The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Read Online

“My future will not copy fair my past”—

I wrote that once; and thinking at my side

My ministering life-angel justified

The word by his appealing look upcast

To the white throne of God, I turned at last,

And there, instead, saw thee, not unallied

To angels in thy soul! Then I, long tried

By natural ills, received the comfort fast,

While budding, at thy sight, my pilgrim’s staff

Gave out green leaves with morning dews impearled.

I seek no copy now of life’s first half:

Leave here the pages with long musing curled,

And write me new my future’s epigraph,

New angel mine, unhoped for in the world!

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Belovèd, thou hast brought me many flowers

Plucked in the garden, all the summer through

And winter, and it seemed as if they grew

In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.

So, in the like name of that love of ours,

Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,

And which on warm and cold days I withdrew

From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers

Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,

And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,

Here’s ivy!—take them, as I used to do

Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.

Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,

And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine.

“O trusted broken prophecy,

O richest fortune sourly crost,

Born for the future, to the future lost!”

I heard last night a little child go singing

’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,

O bella libertà, O bella!—stringing

The same words still on notes he went in search

So high for, you concluded the upspringing

Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch

Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green,

And that the heart of Italy must beat,

While such a voice had leave to rise serene

’Twixt church and palace of a Florence street:

A little child, too, who not long had been

By mother’s finger steadied on his feet,

And still O bella libertà he sang.

Then I thought, musing, of the innumerous

Sweet songs which still for Italy outrang

From older singers’ lips who sang not thus

Exultingly and purely, yet, with pang

Fast sheathed in music, touched the heart of us

So finely that the pity scarcely pained.

I thought how Filicaja led on others,

Bewailers for their Italy enchained,

And how they called her childless among mothers,

Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained

Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers

Might a shamed sister’s,—“Had she been less fair

She were less wretched;”—how, evoking so

From congregated wrong and heaped despair

Of men and women writhing under blow,

Harrowed and hideous in a filthy lair,

Some personating Image wherein woe

Was wrapt in beauty from offending much,

They called it Cybele, or Niobe,

Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such,

Where all the world might drop for Italy

Those cadenced tears which burn not where they touch,—

“Juliet of nations, canst thou die as we?

And was the violet crown that crowned thy head

So over-large, though new buds made it rough,

It slipped down and across thine eyelids dead,

O sweet, fair Juliet?” Of such songs enough,

Too many of such complaints! behold, instead,

Void at Verona, Juliet’s marble trough:[2]

As void as that is, are all images

Men set between themselves and actual wrong,

To catch the weight of pity, meet the stress

Of conscience,—since ’t is easier to gaze long

On mournful masks and sad effigies

Than on real, live, weak creatures crushed by strong.

For me who stand in Italy to-day

Where worthier poets stood and sang before,

I kiss their footsteps yet their words gainsay.

I can but muse in hope upon this shore

Of golden Arno as it shoots away

Through Florence’ heart beneath her bridges four:

Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows,

And tremble while the arrowy undertide

Shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes,

And strikes up palace-walls on either side,

And froths the cornice out in glittering rows,

With doors and windows quaintly multiplied,

And terrace-sweeps, and gazers upon all,

By whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out

From any lattice there, the same would fall

Into the river underneath, no doubt,

It runs so close and fast ’twixt wall and wall.

How beautiful! the mountains from without

In silence listen for the word said next.

What word will men say,—here where Giotto planted

His campanile like an unperplexed

Fine question Heavenward, touching the things granted

A noble people who, being greatly vexed

In act, in aspiration keep undaunted?

What word will God say? Michel’s Night and Day

And Dawn and Twilight wait in marble scorn[3]

Like dogs upon a dunghill, couched on clay

From whence the Medicean stamp’s outworn,

The final putting off of all such sway

By all such hands, and freeing of the unborn

In Florence and the great world outside Florence.

Three hundred years his patient statues wait

In that small chapel of the dim Saint Lawrence:

Day’s eyes are breaking bold and passionate

Over his shoulder, and will flash abhorrence

On darkness and with level looks meet fate,

When once loose from that marble film of theirs;

The Night has wild dreams in her sleep, the Dawn

Is haggard as the sleepless, Twilight wears

A sort of horror; as the veil withdrawn

’Twixt the artist’s soul and works had left them heirs

Of speechless thoughts which would not quail nor fawn,

Of angers and contempts, of hope and love:

For not without a meaning did he place

The princely Urbino on the seat above

With everlasting shadow on his face,

While the slow dawns and twilights disapprove

The ashes of his long-extinguished race

Which never more shall clog the feet of men.

I do believe, divinest Angelo,

That winter-hour in Via Larga, when

They bade thee build a statue up in snow[4]

And straight that marvel of thine art again

Dissolved beneath the sun’s Italian glow,

Thine eyes, dilated with the plastic passion,

Thawing too in drops of wounded manhood, since,

To mock alike thine art and indignation,

Laughed at the palace-window the new prince,—

(“Aha! this genius needs for exaltation,

When all’s said and however the proud may wince,

A little marble from our princely mines!”)

I do believe that hour thou laughedst too

For the whole sad world and for thy Florentines,

After those few tears, which were only few!

That as, beneath the sun, the grand white lines

Of thy snow-statue trembled and withdrew,—

The head, erect as Jove’s, being palsied first,

The eyelids flattened, the full brow turned blank,

The right-hand, raised but now as if it cursed,

Dropt, a mere snowball, (till the people sank

Their voices, though a louder laughter burst

From the royal window)—thou couldst proudly thank

God and the prince for promise and presage,

And laugh the laugh back, I think verily,

Thine eyes being purged by tears of righteous rage

To read a wrong into a prophecy,

And measure a true great man’s heritage

Against a mere great-duke’s posterity.

I think thy soul said then, “I do not need

A princedom and its quarries, after all;

For if I write, paint, carve a word, indeed,

On book or board or dust, on floor or wall,

The same is kept of God who taketh heed

That not a letter of the meaning fall

Or ere it touch and teach His world’s deep heart,

Outlasting, therefore, all your lordships, sir!

So keep your stone, beseech you, for your part,

To cover up your grave-place and refer

The proper titles; I live by my art.

The thought I threw into this snow shall stir

This gazing people when their gaze is done;

And the tradition of your act and mine,

When all the snow is melted in the sun,

Shall gather up, for unborn men, a sign

Of what is the true princedom,—ay, and none

Shall laugh that day, except the drunk with wine.”

Amen, great Angelo! the day’s at hand.

If many laugh not on it, shall we weep?

Much more we must not, let us understand.

Through rhymers sonneteering in their sleep

And archaists mumbling dry bones up the land

And sketchers lauding ruined towns a-heap,—

Through all that drowsy hum of voices smooth,

The hopeful bird mounts carolling from brake,

The hopeful child, with leaps to catch his growth,

Sings open-eyed for liberty’s sweet sake:

And I, a singer also from my youth,

Prefer to sing with these who are awake,

With birds, with babes, with men who will not fear

The baptism of the holy morning dew,

(And many of such wakers now are here,

Complete in their anointed manhood, who

Will greatly dare and greatlier persevere,)

Than join those old thin voices with my new,

And sigh for Italy with some safe sigh

Cooped up in music ’twixt an oh and ah,—

Nay, hand in hand with that young child, will I

Go singing rather, “Bella libertà,”

Than, with those poets, croon the dead or cry

“Se tu men bella fossi, Italia!”

“Less wretched if less fair.” Perhaps a truth

Is so far plain in this, that Italy,

Long trammelled with the purple of her youth

Against her age’s ripe activity,

Sits still upon her tombs, without death’s ruth

But also without life’s brave energy.

“Now tell us what is Italy?” men ask:

And others answer, “Virgil, Cicero,

Catullus, Cæsar.” What beside? to task

The memory closer—“Why, Boccaccio,

Dante, Petrarca,”—and if still the flask

Appears to yield its wine by drops too slow,—

“Angelo, Raffael, Pergolese,”—all

Whose strong hearts beat through stone, or charged again

The paints with fire of souls electrical,

Or broke up heaven for music. What more then?

Why, then, no more. The chaplet’s last beads fall

In naming the last saintship within ken,

And, after that, none prayeth in the land.

Alas, this Italy has too long swept

Heroic ashes up for hour-glass sand;

Of her own past, impassioned nympholept!

Consenting to be nailed here by the hand

To the very bay-tree under which she stept

A queen of old, and plucked a leafy branch;

And, licensing the world too long indeed

To use her broad phylacteries to staunch

And stop her bloody lips, she takes no heed

How one clear word would draw an avalanche

Of living sons around her, to succeed

The vanished generations. Can she count

These oil-eaters with large live mobile mouths

Agape for macaroni, in the amount

Of consecrated heroes of her south’s

Bright rosary? The pitcher at the fount,

The gift of gods, being broken, she much loathes

To let the ground-leaves of the place confer

A natural bowl. So henceforth she would seem

No nation, but the poet’s pensioner,

With alms from every land of song and dream,

While aye her pipers sadly pipe of her

Until their proper breaths, in that extreme

Of sighing, split the reed on which they played:

Of which, no more. But never say “no more”

To Italy’s life! Her memories undismayed

Still argue “evermore;” her graves implore

Her future to be strong and not afraid;

Her very statues send their looks before.

We do not serve the dead—the past is past.

God lives, and lifts His glorious mornings up

Before the eyes of men awake at last,

Who put away the meats they used to sup,

And down upon the dust of earth outcast

The dregs remaining of the ancient cup,

Then turn to wakeful prayer and worthy act.

The Dead, upon their awful ’vantage ground,

The sun not in their faces, shall abstract

No more our strength; we will not be discrowned

As guardians of their crowns, nor deign transact

A barter of the present, for a sound

Of good so counted in the foregone days.

O Dead, ye shall no longer cling to us

With rigid hands of desiccating praise,

And drag us backward by the garment thus,

To stand and laud you in long-drawn virelays!

We will not henceforth be oblivious

Of our own lives, because ye lived before,

Nor of our acts, because ye acted well.

We thank you that ye first unlatched the door,

But will not make it inaccessible

By thankings on the threshold any more.

We hurry onward to extinguish hell

With our fresh souls, our younger hope, and God’s

Maturity of purpose. Soon shall we

Die also! and, that then our periods

Of life may round themselves to memory

As smoothly as on our graves the burial-sods,

We now must look to it to excel as ye,

And bear our age as far, unlimited

By the last mind-mark; so, to be invoked

By future generations, as their Dead.

’T is true that when the dust of death has choked

A great man’s voice, the common words he said

Turn oracles, the common thoughts he yoked

Like horses, draw like griffins: this is true

And acceptable. I, too, should desire,

When men make record, with the flowers they strew,

“Savonarola’s soul went out in fire

Upon our Grand-duke’s piazza,[5] and burned through

A moment first, or ere he did expire,

The veil betwixt the right and wrong, and showed

How near God sat and judged the judges there,—”

Upon the self-same pavement overstrewed

To cast my violets with as reverent care,

And prove that all the winters which have snowed

Cannot snow out the scent from stones and air,

Of a sincere man’s virtues. This was he,

Savonarola, who, while Peter sank

With his whole boat-load, called courageously

“Wake Christ, wake Christ!”—who, having tried the tank

Of old church-waters used for baptistry

Ere Luther came to spill them, swore they stank;

Who also by a princely deathbed cried,

“Loose Florence, or God will not loose thy soul!”

Then fell back the Magnificent and died

Beneath the star-look shooting from the cowl,

Which turned to wormwood-bitterness the wide

Deep sea of his ambitions. It were foul

To grudge Savonarola and the rest

Their violets: rather pay them quick and fresh!

The emphasis of death makes manifest

The eloquence of action in our flesh;

And men who, living, were but dimly guessed,

When once free from their life’s entangled mesh,

Show their full length in graves, or oft indeed

Exaggerate their stature, in the flat,

To noble admirations which exceed

Most nobly, yet will calculate in that

But accurately. We, who are the seed

Of buried creatures, if we turned and spat

Upon our antecedents, we were vile.

Bring violets rather. If these had not walked

Their furlong, could we hope to walk our mile?

Therefore bring violets. Yet if we self-baulked

Stand still, a-strewing violets all the while,

These moved in vain, of whom we have vainly talked.

So rise up henceforth with a cheerful smile,

And having strewn the violets, reap the corn,

And having reaped and garnered, bring the plough

And draw new furrows ’neath the healthy morn,

And plant the great Hereafter in this Now.

Of old ’t was so. How step by step was worn,

As each man gained on each securely!—how

Each by his own strength sought his own Ideal,—

The ultimate Perfection leaning bright

From out the sun and stars to bless the leal

And earnest search of all for Fair and Right

Through doubtful forms by earth accounted real!

Because old Jubal blew into delight

The souls of men with clear-piped melodies,

If youthful Asaph were content at most

To draw from Jubal’s grave, with listening eyes,

Traditionary music’s floating ghost

Into the grass-grown silence, were it wise?

And was ’t not wiser, Jubal’s breath being lost,

That Miriam clashed her cymbals to surprise

The sun between her white arms flung apart,

With new glad golden sounds? that David’s strings

O’erflowed his hand with music from his heart?

So harmony grows full from many springs,

And happy accident turns holy art.

You enter, in your Florence wanderings,

The church of Saint Maria Novella. Pass

The left stair, where at plague-time Machiavel[6]

Saw One with set fair face as in a glass,

Dressed out against the fear of death and hell,

Rustling her silks in pauses of the mass,

To keep the thought off how her husband fell,

When she left home, stark dead across her feet,—

The stair leads up to what the Orgagnas save

Of Dante’s dæmons; you, in passing it,

Ascend the right stair from the farther nave

To muse in a small chapel scarcely lit

By Cimabue’s Virgin. Bright and brave,

That picture was accounted, mark, of old:

A king stood bare before its sovran grace,[7]

A reverent people shouted to behold

The picture, not the king, and even the place

Containing such a miracle grew bold,

Named the Glad Borgo from that beauteous face

Which thrilled the artist, after work, to think

His own ideal Mary-smile should stand

So very near him,—he, within the brink

Of all that glory, let in by his hand

With too divine a rashness! Yet none shrink

Who come to gaze here now; albeit ’t was planned

Sublimely in the thought’s simplicity:

The Lady, throned in empyreal state,

Minds only the young Babe upon her knee,

While sidelong angels bear the royal weight,

Prostrated meekly, smiling tenderly

Oblivion of their wings; the Child thereat

Stretching its hand like God. If any should,

Because of some stiff draperies and loose joints,

Gaze scorn down from the heights of Raffaelhood

On Cimabue’s picture,—Heaven anoints

The head of no such critic, and his blood

The poet’s curse strikes full on and appoints

To ague and cold spasms for evermore.

A noble picture! worthy of the shout

Wherewith along the streets the people bore

Its cherub-faces which the sun threw out

Until they stooped and entered the church door.

Yet rightly was young Giotto talked about,

Whom Cimabue found among the sheep,[8]

And knew, as gods know gods, and carried home

To paint the things he had painted, with a deep

And fuller insight, and so overcome

His chapel-Lady with a heavenlier sweep

Of light: for thus we mount into the sum

Of great things known or acted. I hold, too,

That Cimabue smiled upon the lad

At the first stroke which passed what he could do,

Or else his Virgin’s smile had never had

Such sweetness in ’t. All great men who foreknew

Their heirs in art, for art’s sake have been glad,

And bent their old white heads as if uncrowned,

Fanatics of their pure Ideals still

Far more than of their triumphs, which were found

With some less vehement struggle of the will.

If old Margheritone trembled, swooned

And died despairing at the open sill

Of other men’s achievements (who achieved,

By loving art beyond the master), he

Was old Margheritone, and conceived

Never, at first youth and most ecstasy,

A Virgin like that dream of one, which heaved

The death-sigh from his heart. If wistfully

Margheritone sickened at the smell

Of Cimabue’s laurel, let him go!

For Cimabue stood up very well

In spite of Giotto’s, and Angelico

The artist-saint kept smiling in his cell

The smile with which he welcomed the sweet slow

Inbreak of angels (whitening through the dim

That he might paint them), while the sudden sense

Of Raffael’s future was revealed to him

By force of his own fair works’ competence.

The same blue waters where the dolphins swim

Suggest the tritons. Through the blue Immense

Strike out, all swimmers! cling not in the way

Of one another, so to sink; but learn

The strong man’s impulse, catch the freshening spray

He throws up in his motions, and discern

By his clear westering eye, the time of day.

Thou, God, hast set us worthy gifts to earn

Besides Thy heaven and Thee! and when I say

There’s room here for the weakest man alive

To live and die, there’s room too, I repeat,

For all the strongest to live well, and strive

Their own way, by their individual heat,—

Like some new bee-swarm leaving the old hive,

Despite the wax which tempts so violet-sweet.

Then let the living live, the dead retain

Their grave-cold flowers!—though honour’s best supplied

By bringing actions, to prove theirs not vain.

Cold graves, we say? it shall be testified

That living men who burn in heart and brain,

Without the dead were colder.