Part 7 — ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

I LEFT thee last, a child at heart, A woman scarce in years: I come to thee, a solemn corpse Which neither feels nor fears. I have no breath to use in sighs; They laid the dead-weights on mine eyes To seal them safe from tears. Look on me with thine own calm look: I meet it calm as thou. No look of thine can change this smile, Or break thy sinful vow: I tell thee that my poor scorn’d heart Is of thine earth—thine earth—a part: It cannot vex thee now. I have pray’d for thee with bursting sob When passion’s course was free; I have pray’d for thee with silent lips In the anguish none could see; They whisper’d oft, ‘She sleepeth soft’— But I only pray’d for thee. Go to! I pray for thee no more: The corpse’s tongue is still; Its folded fingers point to heaven, But point there stiff and chill: No farther wrong, no farther woe Hath licence from the sin below Its tranquil heart to thrill. I charge thee, by the living’s prayer, And the dead’s silentness, To wring from out thy soul a cry Which God shall hear and bless! Lest Heaven’s own palm droop in my hand, And pale among the saints I stand, A saint companionless.

I MIND me in the days departed, How often underneath the sun With childish bounds I used to run To a garden long deserted. The beds and walks were vanish’d quite; And wheresoe’er had struck the spade, The greenest grasses Nature laid, To sanctify her right. I call’d the place my wilderness, For no one enter’d there but I. The sheep look’d in, the grass to espy, And pass’d it ne’ertheless. The trees were interwoven wild, And spread their boughs enough about To keep both sheep and shepherd out, But not a happy child. Adventurous joy it was for me; I crept beneath the boughs, and found A circle smooth of mossy ground Beneath a poplar-tree. Old garden rose-trees hedged it in; Bedropt with roses waxen-white, Well satisfied with dew and light, And careless to be seen. Long years ago, it might befall, When all the garden flowers were trim, The grave old gardener prided him On these the most of all. Some Lady, stately overmuch, Here moving with a silken noise, Has blush’d beside them at the voice That liken’d her to such. Or these, to make a diadem, She often may have pluck’d and twined; Half-smiling as it came to mind, That few would look at them. O, little thought that Lady proud, A child would watch her fair white rose, When buried lay her whiter brows, And silk was changed for shroud!— Nor thought that gardener (full of scorns For men unlearn’d and simple phrase) A child would bring it all its praise, By creeping through the thorns! To me upon my low moss seat, Though never a dream the roses sent Of science or love’s compliment, I ween they smelt as sweet. It did not move my grief to see The trace of human step departed: Because the garden was deserted, The blither place for me! Friends, blame me not! a narrow ken Hath childhood ’twixt the sun and sward; We draw the moral afterward— We feel the gladness then. And gladdest hours for me did glide In silence at the rose-tree wall: A thrush made gladness musical Upon the other side. Nor he nor I did e’er incline To peck or pluck the blossoms white:— How should I know but that they might Lead lives as glad as mine? To make my hermit-home complete, I brought clear water from the spring Praised in its own low murmuring, And cresses glossy wet. And so, I thought, my likeness grew (Without the melancholy tale) To ‘gentle hermit of the dale,’ And Angelina too. For oft I read within my nook Such minstrel stories; till the breeze Made sounds poetic in the trees, And then I shut the book. If I shut this wherein I write, I hear no more the wind athwart Those trees, nor feel that childish heart Delighting in delight. My childhood from my life is parted, My footstep from the moss which drew Its fairy circle round: anew The garden is deserted. Another thrush may there rehearse The madrigals which sweetest are; No more for me!—myself afar Do sing a sadder verse. Ah me! ah me! when erst I lay In that child’s-nest so greenly wrought, I laugh’d unto myself and thought, ‘The time will pass away.’ And still I laugh’d, and did not fear But that, whene’er was pass’d away The childish time, some happier play My womanhood would cheer. I knew the time would pass away; And yet, beside the rose-tree wall, Dear God, how seldom, if at all, Did I look up to pray! The time is past: and now that grows The cypress high among the trees, And I behold white sepulchres As well as the white rose,— When wiser, meeker thoughts are given, And I have learnt to lift my face, Reminded how earth’s greenest place The colour draws from heaven,— It something saith for earthly pain, But more for heavenly promise free, That I who was, would shrink to be That happy child again.

ALL are not taken; there are left behind Living Belovèds, tender looks to bring And make the daylight still a happy thing, And tender voices, to make soft the wind: But if it were not so—if I could find No love in all this world for comforting, Nor any path but hollowly did ring Where ‘dust to dust’ the love from life disjoin’d, And if, before those sepulchres unmoving I stood alone (as some forsaken lamb Goes bleating up the moors in weary dearth) Crying ‘Where are ye, O my loved and loving?’— I know a voice would sound, ‘Daughter, I AM. Can I suffice for Heaven and not for earth?’

I TELL you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair, Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness In souls as countries lieth silent-bare Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death— Most like a monumental statue set In everlasting watch and moveless woe Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: If it could weep, it could arise and go.

I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wish’d-for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals old or young: And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw in gradual vision through my tears The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years— Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, ‘Guess now who holds thee?’—‘Death’ I said. But there The silver answer rang—‘Not Death, but Love.’

UNLIKE are we, unlike, O princely Heart! Unlike our uses and our destinies. Our ministering two angels look surprise On one another, as they strike athwart Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art A guest for queens to social pageantries, With gages from a hundred brighter eyes Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part Of chief musician. What hast thou to do With looking from the lattice-lights at me— A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree? The chrism is on thine head—on mine the dew— And Death must dig the level where these agree.

GO from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore Alone upon the threshold of my door Of individual life I shall command The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand Serenely in the sunshine as before, Without the sense of that which I forbore— Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double. What I do And what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine, And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

IF thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love’s sake only. Do not say, ‘I love her for her smile—her look—her way Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day— For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry: A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love’s sake, that evermore Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.

WHEN our two souls stand up erect and strong, Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher, Until the lengthening wings break into fire At either curving point,—what bitter wrong Can the earth do us, that we should not long Be here contented? Think! In mounting higher, The angels would press on us, and aspire To drop some golden orb of perfect song Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay Rather on earth, Belovèd—where the unfit Contrarious moods of men recoil away And isolate pure spirits, and permit A place to stand and love in for a day, With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river. He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, From the deep cool bed of the river; The limpid water turbidly ran, And the broken lilies a-dying lay, And the dragon-fly had fled away, Ere he brought it out of the river. High on the shore sat the great god Pan, While turbidly flow’d the river; And hack’d and hew’d as a great god can With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed, Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed To prove it fresh from the river. He cut it short, did the great god Pan (How tall it stood in the river!), Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notch’d the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sat by the river. ‘This is the way’ laugh’d the great god Pan (Laugh’d while he sat by the river), ‘The only way, since gods began To make sweet music, they could succeed.’ Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river. Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! Piercing sweet by the river! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river. Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man: The true gods sigh for the cost and pain— For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds of the river.