Aurora Leigh. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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monk’s— The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps Some fair, fine trace of what was written once, Some upstroke of an alpha and omega Expressing the old scripture. Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret-room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large—where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books! At last, because the time was ripe, I chanced upon the poets. As the earth Plunges in fury, when the internal fires Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat The marts and temples, the triumphal gates And towers of observation, clears herself To elemental freedom—thus, my soul, At poetry’s divine first finger-touch, Let go conventions and sprang up surprised, Convicted of the great eternities Before two worlds. What’s this, Aurora Leigh, You write so of the poets, and not laugh? Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, Exaggerators of the sun and moon, And soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write so Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God— The only speakers of essential truth, Opposed to relative, comparative, And temporal truths; the only holders by His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms; The only teachers who instruct mankind, From just a shadow on a charnel-wall, To find man’s veritable stature out, Erect, sublime—the measure of a man, And that’s the measure of an angel, says The apostle. Ay, and while your common men Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine, And dust the flaunty carpets of the world For kings to walk on, or our senators, The poet suddenly will catch them up With his voice like a thunder … ‘This is soul, This is life, this word is being said in heaven, Here’s God down on us! what are you about?’ How all those workers start amid their work, Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space, That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade, Is not the imperative labour after all.
My own best poets, am I one with you, That thus I love you—or but one through love? Does all this smell of thyme about my feet Conclude my visit to your holy hill In personal presence, or but testify The rustling of your vesture through my dreams With influent odours? When my joy and pain, My thought and aspiration, like the stops Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb If not melodious, do you play on me, My pipers—and if, sooth, you did not blow, Would no sound come? or is the music mine, As a man’s voice or breath is called his own, Inbreathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubt For cloudy seasons! But the sun was high When first I felt my pulses set themselves For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence Of blood and brain swept outward upon words, As wind upon the alders, blanching them By turning up their under-natures till They trembled in dilation. O delight And triumph of the poet—who would say A man’s mere ‘yes,’ a woman’s common ‘no,’ A little human hope of that or this, And says the word so that it burns you through With a special revelation, shakes the heart Of all the men and women in the world, As if one came back from the dead and spoke, With eyes too happy, a familiar thing Become divine i’ the utterance! while for him The poet, the speaker, he expands with joy; The palpitating angel in his flesh Thrills inly with consenting fellowship To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves Outside of time. O life, O poetry, —Which means life in life! cognisant of life Beyond this blood-beat—passionate for truth Beyond these senses—poetry, my life— My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot From Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished me Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs, And set me in the Olympian roar and round Of luminous faces, for a cup-bearer, To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist For everlasting laughters—I, myself, Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes! How those gods look! Enough so, Ganymede. We shall not bear above a round or two— We drop the golden cup at Heré’s foot And swoon back to the earth—and find ourselves Face-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew, While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs, ‘What’s come now to the youth?’ Such ups and downs Have poets. Am I such indeed? The name Is royal, and to sign it like a queen, Is what I dare not—though some royal blood Would seem to tingle in me now and then, With sense of power and ache—with imposthumes And manias usual to the race. Howbeit I dare not: ’tis too easy to go mad, And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws; The thing’s too common. Many fervent souls Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel If steel had offered, in a restless heat Of doing something. Many tender souls Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread, As children, cowslips:—the more pains they take, The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids, Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse, Before they sit down under their own vine And live for use. Alas, near all the birds Will sing at dawn—and yet we do not take The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.
In those days, though, I never analysed Myself even. All analysis comes late. You catch a sight of Nature, earliest, In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink And drop before the wonder of’t; you miss The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days, And wrote because I lived—unlicensed else: My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent flood Abolished bounds—and, which my neighbour’s field, Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth. We play at leap-frog over the god Term; The love within us and the love without Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love, We scarce distinguish. So, with other power. Being acted on and acting seem the same: In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels, We know not if the forests move or we.
And so, like most young poets, in a flush Of individual life, I poured myself Along the veins of others, and achieved Mere lifeless imitations of live verse, And made the living answer for the dead, Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste, Nor handle,’—we’re too legal, who write young: We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs, As if still ignorant of counterpoint; We call the Muse. … ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’— As if we had seen her purple-braided head With the eyes in it, start between the boughs As often as a stag’s. What make-believe, With so much earnest! what effete results, From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes, From such white heats!—bucolics, where the cows Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud In lashing off the flies—didactics, driven Against the heels of what the master said; And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps A babe might blow between two straining cheeks Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh; And elegiac griefs, and songs of love, Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road, The worse for being warm: all these things, writ On happy mornings, with a morning heart, That leaps for love, is active for resolve, Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood. The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped, Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in. Spare the old bottles!—spill not the new wine.
By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young—(the life of a long life, Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn For ever;) by that strong excepted soul, I count it strange, and hard to understand, That nearly all young poets should write old; That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen, And beardless Byron academical, And so with others. It may be, perhaps, Such have not settled long and deep enough In trance, to attain to clairvoyance—and still The memory mixes with the vision, spoils, And works it turbid. Or perhaps, again, In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx, The melancholy desert must sweep round, Behind you, as before.— For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true, Because myself was true in writing them. I, peradventure, have writ true ones since With less complacence. But I could not hide My quickening inner life from those at watch. They saw a light at a window now and then, They had not set there. Who had set it there? My father’s sister started when she caught My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say I had no business with a sort of soul, But plainly she objected—and demurred, That souls were dangerous things to carry straight Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world.
She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you done Your task this morning?—have you read that book? And are you ready for the crochet here?’— As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong; I know I have not ground you down enough To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust For household uses and proprieties, Before the rain has got into my barn And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re green With out-door impudence? you almost grow?’ To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task, And verify my abstract of the book?