Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-1861)
Aurora Leigh
(1857)
From BOOK 2
Times followed one another. Came a morn
I stood upon the brink of twenty years,
And looked before and after, as I stood
Woman and artist,—either incomplete,
Both credulous of completion. There I held
The whole creation in my little cup,
And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank
“Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine,
And all these peoples.”
I was glad that day;
The June was in me, with its multitudes
Of nightingales all singing in the dark,
And rosebuds reddening where the calayx split.
I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!
So glad, I could not choose be very wise!
And, old at twenty, was inclined to pull
My childhood backward in a childish jest
To see the face of’t once more, and farewell!
In which fantastic mood I bounded forth
At early morning,—would not wait so long
As even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,
But, brushing a green trail across the lawn
With my gown in the dew, took will and away
Among the acacias of the shrubberies,
To fly my fancies in the open air
And keep my birthday, till my aunt awoke
To stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on
As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves,
“The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned
Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone;
And so with me it must be unless I prove
Unworthy of the grand adversity;
And certainly I would not fail so much.
What, therefore, if I crown myself to-day
In sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it;
Before my brows be numbed as Dante’s own
To all the tender pricking of such leaves?
Such leaves! what leaves?”
I pulled the branches down
To choose from.
“Not the bay! I choose no bay
(The fates deny us if we are overbold),
Nor myrtle—which means chiefly love; and love
Is something awful which ones dares not touch
So early o’ mornings. This verbena strains
The point of passionate fragrance; and hard by,
This guelder-rose, at far too slight a beck
Of the wind will toss about her flower-apples.
Ah—there’s my choice,—that ivy on the wall,
That headlong ivy! not a leaf will grow
But thinking of a wreath. Large leaves, smooth leaves,
Serrated like my vines, and half as green.
I like such ivy, bold to leap a height
‘Twas strong to climb; as good to grow on graves
As twist about a thyrsus; pretty too
(And that’s not ill) when twisted round a comb.”
Thus speaking to myself, half singing it,
Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bell
To ring with once being touched, I drew a wreath
Drenched, blinding me with dew, across my brow,
And fastening it behind me so, turning faced
…My public!—cousin Romney—with a mouth
Twice graver than his eyes.
I stood there fixed,—
My arms up, like the caryatid, sole
Of some abolished temple, helplessly
Persistent in a gesture which derides
A former purpose. Yet my blush was flame,
As if from flax, not stone.
“Aurora Leigh,
The earliest of Auroras!”
Hand stretched out
I clasped, as shipwrecked men will clasp a hand,
Indifferent to the sort of palm. The tide
Had caught me at my pastime, writing down
My foolish name too near upon the sea
Which drowned me with a blush as foolish. “You
My cousin!”
The smile died out in his eyes
And dropped upon his lips, a cold dead weight,
For just a moment, “Here’s a book I found!
No name writ on it—poems, by the form;
Some Greek upon the margin,—lady’s Greek
Without the accents. Read it? Not a word.
I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in’t,
Whereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits:
I rather bring it to the witch.”
“My book.
You found it” …
“In the hollow by the stream
That beech leans down into—of which you said
The Oread in it has a Naiad’s heart
And pines for waters.”
“Thank you.”
“Thanks to you
My cousin! that I have seen you not too much
Witch, scholar, poet, dreamer, and the rest,
To be a woman also.”
With a glance
The smile rose in his eyes again and touched
The ivy on my forehead, light as air.
I answered gravely “Poets needs must be
Or men or women—more’s the pity.”
“Ah,
But men, and still less women, happily,
Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath,
Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze
Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles
The clean white morning dresses.”
“So you judge!
Because I love the beautiful I must
Love pleasure chiefly, and be overcharged
For ease and whiteness! well, you know the world,
And only miss your cousin, ‘tis not much.
But learn this; I would rather take my part
With God’s Dead, who afford to walk in white
Yet spread His glory, than keep quiet here
And gather up my feet from even a step
For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.
I choose to walk at all risks.—Here, if heads
That hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce,
For my part, I choose headaches,—and to-day’s
My birthday.”
“Dear Aurora, choose instead
To cure them. You have balsams.”
“I perceive.
The headache is too noble for my sex.
You think the heartache would sound decenter,
Since that’s the woman’s special, proper ache
And altogether tolerable, except
To a woman.”
* * *
There he glowed on me
With all his face and eyes. “No other help?”
Said he—“no more than so?”
“What help?” I asked.
“You’d scorn my help,—as Nature’s self, you say,
Has scorned to put her music in my mouth
Because a woman’s. Do you now turn round
And ask for what a woman cannot give?”
“For what she only can, I turn and ask,”
He answered, catching up my hands in his,
And dropping on my soul from his high-eaved brow
The full weight of his soul,—“I ask for love,
And that, she can; for life in fellowship
Through bitter duties—that, I know she can;
For wifehood—will she?”
“Now,” I said, “may God
Be witness ‘twixt us two!” and with the word,
Meseemed I floated into a sudden light
Above his stature,—“am I proved too weak
To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear
Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,
Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?
Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,
Yet competent to love, like HIM?”
I paused;
Perhaps I darkened, as the lighthouse will
That turns upon the sea. “It’s always so.
Anything does for a wife.”
“Aurora, dear,
And dearly honoured,”—he pressed in at once
With eager utterance,—“you translate me ill.
I do not contradict my thought of you
Which is more reverent, with another thought
Found less so. If your sex is weak for art
(And I, who said so, did but honour you
By using truth in courtship), it is strong
For life and duty. Place you fecund heart
In mine, and let us blossom for the world
That wants love’s colour in the grey of time.
My talk, meanwhile, is arid to you, ay,
Since all my talk can only set you where
You look down coldly on the arena-heaps
Of headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct!
The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his way
Through such a heap of generalised distress
To the individual man with lips and eyes,
Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down,
And hand in hand we’ll go, where yours shall touch
These victims, one by one till, one by one,
The formless, nameless trunk of every man
Shall seem to wear a head with hair you know,
And every woman catch your mother’s face
To melt you into passion.”
“I am a girl,”
I answered slowly; “you do well to name
My mother’s face. Though far too early, alas,
God’s hand did interpose ‘twixt it and me,
I know so much of love as used to shine
In that face and another. Just so much;
No more indeed at all. I have not seen
So much love since, I pray you pardon me,
As answers even to make a marriage with
In this cold land of England. What you love
Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause:
You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,
A wife to help your ends,—in her no end.
Your cause is noble, your ends excellent,
But I, being most unworthy of these and that,
Do otherwise conceive of love, Farewell.”
“Farewell, Aurora? you reject me thus?”
He said.
“Sir, you were married long ago.
You have a wife already whom you love,
Your social theory. Bless you both, I say.
For my part, I am scarcely meek enough
To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse.
Do I look a Hagar, think you?”
“So you jest.”
“Nay, so I speak in earnest,” I replied.
“You treat of marriage too much like, at least,
A chief apostle, you would bear with you
A wife…a sister…shall we speak it out?
A sister of charity.”
“Then must it be
Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong
In hope and in illusion, when I took
The woman to be nobler than the man,
Yourself the noblest woman, in the use
And comprehension of what love is,—love,
That generates the likeness of itself
Through all heroic duties? so far wrong,
In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love,
‘Come, human creature, love and work with me,’—
Instead of ‘Lady, thou art wondrous fair,
‘And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse
‘Will follow at the lightning of their eyes,
‘And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep:
‘Turn round and love me, or I die of love.’”
With quiet indignation I broke in.
“You misconceive the question like a man,
Who sees a woman as the complement
Of his sex merely. You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male,
Stands single in responsible act and thought
As also in birth and death. Whoever says
To a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’
Will get fair answers if the work and love,
Being good themselves, are good for her—the best
She was born for. Women of a softer mood,
Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,
Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,
And catch up with it any kind of work,
Indifferent, so that dear love go with it.
I do not blame such women, though, for love,
They pick much oakum; earth’s fanatics make
Too frequently heaven’s saints. But me your work
Is not the best for,—nor your love the best,
Nor able to commend the kind of work
For love’s sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,
To be overbold in speaking of myself:
I too have my vocation,—work to do,
The heavens and earth have set me since I changed
My father’s face for theirs, and, though your world
Were twice as wretched as you represent,
Most serious work, most necessary work
As any of the economists’. Reform,
Make trade a Christian possibility,
And individual right no general wrong;
Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine and Mine,
And leave one green for men to play at bowls,
With innings for them all!…What then, indeed,
If mortals are not greater by the head
Than any of their prosperities? what then,
Unless the artist keep up open roads
Betwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting through
The best of your conventions with his best,
The speakable, imaginable best
God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond
Both speech and imagination? A starved man
Exceeds a fat beast: we’ll not barter, sir,
The beautiful for barley.—And, even so,
I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet’s individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul,
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses, even to a cleaner stye;
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair’s-breadth off
The dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.—For me,
Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,
Of work like this: perhaps a woman’s soul
Aspires, and not creates: yet we aspire,
And yet I’ll try out your perhapses, sir,
And if I fail…why, burn me up my straw
Like other false works—I’ll not ask for grace;
Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I
Who love my art, would never wish it lower
To suit my stature. I may love my art,
You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,
Seeing that to waste true love on anything
Is womanly, past question.”
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(from Sonnets from the Portuguese)
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 everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
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.
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