ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

1809-1861

Or the kind the foremost writer of English poetry-but a poetess. Or shall I, changing one word, say—and a poetess? For, with beauty everywhere, and womanliness as ubiquitous, I do not presume to decide on the independence, one of the other. Women-writers now and then, like George Sand and George Eliot, if not Currer Bell, have dissembled their sex. Either they have disdained allowances for it; or they have distrusted the superiority of the other to prejudice. Mrs. Browning had none of that affectation, or apprehension. On the contrary, she may be said to have gloried in being a woman.

In any case her verse would have proclaimed the fact. None but a woman-or perhaps a woman immured for a large part of her life in two rooms-could have imagined the repulse of a lover beloved, as in Insufficiency,1 and the martyr's cry of Denial !

I love thee not, I dare not love thee! go

In silence; drop my hand.

If thou seek roses, seek them where they blow

In garden-alleys, not in desert-sand.

Can life and death agree,

That thou shouldst stoop thy song to my complaint?
I cannot love thee. If the word is faint,

Look in my face and see.2

The splendid unreason of Duchess May, the self-devotion to death of the Crusader's bride-page, and the sweet absurdities, not to be read by any male person without a blush, of

Lady Geraldine, are all feminine. So is the conflict, with its result, between the egotism of Isobel's maternal love, and her sick child's craving for his home with the Angels. The grief of the dead blind boy's mother, that she can be no more his sun and moon, and his slave, betrays the same authorship. Pathos, a common gift of poets, is for her steeped in her femininity. Into the dumb affection of her dog this reads the instinct, the impulse, to share his mistress's distress, without requiring to comprehend or justify it

And if one or two quick tears
Dropped upon his glossy ears,
Or a sigh came double,
Up he sprang in eager haste,
Fawning, fondling, breathing fast,
In a tender trouble."

In Wine of Cyprus, noblest, to me, of all her verse, I feel it equally in the affectionate endeavour to balance, as it were, by her own wasting sickness the earlier and different calamity of her aged tutor in Greek. Fondly, as she thanks him for his gift of Hellenic wine, she recalls their studies together in Attic tragedy:

And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek
When, betwixt the folio's turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek :
Past the pane the mountain spreading,
Swept the sheep's bell's tinkling noise,
While a girlish voice was reading,

Somewhat low for ais and ois.

Then, what golden hours were for us!
While we sate together there,
How the white vests of the chorus
Seemed to wave up a live air!

How the cothurns trod majestic
Down the deep iambic lines
And the rolling anapaestic

Curled like vapour over shrines !

Oh, our Aeschylus, the thunderous,
How he drove the bolted breath
Through the cloud, to wedge it ponderous
In the gnarled oak beneath!
Oh, our Sophocles, the royal,

Who was born to monarch's place,
And who made the whole world loyal,
Less by kingly power than grace !

Our Euripides, the human,

With his droppings of warm tears, And his touches of things common, Till they rose to touch the spheres ! Our Theocritus, our Bion,

And our Pindar's shining goals !— These were cup-bearers undying,

Of the wine that 's meant for souls.

And my Plato, the divine one,

If men know the gods aright By their motions as they shine on With a glorious trail of light! And your noble Christian bishops,

Who mouthed grandly the last Greek! Though the sponges on their hyssops Were distent with wine-too weak.

For the rest-a mystic moaning
Kept Cassandra at the gate,
With wild eyes the vision shone in,
And wide nostrils scenting fate.
And Prometheus, bound in passion
By brute Force to the blind stone,
Showed us looks of invocation
Turned to ocean and the sun.

And Medea we saw burning

At her nature's planted stake;
And proud Oedipus fate-scorning

While the cloud came on to break-
While the cloud came on slow, slower,
Till he stood discrowned, resigned !—
But the reader's voice dropped lower
When the poet called him Blind.-

And now-were they not equals in fate? Alas!
For me, I am not worthy

After gods and Greeks to drink
And my lips are pale and earthy
To go bathing from this brink :

Since you heard them speak the last time,
They have faded from their blooms,

And the laughter of my pastime

Has learnt silence at the tombs.1

On account of sex-in spite of it-without relation to it-whichever you will-her work captivates. Its defects are many. The exuberance of words is exasperating. The Lost Bower, for example, delights for a dozen stanzas, and distresses long before the seventy-fourth. The habit of hunting for an occasion of tenderness everywhere is apt to degenerate into spurious sentimentality. The Poet's Vow, and A Child Asleep are flagrant offenders. Poetry has no more business with specific 'poetic' feeling than with 'poetic' diction. A dearth of common sense, and of what I am afraid I must call manliness, is uncomfortably discernible. But, on the other side, the merits are extraordinary. It was an angelic thought to imagine a nightingale in Paradise pursuing the human exiles thence with a regretful adieu :

I am the nearest nightingale
That singeth in Eden after you;

And I am singing loud and true,
And sweet,-I do not fail.

I sit upon a cypress bough

Close to the gate, and I fling my song
Over the gate and through the mail
Of the warden angels marshalled strong,
Over the gate and after you!

And the warden angels let it pass,
Because the poor brown bird, alas,

Sings in the garden, sweet and true.
And I built my song of high pure notes,
Note after note, height over height
Till I strike the arch of the Infinite,
And I bridge abysmal agonies

With strong, clear calms of harmonies,—

And something abides, and something floats,
In the song which I sing after you.

Fare ye well, farewell! 5

Hardly less ethereal is a Portrait :
I will paint her as I see her,

Ten times have the lilies blown,
Since she looked upon the sun.
And her face is lily-clear,

Lily-shaped, and dropped in duty
To the law of its own beauty.
Oval cheeks encoloured faintly,
Which a trail of golden hair
Keeps from fading off to air ;
And a forehead fair and saintly,
Which two blue eyes undershine,
Like meek prayers before a shrine.

Face and figure of a child,—

Thought too calm, you think, and tender,
For the childhood you would lend her

Yet child-simple, undefiled,

Frank, obedient, waiting still

On the turnings of your will.