Ralph Waldo Emerson, comp. (1803–1882). Parnassus: An Anthology of Poetry. 1880.
Lady Geraldines CourtshipElizabeth Barrett Browning (18061861)
D
Down the purple of this chamber, tears should scarcely run at will:
I am humbled who was humble! Friend,—I bow my head before you!
You should lead me to my peasants!—but their faces are too still.
And she treads the crimson carpet, and she breathes the perfumed air;
And a kingly blood sends glances up her princely eye to trouble,
And the shadow of a monarch’s crown is softened in her hair.
She has farms and she has manors, she can threaten and command,
And the palpitating engines snort in steam across her acres,
As they mark upon the blasted heaven the measure of her land.
Upon princely suitors praying, she has looked in her disdain:
She has sprung of English nobles, I was born of English peasants;
What was I that I should love her,—save for competence to pain!
As the finches or the thrushes, while she thought of other things.
Oh, she walked so high above me, she appeared to my abasement,
In her lovely silken murmur, like an angel clad in wings!
She has blest their little children,—as a priest or queen were she.
Far too tender, or too cruel far, her smile upon the poor was,
For I thought it was the same smile which she used to smile on me.
And of all the fair court-ladies, few have jewels half as fine:
Oft the prince has named her beauty, ’twixt the red wine and the chalice:
Oh, and what was I to love her? my Beloved, my Geraldine!
To love all things set above me, all of good and all of fair:
Nymphs of mountain, not of valley, we are wont to call the Muses,
And in nympholeptic climbing, poets pass from mount to star.
With their critical deduction for the modern writer’s fault;
I could sit at rich men’s tables,—though the courtesies that raised me,
Still suggested clear between us the pale spectrum of the salt.
Then returning to each other, “Yes, our plans are for the moors;”
Then with whisper dropped behind me,—“There he is! the latest comer!
Oh, she only likes his verses! what is over, she endures.
And we make a point by asking him, of being very kind;—
You may speak, he does not hear you; and besides, he writes no satire,—
All these serpents kept by charmers, leave their natural sting behind.”
Till, as frost intense will burn you, the cold scorning scorched my brow;
When a sudden silver speaking, gravely cadenced, overrung them,
And a sudden silken stirring touched my inner nature through.
Slowly round she swept her eyelids, and said clear before them all,
“Have you such superfluous honor, sir, that able to confer it,
You will come down, Mr. Bertram, as my guest to Wycombe Hall?”
But because a silence followed it, blushed somewhat as for shame;
Then, as scorning her own feeling, resumed calmly—“I am seeking
More distinction than these gentlemen think worthy of my claim.
(Here her smile sprang like a fountain, and, so overflowed her mouth,)
“But because my woods in Sussex have some purple shades at gloaming
Which are worthy of a king in state, or poet in his youth.
Sir, I scarce should dare,—but only where God asked the thrushes first,—
And if you will sing beside them, in the covert of my beeches,
I will thank you for the woodlands,… for the human world at worst.”
And I bowed,—I could not answer! Alternate light and gloom,—
While as one who quells the lions, with a steady eye serenely,
She, with level fronting eyelids, passed out stately from the room.
With their leafy tide of greenery still rippling up the wind!
Oh, the cursed woods of Sussex! where the hunter’s arrow found me,
When a fair face and a tender voice had made me mad and blind!
And the lovely London ladies trod the floors with gliding feet;
And their voices low with fashion, not with feeling, softly freighted
All the air about the windows, with elastic laughters sweet.
Which the floating orbs of curtains did with gradual shadow sweep:
While the swans upon the river, fed at morning by the heiress,
Trembled downward through their snowy wings at music in their sleep.
Till the finches of the shrubberies grew restless in the dark;
But the cedars stood up motionless, each in a moonlight ringing,
And the deer, half in the glimmer, strewed the hollows of the park.
To commix my words and laughter with the converse and the jest,
Oft I sat apart, and gazing on the river through the beeches,
Heard, as pure the swans swam down it, her pure voice o’erfloat the rest.
Spread out cheery from the courtyard till we lost them in the hills;
While herself and other ladies, and her suitors left beside her,
Went a-wandering up the gardens through the laurels and abeles.
Of the virginal white vesture gathered closely to her throat;
With the golden ringlets in her neck just quickened by her going,
And appearing to breathe sun for air, and doubting if to float,—
And which trembled a green shadow in betwixt her and the skies,
As she turned her face in going, thus, she drew me on to love her,
And to worship the divineness of the smile hid in her eyes.
And her front is calm,—the dimple rarely ripples on her cheek:
But her deep blue eyes smile constantly,—as if they in discreetness
Kept the secret of a happy dream she did not care to speak.
And I walked among her noble friends, and could not keep behind:
Spake she unto all and unto me,—“Behold, I am the warden
Of the song-birds in these lindens, which are cages to their mind.
Whence the beeches rounded greenly, stand away in reverent fear;
I will let no music enter, saving what the fountain sings us,
Which the lilies round the basin may seem pure enough to hear.
Like a holy thought sent feebly up from soul of fasting saint!
Whereby lies a marble Silence, sleeping! (Lough the sculptor wrought her,)
So asleep she is forgetting to say Hush!—a fancy quaint!
And the left hand’s index droppeth from the lips upon the cheek:
And the right hand,—with the symbol rose held slack within the fingers,—
Has fallen back within the basin,—yet this Silence will not speak!
Is the thought as I conceive it: it applies more high and low.
Our true noblemen will often through right nobleness grow humble,
And assert an inward honor by denying outward show.”
Yet she holds it—or would scarcely be a Silence to our ken!
And your nobles wear their ermine on the outside, or walk blackly
In the presence of the social law, as most ignoble men.
’Tis the substance that wanes ever, ’tis the symbol that exceeds;
Soon we shall have nought but symbol! and for statues like this Silence,
Shall accept the rose’s image,—in another case, the weed’s.”
Find for things, names;—shows for actions, and pure gold for honor clear;
But when all is run to symbol in the Social, I will throw you
The world’s book which now reads dryly, and sit down with Silence here.”
Friends who listened laughed her words off while her lovers deemed her fair;
A fair woman—flushed with feeling, in her noble-lighted station
Near the statue’s white reposing,—and both bathed in sunny air!
And beheld in light and shadow the leaves in and outward move;
And the little fountain leaping toward the sun-heart to be warmer,
And recoiling in a tremble from the too much light above.
Did I follow as she drew me by the spirit to her feet,—
Why, her greyhound followed also! dogs—we both were dogs for scorning,—
To be sent back when she pleased it, and her path lay through the wheat.
Did I follow at her drawing, while the week-days passed along;
Just to feed the swans this noontide, or to see the fawns to-morrow,
Or to teach the hill-side echo some sweet Tuscan in a song.
With the forest green behind us, and its shadow cast before;
And the river running under; and across it from the rowans
A brown partridge whirring near us, till we felt the air it bore,—
Made by Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own;
Read the pastoral parts of Spenser,—or the subtle interflowings
Found in Petrarch’s sonnets,—here’s the book—the leaf is folded down!—
Howitt’s ballad-verse, or Tennyson’s enchanted revery,—
Or from Browning some “Pomegranate,” which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth,—
For the echo in you breaks upon the words which you are speaking,
And the chariot-wheels jar in the gate through which you drive them forth.
A slow arm of sweet compression, felt with beatings at the breast,
She would break out on a sudden, in a gush of woodland singing,
Like a child’s emotion in a god,—a naiad tired of rest.
For her looks sing too,—she modulates her gestures on the tune;
And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are finest,
’Tis the eyes that shoot out vocal light, and seem to swell them on.
Made another singing—of the soul! a music without bars,—
While the leafy sounds of woodlands, humming round where we were walking,
Brought interposition worthy sweet,—as skies about the stars.
And had sympathies so rapid, open, free as bird on branch,
Just as ready to fly east as west, whichever way besought them,
In the birchen wood a chirrup, or a cock-crow in the grange.
Has a grace in being gay, which even mournful souls approve,
For the root of some grave earnest thought is under-struck so rightly,
As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above.
Of the sheep that browsed the grasses,—of the reapers in the corn,—
Of the little children from the schools, seen winding through the meadow,—
Of the poor rich world beyond them, still kept poorer by its scorn.
And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear:
So, of mankind in the abstract, which grows slowly into nature,
Yet will lift the cry of “progress,” as it trod from sphere to sphere.
With a broad clown’s back turned broadly to the glory of the stars—
We are gods by our own reck’ning,—and may well shut up the temples,
And wield on, amid the incense-steam, the thunder of our cars.
With, at every mile run faster,—‘O the wondrous, wondrous age!’
Little thinking if we work our
Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.
But the child’s most gradual learning to walk upright without bane?
When we drive out from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses,
Are we greater than the first men who led black ones by the mane?
If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath,
’Twere but power within our tether,—no new spirit-power comprising,
And in life we were not greater men, nor bolder men in death.”
As I loved all Heavenly objects, with uplifted eyes and hands!
As I loved pure inspirations,—loved the graces, loved the virtues,
In a Love content with writing his own name on desert sands.
Any crown to crown Love’s silence,—silent Love that sat alone,—
Out, alas! the stag is like me,—he, that tries to go on grazing
With the great deep gun-wound in his neck, then reels with sudden moan.
But she smiles them down imperially, as Venus did the waves;—
And with such a gracious coldness, that they cannot press their futures
On the present of her courtesy, which yieldingly enslaves.
With the great saloon beyond it lost in pleasant thought serene,—
For I had been reading Camoens—that poem you remember,
Which his lady’s eyes are praised in, as the sweetest ever seen;
A vibration and impulsion to an end beyond its own,
As the branch of a green osier, when a child would overcome it,
Springs up freely from his clasping and goes swinging in the sun.
Speakers using earnest language,—“Lady Geraldine, you would!”
And I heard a voice that pleaded ever on, in accents stronger,
As a sense of reason gave it power to make its rhetoric good.
Soul completed into lordship,—might and right read on his brow:
Very finely courteous,—far too proud to doubt his domination
Of the common people,—he atones for grandeur by a bow.
Than resistance, coldly casting off the looks of other men,
As steel, arrows,—unelastic lips, which seem to taste possession,
And be cautious lest the common air should injure or distrain.
With a bearing not ungraceful; fond of art, and letters too;
Just a good man made a proud man, as the sandy rocks that border
A wild coast, by circumstances, in a regnant ebb and flow.
In the room I stood up blindly, and my burning heart within
Seemed to seethe and fuse my senses, till they ran on all sides darkening,
And scorchèd, weighed like melted metal round my feet that stood therein.
For the sake of liberal uses, and great actions to be done,—
And she interrupted gently, “Nay, my lord, the old tradition
Of your Normans, by some worthier hand than mine is, should be won.”
Or attempted—for with gravity and instance she replied,—
“Nay, indeed, my lord, this talk is vain, and we had best eschew it,
And pass on like friends, to other points less easy to decide.”
Worked his pride up to the surface, for she answered in slow scorn,—
“And your lordship judges rightly. Whom I marry, shall be noble,
Ay, and wealthy. I shall never blush to think how he was born.”
And my soul sprang up astonished; sprang full-statured in an hour:
Know you what it is when, anguish, with apocalyptic
To a Pythian height dilates you,—and despair sublimes to power?
Whence conventions coiled to ashes: I felt self-drawn out, as man,
From amalgamate false natures; and I saw the skies grow ruddy
With the deepening feet of angels, and I knew what spirits can.
Was a man or beast—perhaps so; for the tiger roars when speared;
And I walked on, step by step, along the level of my passion—
Oh my soul! and passed the doorway to her face, and never feared.
But for her,—she half arose, then sat—grew scarlet and grew pale:
Oh she trembled!—’tis so always with a worldly man or woman
In the presence of true spirits,—what else can they do but quail?
Far too strong for it! then drooping, bowed her face upon her hands,—
And I spake out wildly, fiercely, brutal truths of her and others!
I, she planted in the desert, swathed her, windlike, with my sands.
Trod them down with words of shaming,—all the purple and the gold,
All the “landed stakes” and lordships,—all that spirits pure and ardent
Are cast out of love and honor because chancing not to hold.
But for better souls that nearer to the height of yours have trod.
And this age shows to my thinking, still more infidels to Adam,
Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to God.
With whom first and last are equal, saint and corpse and little child!
We are fools to your deductions, in these figments of heart-closing!
We are traitors to your causes, in these sympathies defiled!
That comes quickly—quick as sin does, ay, and culminates to sin;
But for Adam’s seed,
With God’s image stamped upon it, and God’s kindling breath within.
Getting so by heart your beauty, which all others must adore,
While you draw the golden ringlets down your fingers, to vow gayly
You will wed no man that’s only good to God,—and nothing more?
Of all women He has fashioned,—with your lovely spirit-face,
Which would seem too near to vanish if its smile were not so human,
And your voice of holy sweetness, turning common words to grace,
In the gross, as mere men, broadly,—not as noble men, forsooth,—
As mere Pariahs of the outer world, forbidden to assoil them
In the hope of living, dying, near that sweetness of your mouth?
If its instrument were gifted with a better silver string,
I would kneel down where I stand, and say,—Behold me! I am worthy
Of thy loving, for I love thee! I am worthy as a king.
That I, poor, weak, tost with passion, scorned by me and you again,
Love you, Madam,—dare to love you,—to my grief and your dishonor,—
To my endless desolation, and your impotent disdain!”
And I hear my hot soul dropping on the lines in showers of tears—
Oh, a woman! friend, a woman! Why, a beast had scarce been duller
Than roar bestial loud complaints against the shining of the spheres.
Which my soul had used. The silence drew her face up like a call.
Could you guess what word she uttered? She looked up, as if in wonder,
With tears beaded on her lashes, and said “Bertram!” it was all.
Which at needs is used by women, she had risen up and said,
“Sir, you are my guest, and therefore I have given you a full hearing,—
Now, beseech you, choose a name exacting somewhat less instead,”—
A mere word, without her accent,—and you cannot judge the weight
Of the calm which crushed my passion! I seemed drowning in a vapor,—
And her gentleness destroyed me whom her scorn made desolate.
Which had rushed on, sparing nothing, into forms of abstract truth,
With a logic agonizing through unseemly demonstration,
And with youth’s own anguish turning grimly gray the hairs of youth,—
I spake basely,—using truth,—if what I spake indeed was true,—
To avenge wrong on a woman,—her, who sat there weighing nicely
A full manhood’s worth, found guilty of such deeds as I could do!—
As a wild horse through a city runs with lightning in his eyes,
And then dashing at a church’s cold and passive wall, impassioned,
Strikes the death into his burning brain, and blindly drops and dies,—
’Twas my strength of passion slew me!—fell before her like a stone;
Fast the dreadful world rolled from me, on its roaring wheels of blackness!
When the light came I was lying in this chamber—and alone.
And to cast it from her scornful sight,—but not beyond the gate—
She was too kind to be cruel, and too haughty not to pardon
Such a man as I,—’twere something to be level to her hate.
How my life is read all backward, and the charm of life undone!
I shall leave her house at dawn;—I would to-night, if I were better;—
And I charge my soul to hold my body strengthened for the sun.
No weak moanings—one word only left in writing for her hands,
Out of reach of all derision, and some unavailing praises,
To make front against this anguish in the far and foreign lands.
I but nurse my spirit’s falcon, that its wings may soar again:
There’s no room for tears of weakness in the blind eyes of a Phemius:
Into work the poet kneads them,—and he does not die till then.
Still in hot and heavy splashes, fell the tears on every leaf:
Having ended, he leans backward in his chair, with lips that quiver
From the deep unspoken, ay, and deep unwritten thoughts of grief.
’Twixt the purple lattice-curtains, how she standeth still and pale!
’Tis a vision, sure, of mercies, sent to soften his self-curses—
Sent to sweep a patient quiet o’er the tossing of his wail.
Shining eyes, like antique jewels set in Parian statue-stone!
Underneath that calm white forehead, are ye ever burning torrid
O’er the desolate sand-desert of my heart and life undone?”
Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows;
While the gliding of the river sends a rippling noise forever
Through the open casement whitened by the moonlight’s slant repose.
Now I see it plainly, plainly; now I cannot hope or doubt—
There, the brows of mild repression,—there, the lips of silent passion,
Curved like an archer’s bow to send the bitter arrows out.”
And approached him slowly, slowly, in a gliding measured pace;
With her two white hands extended, as if praying one offended,
And a look of supplication, gazing earnest in his face.
Let the blessèd apparition melt not yet to its divine!
No approaching,—hush! no breathing! or my heart must swoon to death in
That too utter life thou bringest—O thou dream of Geraldine!”
But the tears ran over lightly from her eyes, and tenderly;
“Dost thou, Bertram, truly love me? Is no woman far above me
Found more worthy of thy poet-heart than such a one as I?”
Flowing ever in a shadow greenly onward to the sea;
So, thou vision of all sweetness—princely to a full completeness,—
Would my heart and life flow onward—deathward—through this dream of T
While the silver tears ran faster down the blushing of her cheeks;
Then with both her hands enfolding both of his, she softly told him,
“Bertram, if I say I love thee,… ’tis the vision only speaks.”
And she whispered low in triumph,—“It shall be as I have sworn!
Very rich he is in virtues,—very noble—noble, certes;
And I shall not blush in knowing that men call him lowly born!”