Eschew such serfdom. What the
poet writes,
(262) He writes: mankind accepts it if
it suits,
(263) And that’s success: if not, the
poem’s passed
(264) From hand to hand, and yet from
hand to hand,
(265) Until the unborn snatch it,
crying out
(266) In pity on their fathers’ being
so dull,
(267) And that’s success
too.
(267) I will
write no plays;
(268) Because the drama, less sublime
in this,
(269) Makes lower appeals, depends more
menially,
(270) Adopts the standard of the public
taste
42
(271) To chalk its height on, wears a
dog-chain round
(272) Its regal neck, and learns to
carry and fetch
(273) The fashions of the day to please
the day,
(274) Fawns close on pit and
boxes,
43 who clap hands
(275) Commending chiefly its
docility
(276) And humour in stage-tricks,—or
else indeed
(277) Gets hissed at, howled at,
stamped at like a dog,
(278) Or worse, we’ll say. For dogs,
unjustly kicked,
(279) Yell, bite at need; but if your
dramatist
(280) (Being wronged by some five
hundred nobodies
(281) Because their grosser brains most
naturally
(282) Misjudge the fineness of his
subtle wit)
(283) Shows teeth an almond’s breadth,
protests the length
(284) Of a modest phrase,—‘My gentle
countrymen,
(285) “There’s something in it haply of
your fault,”—
(286) Why then, besides five hundred
nobodies,
(287) He’ll have five thousand and five
thousand more
(288) Against him,—the whole
public,—all the hoofs
(289) Of King Saul’s father’s
asses,
44 in full drove,
(290) And obviously deserve it. He
appealed
(291) To these,—and why say more if
they condemn,
(292) Than if they praise him?—Weep, my
Æschylus,
(293) But low and far, upon Sicilian
shores!
(294) For since ’t was Athens (so I
read the myth)
(295) Who gave commission to that fatal
weight
(296) The tortoise, cold and hard, to
drop on thee
(297) And crush thee,—better cover thy
bald head;
45
(298) She’ll hear the softest hum of
Hyblan bee
46
(299) Before thy loudest
protestation!
(290)
Then
(300) The risk’s still worse upon the
modern stage:
(301) I could not, for so little,
accept success,
(302) Nor would I risk so much, in ease
and calm,
(303) For manifester gains: let those
who prize,
(304) Pursue them: I stand off. And
yet, forbid,
(305) That any irreverent fancy or
conceit
(306) Should litter in the Drama’s
throne-room where
(307) The rulers of our art, in whose
full veins
(308) Dynastic glories mingle, sit in
strength
(309) And do their kingly
work,—conceive, command,
(310) And, from the imagination’s
crucial heat,
(311) Catch up their men and women all
a-flame
(312) For action, all alive and forced
to prove
(313) Their life by living out heart,
brain, and nerve,
(314) Until mankind makes witness,
‘These be men
(315) As we are,’ and vouchsafes the
greeting due
(316) To Imogen and Juliet
47 —sweetest kin
(317) On art’s side.
(317) ’T is that, honouring to
its worth
(318) The drama, I would fear to keep
it down
(319) To the level of the footlights.
Dies no more
(320) The sacrificial goat, for
Bacchus, slain,
48
(321) His filmed eyes fluttered by the
whirling white
(322) Of choral vestures,—troubled in
his blood,
(323) While tragic voices that clanged
keen as swords,
(324) Leapt high together with the
altar-flame
49
(325) And made the blue air wink. The
waxen mask,
(326) Which set the grand still front
of Themis’ son
50
(327) Upon the puckered visage of a
player,—
(328) The buskin,
51 which he rose upon and
moved,
(329) As some tall ship first conscious
of the wind
(330) Sweeps slowly past the piers,—the
mouthpiece, where
(331) The mere man’s voice with all its
breaths and breaks
(332) Went sheathed in brass, and
clashed on even heights
(333) Its phrasèd thunders,—these
things are no more,
(334) Which once were. And concluding,
which is clear,
(335) The growing drama has outgrown
such toys
(336) Of simulated stature, face, and
speech,
(337) It also peradventure may
outgrow
(338) The simulation of the painted
scene,
(339) Boards, actors, prompters,
gaslight, and costume,
(340) And take for a worthier stage the
soul itself,
52
(341) Its shifting fancies and
celestial lights,
(342) With all its grand orchestral
silences
(343) To keep the pauses of its
rhythmic sounds.
(344) Alas, I still see something to be
done,
(345) And what I do, falls short of
what I see,
(346) Though I waste myself on doing.
Long green days,
(347) Worn bare of grass and
sunshine,—long calm nights,
(348) From which the silken sleeps were
fretted out,
(349) Be witness for me, with no
amateur’s
(350) Irreverent haste and busy
idleness
(351) I set myself to art! What then?
what’s done?
(352) What’s done, at last?
(352) Behold, at last, a
book.
(353) If life-blood’s necessary, which
it is,—
(354) (By that blue vein athrob on
Mahomet’s brow,
53
(355) Each prophet-poet’s book must
show man’s blood!)
(356) If life-blood’s fertilising, I
wrung mine
(357) On every leaf of this,—unless the
drops
(358) Slid heavily on one side and left
it dry.
(359) That chances often: many a fervid
man
(360) Writes books as cold and flat as
grave-yard stones
(361) From which the lichen’s scraped;
and if Saint Preux
(362) Had written his own letters, as
he might,
(363) We had never wept to think of the
little mole
(364) ’Neath Julie’s drooping eyelid.
Passion is
(365) But something suffered, after
all.
(365) While
Art
(366) Sets action on the top of
suffering:
(367) The artist’s part is both to be
and do,
(368) Transfixing with a special,
central power
(369) The flat experience of the common
man,
(370) And turning outward, with a
sudden wrench,
(371) Half agony, half ecstasy, the
thing
(372) He feels the inmost,—never felt
the less
(373) Because he sings it. Does a torch
less burn
(374) For burning next reflectors of
blue steel,
(375) That he should be the colder for his place
(376) ’Twixt two incessant fires,—his
personal life’s,
(377) And that intense refraction which
burns back
(378) Perpetually against him from the
round
(379) Of crystal conscience he was born
into
(380) If artist-born? O sorrowful great
gift
(381) Conferred on poets, of a twofold
life,
(382) When one life has been found
enough for pain!
(383) We, staggering ’neath our burden
as mere men,
(384) Being called to stand up
straight as demi-gods,
(385) Support the intolerable strain
and stress
(386) Of the universal, and send
clearly up
(387) With voices broken by the human
sob,
(388) Our poems to find rhymes among
the stars!
(389) But soft,—a ‘poet’ is a word soon
said,
(390) A book’s a thing soon written.
Nay, indeed,
(391) The more the poet shall be
questionable,
(392) The more unquestionably comes his
book.
(393) And this of mine—well, granting
to myself
(394) Some passion in it,—furrowing up
the flats,
(395) Mere passion will not prove a
volume worth
(396) Its gall and rags even. Bubbles
round a keel
(397) Mean nought, excepting that the
vessel moves.
(398) There’s more than passion goes to
make a man
(399) Or book, which is a man
too.
(399) I am
sad.
(400) I wonder if Pygmalion had these
doubts
(401) And, feeling the hard marble
first relent,
(402) Grow supple to the straining of
his arms,
(403) And tingle through its cold to
his burning lip,
(404) Supposed his senses mocked,
supposed the toil
(405) Of stretching past the known and
seen to reach
(406) The archetypal Beauty out of
sight,
(407) Had made his heart beat fast
enough for two,
(408) And with his own life dazed and
blinded him!
(409) Not so; Pygmalion loved,—and
whoso loves
(410) Believes the
impossible.
(410) But
I am sad:
(411) I cannot thoroughly love a work
of mine,
(412) Since none seems worthy of my
thought and hope
(413) More highly mated. He has shot
them down,
(414) My Phœbus Apollo, soul within my
soul,
(415) Who judges, by the attempted,
what’s attained,
(416) And with the silver arrow from
his height
(417) Has struck down all my works
before my face
(418) While I said nothing. Is there
aught to say?
(419) I called the artist but a
greatened man.
(420) He may be childless also, like a
man.
(421) I laboured on alone. The wind and
dust
(422) And sun of the world beat
blistering in my face;
(423) And hope, now for me, now against
me, dragged
(424) My spirits onward, as some
fallen balloon,
(425) Which, whether caught by
blossoming tree or bare,
(426) Is torn alike. I sometimes
touched my aim,
(427) Or seemed,—and generous souls
cried out, ‘Be strong,
(428) Take courage; now you’re on our
level,—now!
(429) The next step saves you!’ I was
flushed with praise,
(430) But, pausing just a moment to
draw breath,
(431) I could not choose but murmur to
myself
(432) ‘Is this all? all that’s done?
and all that’s gained?
(433) If this then be success, ’t is
dismaller
(434) Than any failure.’
(434) O my God, my God,
(435) O supreme Artist, who as sole
return
(436) For all the cosmic wonder of Thy
work,
(437) Demandest of us just a word . . a
name,
(438) ‘My Father!’ thou hast knowledge,
only thou,
(439) How dreary ’t is for women to sit
still
(440) On winter nights by solitary
fires
(441) And hear the nations praising
them far off,
(442) Too far! ay, praising our quick
sense of love,
(443) Our very heart of passionate
womanhood,
(444) Which could not beat so in the
verse without
(445) Being present also in the
unkissed lips
(446) And eyes undried because there’s
none to ask
(447) The reason they grew
moist.
(447) To sit
alone
(448) And think for comfort how, that
very night,
(449) Affianced lovers, leaning face to
face
(450) With sweet half-listenings for
each other’s breath,
(451) Are reading haply from a page of
ours,
(452) To pause with a thrill (as if
their cheeks had touched)
(453) When such a stanza, level to
their mood,
(454) Seems floating their own thought
out—‘So I feel
(455) For thee,’—‘And I, for thee: this
poet knows
(456) What everlasting love is!’—how,
that night,
(457) Some father, issuing from the
misty roads
(458) Upon the luminous round of lamp
and hearth
(459) And happy children, having caught
up first
(460) The youngest there until it
shrink and shriek
(461) To feel the cold chin prick its
dimples through
(462) With winter from the hills, may
throw i’ the lap
(463) Of the eldest, (who has learnt to
drop her lids
(464) To hide some sweetness newer than
last year’s)
(465) Our book and cry, . . ‘Ah you,
you care for rhymes;
(466) So here be rhymes to pore on
under trees,
(467) When April comes to let you! I’ve
been told
(468) They are not idle as so many
are,
(469) But set hearts beating pure as
well as fast.
(470) ’T is yours, the book; I’ll write
your name in it,
(471) That so you may not lose, however
lost
(472) In poet’s lore and charming
reverie,
(473) The thought of how your father
thought of you
(474) In riding from the
town.’
(474) To have
our books
(475) Appraised by love, associated
with love,
(476) While we sit loveless! is it
hard, you think?
(477) At least ’t is mournful. Fame,
indeed, ’t was said,
(478) Means simply love. It was a man
said that:
(479) And then, there’s love and love:
the love of all
(480) (To risk in turn a woman’s
paradox,)
(481) Is but a small thing to the love
of one.
(482) You bid a hungry child be
satisfied
(483) With a heritage of many
corn-fields: nay,
(484) He says he’s hungry,—he would
rather have
(485) That little barley-cake you keep
from him
(486) While reckoning up his harvests.
So with us;
(487) (Here, Romney, too, we fail to
generalise!)
(488) We’re hungry.
(488) Hungry! but it’s
pitiful
(489) To wail like unweaned babes and
suck our thumbs
(490) Because we’re hungry. Who, in all
this world,
(491) (Wherein we are haply set to pray
and fast,
(492) And learn what good is by its
opposite)
(493) Has never hungered? Woe to him
who has found
(494) The meal enough! if Ugolino’s
full,
(495) His teeth have crunched some foul
unnatural thing:
(496) For here satiety proves
penury
(497) More utterly irremediable. And
since
(498) We needs must hunger,—better,
for man’s love,
(499) Than God’s truth! better, for
companions sweet,
(500) Than great convictions! let us
bear our weights,
(501) Preferring dreary hearths to
desert souls.
(502) Well, well! they say we’re
envious, we who rhyme;
(503) But I, because I am a woman
perhaps
(504) And so rhyme ill, am ill at
envying.
(505) I never envied Graham his breadth
of style,
(506) Which gives you, with a random
smutch or two,
(507) (Near-sighted critics analyse to
smutch)
(508) Such delicate perspectives of
full life:
(509) Nor Belmore, for the unity of
aim
(510) To which he cuts his cedarn
poems, fine
(511) As sketchers do their pencils:
nor Mark Gage,
(512) For that caressing colour and
trancing tone
(513) Whereby you’re swept away and
melted in
(514) The sensual element, which with a
back wave
(515) Restores you to the level of pure
souls
(516) And leaves you with Plotinus.
None of these,
(517) For native gifts or popular
applause,
(518) I’ve envied; but for this,—that
when by chance
(519) Says some one,—‘There goes
Belmore, a great man!
(520) He leaves clean work behind him,
and requires
(521) No sweeper up of the chips,’ . .
a girl I know,
(522) Who answers nothing, save with
her brown eyes,
(523) Smiles unaware as if a guardian
saint
(524) Smiled in her:—for this,
too,—that Gage comes home
(525) And lays his last book’s
prodigal review
(526) Upon his mother’s knee, where,
years ago,
(527) He laid his childish
spelling-book and learned
(528) To chirp and peck the letters
from her mouth,
(529) As young birds must. ‘Well done,’
she murmured then;
(530) She will not say it now more
wonderingly:
(531) And yet the last ‘Well done’ will
touch him more,
(532) As catching up to-day and
yesterday
(533) In a perfect chord of love: and
so, Mark Gage,
(534) I envy you your mother!—and you,
Graham,
(535) Because you have a wife who loves
you so,
(536) She half forgets, at moments, to
be proud
(537) Of being Graham’s wife, until a
friend observes,
(538) ‘The boy here, has his father’s
massive brow,
(539) Done small in wax . . if we push
back the curls.’
(540) Who loves me? Dearest
father,—mother sweet,—
(541) I speak the names out sometimes
by myself,
(542) And make the silence shiver. They
sound strange,
(543) As Hindostanee to an Ind-born
man
(544) Accustomed many years to English
speech;
(545) Or lovely poet-words grown
obsolete,
(546) Which will not leave off singing.
Up in heaven
(547) I have my father,—with my
mother’s face
(548) Beside him in a blotch of
heavenly light;
(549) No more for earth’s familiar,
household use,
(550) No more. The best verse written
by this hand,
(551) Can never reach them where they
sit, to seem
(552) Well-done to them. Death quite
unfellows us,
(553) Sets dreadful odds betwixt the
live and dead,
(554) And makes us part as those at
Babel did
(555) Through sudden ignorance of a
common tongue.
(556) A living Cæsar would not dare to
play
(557) At bowls with such as my dead
father is.
(558) And yet this may be less so than
appears,
(559) This change and separation.
Sparrows five
(560) For just two farthings, and God
cares for each.
(561) If God is not too great for
little cares,
(562) Is any creature, because gone to
God?
(563) I’ve seen some men, veracious,
nowise mad,
(564) Who have thought or dreamed,
declared and testified,
(565) They heard the Dead a-ticking
like a clock
(566) Which strikes the hours of the
eternities,
(567) Beside them, with their natural
ears,—and known
(568) That human spirits feel the human
way
(569) And hate the unreasoning awe
which waves them off
(570) From possible communion. It may
be.
(571) At least, earth separates as well
as heaven.
(572) For instance, I have not seen
Romney Leigh
(573) Full eighteen months . . add
six, you get two years.
(574) They say he’s very busy with good
works,—
(575) Has parted Leigh Hall into
almshouses.
(576) He made one day an almshouse of
his heart,
(577) Which ever since is loose upon
the latch
(578) For those who pull the string.—I
never did.
(...) ...
(1211) At least I am a poet in being
poor,
(1212) Thank God. I wonder if the
manuscript
(1213) Of my long poem, if ’t were sold
outright,
(1214) Would fetch enough to buy me
shoes to go
(1215) A-foot, (thrown in, the
necessary patch
(1216) For the other side the Alps)? It
cannot be.
(1217) I fear that I must sell this
residue
(1218) Of my father’s books, although
the Elzevirs
(1219) Have fly-leaves over-written by
his hand
(1220) In faded notes as thick and fine
and brown
(1221) As cobwebs on a tawny
monument
(1222) Of the old Greeks—conferenda hæc
cum his—
(1223) Corruptè citat—lege
potiùs,
(1224) And so on, in the scholar’s
regal way
(1225) Of giving judgment on the parts
of speech,
(1226) As if he sate on all twelve
thrones up-piled,
(1227) Arraigning Israel. Ay, but books
and notes
(1228) Must go together. And this
Proclus too,
(1229) In these dear quaint contracted
Grecian types,
(1230) Fantastically crumpled like his
thoughts
(1231) Which would not seem too plain;
you go round twice
(1232) For one step forward, then you
take it back
(1233) Because you’re somewhat giddy;
there’s the rule
(1234) For Proclus. Ah, I stained this
middle leaf
(1235) With pressing in ’t my Florence
iris-bell,
(1236) Long stalk and all: my father
chided me
(1237) For that stain of blue blood,—I
recollect
(1238) The peevish turn his voice
took,—‘Silly girls,
(1239) Who plant their flowers in our
philosophy
(1240) To make it fine, and only spoil
the book!
(1241) No more of it, Aurora.’ Yes—no
more!
(1242) Ah, blame of love, that’s
sweeter than all praise
(1243) Of those who love not! ’t is so
lost to me,
(1244) I cannot, in such beggared life,
afford
(1245) To lose my Proclus,—not for
Florence even.
(1246) The kissing Judas, Wolf, shall
go instead,
(1247) Who builds us such a royal book
as this
(1248) To honour a chief-poet,
folio-built,
(1249) And writes above, ‘The house of
Nobody!’
(1250) Who floats in cream, as rich as
any sucked
(1251) From Juno’s breasts, the broad
Homeric lines,
(1252) And, while with their spondaic
prodigious mouths
(1253) They lap the lucent margins as
babe-gods,
(1254) Proclaims them bastards. Wolf’s
an atheist;
(1255) And if the Iliad fell out, as he
says,
(1256) By mere fortuitous concourse of
old songs,
(1257) Conclude as much too for the
universe.
(1258) That Wolf, those Platos: sweep
the upper shelves
(1259) As clean as this, and so I am
almost rich,
(1260) Which means, not forced to think
of being poor
(1261) In sight of ends. To-morrow: no
delay.
(1262) I’ll wait in Paris till good
Carrington
(1263) Dispose of such and, having
chaffered for
(1264) My book’s price with the
publisher, direct
(1265) All proceeds to me. Just a line
to ask
(1266) His help.
(1266) And now I come, my
Italy,
(1267) My own hills! Are you ’ware of
me, my hills,
(1268) How I burn toward you? do you
feel to-night
(1269) The urgency and yearning of my
soul,
(1270) As sleeping mothers feel the
sucking babe
(1271) And smile?—Nay, not so much as
when in heat
(1272) Vain lightnings catch at your
inviolate tops
(1273) And tremble while ye are
stedfast. Still ye go
(1274) Your own determined, calm,
indifferent way
(1275) Toward sunrise, shade by shade,
and light by light,
(1276) Of all the grand progression
nought left out,
(1277) As if God verily made you for
yourselves
(1278) And would not interrupt your
life with ours.