Sonnets from the Portuguese

Transcribed from the 1906 Caradoc Press edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
THE CARADOC PRESS BEDFORD PARK CHISWICK LONDON MDCCCCVI
I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-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.”
But only three in all God’s universe Have heard this word thou hast said,—Himself, beside Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied One of us . . . that was God, . . . and laid the curse So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce My sight from seeing thee,—that if I had died, The death-weights, placed there, would have signified Less absolute exclusion. “Nay” is worse From God than from all others, O my friend! Men could not part us with their worldly jars, Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend; Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars: And, heaven being rolled between us at the end, We should but vow the faster for the stars.
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.