dots-menu
×

Home  »  The English Poets  »  Extracts from Aurora Leigh: The Journey South

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

Extracts from Aurora Leigh: The Journey South

I JUST knew it when we swept

Above the old roofs of Dijon: Lyons dropped

A spark into the night, half trodden out

Unseen. But presently the winding Rhone

Washed out the moonlight large along his banks,

Which strained their yielding curves out clear and clean

To hold it,—shadow of town and castle blurred

Upon the hurrying river. Such an air

Blew thence upon the forehead,—half an air

And half a water,—that I leaned and looked,

Then, turning back on Marian, smiled to mark

That she looked only on her child, who slept,

His face toward the moon too.
So we passed

The liberal open country and the close,

And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedge

By great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,

Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits,

And lets it in at once: the train swept in

Athrob with effort, trembling with resolve,

The fierce denouncing whistle wailing on

And dying off smothered in the shuddering dark,

While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressed

As other Titans underneath the pile

And nightmare of the mountains. Out, at last,

To catch the dawn afloat upon the land!

—Hills, slung forth broadly and gauntly everywhere,

Not crampt in their foundations, pushing wide

Rich outspreads of the vineyards and the corn,

(As if they entertained i’ the name of France)

While, down their straining sides, streamed manifest

A soil as red as Charlemagne’s knightly blood,

To consecrate the verdure. Some one said,

‘Marseilles!’ And lo, the city of Marseilles,

With all her ships behind her, and beyond,

The scimitar of ever-shining sea

For right-hand use, bared blue against the sky!

*****

I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;

The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,

One straining past another along the shore,

The way of grand dull Odyssean ghosts,

Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas

And stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peak

They stood: I watched, beyond that Tyrian belt

Of intense sea betwixt them and the ship,

Down all their sides the misty olive-woods

Dissolving in the weak congenial moon,

And still disclosing some brown convent-tower

That seems as if it grew from some brown rock,

Or many a little lighted village, dropt

Like a fallen star upon so high a point,

You wonder what can keep it in its place

From sliding headlong with the waterfalls

Which powder all the myrtle and orange groves

With spray of silver. Thus my Italy

Was stealing on us. Genoa broke with day,

The Doria’s long pale palace striking out,

From green hills in advance of the white town,

A marble finger dominant to ships

Seen glimmering through the uncertain gray of dawn.