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MOTHERLESS
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 snatch’d up from a failing lamp | |
| Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail; | 5 |
| 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 reconcil’d and fraterniz’d my soul | 10 |
| 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 | 15 |
| 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.) | 20 |
| 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, | 25 |
| Although such trifles: children learn by such, | |
| Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play, | |
| And get not over-early solemniz’d,— | |
| But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine, | |
| Which burns and hurts not,—not a single bloom,— | 30 |
| 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; | 35 |
| So mothers have God’s license to be miss’d. | |
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BOOKS
Or else I sat on in my chamber green, | |
| And liv’d my life, and thought my thoughts, and pray’d | |
| My prayers without the vicar; read my books, | |
| Without considering whether they were fit | 40 |
| To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good | |
| By being ungenerous, even to a book, | |
| And calculating profits … so much help | |
| By so much reading. It is rather when | |
| We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge | 45 |
| Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s pro-found, | |
| Impassion’d for its beauty and salt of truth— | |
| ’T is then we get the right good from a book. | |
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THE POETS
I had found the secret of a garret-room | |
| Pil’d high with cases in my father’s name; | 50 |
| Pil’d high, pack’d 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, | 55 |
| 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! | 60 |
| At last, because the time was ripe, | |
| I chanced upon the poets. | |
| As the earth | |
| Plunges in fury, when the internal fires | |
| Have reach’d and prick’d her heart, and, throwing flat | 65 |
| 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 surpris’d, | 70 |
| Convicted of the great eternities | |
| Before the worlds. | |
| What ’s this, Aurora Leigh, | |
| You write so of the poets, and not laugh? | |
| Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, | 75 |
| 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, | 80 |
| Oppos’d to relative, comparative, | |
| And temporal truths; the only holders by | |
| His sun-skirts, through conventional gray glooms; | |
| The only teachers who instruct mankind, | |
| From just a shadow on a charnel wall, | 85 |
| 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. | |
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THE FERMENT OF NEW WINE
And so, like most young poets, in a flush | 90 |
| Of individual life, I pour’d myself | |
| Along the veins of others, and achiev’d | |
| Mere lifeless imitations of live verse, | |
| And made the living answer for the dead, | |
| Profaning nature. “Touch not, do not taste, | 95 |
| 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 | 100 |
| 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 | 105 |
| Would scare the writer if they splash’d 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 | 110 |
| Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh; | |
| And elegiac griefs, and songs of love, | |
| Like cast-off nosegays pick’d up on the road, | |
| The worse for being warm: all these things, writ | |
| On happy mornings, with a morning heart, | 115 |
| That helps 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 warp’d, | |
| Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in. | 120 |
| Spare the old bottles!—spill not the new wine. | |
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| By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepp’d | |
| In gradual progress like another man, | |
| But, turning grandly on his central self, | |
| Enspher’d himself in twenty perfect years | 125 |
| And died, not young,—(the life of a long life, | |
| Distill’d 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, | 130 |
| 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 | 135 |
| 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, | 140 |
| 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. | 145 |
| I, peradventure, have writ true ones since | |
| With less complacence. | |
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ENGLAND
Whoever lives true life, will love true love. | |
| I learn’d to love that England. Very oft, | |
| Before the day was born, or otherwise | 150 |
| 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 | 155 |
| Escap’d,—so many a green slope built on slope | |
| Betwixt me and the enemy’s house behind, | |
| I dar’d to rest, or wander,—like a rest | |
| Made sweeter for the step upon the grass,— | |
| And view the ground’s most gentle dimplement, | 160 |
| (As if God’s finger touch’d 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; | 165 |
| Such nooks of valleys, lin’d 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 | 170 |
| Self-pois’d upon their prodigy of shade,— | |
| I thought my father’s land was worthy too | |
| Of being my Shakespear’s.… | |
| …Breaking into voluble ecstacy, | |
| I flatter’d all the beauteous country round, | 175 |
| 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 | 180 |
| ’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all alive | |
| With birds and gnats and large white butterflies | |
| Which look as if the May-flower had sought life | |
| And palpitated forth upon the wind,— | |
| Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist, | 185 |
| Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills, | |
| And cattle grazing in the water’d vales, | |
| And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods, | |
| And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere, | |
| Confus’d with smell of orchards. “See,” I said, | 190 |
| “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 leap’d, | 195 |
| And clapp’d my hands, and call’d all very fair. | |
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“BY SOLITARY FIRES”
O MY God, my God, | |
| O supreme Artist, who as sole return | |
| For all the cosmic wonder of Thy work, | |
| Demandest of us just a word … a name, | 200 |
| “My Father!”—thou hast knowledge, only thou, | |
| How dreary ’t is for women to sit still | |
| On winter nights by solitary fires, | |
| And hear the nations praising them far off, | |
| Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love, | 205 |
| Our very heart of passionate womanhood, | |
| Which could not beat so in the verse without | |
| Being present also in the unkiss’d lips, | |
| And eyes undried because there ’s none to ask | |
| The reason they grew moist. | 210 |
| To sit alone, | |
| And think, for comfort, how, that very night, | |
| Affianced lovers, leaning face to face | |
| With sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath, | |
| Are reading haply from some page of ours, | 215 |
| To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touch’d, | |
| When such a stanza, level to their mood, | |
| Seems floating their own thoughts out—“So I feel | |
| For thee,”—“And I, for thee: this poet knows | |
| What everlasting love is!”—how, that night | 220 |
| A father issuing from the misty roads | |
| Upon the luminous round of lamp and hearth | |
| And happy children, having caught up first | |
| The youngest there until it shrunk and shriek’d | |
| To feel the cold chin prick its dimple through | 225 |
| With winter from the hills, may throw i’ the lap | |
| Of the eldest (who has learn’d to drop her lids | |
| To hide some sweetness newer than last year’s) | |
| Our book and cry, … “Ah you, you care for rhymes; | |
| So here be rhymes to pore on under trees, | 230 |
| When April comes to let you! I ’ve been told | |
| They are not idle as so many are, | |
| But set hearts beating pure as well as fast: | |
| It ’s yours, the book; I ’ll write your name in it,— | |
| That so you may not lose, however lost | 235 |
| In poet’s lore and charming reverie, | |
| The thought of how your father thought of you | |
| In riding from the town.” | |
| To have our books | |
| Apprais’d by love, associated with love, | 240 |
| While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think? | |
| At least ’t is mournful. Fame, indeed, ’t was said, | |
| Means simply love. It was a man said that. | |
| And then there ’s love and love: the love of all | |
| (To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,) | 245 |
| Is but a small thing to the love of one. | |
| You bid a hungry child be satisfied | |
| With a heritage of many corn-fields: nay, | |
| He says he ’s hungry,—he would rather have | |
| That little barley-cake you keep from him | 250 |
| While reckoning up his harvests. So with us. | |
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ROMNEY AND AURORA
But oh, the night! oh, bitter-sweet! oh, sweet! | |
| O dark, O moon and stars, O ecstasy | |
| Of darkness! O great mystery of love,— | |
| In which absorb’d, loss, anguish, treason’s self | 255 |
| Enlarges rapture,—as a pebble dropp’d | |
| In some full wine-cup, over-brims the wine! | |
| While we two sate together, lean’d that night | |
| So close, my very garments crept and thrill’d | |
| With strange electric life; and both my cheeks | 260 |
| Grew red, then pale, with touches from my hair | |
| In which his breath was; while the golden moon | |
| Was hung before our faces as the badge | |
| Of some sublime inherited despair, | |
| Since ever to be seen by only one,— | 265 |
| A voice said, low and rapid as a sigh, | |
| Yet breaking, I felt conscious, from a smile,— | |
| “Thank God, who made me blind, to make me see! | |
| Shine on, Aurora, dearest light of souls, | |
| Which rul’st for evermore both day and night! | 270 |
| I am happy.” | |
| I flung closer to his breast, | |
| As sword that, after battle, flings to sheathe; | |
| And, in that hurtle of united souls, | |
| The mystic motions, which in common moods | 275 |
| Are shut beyond our sense, broke in on us, | |
| And, as we sate, we felt the old earth spin, | |
| And all the starry turbulence of worlds | |
| Swing round us in their audient circles, till | |
| If that same golden moon were overhead | 280 |
| Or if beneath our feet, we did not know. | |
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