Emerson and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

Give me again, ye fountains and ye streams,
That flood of life, not yours, that swells your front Beyond the natural fulness of your wont. I gave, and I take back as it beseems.
And thou dense choking atmosphere on high
Disperse thy fog of sighs—for it is mine, And make the glory of the sun to shine Again on my dim eyes.—O, Earth and Sky
Give me again the footsteps I have trod.
Let the paths grow where I walked them bare, The echoes where I waked them with my prayer Be deaf—and let those eyes—those eyes, O God,
Give me the light I lent them.—That some soul
May take my love. Thou hadst no need of it.

This rough and exceedingly obscure sonnet, in which strong feeling has condensed and distorted the language, seems to have been written by a man who has been in love and has been repulsed. The shock has restored him to a momentary realization of the whole experience. He looks at the landscape, and lo! the beauty has dropped out of it. The stream has lost its power, and the meadow its meaning. Summer has stopped. His next thought is: "But it is I who had lent the landscape this beauty. That landscape was myself, my dower, my glory, my birthright," and so he breaks out with "Give me back the light I threw upon you," and so on till the bitter word flung to the woman in the last line. The same clearness of thought and obscurity of expression and the same passion is to be found in the famous sonnet—"Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto,"—where he blames himself for not being able to obtain her good-will—as a bad sculptor who cannot hew out the beauty from the rock, although he feels it to be there; and in that heart-breaking one where he says that people may only draw from life what they give to it, and says no good can come to a man who, looking on such great beauty, feels such pain.

It is not profitable, nor is it necessary for the comprehension of the poems, to decide to whom or at what period each one was written. There is dispute about some of them as to whether they were addressed to men or women. There is question as to others whether they are prayers addressed to Christ or love poems addressed to Vittoria. In this latter case, perhaps, Michael Angelo did not himself know which they were.

Vittoria used to instruct him in religion, and he seems to have felt for her a love so deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touching that the words are alive in which he mentions her.

"I wished," he writes beneath a sonnet which he sent her, evidently in return for some of her own religious poems, "I wished, before taking the things that you had many times deigned to give me, in order that I might receive them the less unworthily, to make something for you from my own hand. But then, remembering and knowing that the grace of God may not be bought, and that to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, I confess my fault, and willingly receive the said things, and when they shall arrive, not because they are in my house, but I myself as being in a house of theirs, shall deem myself in Paradise."

We must not forget that at this time Michael Angelo was an old man, that he carried about with him a freshness and vigor of feeling that most people lose with their youth. A reservoir of emotion broke loose within him at a time when it caused his hale old frame suffering to undergo it, and reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope with it. A mystery play was enacted in him,—each sonnet is a scene. There is the whole of a man in each of many of these sonnets. They do not seem so much like poems as like microcosms. They are elementally complete. The soul of man could be evolved again from them if the formula were lost.

XL

I know not if it be the longed for light
Of its creator which the soul perceives, Or if in people's memory there lives A touch of early grace that keeps them bright
Or else ambition,—or some dream whose might
Brings to the eyes the hope the heart conceives And leaves a burning feeling when it leaves— That tears are welling in me as I write.
The things I feel, the things I follow and the things
I seek—are not in me,—I hardly know the place To find them. It is others make them mine. It happens when I see thee—and it brings
Sweet pain—a yes,—a no,—sorrow and grace Surely it must have been those eyes of thine.

There are others which give a most touching picture of extreme piety in extreme old age. And there are still others which are both love poems and religious poems at the same time.

LV