PENGUIN CLASSICS

PENGUIN SELECTED ENGLISH POETS
GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
AURORA LEIGH AND OTHER POEMS

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING was born in County Durham in 1806. As a child she studied Italian, Greek and Hebrew and read Lord Byron’s poetry and Madame de Staël’s novels in her father’s mansion, Hope End, in Herefordshire, built with Jamaican slave wealth. Crippled in childhood, she also lost her favourite brother, Edward, when he drowned in Torbay. With the freeing of the slaves the Barretts had to sell Hope End and came to live in Wimpole Street in London. Elizabeth Barrett was encouraged by the leading writers of her day in her essay writing and in her poetry; her poem The Cry of the Children (1843) was read in the House of Lords and influenced legislation to protect working children. At the age of forty, in September 1846, she eloped from Wimpole Street with Robert Browning following their epistolary courtship. The couple came to Italy with her maid, Elizabeth Wilson, and her dog, Flush, where Elizabeth recovered enough from her invalidism and dependency upon laudanum to bear the child Pen, and where she wrote: The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point (1848), against slavery in the United States; Casa Guidi Windows (1851), against the oppression of Italy by foreign nations; and Aurora Leigh (1856), against the oppression of women and children. Her publications and money from her family supported her husband and child, but gradually Robert and Elizabeth grew apart. She died in 1861, in Casa Guidi, worn out by illness, addiction and arguments with Robert. She keenly wanted her son to study modern languages, the Arts and diplomacy while Robert wanted him to study the Classics and be an English gentleman. At her death Robert took Pen to England but when he grew up, after failing Classics at Balliol, he became an artist and returned to live in his parents’ beloved Italy. Robert Browning died in old age in Venice and is buried in Westminster Abbey. His wife lies apart from him in Florence’s Protestant Cemetery.

JOHN ROBERT GLORNEY BOLTON was born in Warwick, attended Ardingly, then worked at the Bodleian Library during the First World War. He matriculated to St Catherine’s Society of Oxford University, leaving there to write for the Yorkshire Post, then the Times of India. He covered the Salt March and was Gandhi’s friend and biographer, writing The Tragedy of Gandhi. He also wrote Peasant and Prince, The Dome of Devotion, Christopher Wren, Czech Tragedy, Pétain and (with his wife) a dual autobiography, Two Lives Converge. He lived in Italy from 1954 until his death, working for the United Nations in Rome, writing a biography of Pope John XXIII, Roman Century and an unfinished biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

His daughter, JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY, was born in Devonshire Place, London, educated at St Mary’s School, Sussex, and received her PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at Princeton University and the University of Colorado, Boulder, and has published Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer, Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages and Saint Bride and Her Book: Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations. She was Acting Curator of Casa Guidi in Florence, 1987–8. After raising her three sons, Richard, Colin and Jonathan, she retired as Professor Emerita to enter an Anglican convent.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Aurora Leigh and other Poems

Edited by JOHN ROBERT GLORNEY BOLTON
and JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 1995
17

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193533-1

Preface

Acknowledgements

Table of Dates

PREFACE

This edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s selected poetry, apart from Aurora Leigh and ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, presents texts from the earliest printed versions, compared with their manuscripts at Baylor University’s Armstrong Browning Library and London’s British Library.

Aurora Leigh was dedicated on 17 October 1856 to John Kenyon and published by Chapman and Hall in that year (though it bears the publication date of 1857). Aurora Leigh’s text is given from the final revises for the first English edition, which were prepared by Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s literary agent, the corrections being in his handwriting, and then autographed (London, 20 October 1856) by Elizabeth for ‘Mr. Francis of New York’, to be used in turn for the first American edition. This text, now in the Robert Taylor Collection, Princeton University Library, is chosen because it is closest to the spontaneity of the first English published Aurora Leigh, while also being the text used for the nineteenth-century American editions of the poem. Later corrections supplied by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (and which are adopted in twentieth-century critical editions) make the text more laboured.

The ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ text does not follow the earliest printed edition of 1850, but is given from Elizabeth’s manuscript notebook, now in the British Library, which was written by her at 50 Wimpole Street secretly during her courtship in 1846, then brought with her to Italy and only shyly presented to Robert at Bagni di Lucca where they, their child and his nurse, had gone to stay in the mountains away from the heat of Florence in 1849.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself never received a copy of the Boston Liberty Bell in which The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point was thought to have appeared. Nor does the Baylor University Armstrong Browning Library own a copy. The text given here is that from the manuscript at Baylor and from the 1849 and 1850 London editions.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning tended, though not always, to use two rather than three ellipses (..), ampersands (&s) for ands, her exclamation marks lack the point (which cannot be reproduced typographically), and she often employed equal signs (=) for dashes in manuscript; her publishers regularized these to varying degrees. Her printer for Aurora Leigh chose to use single quotation marks within single quotation marks, and we present a diplomatic text of that first edition. For the selected poems we use the punctuation practices of the Aurora Leigh 1856 edition, except for the 1846 manuscript text of the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. Her footnotes are usually supplied as such, her endnotes being given in the Notes followed by her initials: [EBB].

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote of Michelangelo’s Medici Tomb sculpture of Aurora, Dawn, in Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Aurora Leigh (1856) to convey her love of Florence, her anguish for Italy, and her loyalty to the Risorgimento. Her poetry worked for the liberation of the oppressed, whether they were nations or slaves, women or children. The Notes give the bibliographical, biographical, political and intertextual contexts of the poems and discuss Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s allusions.

The poems of this edition ideally should be read with her sprightly and uncomplaining, learned yet joyous letters, especially those written between herself and Robert during their Wimpole Street courtship. Better yet, this edition should be read with the entire Regency period library at Hope End of biblical and classical texts in their original languages, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew them, or in translation, as in the Penguin Classics, including volumes of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Apuleius, Virgil and Dante, to be joined by the works of Chaucer, Langland, Milton, Shakespeare, Fielding, Byron and Dickens, and of women’s books, which she also read avidly though Robert Browning despised them, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou Italie (1807), George Sand’s Consuelo (1842) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). To these one could add men’s contextual books, such as Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–9), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) and The Blithedale Romance (1852), Henry James’s Princess Casamassima (1886) and William Wetmore Story and his Friends (1903), which fed upon the lives and works of women associated with the Italian Risorgimento, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Jesse White Mario, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna Brownell Jameson, Isa Blagden, Harriet Hosmer, Cristina Trivulzio, Princess Belgioioso, Theodosia Garrow Trollope and Anita Garibaldi.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors acknowledge their gratitude to the British Council, Rome, the British Institute, Florence, the Library of the University of California at Berkeley, the Robert Taylor Collection at Princeton University, Quincy University’s Library, London’s British Library, Baylor University’s Armstrong Browning Library, the Browning Institute of New York and Florence and the Friends of Casa Guidi.

The text of Aurora Leigh is published with permission from the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Robert Taylor Collection), Princeton University Libraries; John Murray granted permission for the study and use of Elizabeth Barrett Browning manuscript and copyright materials.

TABLE OF DATES

1806 6 March: Birth of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett, known to her family as ‘Ba’, called by herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (hereafter referred to as EBB), to Edward and Mary Barrett Moulton Barrett. Hope End, in Malvern, Herefordshire, begun as a Turkish palace built with slave and sugar wealth from the Cinnamon Hill Plantation, Jamaica.

1807 26 June: Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, ‘Bro’, born. Slave trade is abolished.

1812 7 May: Robert Browning (hereafter referred to as RB) born.

1815 17 October–26 November: EBB and parents in Paris after the Battle of Waterloo.

1817–20 Edward and EBB’s tutor in Latin and Greek, Daniel McSwiney, at Hope End until Bro enters Charterhouse.

1820 The Battle of Marathon, written in the style of Homer, Pope and Byron, begun at eleven, privately printed and dedicated to her father.

1821 ‘Stanzas, Excited by Some Reflections on the Present State of Greece’ published in New Monthly Magazine. EBB’s illness begins, she is given laudanum.

1824 30 June: ‘Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron’ published in Globe and Traveller.

1826 Anonymous publication of Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, printing costs paid for by Mary Trepsack, Barrett slave from Jamaica. EBB’s friendships begin with Sir Uvedale Price and with blind Hugh Stuart Boyd, both Greek scholars.

1827 Sir Uvedale Price publishes An Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages, much of it derived from correspondence with EBB on Greek and Latin metrics in poetry.

1828 7 October: Death of EBB’s mother.

1829 Death of Sir Uvedale Price.

1832 Slave insurrection, West Indies. EBB translates Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. August: Hope End left for Sidmouth.

1833 EBB’s Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous Poems published anonymously. August: Abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

1835 Family moves to 74 Gloucester Place in London’s Marylebone district, popular with West Indian slave-owners. RB, also associated with West Indies, publishes Paracelsus, which EBB reads, knowing Paracelsus invented laudanum from opium.

1836 28 May: EBB dines at John Kenyon’s with William Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor.

1837 EBB ill, treated by Dr William Chambers, physician to King William, Queen Adelaide and later to Queen Victoria.

1838 Lung haemorrhage, laudanum used. EBB sent to Torquay to convalesce. May: The Seraphim, and Other Poems, first non-anonymous publication.

1840 15 February: EBB’s ‘The Crowned and Wedded Queen’ published in the Athenaeum to celebrate the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert on 10 February. 11 July: Bro drowns in Torbay.

1841 January: Miss Mitford gives EBB the spaniel Flush. The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernized contains EBB’s ‘Queen Annelida and False Arcite’. RB publishes first instalment of Bells and Pomegranates, including Pippa Passes, set in Asolo, near Venice. September: EBB returns to London, 50 Wimpole Street, where she lives for the next five years. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller at Brook Farm, a socialist community near Boston.

1842 The Athenaeum publishes EBB’s translations from Gregory Nazienzen and ‘Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets’. Richard Hengist Horne’s ‘Report on the Employment of Children and Young Persons in Mines and Manufactories’.

1843 August: The Cry of the Children, published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. September: Flush stolen, ransomed.

1844 Richard Hengist Horne, editor, A New Spirit of the Age, includes unsigned essays by EBB and RB. EBB meets Anna Jameson, the art critic and author of The Loves of the Poets. EBB publishes Poems, which include ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’. Flush again stolen, ransomed.

1845 10 January: Courtship by letter with RB begins, prompted by her reference to him in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, her Poems being given to his family by Kenyon.

1846 EBB writes still untitled ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. 31 July: She visits Westminster Abbey and makes other expeditions towards recovery. 5 September: EBB goes personally to negotiate ransom with dog-robbers for Flush. 12 September: Marriage to RB, EBB’s maid, Elizabeth Wilson, her witness, 19 September: EBB, RB, Wilson and Flush leave for the Continent, meeting Anna Jameson and her niece Gerardine in Paris, on 21 September, who travel on with them to Italy, visiting Petrarch and Laura’s Vaucluse, near Avignon, on the way to Pisa.

1847 4 April: Easter, Margaret Fuller meets Marchese Angelo Ossoli in St Peter’s, Rome. 17 April: Brownings come to Florence. EBB and RB meet the American sculptor, William Wetmore Story. 14 July: Brownings visit Vallombrosa, lease Casa Guidi.

1848 10 May: Hugh Stuart Boyd’s death. 5 September: Angelo Eugenio Filippo Ossoli born to Margaret Fuller. EBB sends The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point to be published, Boston, the Liberty Bell; writes Casa Guidi Windows, Part One; reads Jane Eyre.

1849 9 March: Robert Weidemann (‘Pen’) Browning born, EBB’s maid, Elizabeth Wilson, having urged EBB to stop taking opium long enough to have successful pregnancy. Austrians arrive in Florence at the Grand Duke’s invitation to take over control of Tuscany. 30 June: Brownings go to stay at Bagni di Lucca, EBB gives RB the untitled manuscript of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ written secretly during their courtship; RB urges their publication, EBB suggests title of ‘Sonnets from the Bosnian’, RB choosing ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. Margaret Fuller works under Princess Belgioioso (James’s Princess Casamassima) in Roman hospitals during French siege against Risorgimento’s Roman Republic. 29 June: Rome falls to French, Anita Garibaldi dies in childbirth during flight.

1850 April: EBB’s friendship with Margaret Fuller. 1 June: The Athenaeum proposes EBB for Poet Laureate at death of William Wordsworth. 19 July: Margaret Fuller’s death at sea. 28 July: EBB’s fourth miscarriage. EBB publishes Poems, reads Shirley.

1851 Brownings visit England and see the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace with Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave. EBB publishes Casa Guidi Windows, Parts One and Two.

1852 14 February: EBB meets George Sand. American sculptor Hiram Powers in Florence when the Brownings return; later, they meet Harriet Hosmer in Rome. Hawthorne publishes The Blithedale Romance.

1854 RB and EBB publish Two Poems, which includes ‘A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London’. Flush dies and is buried in cellar at Casa Guidi.

1855 27 September: Tennyson reads Maud to Brownings and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. RB publishes Men and Women.

1856 EBB publishes Aurora Leigh, dedicates poem to Kenyon. 3 December: Kenyon’s death, leaves Brownings £11,000 in his will. EBB’s Poems reissued in three volumes.

1857 17 April: Death of EBB’s father following eleven years of bitter estrangement from his daughter.

1859 March: RB, by command of the Queen, dines with the Prince of Wales in Rome.

1860 EBB publishes Poems before Congress. June: RB finds ‘The Old Yellow Book’, of 1698 Roman trial of Guido Franceschini for the murder of his wife, Pompilia, in the San Lorenzo market, from which RB composes The Ring and the Book. Hawthorne publishes The Marble Faun, Donatello being modelled on RB.

1861 18 February: Italy, except for Papal States, accepts government by Victor Emmanuel II, King of Sardinia and Piedmont. 20 May: Hans Christian Andersen and RB recite ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ at children’s party. 6 June: Death of Risorgimento’s Camille Cavour. 29 June: EBB’s death, Casa Guidi. 1 July: Funeral in Florence. 27 July: RB and Pen leave Florence, RB never to return there.

1862 EBB’s Last Poems, edited by RB, published.

1863 EBB’s The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets, edited by RB, published; George Eliot publishes Romola, which she had researched in Florence in 1861.

1868–9 RB publishes The Ring and the Book.

1870 Italy, including Papal States, a free and unified nation.

1889 RB dies in his son’s Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice; buried in Westminster Abbey.

1912 EBB and RB’s son, Pen, dies in Asolo, the Venetian town celebrated by RB in Pippa Passes. Pen had hoped to make Casa Guidi a shrine to his parents; Balliol College, Oxford, to have the manuscript of Aurora Leigh (he had given Balliol his portrait of RB; EBB’s Castellani ring was presented to Balliol by Mrs Orr).

1913 The Brownings’ manuscripts and art treasures, which Pen had intended for Casa Guidi and Balliol, sold at auction by Sotheby’s.

AURORA LEIGH (1856)

First Book

OF writing many books there is no end;

And I who have written much in prose and verse

For others’ uses, will write now for mine,—

Will write my story for my better self,

5 As when you paint your portrait for a friend,

Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it

Long after he has ceased to love you, just

To hold together what he was and is.

I, writing thus, am still what men call young;

10 I have not so far left the coasts of life

To travel inland, that I cannot hear

That murmur of the outer Infinite

Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep

When wondered at for smiling; not so far,

15 But still I catch my mother at her post

Beside the nursery-door, with finger up,

‘Hush, hush—here’s too much noise!’ while her sweet eyes

Leap forward, taking part against her word

In the child’s riot. Still I sit and feel

20 My father’s slow hand, when she had left us both,

Stroke out my childish curls across his knee;

And hear Assunta’s daily jest (she knew

He liked it better than a better jest)

Inquire how many golden scudi went

25 To make such ringlets. O my father’s hand,

Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,—

Draw, press the child’s head closer to thy knee!

I’m still too young, too young to sit alone.

I write. My mother was a Florentine,

30 Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me

When scarcely I was four years old; my life,

A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp,

Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;

She could not bear the joy of giving life—

35 The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kiss

Had left a longer weight upon my lips,

It might have steadied the uneasy breath,

And reconciled and fraternised my soul

With the new order. As it was, indeed,

40 I felt a mother-want about the world,

And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb

Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,—

As restless as a nest-deserted bird

Grown chill through something being away, though what

45 It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born

To make my father sadder, and myself

Not overjoyous, truly. Women know

The way to rear up children, (to be just,)

They know a simple, merry, tender knack

50 Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,

And stringing pretty words that make no sense,

And kissing full sense into empty words;

Which things are corals to cut life upon,

Although such trifles: children learn by such,

55 Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,

And get not over-early solemnised,—

But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,

Which burns and hurts not,—not a single bloom,—

Become aware and unafraid of Love.

60 Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well

—Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains,

And wills more consciously responsible,

And not as wisely, since less foolishly;

So mothers have God’s licence to be missed.

65 My father was an austere Englishman,

Who, after a dry life-time spent at home

In college-learning, law, and parish talk,

Was flooded with a passion unaware,

His whole provisioned and complacent past

70 Drowned out from him that moment. As he stood

In Florence, where he had come to spend a month

And note the secret of Da Vinci’s drains,

He musing somewhat absently perhaps

Some English question . . whether men should pay

75 The unpopular but necessary tax

With left or right hand—in the alien sun

In that great square of the Santissima,

There drifted past him (scarcely marked enough

To move his comfortable island-scorn,)

80 A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm,—

The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens holding up

Tall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslant

To the blue luminous tremor of the air,

And letting drop the white wax as they went

85 To eat the bishop’s wafer at the church;

From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,

A face flashed like a cymbal on his face

And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,

Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,

90 He too received his sacramental gift

With eucharistic meanings; for he loved.

And thus beloved, she died. I’ve heard it said

That but to see him in the first surprise

Of widower and father, nursing me,

95 Unmothered little child of four years old,

His large man’s hands afraid to touch my curls,

As if the gold would tarnish,—his grave lips

Contriving such a miserable smile,

As if he knew needs must, or I should die,

100 And yet ’twas hard,—would almost make the stones

Cry out for pity. There’s a verse he set

In Santa Croce to her memory,

‘Weep for an infant too young to weep much

When death removed this mother’—stops the mirth

105 To-day on women’s face when they walk

With rosy children hanging on their gowns,

Under the cloister, to escape the sun

That scorches in the piazza. After which,

He left our Florence, and made haste to hide

110 Himself, his prattling child, and silent grief,

Among the mountains above Pelago;

Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need

Of mother nature more than others use,

And Pan’s white goats, with udders warm and full

115 Of mystic contemplations, come to feed

Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own—

Such scholar-scraps he talked, I’ve heard from friends,

For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,

Will get to wear it as a hat aside

120 With a flower stuck in’t. Father, then, and child,

We lived among the mountains many years,

God’s silence on the outside of the house,

And we, who did not speak too loud, within;

And old Assunta to make up the fire,

125 Crossing herself whene’er a sudden flame

Which lightened from the firewood, made alive

That picture of my mother on the wall.

The painter drew it after she was dead;

And when the face was finished, throat and hands,

130 Her cameriera carried him, in hate

Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade

She dressed in at the Pitti. ‘He should paint

No sadder thing than that,’ she swore, ‘to wrong

Her poor signora.’ Therefore very strange

135 The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch

For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up,

And gaze across them, half in terror, half

In adoration, at the picture there,—

That swan-like supernatural white life,

140 Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk

Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power

To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:

For hours I sate and stared. Assunta’s awe

And my poor father’s melancholy eyes

145 Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts

When wondering beyond sight. And as I grew

In years, I mixed, confusedly, unconsciously,

Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,

Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,

150 Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,

With still that face… which did not therefore change,

But kept the mystic level of all forms,

And fears and admirations; was by turns

Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,—

155 A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,

A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,

A still Medusa, with mild milky brows

All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes

Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,

160 Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords

Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her first

Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,

And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;

Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile

165 In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth

My father pushed down on the bed for that,—

Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,

Buried at Florence. All which images,

Concentred on the picture, glassed themselves

170 Before my meditative childhood, . . as

The incoherencies of change and death

Are represented fully, mixed and merged,

In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.

And while I stared away my childish wits

175 Upon my mother’s picture, (ah, poor child!)

My father, who through love had suddenly

Thrown off the old conventions, broken loose

From chin-bands of the soul, like Lazarus,

Yet had no time to learn to talk and walk

180 Or grow anew familiar with the sun,—

Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived,

But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims,—

Whom love had unmade from a common man

But not completed to an uncommon man,—

185 My father taught me what he had learnt the best

Before he died and left me,—grief and love.

And, seeing we had books among the hills,

Strong words of counselling souls, confederate

With vocal pines and waters,—out of books

190 He taught me all the ignorance of men,

And how God laughs in heaven when any man

Says ‘Here I’m learned; this, I understand;

In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.’

He sent the schools to school, demonstrating

195 A fool will pass for such through one mistake,

While a philosopher will pass for such,

Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross

And heaped up to a system.

I am like,

They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows

200 Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth

Of delicate features,—paler, near as grave;

But then my mother’s smile breaks up the whole,

And makes it better sometimes than itself.

So, nine full years, our days were hid with God

205 Among his mountains. I was just thirteen,

Still growing like the plants from unseen roots

In tongue-tied Springs,—and suddenly awoke

To full life and its needs and agonies,

With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside

210 A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,

Makes awful lightning. His last word was ‘Love—’

‘Love, my child, love, love!’—(then he had done with grief)

‘Love, my child.’ Ere I answered he was gone,

And none was left to love in all the world.

215 There, ended childhood: what succeeded next

I recollect as, after fevers, men

Thread back the passage of delirium,

Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;

Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives;

220 A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i’ the flank

With flame, that it should eat and end itself

Like some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,

I do remember clearly how there came

A stranger with authority, not right,

225 (I thought not) who commanded, caught me up

From old Assunta’s neck; how, with a shriek,

She let me go,—while I, with ears too full

Of my father’s silence, to shriek back a word,

In all a child’s astonishment at grief

230 Stared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,

My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!

The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,

Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,

Like one in anger drawing back her skirts

235 Which suppliants catch at. Then the bitter sea

Inexorably pushed between us both

And sweeping up the ship with my despair

Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.

Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;

240 Ten nights and days without the common face

Of any day or night; the moon and sun

Cut off from the green reconciling earth,

To starve into a blind ferocity

And glare unnatural; the very sky

245 (Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea

As if no human heart should scape alive,)

Bedraggled with the desolating salt,

Until it seemed no more that holy heaven

To which my father went. All new, and strange—

250 The universe turned stranger, for a child.

Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs

Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home

Among those mean red houses through the fog?

And when I heard my father’s language first

255 From alien lips which had no kiss for mine,

I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,—

And some one near me said the child was mad

Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.

Was this my father’s England? the great isle?

260 The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship

Of verdure, field from field, as man from man;

The skies themselves looked low and positive,

As almost you could touch them with a hand,

And dared to do it, they were so far off

265 From God’s celestial crystals; all things, blurred

And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates

Absorb the light here?—not a hill or stone

With heart to strike a radiant colour up

Or active outline on the indifferent air.

270 I think I see my father’s sister stand

Upon the hall-step of her country-house

To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,

Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight

As if for taming accidental thoughts

275 From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey

By frigid use of life (she was not old,

Although my father’s elder by a year)

A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;

A close mild mouth, a little soured about

280 The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,

Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;

Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smiled,

But never, never have forgot themselves

In smiling; cheeks, in which was yet a rose

285 Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,

Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,

Past fading also.

She had lived, we’ll say,

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,

A quiet life, which was not life at all,

290 (But that, she had not lived enough to know)

Between the vicar and the country squires,

The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes

From the empyreal, to assure their souls

Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,

295 The apothecary looked on once a year,

To prove their soundness of humility.

The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts

Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,

Because we are of one flesh after all

300 And need one flannel, (with a proper sense

Of difference in the quality)—and still

The book-club, guarded from your modern trick

Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,

Preserved her intellectual. She had lived

305 A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,

Accounting that to leap from perch to perch

Was act and joy enough for any bird.

Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live

In thickets, and eat berries!

I, alas,

310 A wild bird, scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,

And she was there to meet me. Very kind.

Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.

She stood upon the steps to welcome me,

Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck,—

315 Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool

To draw the new light closer, catch and cling

Less blindly. In my ears, my father’s word

Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,

‘Love, love, my child.’ She, black there with my grief,

320 Might feel my love—she was his sister once—

I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,

Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,

And drew me feebly through the hall, into

The room she sate in.

There, with some strange spasm

325 Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands

Imperiously, and held me at arm’s length,

And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes

Searched through my face,—ay stabbed it through and through,

Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find

330 A wicked murderer in my innocent face,

If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,

She struggled for her ordinary calm,

And missed it rather,—told me not to shrink,

As if she had told me not lie or swear,—

335 ‘She loved my father and would love me too

As long as I deserved it.’ Very kind.

I understood her meaning afterward;

She thought to find my mother in my face,

And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,

340 Had loved my father truly, as she could,

And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,

My Tuscan mother, who had fooled away

A wise man from wise courses, a good man

From obvious duties, and, depriving her,

345 His sister, of the household precedence,

Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,

And made him mad, alike by life and death,

In love and sorrow. She had pored for years

What sort of woman could be suitable

350 To her sort of hate, to entertain it with;

And so, her very curiosity

Became hate too, and all the idealism

She ever used in life, was used for hate,

Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at last

355 The love from which it grew, in strength and heat,

And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a sense

Of disputable virtue (say not, sin)

When Christian doctrine was enforced at church.

And thus my father’s sister was to me

360 My mother’s hater. From that day, she did

Her duty to me, (I appreciate it

In her own words as spoken to herself)

Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,

But measured always. She was generous, bland,

365 More courteous than was tender, gave me still

The first place,—as if fearful that God’s saints

Would look down suddenly and say, ‘Herein

You missed a point, I think, through lack of love.’

Alas, a mother never is afraid

370 Of speaking angerly to any child,

Since love, she knows, is justified of love.

And I, I was a good child on the whole,

A meek and manageable child. Why not?

I did not live, to have the faults of life:

375 There seemed more true life in my father’s grave

Than in all England. Since that threw me off

Who fain would cleave, (his latest will, they say,

Consigned me to his land) I only thought

Of lying quiet there where I was thrown

380 Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her

To prick me to a pattern with her pin,

Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,

And dry out from my drowned anatomy

This last sea-salt left in me.

So it was.

385 I broke the copious curls upon my head

In braids, because she liked smooth-ordered hair.

I left off saying my sweet Tuscan words

Which still at any stirring of the heart

Came up to float across the English phrase

390 As lilies, (Bene.. or che ch’è) because

She liked my father’s child to speak his tongue.

I learnt the collects and the catechism,

The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,

The Articles . . the Tracts against the times,

395 (By no means Buonaventure’s ‘Prick of Love,’)

And various popular synopses of

Inhuman doctrines never taught by John,

Because she liked instructed piety.

I learnt my complement of classic French

400 (Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,)

And German also, since she liked a range

Of liberal education,—tongues, not books.

I learnt a little algebra, a little

Of the mathematics,—brushed with extreme flounce

405 The circle of the sciences, because

She misliked women who are frivolous.

I learnt the royal genealogies

Of Oviedo, the internal laws

Of the Burmese empire, . . by how many feet

410 Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh.

What navigable river joins itself

To Lara, and what census of the year five

Was taken at Klagenfurt,—because she liked

A general insight into useful facts.

415 I learnt much music,—such as would have been

As quite impossible in Johnson’s day

As still it might be wished—fine sleights of hand

And unimagined fingering, shuffling off

The hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notes

420 To a noisy Tophet; and I drew . . costumes

From French engravings, nereids neatly draped

With smirks of simmering godship,—I washed in

From nature, landscapes, (rather say, washed out.)

I danced the polka and Cellarius,

425 Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,

Because she liked accomplishment in girls.

I read a score of books on womanhood

To prove, if women do not think at all,

They may teach thinking, (to a maiden aunt

430 Or else the author)—books demonstrating

Their right of comprehending husband’s talk

When not too deep, and even of answering

With pretty ‘may it please you,’ or ‘so it is,’—

Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,

435 Particular worth and general missionariness,

As long as they keep quiet by the fire

And never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay,’

For that is fatal,—their angelic reach

Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,

440 And fatten household sinners,—their, in brief,

Potential faculty in everything

Of abdicating power in it: she owned

She liked a woman to be womanly,

And English women, she thanked God and sighed,

445 (Some people always sigh in thanking God)

Were models to the universe. And last

I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like

To see me wear the night with empty hands,

A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdess

450 Was something after all, (the pastoral saints

Be praised for’t) leaning lovelorn with pink eyes

To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;

Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat

So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell

455 Which slew the tragic poet.

By the way,

The works of women are symbolical.

We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,

Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,

To put on when you’re weary—or a stool

460 To stumble over and vex you . . ‘curse that stool!’

Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean

And sleep, and dream of something we are not,

But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!

This hurts most, this . . that, after all, we are paid

Aurora Leigh and other Poems

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

TABLE OF DATES

FURTHER READING

Editions

Letters

Biography

Criticism and Scholarship

AURORA LEIGH (1856)

First Book