Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Aurora Leigh (Aurora Leigh) lyrics

Of writing many books there is no end
And I who have written much
In prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine
Will write my story for my better self
As when you paint your portrait for a friend
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is
I, writing thus, am still what men call young
I have not so far left the coasts of life
To travel inland, that I cannot hear
That murmur of the outer Infinite
Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep
Whеn wondered at for smiling not so far
But still I catch my mother at hеr post
Beside the nursery door, with finger up
‘Hush, hush here’s too much noise!’
While her sweet eyes
Leap forward, taking part against her word
In the child’s riot still I sit and feel


My father’s slow hand, when she
Had left us both
Stroke out my childish curls across his knee
And hear Assunta’s daily jest (she knew
He liked it better than a better jest)
Inquire how many golden scudi went
To make such ringlets o my father’s hand
Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily
Draw, press the child’s head
Closer to thy knee!
I’m still too young, too young, to sit alone
I write my mother was a Florentine
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old my life
A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp
Which went out therefore she
Was weak and frail
She could not bear the joy of giving life
The mother’s rapture slew her if her kiss
Had left a longer weight upon my lips
It might have steadied the uneasy breath
And reconciled and fraternised my soul
With the new order as it was, indeed
I felt a mother-want about the world
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold
As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away
Though what
It knows not i, Aurora Leigh, was born
To make my father sadder, and myself
Not overjoyous, truly women know
The way to rear up children (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes
And stringing pretty words that
Make no sense
And kissing full sense into empty words
Which things are corals to cut life upon
Although such trifles: children
Learn by such
Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play
And get not over-early solemnised
But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine
Which burns and hurts not
Not a single bloom
Become aware and unafraid of Love
Such good do mothers fathers love as well
Mine did, I know, but
Still with heavier brains
And wills more consciously responsible
And not as wisely, since less foolishly
So mothers have God’s licence to be missed
My father was an austere Englishman
Who, after a dry life-time spent at home
In college learning, law, and parish talk
Was flooded with a passion unaware
His whole provisioned and complacent past
Drowned out from him that moment as he stood
In Florence
Where he had come to spend a month
And note the secret of Da Vinci’s drains
He musing somewhat absently perhaps
Some English question whether men should pay
The unpopular but necessary tax
With left or right hand in the alien sun
In that great square of the Santissima
There drifted past him
(scarcely marked enough
To move his comfortable island-scorn)
A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm
The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens
Holding up
Tall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslant
To the blue luminous tremor of the air
And letting drop the white wax as they went
To eat the bishop’s wafer at the church
From which long trail of
Chanting priests and girls
A face flashed like a cymbal on his face
And shook with silent clangour
Brain and heart
Transfiguring him to music thus, even thus
He too received his sacramental gift
With eucharistic meanings for he loved
And thus beloved, she died i’ve heard it said
That but to see him in the first surprise
Of widower and father, nursing me
Unmothered little child of four years old
His large man’s hands afraid
To touch my curls
As if the gold would tarnish, his grave lips
Contriving such a miserable smile
As if he knew needs must, or I should die
And yet ’twas hard
Would almost make the stones
Cry out for pity there’s a verse he set
In Santa Croce to her memory
‘Weep for an infant too young to weep much
When death removed this mother’
Stops the mirth
To day, on women’s faces when they walk
With rosy children hanging on their gowns
Under the cloister, to escape the sun
That scorches in the piazza after which
He left our Florence, and made haste to hide
Himself, his prattling child
And silent grief
Among the mountains above Pelago
Because unmothered babes, he thought
Had need
Of mother nature more than others use
And Pan’s white goats
With udders warm and full
Of mystic contemplations, come to feed
Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own
Such scholar-scraps he talked, I’ve
Heard from friends
For even prosaic men, who wear grief long
Will get to wear it as a hat aside
With a flower stuck in’t
Father, then, and child
We lived among the mountains many years
God’s silence on the outside of the house
And we, who did not speak too loud, within
And old Assunta to make up the fire
Crossing herself whene’er a sudden flame
Which lightened from the firewood, made alive
That picture of my mother on the wall
The painter drew it after she was dead
And when the face was
Finished, throat and hands
Her cameriera carried him, in hate
Of the English-fashioned shroud
The last brocade
She dressed in at the Pitti ‘He should paint
No sadder thing than that, ’ she swore
‘to wrong
Her poor signora’ Therefore very strange
The effect was i, a little child
Would crouch for hours upon the floor
With knees drawn up
And gaze across them, half in terror, half
In adoration, at the picture there
That swan-like supernatural white life
Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk
Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power
To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:
For hours I sate and stared assunta’s awe
And my poor father’s melancholy eyes
Still pointed that way that way
Went my thoughts
When wandering beyond sight and as I grew
In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously
Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed
Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful
Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque
With still that face which
Did not therefore change
But kept the mystic level of all forms
And fears and admirations was by turns
Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy
Witch, and sprite
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate
A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love
A still Medusa, with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as
Sweat will or, anon
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked or, Lamia in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she
Shrunk and blinked
And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean
Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile
In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth
My father pushed down on the bed for that
Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss
Buried at Florence all which images
Concentred on the picture, glassed themselves
Before my meditative childhood, as
The incoherencies of change and death
Are represented fully, mixed and merged
In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life
And while I stared away my childish wit's
Upon my mother’s picture (ah, poor child)
My father, who through love had suddenly
Thrown off the old conventions, broken loose
From chin bands of the soul, like Lazarus
Yet had no time to learn to talk and walk
Or grow anew familiar with the sun
Who had reached to freedom
Not to action, lived
But lived as one entranced
With thoughts, not aims
Whom love had unmade from a common man
But not completed to an uncommon man
My father taught me what he
Had learnt the best
Before he died and left me, grief and love
And, seeing we had books among the hills
Strong words of counselling souls
Confederate
With vocal pines and waters, out of books
He taught me all the ignorance of men
And how God laughs in heaven when any man
Says ‘Here I’m learned this, I understand
In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt’
He sent the schools to school, demonstrating
A fool will pass for
Such through one mistake
While a philosopher will pass for such
Through said mistakes being ventured
In the gross and heaped up to a system
I am like
They tell me, my dear father broader brows
Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth
Of delicate features, paler, near as grave
But then my mother’s smile
Breaks up the whole
And makes it better sometimes than it'self
So, nine full years
Our days were hid with God
Among his mountains i was just thirteen
Still growing like the plants
From unseen roots
In tongue-tied Springs, and suddenly awoke
To full life and it's needs and agonies
With an intense, strong
Struggling heart beside
A stone-dead father life, struck
Sharp on death
Makes awful lightning his last word was
‘Love ’ ‘Love, my child, love, love!’
(then he had done with grief)
‘Love, my child’ Ere I answered he was gone
And none was left to love in all the world
There, ended childhood: what succeeded next
I recollect as, after fevers, men
Thread back the passage of delirium
Missing the turn still, baffled by the door
Smooth endless days
Notched here and there with knives
A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i’ the flank
With flame
That it should eat and end it'self
Like some tormented scorpion then, at last
I do remember clearly, how there came
A stranger with authority, not right
(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up
From old Assunta’s neck how, with a shriek
She let me go, while I, with ears too full
Of my father’s silence, to
Shriek back a word
In all a child’s astonishment at grief
Stared at the wharfage where
She stood and moaned
My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!
The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy
Drawn backward from the
Shuddering steamer-deck
Like one in anger drawing back her skirts
Which suppliants catch at then the bitter sea
Inexorably pushed between us both
And sweeping up the ship with my despair
Threw us out as a pasture to the stars
Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep
Ten nights and days, without the common face
Of any day or night the moon and sun
Cut off from the green reconciling earth
To starve into a blind ferocity
And glare unnatural the very sky
(Dropping it's bell-net down upon the sea
As if no human heart should scape alive)
Bedraggled with the desolating salt
Until it seemed no more that holy heaven
To which my father went all new, and strange
The universe turned stranger, for a child
Then, land! then, England! oh
The frosty cliffs
Looked cold upon me could I find a home
Among those mean red houses through the fog?
And when I heard my father’s language first
From alien lips which had no kiss for mine
I wept aloud, then laughed
Then wept, then wept
And some one near me said the child was mad
Through much sea-sickness the train
Swept us on
Was this my father’s England? the great isle?
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship
Of verdure, field from field, as man from man
The skies themselves looked low and positive
As almost you could touch them with a hand
And dared to do it, they were so far off
From God’s celestial crystals all things
Blurred and dull and vague did
Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here? not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant colour up
Or active outline on the indifferent air!
I think I see my father’s sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country-house
To give me welcome she
Stood straight and calm
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses brown hair
Pricked with grey
By frigid use of life (she was not old
Although my father’s elder by a year)
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines
A close mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves
Or peradventure niggardly half-truths
Eyes of no colour, once
They might have smiled
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling cheeks, in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book
Kept more for ruth than
Pleasure, if past bloom, past fading also
She had lived, we’ll say
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life
A quiet life, which was not life at all
(But that, she had not lived enough to know)
Between the vicar and the county squires
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyreal, to assure their souls
Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss
The apothecary looked on once a year
To prove their soundness of humility
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats
Because we are of one flesh after all
And need one flannel (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality) and still
The book-club, guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions
From the crease
Preserved her intellectual she had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird
Dear heaven
How silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries! I, alas
A wild bird scarcely fledged, was
Brought to her cage
And she was there to meet me very kind
Bring the clean water give out the fresh seed
She stood upon the steps to welcome me
Calm, in black garb i clung about her neck
Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool
To draw the new light closer, catch and cling
Less blindly in my ears, my father’s word
Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells
‘Love, love, my child’ She, black
There with my grief
Might feel my love she was his sister once
I clung to her a moment, she seemed moved
Kissed me with cold lips
Suffered me to cling
And drew me feebly through the hall, into
The room she sate in
There, with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm’s length
And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face, ay, stabbed
It through and through
Through brows and cheeks and chin
As if to find
A wicked murderer in my innocent face
If not here, there perhaps
Then, drawing breath
She struggled for her ordinary calm
And missed it rather, told me not to shrink
As if she had told me not to lie or swear
‘She loved my father, and would love me too
As long as I deserved it’ Very kind
I understood her meaning afterward
She thought to find my mother in my face
And questioned it for that for she, my aunt
Had loved my father truly, as she could
And hated, with the gall of gentle souls
My Tuscan mother, who had fooled away
A wise man from wise courses, a good man
From obvious duties, and, depriving her
His sister, of the household precedence
Had wronged his tenants, robbed
His native land
And made him mad, alike by life and death
In love and sorrow she had pored for years
What sort of woman could be suitable
To her sort of hate, to entertain it with
And so, her very curiosity
Became hate too, and all the idealism
She ever used in life, was used for hate
Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at last
The love from which it grew
In strength and heat
And wrinkled her smooth conscience
With a sense
Of disputable virtue (say not, sin)
When Christian doctrine was
Enforced at church
And thus my father’s sister was to me
My mother’s hater from that day, she did
Her duty to me (I appreciate it
In her own word as spoken to herself)
Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out
But measured always she was generous, bland
More courteous than was tender, gave me still
The first place
As if fearful that God’s saints
Would look down suddenly and say, ‘Herein
You missed a point, I think
Through lack of love’
Alas, a mother never is afraid
Of speaking angerly to any child
Since love, she knows, is justified of love
And I, I was a good child on the whole
A meek and manageable child why not?
I did not live, to have the faults of life:
There seemed more true life
In my father’s grave
Than in all England since that threw me off
Who fain would cleave
(his latest will, they say
Consigned me to his land) I only thought
Of lying quiet there where I was thrown
Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her
To prick me to a pattern with her pin
Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf
And dry out from my drowned anatomy
The last sea-salt left in me so it was
I broke the copious curls upon my head
In braids
Because she liked smooth-ordered hair
I left off saying my sweet Tuscan words
Which still at any stirring of the heart
Came up to float across the English phrase
As lilies (Bene or che ch’è) because
She liked my father’s child
To speak his tongue
I learnt the collects and the catechism
The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice
The Articles the Tracts against the times
(By no means Buonaventure’s ‘Prick of Love
’) and various popular synopses of
Inhuman doctrines never taught by John
Because she liked instructed piety
I learnt my complement of classic French
(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism)
And German also, since she liked a range
Of liberal education, tongues, not books
I learnt a little algebra, a little
Of the mathematics
Brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences, because
She misliked women who are frivolous
I learnt the royal genealogies
Of Oviedo, the internal laws
Of the Burmese empire, by how many feet
Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh
What navigable river joins it'self
To Lara, and what census of the year five
Was taken at Klagenfurt, because she liked
A general insight into useful facts
I learnt much music, such as would have been
As quite impossible in Johnson’s day
As still it might be wished
Fine sleights of hand
And unimagined fingering, shuffling off
The hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notes
To a noisy Tophet and I drew costumes
From French engravings, nereids
Neatly draped
With smirks of simmering godship, I washed in
From nature, landscapes
(rather say, washed out)
I danced the polka and Cellarius
Spun glass, stuffed birds, and
Modelled flowers in wax
Because she liked accomplishments in girls
I read a score of books on womanhood
To prove, if women do not think at all
They may teach thinking (to a maiden-aunt
Or else the author) books demonstrating
Their right of comprehending husband’s talk
When not too deep, and even of answering
With pretty ‘may it please, you
’ or ‘so it is, ’
Their rapid insight and fine aptitude
Particular worth and general missionariness
As long as they keep quiet by the fire
And never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay, ’
For that is fatal, their angelic reach
Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn
And fatten household sinners
Their, in brief
Potential faculty in everything
Of abdicating power in it: she owned
She liked a woman to be womanly
And English women, she thanked
God and sighed
(Some people always sigh in thanking God)
Were models to the universe and last
I learnt cross-stitch
Because she did not like
To see me wear the night with empty hands
A doing nothing so, my shepherdess
Was something after all (the pastoral saints
Be praised for’t) leaning lovelorn
With pink eyes
To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks
Her head uncrushed by that
Round weight of hat
So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell
Which slew the tragic poet by the way
The works of women are symbolical
We sew, sew, prick our
Fingers, dull our sight
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir
To put on when you’re weary or a stool
To stumble over and vex
You ‘curse that stool!’
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not
But would be for your sake alas, alas!
This hurts most, this that, after all
We are paid the worth of our work, perhaps
In looking down
Those years of education (to return)
I wonder if Brinvilliers suffered more
In the water-torture, flood succeeding flood
To drench the incapable throat
And split the veins
Than I did certain of your feebler souls
Go out in such a process many pine
To a sick, inodorous light my own endured:
I had relations in the Unseen, and drew
The elemental nutriment and heat
From nature, as earth feels
The sun at nights
Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark
I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outside
Of the inner life, with all it's ample room
For heart and lungs, for will and intellect
Inviolable by conventions god
I thank thee for that grace of thine!
At first
I felt no life which was not patience, did
The thing she bade me
Without heed to a thing
Beyond it, sate in just the chair she placed
With back against the window, to exclude
The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn
Which seemed to have come on
Purpose from the woods
To bring the house a message, ay, and walked
Demurely in her carpeted low rooms
As if I should not, harkening my own steps
Misdoubt I was alive i read her books
Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh
Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors
And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup
(I blushed for joy at
That) ‘The Italian child
For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways
Thrives ill in England: she is paler yet
Than when we came the last time she will die’
‘Will die’ My cousin, Romney
Leigh, blushed too
With sudden anger, and approaching me
Said low between his teeth
‘You’re wicked now?
You wish to die and leave the world a-dusk
For others
With your naughty light blown out?’
I looked into his face defyingly
He might have known, that, being what I was
’Twas natural to like to get away
As far as dead folk can and then indeed
Some people make no trouble when they die
He turned and went abruptly, slammed the door
And shut his dog out romney, Romney Leigh
I have not named my cousin hitherto
And yet I used him as a sort of friend
My elder by few years, but cold and shy
And absent tender, when he thought of it
Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes
As well as early master of Leigh Hall
Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youth
Repressing all it's seasonable delights
And agonising with a ghastly sense
Of universal hideous want and wrong
To incriminate possession when he came
From college to the country, very oft
He crossed the hills on visit's to my aunt
With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses
A book in one hand, mere statistics (if
I chanced to lift the cover) count of all
The goats whose beards are
Sprouting down toward hell
Against God’s separating judgment-hour
And she, she almost loved him, even allowed
That sometimes he should seem to sigh my way
It made him easier to be pitiful
And sighing was his gift so, undisturbed
At whiles she let him shut my music up
And push my needles down, and lead me out
To see in that south angle of the house
The figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock
On some light pretext she would turn her head
At other moments, go to fetch a thing
And leave me breath enough to speak with him
For his sake it was simple sometimes too
He would have saved me utterly, it seemed
He stood and looked so
Once, he stood so near
He dropped a sudden hand upon my head
Bent down on woman’s work, as soft as rain
But then I rose and shook it off as fire
The stranger’s touch that took
My father’s place, yet dared seem soft
I used him for a friend
Before I ever knew him for a friend
’Twas better, ’twas worse also, afterward:
We came so close, we saw our differences
Too intimately always Romney Leigh
Was looking for the worms, I for the gods
A godlike nature his the gods look down
Incurious of themselves and certainly
’Tis well I should remember, how, those days
I was a worm too, and he looked on me
A little by his act perhaps, yet more
By something in me, surely not my will
I did not die but slowly, as one in swoon
To whom life creeps back in
The form of death
With a sense of separation, a blind pain
Of blank obstruction, and a roar i’ the ears
Of visionary chariots which retreat
As earth grows clearer slowly, by degrees
I woke, rose up where was I? in the world
For uses, therefore, I must count worth while
I had a little chamber in the house
As green as any privet hedge a bird
Might choose to build in
Though the nest it'self
Could show but dead-brown sticks
And straws the walls
Were green, the carpet was pure green
The straight
Small bed was curtained greenly
And the folds
Hung green about the window, which let in
The out door world with all it's greenery
You could not push your head out and escape
A dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle
But so you were baptised into the grace
And privilege of seeing first, the lime
(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure
My morning-dream was often hummed away
By the bees in it) past the lime, the lawn
Which, after sweeping broadly
Round the house
Went trickling through the shrubberies
In a stream
Of tender turf, and wore and lost it'self
Among the acacias, over which, you saw
The irregular line of elms by the deep lane
Which stopped the grounds and
Dammed the overflow
Of arbutus and laurel out of sight
The lane was sunk so deep, no foreign tramp
Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales
Could guess if lady’s hall or tenant’s lodge
Dispensed such odours
Though his stick well-crooked
Might reach the lowest trail
Of blossoming briar
Which dipped upon the wall behind the elms
And through their tops
You saw the folded hills
Striped up and down with hedges (burly oaks
Projecting from the lines to show themselves)
Through which my cousin
Romney’s chimneys smoked
As still as when a silent mouth in frost
Breathes showing where the woodlands
Hid Leigh Hall
While, far above, a jut of table land
A promontory without water, stretched
You could not catch it if
The days were thick
Or took it for a cloud but, otherwise
The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve
And use it for an anvil till he had filled
The shelves of heaven
With burning thunderbolts
And proved he need not rest so early: then
When all his setting trouble was resolved
To a trance of passive glory, you might see
In apparition on the golden sky
(Alas, my Giotto’s background) the sheep run
Along the fine clear outline, small as mice
That run along a witch’s scarlet thread
Not a grand nature not my chestnut-woods
Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs
To the precipices not my headlong leaps
Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear
In leaping through the palpitating pines
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity
With thrills of time upon it not indeed
My multitudinous mountains, sitting in
The magic circle, with the mutual touch
Electric, panting from their full deep hearts
Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for
Communion and commission italy
Is one thing, England one on English ground
You understand the letter ere the fall
How Adam lived in a garden all the fields
Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like
The hills are crumpled plains
The plains, parterres
The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped
And if you seek for any wilderness
You find, at best, a park a nature tamed
And grown domestic like a barn door fowl
Which does not awe you with
It's claws and beak
Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up
But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of
Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast
In the pause of finer meditation
Rather say
A sweet familiar nature, stealing in
As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand
Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so
Of presence and affection, excellent
For inner uses, from the things without
I could not be unthankful, I who was
Entreated thus and holpen in the room
I speak of, ere the house was well awake
And also after it was well asleep
I sate alone, and drew the blessing in
Of all that nature with a gradual step
A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray
It came in softly, while the angels made
A place for it beside me the moon came
And swept my chamber clean
Of foolish thoughts the sun came, saying
‘Shall I lift this light
Against the lime-tree, and you will not look?
I make the birds sing listen! but, for you
God never hears your voice, excepting when
You lie upon the bed at nights and weep’
Then, something moved me then, I wakened up
More slowly than I verily write now
But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide
The window and my soul, and let the airs
And out door sights sweep gradual gospels in
Regenerating what I was o Life
How oft we throw it off and think, ‘Enough
Enough of life in so much! here’s a cause
For rupture herein we must break with Life
Or be ourselves unworthy here we are wronged
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration:
Farewell Life!’
And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended then, Life calls to us
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice
Above us, or below us, or around
Perhaps we name it Nature’s voice, or Love’s
Tricking ourselves
Because we are more ashamed
To own our compensations than our griefs:
Still, Life’s voice! still
We make our peace with Life
And I, so young then, was not sullen soon
I used to get up early, just to sit
And watch the morning quicken in the grey
And hear the silence open like a flower
Leaf after leaf
And stroke with listless hand
The woodbine through the window, till at last
I came to do it with a sort of love
At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled
A melancholy smile, to catch myself
Smiling for joy capacity for joy
Admit's temptation it seemed, next
Worth while
To dodge the sharp sword set against my life
To slip down stairs through
All the sleepy house
As mute as any dream there, and escape
As a soul from the body, out of doors
Glide through the shrubberies, drop
Into the lane
And wander on the hills an hour or two
Then back again before the house should stir
Or else I sate on in my chamber green
And lived my life, and thought my thoughts
And prayed
My prayers without the vicar read my books
Without considering whether they were fit
To do me good mark, there we get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book
And calculating profit's so much help
By so much reading it is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a
Book’s profound
Impassioned for it's beauty and salt of truth
’Tis then we get the right good from a book
I read much what my father taught before
From many a volume, Love re-emphasised
Upon the self-same pages: Theophrast
Grew tender with the memory of his eyes
And Ælian made mine wet the trick of Greek
And Latin, he had taught me, as he would
Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives
If such he had known
Most like a shipwrecked man
Who heaps his single platter
With goats’ cheese
And scarlet berries or like any man
Who loves but one, and so gives all at once
Because he has it, rather than because
He counts it worthy thus, my father gave
And thus, as did the women formerly
By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil
Across the boy’s audacious front, and swept
With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks
He wrapt his little daughter in his large
Man’s doublet, careless did it fit or no
But, after I had read for memory
I read for hope the path my father’s foot
Had trod me out, which suddenly broke off
(What time he dropped the wallet of the flesh
And passed) alone I carried on, and set
My child heart ’gainst the thorny underwood
To reach the grassy shelter of the trees
Ah, babe i’ the wood, without a brother babe!
My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird
Flies back to cover all that past with leaves
Sublimest danger, over which none weeps
When any young wayfaring soul goes forth
Alone, unconscious of the perilous road
The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes
To thrust his own way, he an alien, through
The world of books! Ah, you!
You think it fine
You clap hands ‘A fair day!’
You cheer him on
As if the worst, could happen, were to rest
Too long beside a fountain yet, behold
Behold! the world of books is still the world
And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant for the wicked there
Are winged like angels every
Knife that strikes
Is edged from elemental fire to assail
A spiritual life the beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness power is justified
Though armed against St michael many a crown
Covers bald foreheads in
The book-world, true
There’s no lack, neither, of
God’s saints and kings
That shake the ashes of the grave aside
From their calm locks, and undiscomfited
Look stedfast truths against
Time’s changing mask
True, many a prophet teaches in the roads
True, many a seer pulls
Down the flaming heavens
Upon his own head in strong martyrdom
In order to light men a moment’s space
But stay! who judges? who distinguishes
’Twixt Saul and Nahash justly
At first sight
And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin
To serve king David? who discerns at once
The sound of the trumpets
When the trumpets blow
For Alaric as well as Charlemagne?
Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers
From conjurors? The child
There? Would you leave
That child to wander in a battle-field
And push his innocent smile against the guns?
Or even in the catacombs, his torch
Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all
The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!
I read books bad and good some bad and good
At once: good aims not
Always make good books:
Well-tempered spades turn up
Ill-smelling soils
In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove
God’s being so definitely, that man’s doubt
Grows self-defined the other side the line
Made atheist by suggestion moral books
Exasperating to license genial books
Discounting from the human dignity
And merry books, which set you weeping when
The sun shines, ay, and melancholy books
Which make you laugh that any one should weep
In this disjointed life, for one wrong more
The world of books is still
The world, I write
And both worlds have God’s
Providence, thank God
To keep and hearten: with
Some struggle, indeed, among the breakers
Some hard swimming through
The deeps I lost breath in my soul sometimes
And cried, ‘God save me if there’s any God, ’
But, even so, God saved me and, being dashed
From error on to error, every turn
Still brought me nearer to the central truth
I thought so all this anguish in the thick
Of men’s opinions press and counterpress
Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now
Emergent all the best of it, perhaps
But throws you back upon a noble trust
And use of your own instinct, merely proves
Pure reason stronger than bare inference
At strongest try it
Fix against heaven’s wall
Your scaling ladders of high logic mount
Step by step! Sight goes
Faster that still ray
Which strikes out from you
How, you cannot tell
And why, you know not (did you eliminate
That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)
Goes straight and fast as light
And high as God
The cygnet finds the water but the man
Is born in ignorance of his element
And feels out blind at first, disorganised
By sin i’ the blood
His spirit-insight dulled
And crossed by his sensations presently
We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes
Then, mark, be reverent, be obedient
For those dumb motions of imperfect life
Are oracles of vital Deity
Attesting the Hereafter let who says
‘The soul’s a clean white
Paper, ’ rather say
A palimpsest, a prophet’s holograph
Defiled, erased and covered by a 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 spirit's
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?
And should I sit down to the crochet work?
Was such her pleasure?’ then
I sate and teased
The patient needle till it spilt the thread
Which oozed off from it in meandering lace
From hour to hour i was not, therefore, sad
My soul was singing at a work apart
Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm
As sings the lark when sucked
Up out of sight
In vortices of glory and blue air
And so, through forced work
And spontaneous work
The inner life informed the outer life
Reduced the irregular blood
To settled rhythms, made cool the forehead
With fresh-sprinkling dreams
And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin
Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks
Though somewhat faint i clenched
My brows across
My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass
And said, ‘We’ll live
Aurora! we’ll be strong
The dogs are on us but we will not die’
Whoever lives true life, will love true love
I learnt to love that England very oft
Before the day was born, or otherwise
Through secret windings of the afternoons
I threw my hunters off and plunged myself
Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag
Will take the waters, shivering with the fear
And passion of the course and when, at last
Escaped, so many a green slope built on slope
Betwixt me and the enemy’s house behind
I dared to rest, or wander, like a rest
Made sweeter for the step upon the grass
And view the ground’s most gentle dimplement
(As if God’s finger touched but did not press
In making England) such an up and down
Of verdure, nothing too much up or down
A ripple of land such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly and
The wheatfields climb
Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises
Fed full of noises by invisible streams
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew, at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade
I thought my father’s land was worthy too
Of being my Shakspeare’s very oft alone
Unlicensed not unfrequently with leave
To walk the third with Romney and his friend
The rising painter, Vincent Carrington
Whom men judge hardly, as bee-bonnetted
Because he holds that, paint a body well
You paint a soul by implication, like
The grand first Master pleasant walks! for if
He said ‘When I was last in Italy’
It sounded as an instrument that’s played
Too far off for the tune and yet it’s fine
To listen ofter we walked only two
If cousin Romney please, d to walk with me
We read, or talked, or quarrelled
As it chanced: We were not lovers
Nor even friends well matched
Say rather, scholars upon different tracks
And thinkers disagreed he, overfull
Of what is, and I, haply, overbold
For what might be
But then the thrushes sang
And shook my pulses and the elms’ new leaves
And then I turned, and held my finger up
And bade him mark that, howsoe’er the world
Went ill, as he related, certainly
The thrushes still sang in it at which word
His brow would soften, and he bore with me
In melancholy patience, not unkind
While, breaking into voluble ecstacy
I flattered all the beauteous country round
As poets use the skies
The clouds, the fields
The happy violets hiding from the roads
The primroses run down to, carrying gold
The tangled hedgerows
Where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
’Twixt dripping ash-boughs
Hedgerows all alive with birds and gnats and
Large white butterflies which look as if the
May-flower had caught life
And palpitated forth upon the wind
Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills
And cattle grazing in the watered vales
And cottage chimneys smoking from the woods
And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere
Confused with smell of orchards
‘See, ’ I said
‘And see! is God not with us on the earth?
And shall we put Him down by aught we do?
Who says there’s nothing for
The poor and vile
Save poverty and wickedness? behold!’
And ankle deep in English grass I leaped
And clapped my hands
And called all very fair
In the beginning when God called all good
Even then, was evil near us, it is writ
But we, indeed, who call
Things good and fair
The evil is upon us while we speak
Deliver us from evil, let us pray