ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

1806-1861

101. To George Sand. I. A Desire

Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man,

Self-called George Sand! whose soul, amid the lions

Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance,

And answers roar for roar, as spirits can!

I would some mild miraculous thunder ran

Above the applauded circus, in appliance

Of thine own nobler nature’s strength and science,

Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan,

From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place

With holier light! that thou to woman’s claim,

And man’s, mightst join beside the angel’s grace

Of a pure genius sanctified from blame,—

Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace,

To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame.

102. II. A Recognition

True genius, but true woman! dost deny

Thy woman’s nature with a manly scorn,

And break away the gauds and armlets worn

By weaker women in captivity?

Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry

Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn!—

Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn,

Floats back dishevelled strength in agony,

Disproving thy man’s name! and while before

The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,

We see thy woman-heart beat evermore

Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,

Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore,

Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire.

Sonnets from the Portuguese

103. i

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.’

104. iii

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 ply 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.

105. vi

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 forebore, ...

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.

106. xxii

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 curvèd point,—what bitter wrong

Can the earth do to 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.

107. xxviii

My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white!—

And yet they seem alive and quivering

Against my tremulous hands which loose the string

And let them drop down on my knee to-night.

This said, ... he wished to have me in his sight

Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring

To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,

Yet I wept for it!—this, ... the paper’s light ...

Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed

As if God’s future thundered on my past.

This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled

With lying at my heart that beat too fast.

And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed,

If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

108. xliii

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 every day’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.

109. A Musical Instrument

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.

III

High on the shore sate the great god Pan,

While turbidly flowed the river;

And hacked and hewed as a great god can,

With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

Till there was not a sign of a 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 notched the poor dry empty thing

In holes, as he sate by the river.

‘This is the way,’ laughed the great god Pan

(Laughed while he sate 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.

VII

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 in the river.

110. The Cry of the Children

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years?

They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,

And that cannot stop their tears.

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,

The young birds are chirping in the nest,

The young fawns are playing with the shadows,

The young flowers are blowing toward the west—

But the young, young children, O my brothers,

They are weeping bitterly!

They are weeping in the playtime of the others,

In the country of the free.

Do you question the young children in the sorrow,

Why their tears are falling so?

The old man may weep for his to-morrow

Which is lost in Long Ago;

The old tree is leafless in the forest,

The old year is ending in the frost,

The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest,

The old hope is hardest to be lost.

But the young, young children, O my brothers,

Do you ask them why they stand

Weeping sore before the bosom of their mothers,

In our happy Fatherland?

III

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

And their looks are sad to see,

For the man’s hoary anguish draws and presses

Down the cheeks of infancy.

‘Your old earth’, they say, ‘is very dreary;

Our young feet’, they say, ‘are very weak!

Few paces have we taken, yet are weary—

Our grave-rest is very far to seek.

Ask the aged why they weep, and not the children;

For the outside earth is cold;

And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,

And the graves are for the old.’

‘True,’ say the children, ‘it may happen

That we die before our time;

Little Alice died last year—her grave is shapen

Like a snowball, in the rime.

We looked into the pit prepared to take her:

Was no room for any work in the close clay!

From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her,

Crying, “Get up, little Alice! it is day.”

If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower,

With your ear down, little Alice never cries;

Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her,

For the smile has time for growing in her eyes:

And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in

The shroud by the kirk-chime!

It is good when it happens’, say the children,

‘That we die before our time.’

Alas, alas, the children! they are seeking

Death in life, as best to have;

They are binding up their hearts away from breaking,

With a cerement from the grave.

Go out, children, from the mine and from the city,

Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do;

Pluck you handfuls of the meadow cowslips pretty,

Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through!

But they answer, ‘Are your cowslips of the meadows

Like our weeds anear the mine?

Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows,

From your pleasures fair and fine!

‘For oh,’ say the children, ‘we are weary,

And we cannot run or leap;

If we cared for any meadows, it were merely

To drop down in them and sleep.

Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,

We fall upon our faces, trying to go;

And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,

The reddest flower would look as pale as snow;

For, all day, we drag our burden tiring

Through the coal-dark, underground—

Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron

In the factories, round and round.

VII

‘For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning,—

Their wind comes in our faces,—

Till our hearts turn,—our head, with pulses burning,

And the walls turn in their places;

Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling,

Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,

Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling,

All are turning, all the day, and we with all.

And all day, the iron wheels are droning,

And sometimes we could pray,

“O ye wheels” (breaking out in a mad moaning),

“Stop! be silent for to-day!”’

VIII

Aye! be silent! Let them hear each other breathing

For a moment, mouth to mouth!

Let them touch each other’s hands, in a fresh wreathing

Of their tender human youth!

Let them feel that this cold metallic motion

Is not all the life God fashions or reveals:

Let them prove their living souls against the notion

That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!—

Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward,

Grinding life down from its mark;

And the children’s souls, which God is calling sunward,

Spin on blindly in the dark.

Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers,

To look up to Him and pray;

So the blessèd One who blesseth all the others,

Will bless them another day.

They answer, ‘Who is God that He should hear us,

While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred?

When we sob aloud, the human creatures near us

Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word.

And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding)

Strangers speaking at the door:

Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him,

Hears our weeping any more?

‘Two words, indeed, of praying we remember,

And at midnight’s hour of harm,

“Our Father,” looking upward in the chamber,

We say softly for a charm.

We know no other words, except “Our Father”,

And we think that, in some pause of angels’ song,

God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather,

And hold both within His right hand which is strong.

“Our Father!” If He heard us, He would surely

(For they call Him good and mild)

Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely,

“Come and rest with Me, My child.”

‘But, no!’ say the children, weeping faster,

‘He is speechless as a stone;

And they tell us, of His image is the master

Who commands us to work on.

Go to!’ say the children,—‘up in Heaven,

Dark, wheel-like, turning clouds are all we find.

Do not mock us; grief has made us unbelieving—

We look up for God, but tears have made us blind.’

Do you hear the children weeping and disproving,

O my brothers, what ye preach?

For God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving,

And the children doubt of each.

XII

And well may the children weep before you!

They are weary ere they run;

They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory

Which is brighter than the sun.

They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;

They sink in man’s despair, without its calm;

Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom,

Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm,—

Are worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly

The harvest of its memories cannot reap,—

Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly.

Let them weep! let them weep!

XIII

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

And their look is dread to see,

For they mind you of their angels in high places,

With eyes turned on Deity!—

‘How long,’ they say, ‘how long, O cruel nation,

Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,—

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,

And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?

Our blood splashes upward, O goldheaper,

And your purple shows your path!

But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper

Than the strong man in his wrath.’

111. To Flush, My Dog

Loving friend, the gift of one

Who her own true faith has run

Through thy lower nature,

Be my benediction said

With my hand upon thy head,

Gentle fellow creature!

Like a lady’s ringlets brown,

Flow thy silken ears adown

Either side demurely

Of thy silver-suited breast,

Shining out from all the rest

Of thy body purely.

III

Darkly brown thy body is,

Till the sunshine striking this

Alchemize its dullness,

When the sleek curls manifold

Flash all over into gold,

With a burnished fullness.

Underneath my stroking hand,

Startled eyes of hazel bland

Kindling, growing larger,

Up thou leapest with a spring,

Full of prank and curveting,

Leaping like a charger.

Leap! thy broad tail waves a light,

Leap! thy slender feet are bright,

Canopied in fringes;

Leap—those tasselled ears of thine

Flicker strangely, fair and fine,

Down their golden inches.

Yet, my pretty, sportive friend,

Little is’t to such an end

That I praise thy rareness!

Other dogs may be thy peers

Haply in these drooping ears,

And this glossy fairness,

VII

But of thee it shall be said,

This dog watched beside a bed

Day and night unweary,—

Watched within a curtained room,

Where no sunbeam brake the gloom

Round the sick and dreary.

VIII

Roses, gathered for a vase,

In that chamber died apace,

Beam and breeze resigning;

This dog only, waited on

Knowing that when light is gone

Love remains for shining.

Other dogs in thymy dew

Tracked the hares and followed through

Sunny moor or meadow;

This dog only, crept and crept

Next a languid cheek that slept,

Sharing in the shadow.

Other dogs of loyal cheer

Bounded at the whistle clear,

Up the woodside hieing;

This dog only, watched in reach

Of a faintly uttered speech,

Or a louder sighing.

And if one or two quick tears

Dropped upon his glossy ears,

Or a sigh came double,—

Up he sprang in eager haste,

Fawning, fondling, breathing fast

In a tender trouble.

XII

And this dog was satisfied

If a pale thin hand would glide

Down his dewlaps sloping,—

Which he pushed his nose within,

After,—platforming his chin

On the palm left open.

XIII

This dog, if a friendly voice

Call him now to blyther choice

Than such chamber-keeping,

‘Come out!’ praying from the door,—

Presseth backward as before,

Up against me leaping.

XIV

Therefore to this dog will I,

Tenderly not scornfully,

Render praise and favour:

With my hand upon his head,

Is my benediction said

Therefore, and for ever.

And because he loves me so,

Better than his kind will do

Often, man or woman,

Give I back more love again

Than dogs often take of men,

Leaning from my Human.

XVI

Blessings on thee, dog of mine,

Pretty collars make thee fine,

Sugared milk make fat thee!

Pleasures wag on in thy tail,

Hands of gentle motion fail

Nevermore, to pat thee!

XVII

Downy pillow take thy head,

Silken coverlid bestead,

Sunshine help thy sleeping!

No fly’s buzzing wake thee up,

No man break thy purple cup,

Set for drinking deep in.

XVIII

Whiskered cats arointed flee,

Sturdy stoppers keep from thee

Cologne distillations;

Nuts lie in thy path for stones,

And thy feast-day macaroons

Turn to daily rations!

XIX

Mock I thee, in wishing weal?—

Tears are in my eyes to feel

Thou art made so straitly,

Blessing needs must straiten too,—

Little canst thou joy or do,

Thou who lovest greatly.

Yet be blessèd to the height

Of all good and all delight

Pervious to thy nature;

Only loved beyond that line,

With a love that answers thine,

Loving fellow creature.

112. The Deserted Garden

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 vanished quite;

And wheresoe’er had struck the spade,

The greenest grasses Nature laid,

To sanctify her right.

I called the place my wilderness,

For no one entered there but I;

The sheep looked in, the grass to espy,

And passed 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 blushed beside them at the voice

That likened her to such.

And these, to make a diadem,

She often may have plucked and twined,

Half-smiling as it came to mind

That few would look at them.

Oh, 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 unlearned 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

Has 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 roses 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 footsteps 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 laughed unto myself and thought

‘The time will pass away’.

And still I laughed, and did not fear

But that, whene’er was past 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 graver, 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.

113. Grief

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.