Aurora Leigh. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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, (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 (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 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 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. 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 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, Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax, Because she liked accomplishments 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 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, 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, 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, (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 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 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 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 The worth of our work, perhaps. In looking down Those years of education, (to return) I wonder if Brinvilliers suffered more In the water-torture, … flood succeeding flood To drench the incapable throat and split the veins … Than I did. Certain of your feebler souls Go out in such a process; many pine To a sick, inodorous light; my own endured: I had relations in the Unseen, and drew The elemental nutriment and heat From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights, Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark. I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outside Of the inner life, with all its ample room For heart and lungs, for will and intellect, Inviolable by conventions. God, I thank thee for that grace of thine! At first, I felt no life which was not patience—did The thing she bade me, without heed to a thing Beyond it, sate in just the chair she placed, With back against the window, to exclude The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn, Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woods To bring the house a message—ay, and walked Demurely in her carpeted low rooms, As if I should not, harkening my own steps, Misdoubt I was alive. I read her books, Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh, Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors, And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup, (I blushed for joy at that)—‘The Italian child, For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways, Thrives ill in England: she is paler yet Than when we came the last time; she will die.’

      ‘Will die.’ My cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too, With sudden anger, and approaching me Said low between his teeth—‘You’re wicked now? You wish to die and leave the world a-dusk For others, with your naughty light blown out?’ I looked into his face defyingly. He might have known, that, being what I was, ’Twas natural to like to get away As far as dead folk can; and then indeed Some people make no trouble when they die. He turned and went abruptly, slammed the door And shut his dog out. Romney, Romney Leigh. I have not named my cousin hitherto, And yet I used him as a sort of friend; My elder by few years, but cold and shy And absent … tender, when he thought of it, Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes, As well as early master of Leigh Hall, Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youth Repressing all its seasonable delights, And agonising with a ghastly sense Of universal hideous want and wrong To incriminate possession. When he came From college to the country, very oft He crossed the hills on visits to my aunt, With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses, A book in one hand—mere statistics, (if I chanced to lift the cover) count of all The goats whose beards are sprouting down toward hell, Against God’s separating judgment-hour. And she, she almost loved him—even allowed That sometimes he should seem to sigh my way; It made him easier to be pitiful, And sighing was his gift. So, undisturbed At whiles she let him shut my music up And push my needles down, and lead me out To see in that south angle of the house The figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock, On some light pretext. She would turn her head At other moments, go to fetch a thing, And leave me breath enough to speak with him, For his sake; it was simple. Sometimes too He would have saved me utterly, it seemed, He stood and looked so. Once, he stood so near He dropped a sudden hand upon my head Bent down on woman’s work, as soft as rain— But then I rose and shook it off as fire, The stranger’s touch that took my father’s place, Yet dared seem soft. I used him for a friend Before I ever knew him for a friend. ’Twas better, ’twas worse also, afterward: We came so close, we saw our differences Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh Was looking for the worms, I for the gods. A godlike nature his; the gods look down, Incurious of themselves; and certainly ’Tis well I should remember, how, those days, I was a worm too, and he looked on me.

      A little by his act perhaps, yet more By something in me, surely not my will, I did not die. But slowly, as one in swoon, To whom life creeps back in the form of death, With a sense of separation, a blind pain Of blank obstruction, and a roar i’ the ears Of visionary chariots which retreat As earth grows clearer … slowly, by degrees, I woke, rose up … where was I? in the world; For uses, therefore, I must count worth while.

      I had a little chamber in the house, As green as any privet-hedge a bird Might choose to build in, though the nest itself Could show but dead-brown sticks and straws; the walls Were green, the carpet was pure green, the straight Small bed was curtained greenly, and the folds Hung green about the window, which let in The out-door world with all its greenery. You could not push your head out and escape A dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle, But so you were baptised into the grace And privilege of seeing. … First, the lime, (I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure— My morning-dream was often hummed away By the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn, Which, after sweeping broadly round the house, Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself Among the acacias, over which, you saw The irregular line of elms by the deep lane Which stopped the grounds and dammed the overflow Of arbutus and laurel. Out of sight The lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign tramp Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales Could guess if lady’s hall or tenant’s lodge Dispensed such odours—though his stick well-crooked Might reach the lowest trail of blossoming briar Which dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms, And through their tops, you saw the folded hills Striped up and down with hedges, (burly oaks Projecting from the lines to show themselves) Through which my cousin Romney’s chimneys smoked As still as when a silent mouth in frost Breathes—showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall; While, far above, a jut of table-land, A promontory without water, stretched— You could not catch it if the days were thick, Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve And use it for an anvil till he had filled The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts, And proved he need not rest so early:—then, When all his setting trouble was resolved To a trance of passive glory, you might see In apparition on the golden sky (Alas, my Giotto’s background!) the sheep run Along the fine clear outline, small as mice That run