Matthew Arnold (1822–88). The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840–1867. 1909.
New Poems, 1867Rachel
Brown in the garden of the Tuileries,
Brown with September, droop’d the chestnut-trees.
’Twas dawn; a brougham roll’d through the streets, and made
Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease,
Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,
Sate in the brougham, and those blank walls survey’d.
To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine;
Why stops she by this empty play-house drear?
All spots, match’d with that spot, are less divine;
And Rachel’s Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!
Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore
The dying Rachel in a chair they bore
Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore—
The rose-crown’d queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia—full on her death-bed. ’Twas well!
In this her life’s last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate’s frowns,
Sole object of her dying eyes remain
The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.
At a mean inn in German Aarau born,
To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,
Trick’d out with a Parisian speech and face,
Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,
While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place—
She had—one power, which made her breast its home!
In her, like us, there clash’d, contending powers,
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Her genius and her glory are her own.