Part 1

Transcriber's Notes:

Underscores "_" before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_ in the original text. Equal signs "=" before and after a word or phrase indicate =bold= in the original text. Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals. Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved. Typographical errors have been silently corrected but other variations in spelling and punctuation remain unaltered. Where double quotes have been repeated at the beginnings of consecutive lines, they have been omitted for clarity.

_The Fourth Edition of_ =ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S POEMS.= With numerous Additions. Three Vols. Foolscap 8vo.

=MEN AND WOMEN.= =BY ROBERT BROWNING.= Two Vols. Foolscap 8vo. 12_s._

_A New Edition of_ =ROBERT BROWNING’S POEMS.= Two Vols. Foolscap 8vo. 16_s._

ALSO,

=CHRISTMAS-EVE AND EASTER-DAY.= A POEM. Foolscap 8vo. 6_s._

CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.

=AURORA LEIGH.=

BY =ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.=

LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1857.

LONDON: BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

DEDICATION TO JOHN KENYON, ESQ.

THE words ‘cousin’ and ‘friend’ are constantly recurring in this poem, the last pages of which have been finished under the hospitality of your roof, my own dearest cousin and friend;—cousin and friend, in a sense of less equality and greater disinterestedness than ‘Romney’’s.

Ending, therefore, and preparing once more to quit England, I venture to leave in your hands this book, the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered: that as, through my various efforts in literature and steps in life, you have believed in me, borne with me, and been generous to me, far beyond the common uses of mere relationship or sympathy of mind, so you may kindly accept, in sight of the public, this poor sign of esteem, gratitude, and affection, from

your unforgetting E. B. B.

39, DEVONSHIRE PLACE, _October_ 17, 1856.

AURORA LEIGH.

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, 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; 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, 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 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 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, 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— 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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.

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 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 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,) 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 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, 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, 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, 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 To-day, on women’s faces 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously, Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed, Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful, 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,— 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, 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 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 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 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 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,— 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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; 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, (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 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 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; 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 (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— 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 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? 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 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!

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 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 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 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, (But that, she had not lived enough to know) Between the vicar and the county squires, The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes From the empyreal, to assure their souls Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss, 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 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 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, 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,— 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, 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 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 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 to lie or swear,— ‘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, 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, 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 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 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 My mother’s hater. From that day, she did Her duty to me, (I appreciate it In her own word as spoken to herself) Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out, But measured always. She was generous, bland, 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 Of speaking angerly to any child, Since love, she knows, is justified of love.