Aurora Leigh, Book Five

lava-lymphEBB's metaphorical coinage; lymph here probably in the poetic sense of a stream of water (see OED, definition 1a), although the more common sense of a colorless bodily fluid may also be invoked.

finger of God a phrase possibly invoking Michelangelo's image of God in the act of creating Adam in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

theurgic involving the operation of a divine or supernatural agency.

We women are too apt to look to One cf. Aurora's debate with Romney regarding this common Victorian view of gender difference in Book 2, ll.186-304.

We must have mediators / ... blood must quicken in our palms: an echo of Romeo and Juliet Juliet I.v.97-8, "For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss."

Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white: the white, i.e., the bull's-eye; cf. RB's use of this image (" the arrow head in white") to praise EBB's invocation of European "king-poets" in "A Vision of Poets" (1844), see BC 11:15, cited Reynolds, Aurora Leigh Norton, p. 142.

the highest fame was never reached except / By what was aimed above it a philosophy expressed by the Victorian art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) in "On The Nature of Gothic Architecture" in The Stones of Venice (1851-53), who believed that "no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure"; cf. RB's the comparable philosophy in "Andrea del Sarto" (1855), ll. 97-98.

"Let no one be called happy till his death." Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, the last lines (1528-30). See also Euripides,Andromache , 100-101.

My ballads prospered a parallel with EBB's own career; ballads such as "The Romaunt of Margret," "The Poet's Vow" (both 1836), "The Romaunt of the Page" (pub. 1838, dated 1839) and "Rhyme of the Duchess May" (1844) won her both critical praise and popular attention (see the "Introduction," EBB Broadview, pp. 19-24, and the headnotes to these and other ballads in WEBB, vol. 1). The most modern of these in subject matter, "Lady Geraldine's Courtship: A Romance of the Age" (1844), was the prototype of Aurora Leigh. Though it is a hybrid work, written the form of a framed dramatic epistle, EBB and many Victorians categorized it as a ballad (see "Critical Introduction," WEBB, vol. 3 pp. ix-x).

He can stand / Like Atlas, in the sonnet: an echo of ll. 60-63 in Keats' 'To Charles Cowden Clarke' (1817), although there the Atlas metaphor is associated with the ode; see Reynolds, Aurora Leigh Norton, p.144.

"The Hills" EBB may have had in mind the descriptions of the the Malvern Hills, visible from her Hope End childhood home near Ledbury in Herefordshire, described in her own poem, "The Lost Bower" (1844).

stirred its bark / With close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs: the nymph Daphne, fleeing from Apollo's amorous pursuit, was changed into a laurel tree. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.548-52.

A tree's mere firewood, unless humanised,— / Which well the Greeks knew cf. Ruskin's parallel view of the Greek response to Nature in his chapter "Of Classical Landscape" (Modern Painters 3, 1856), noted by Reynolds, Aurora Leigh, Norton, p. 145).

like a fakir in a box / Left too long buried a Hindu devotee or ascetic. Reynolds cites an account by J. M. Honigberger in Thirty-Five Years in the East (London, 1852) of a Hindu religious ascetic named Haridas exhumed in the manner described in the following lines and revived by drawing the tongue back into its natural position (Aurora Leigh Norton, p. 100).

chrism oil mingled with balm consecrated for use in certain sacraments in the Eastern and Western Churches, here applied in a figurative sense.

We want no half-gods, Panomphæan Joves: Panomphæus, meaning "the author of all signs and omens" is a surname of Jove (or Zeus). In "The Dead Pan" (1844, see WEBB, vol. 2), EBB portrays such Greek "half-gods" abolished by Christian salvation.

Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads and the rest fauns: minor rural gods, part man, part goat, often associated with the god Pan; naiads: nymphs thought to inhabit rivers and springs as spirits; tritons: minor sea deities, often portrayed as part man, part fish; oreads: mountain nymphs.

correspondence, to that spirit worldaccording to Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish philosopher, scientist and mystic who had earlier influenced Willliam Blake, every natural object symbolizes or corresponds to some spiritual fact or principle which is its archetype or prototype (a concept also found in Neo-Platonism and Transcendentalism). On Swedenborg's influence on the philosophy of Aurora Leigh, see WEBB, vol. 3, p. xv, and p. 292, n.11).

The critics say the epics have died out a common critical view in the mid-nineteenth century, despite continuing experimentation with epic forms. See Herbert F. Tucker's Epic: Britian's Heroic Muse, 1790-1910. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Agamemnon King of Mycenae and a leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan war; his murder by his wife Clytemnestra is the subject of the Agamemnon (458 BC) by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525-456 BC); on EBB's views of Aeschylus as the greatest Greek poet and her unpublished monodrama on Aeschylus, see the note to Book 1, l. 455.

the goat-nursed gods: Zeus, chief of the Greek gods, was nursed by the goat Amalthea.

Payne Knight: Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824), classical scholar, connoisseur, member of parliament and trustee of the British Museum. EBB's hostility to him stemmed in part from what she saw as his inferior translations (including removal of hundreds of lines from the Iliad and the Odyssey). See WEBB, vol. 3, p. 292, n. 15).

Hector's infant whimpered at a plume: for the description of the infant of Hector, the hero of the Trojans, crying and shunning his father in helmet and armor, see the Iliad 6:466-70; the passage is included (ll. 84-88) in EBB's 1845 translation, "Paraphrases on Homer: Hector and Andromache" (pub. 1862, WEBB, Vol. 4, pp. 144-47)

epos an epic poem.

but every age / Appears to souls who live in't (ask Carlyle) / Most unheroic: an idea frequently expressed by Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) and shared by RB as well as EBB (see BC 12:335).

gaberdines garments of coarse material worn by beggars.

An age of mere transition a phrase used by the philosopher, economist, and later Member of Parliament, John Stuart Mill (1806-73) in an essay entitled 'The Spirit of the Age' (The Examiner, January-May 1831). For RB's comments on the term to EBB in 1846, see (BC 12:335).

Mount Athos carved, as Alexander schemed, / To some colossal statue of a man: Alexander the Great (356-23 BC) , King of Macedon, who conquered the known world. Plutarch in his Lives recounts that Alexander declined the proposal by the artist Stasicrates to transform Mount Athos into a large statue of the king.

I do distrust the poet who discerns / No character or glory in his times /And trundles back his soul five hundred years a satire of the fashion for all things medieval in the 1840s and '50s, reflected in literature, the visual arts, architecture (the Gothic revival) and the staging of medieval tournaments. Although Tennyson noted the parallels between the debate between past and present subjects for poetry in Aurora Leigh and his poem "The Epic" (1842), EBB was critical of Tennyson's own medievalism in works such as The Princess (1847). See WEBB, vol. 3, p. 293, n. 23.

Charlemagne: see note to Book 1, line 771.

more passion, more heroic heat, / Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms phrasing that echoes EBB's description to RB in an 1845 letter of the "novel-poem" she one day hoped to write on the model of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" (1844), "running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawingrooms' (BC 10:102),

Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles The subject of the epic poem of medieval France, La Chanson de Roland (c. 1140-70).

King Arthur's self / Was commonplace to Lady Guenever he legendary king of early Britain and his wife Guenevere, subject matter treated in Tennyson's 'Morte d'Arthur' (1842) and Idylls of the King, the first four books of which appeared in 1859.

Fleet Street: the London centre of newspaper publishing.

[C]atch /Upon the burning lava of a song / The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age a combination of metaphors that one mid-Victorian reviewer (William Roscoe) in the conservative National Review (April 1857) found "almost savage," exclaiming, "Burning lava and a woman's breast! and concentrated in the latter the fullest ideas of life. It is absolute pain to read it. No man could have written it" (p. 245). Another (the Chartist poet and essayist Gerald Massey), however, commended the evocation of "the lava mould of that beautiful bosom found … amongst the ruins of Pompeii" in these and the following lines (North British Review, 36 (May 1862), pp. 517-18).

inward evermore / To outward, -- so in life, and so in art / Which still is life a philosophy central to Aurora Leigh, as a March 1855 letter makes clear: EBB described the work as 'opposing the practical and the ideal lifes, [sic] and showing how the practical and real (so called) is but the external evolution of the ideal and spiritual—that it is from inner to outer, . . whether in life, morals, or art–(see "Critical Introduction, WEBB, vol. 3, p. xiv, and Book 1, l. 1058.). In relation to art, Aurora's philosophy that the inner "spirit" of each work should "make the form" coincides with Romantic theories of form; cf., especially, the distinction between "organic" and "mechanic" form advanced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) in his "Lectures on Shakespeare" (wr.1812).

unities of time and place: principles of Aristotelian dramatic composition adopted and expanded by French classical dramatists; unity of time – the action of a play should occur at one time (i.e. one day) and unity of place – and in one place.

Like Jacob's white-peeled rods before the rams: see Genesis 30:25-43, concerning the dispute between Jacob and his uncle and father-in-law Laban (the father of Leah and Rachael). Laban promises Jacob the "spotted and speckled" (verse 32) cattle, sheep and goats in his herds in return for Jacob's services. When Laban reneges on his promise, Jacob lays parti-colored stakes from trees (some white and peeled, some green) before the flocks to make them conceive more parti-coloured animals through the power of suggestion.

prick the galleries to the heart pierce to the heart or affect the audience in the cheaper balcony seats; figuratively, the less refined or educated audience.

a wigless Hamlet: i.e., a Hamlet without the powdered wig worn in eighteenth-century productions, when Shakespeare was performed in contemporary dress; in the early 19th century, the actor Charles Kemble (1775-1854) introduced historic costuming.

for London or for Edinburgh: principal sites of publication for major periodicals such as, in London, The Athenæum, The Westminster Review, and The Quarterly Review, and in Edinburgh, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, The Edinburgh Review and The North British Review.

write no plays ... adopts the standards of the public taste cf. EBB's comments to RB on 17 and 27 February 1845 concerning the "great mill of the 'rank, popular' playhouse'" and the "vulgariz[ing]" nature of "the modern theatre" (BC 10: 79, 101); see also the note to line 340, below.

pit and boxesthe pit or floor of the theatre (the cheapest area) and the private boxes, reserved by the wealthier classes.

King Saul's father's asses see 1 Samuel 9:20, "And as for thine asses that were lost three days ago, set not thy mind on them; for they are found."

Weep, my Æschylus, / ... thy bald head see the note to Book 1, ll. 454-5, on this allusion to the Greek poet's death in Sicily, the subject of EBB's unpublished "[Aeschylus Monodrama]", long misattributed to RB [hot link to earlier note].

Hyblan bee Hybla, a mountain in Sicily famed for its honey; see, e.g., Virgil's Eclogues 1:54.

Imogen and Juliet Imogen from Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. On EBB's high regard for the Elizabethan dramatists and especially Shakespeare (as opposed to contemporary Victorian theatre), see her survey of English poetry, "The Book of the Poets," WEBB, vol. 4, pp. 461-4.

The sacrificial goat, for Bacchus, slainanimal sacrifice associated with sacred rites for the Greek god Dionysius (Roman name Bacchus), from which the Greek drama arose. See the notes to ll. 319-20 in Aurora Leigh Norton and WEBB, vol. 1.

alter-flame the flame from the thymele, the altar of Dionysus in the centre of the orchestra in the ancient Greek theatre.

waxen mask, / Which set the grand still front of Themis' son the mask worn by actors in Greek drama, here portraying the grand front (a poetical term for forehead) of Prometheus, sometimes referred to as "Themis' son" (i.e., son of the Titan goddess Themis) in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound; see EBB's second translation of the play (1850) in WEBB, vol. 1, ll. 19, 251-3.

buskin The high thick-soled boot (cothurnus) worn by the actors in ancient Athenian tragedy; frequently contrasted with the "sock" or low shoe worn by comedians.

take for a worthier stage the soul itself cf. dramatic poems in WEBB, vol. 1, by EBB such as "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus" (1838), "Bertha in the Lane" (1844) and "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (pub. 1847, dated 1848), as well as RB's much cited comments in a 1863 dedication prefacing his poem Sordello (1840) that his emphasis lay on "incidents in development of a soul." See also EBB's letters to RB of 17 and 27 February 1845, expressing her skepticism of "modern theatre," praising his "dramatic impersonations" (i.e., dramatic monologues), and encouraging him to exercise his "great dramatic power" more in a "less definite mould" , i.e., dramatic poetry as opposed to stage plays (BC 10: 79, 101-2).

that blue vein athrob on Mahomet's brow the vein on Mohammed's brow described as throbbing when he experienced anger in On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) by Thomas Carlyle and other sources; see the note to l. 354 in Aurora Leigh Norton and WEBB, vol. 3. Cf. RB's "Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast" (l. 44, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church" (1845).