Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I Love me Sweet, with all thou art, Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the lightest part, Love me in full being. II Love me with thine open youth In its frank surrender; With the vowing of thy mouth, With its silence tender. III Love me with thine azure eyes, Made for earnest granting; Taking colour from the skies, Can Heaven’s truth be wanting? IV Love me with their lids, that fall Snow-like at first meeting; Love me with thine heart, that all Neighbours then see beating. V Love me with thine hand stretched out Freely—open-minded: Love me with thy loitering foot,— Hearing one behind it. VI Love me with thy voice, that turns Sudden faint above me; Love me with thy blush that burns When I murmur Love me! VII Love me with thy thinking soul, Break it to love-sighing; Love me with thy thoughts that roll On through living—dying. VIII Love me when in thy gorgeous airs, When the world has crowned thee; Love me, kneeling at thy prayers, With the angels round thee. IX Love me pure, as musers do, Up the woodlands shady: Love me gaily, fast and true As a winsome lady. X Through all hopes that keep us brave, Farther off or nigher, Love me for the house and grave, And for something higher. XI Thus, if thou wilt prove me, Dear, Woman’s love no fable. I will love thee—half a year— As a man is able.

We cannot live, except thus mutually We alternate, aware or unaware, The reflex act of life: and when we bear Our virtue onward most impulsively, Most full of invocation, and to be Most instantly compellant, certes, there We live most life, whoever breathes most air And counts his dying years by sun and sea. But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth Throw out her full force on another soul, The conscience and the concentration both Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole And aim consummated, is Love in sooth, As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

" Yes !" I answered you last night ; " No !" this morning, Sir, I say ! Colours, seen by candle-light, Will not look the same by day. When the tabors played their best, Lamps above, and laughs below — Love me sounded like a jest, Fit for Yes or fit for No ! Call me false, or call me free — Vow, whatever light may shine, No man on your face shall see Any grief for change on mine. Yet the sin is on us both — Time to dance is not to woo — Wooer light makes fickle troth — Scorn of me recoils on you ! Learn to win a lady's faith Nobly, as the thing is high ; Bravely, as for life and death — With a loyal gravity. Lead her from the festive boards, Point her to the starry skies, Guard her, by your truthful words, Pure from courtship's flatteries. By your truth she shall be true — Ever true, as wives of yore — And her Yes , once said to you, SHALL be Yes for evermore.

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair, Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy dead in silence like to death— Most like a monumental statue set In everlasting watch and moveless woe Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: If it could weep, it could arise and go.

"Pheu pheu, ti prosderkesthe m ommasin, tekna;" [[Alas, alas, why do you gaze at me with your eyes, my children.]]—Medea. Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years ? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, — And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows ; The young birds are chirping in the nest ; The young fawns are playing with the shadows ; The young flowers are blowing toward the west— But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly ! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free. Do you question the young children in the sorrow, Why their tears are falling so ? The old man may weep for his to-morrow Which is lost in Long Ago — The old tree is leafless in the forest — The old year is ending in the frost — The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest — The old hope is hardest to be lost : But the young, young children, O my brothers, Do you ask them why they stand Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, In our happy Fatherland ? They look up with their pale and sunken faces, And their looks are sad to see, For the man's grief abhorrent, draws and presses Down the cheeks of infancy — "Your old earth," they say, "is very dreary;" "Our young feet," they say, "are very weak !" Few paces have we taken, yet are weary— Our grave-rest is very far to seek ! Ask the old why they weep, and not the children, For the outside earth is cold — And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering, And the graves are for the old !" "True," say the children, "it may happen That we die before our time ! Little Alice died last year her grave is shapen Like a snowball, in the rime. We looked into the pit prepared to take her — Was no room for any work in the close clay : From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her, Crying, 'Get up, little Alice ! it is day.' If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower, With your ear down, little Alice never cries ; Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her, For the smile has time for growing in her eyes ,— And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in The shroud, by the kirk-chime ! It is good when it happens," say the children, "That we die before our time !" Alas, the wretched children ! they are seeking Death in life, as best to have ! They are binding up their hearts away from breaking, With a cerement from the grave. Go out, children, from the mine and from the city — Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do — Pluck you handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through ! But they answer, " Are your cowslips of the meadows Like our weeds anear the mine ? Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows, From your pleasures fair and fine! "For oh," say the children, "we are weary, And we cannot run or leap — If we cared for any meadows, it were merely To drop down in them and sleep. Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping — We fall upon our faces, trying to go ; And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping, The reddest flower would look as pale as snow. For, all day, we drag our burden tiring, Through the coal-dark, underground — Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron In the factories, round and round. "For all day, the wheels are droning, turning, — Their wind comes in our faces, — Till our hearts turn, — our heads, with pulses burning, And the walls turn in their places Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling — Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall, — Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling — All are turning, all the day, and we with all ! — And all day, the iron wheels are droning ; And sometimes we could pray, 'O ye wheels,' (breaking out in a mad moaning) 'Stop ! be silent for to-day ! ' " Ay ! be silent ! Let them hear each other breathing For a moment, mouth to mouth — Let them touch each other's hands, in a fresh wreathing Of their tender human youth ! Let them feel that this cold metallic motion Is not all the life God fashions or reveals — Let them prove their inward souls against the notion That they live in you, or under you, O wheels ! — Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward, As if Fate in each were stark ; And the children's souls, which God is calling sunward, Spin on blindly in the dark. Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers, To look up to Him and pray — So the blessed One, who blesseth all the others, Will bless them another day. They answer, " Who is God that He should hear us, While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred ? When we sob aloud, the human creatures near us Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word ! And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding) Strangers speaking at the door : Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him, Hears our weeping any more ? " Two words, indeed, of praying we remember ; And at midnight's hour of harm, — 'Our Father,' looking upward in the chamber, We say softly for a charm. We know no other words, except 'Our Father,' And we think that, in some pause of angels' song, God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather, And hold both within His right hand which is strong. 'Our Father !' If He heard us, He would surely (For they call Him good and mild) Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely, 'Come and rest with me, my child.' "But, no !" say the children, weeping faster, " He is speechless as a stone ; And they tell us, of His image is the master Who commands us to work on. Go to ! " say the children,—"up in Heaven, Dark, wheel-like, turning clouds are all we find ! Do not mock us ; grief has made us unbelieving — We look up for God, but tears have made us blind." Do ye hear the children weeping and disproving, O my brothers, what ye preach ? For God's possible is taught by His world's loving — And the children doubt of each. And well may the children weep before you ; They are weary ere they run ; They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory Which is brighter than the sun : They know the grief of man, without its wisdom ; They sink in the despair, without its calm — Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom, — Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm, — Are worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly No dear remembrance keep,— Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly : Let them weep ! let them weep ! They look up, with their pale and sunken faces, And their look is dread to see, For they think you see their angels in their places, With eyes meant for Deity ;— "How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation, Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart, — Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, And tread onward to your throne amid the mart ? Our blood splashes upward, O our tyrants, And your purple shews your path ; But the child's sob curseth deeper in the silence Than the strong man in his wrath !"

Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,– A mere, mere woman,–a mere flaccid nerve,- A kerchief left out all night in the rain, Turned soft so,–overtasked and overstrained And overlived in this close London life! And yet I should be stronger. Never burn Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare With red seals from the table, saying each, 'Here's something that you know not.'

'There it is!– You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise, Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang, Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up A whole life at each wound; incapable Of deepening, widening a large lap of life To hold the world-full woe. The human race To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in the cold, Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes Will write of factories and of slaves, as if Your father were a negro, and your son A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you,– All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard To general suffering. Here's the world half blind With intellectual light, half brutalised With civilization, having caught the plague In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain And sin too! ... does one woman of you all, (You who weep easily) grow pale to see This tiger shake his cage?–does one of you Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls And pine and die, because of the great sum Of universal anguish?–Show me a tear Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours, Because the world is mad? You cannot count, That you should weep for this account, not you! You weep for what you know. A red-haired child Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, Though but so little as with a finger-tip, Will set you weeping! but a million sick . . You could as soon weep for the rule of three, Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world Uncomprehended by you must remain Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives. Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,–and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind.' 'With which conclusion you conclude' . . 'But this– That you, Aurora, with the large live brow And steady eyelids, cannot condescend To play at art, as children play at swords, To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired Because true action is impossible. You never can be satisfied with praise Which men give women when they judge a book Not as mere work, but as mere woman's work, Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent! 'What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps! 'What delicate discernment ... almost thought! 'The book does honour to the sex, we hold. 'Among our female authors we make room 'For this fair writer, and congratulate 'The country that produces in these times 'Such women, competent to ... spell.'' 'Stop there!' I answered–burning through his thread of talk With a quick flame of emotion,–'You have read My soul, if not my book, and argue well I would not condescend ... we will not say To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use Of holy art and golden life. I am young, And peradventure weak–you tell me so– Through being a woman. And, for all the rest, Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance At fairs on tight-rope, till the babies dropped Their gingerbread for joy,–than shift the types For tolerable verse, intolerable To men who act and suffer. Better far, Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means, Than a sublime art frivolously.' * Then I spoke. 'I have not stood long on the strand of life, And these salt waters have had scarcely time To creep so high up as to wet my feet. I cannot judge these tides–I shall, perhaps. A woman's always younger than a man At equal years, because she is disallowed Maturing by the outdoor sun and air, And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk. Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise! You think a woman ripens as a peach,– In the cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now; I'm young in age, and younger still, I think, As a woman. But a child may say amen To a bishop's prayer and see the way it goes; And I, incapable to loose the knot Of social questions, can approve, applaud August compassion, christian thoughts that shoot Beyond the vulgar white of personal aims. Accept my reverence.' 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 me 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 most 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 your fecund heart In mine, and let us blossom for the world That wants love's colour in the grey of time. With all my talk I can but 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. 'Why, sir, you are 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 lighting of the 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 over-bold 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 were 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 unspeakable, 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.'

In those days, though, I never analysed Myself even. All analysis comes late. You catch a sight of Nature, earliest, In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink And drop before the wonder of ‘t; you miss The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days, And wrote because I lived–unlicensed else: My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent flood Abolished bounds,–and, which my neighbour’s field, Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth. We play at leap-frog over the god Term; The love within us and the love without Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love, We scarce distinguish. So, with other power. Being acted on and acting seem the same: In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels, We know not if the forests move or we. And so, like most young poets, in a flush Of individual life, I poured myself Along the veins of others, and achieved Mere lifeless imitations of life verse, And made the living answer for the dead, Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste, Nor handle,’–we’re too legal, who write young: We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs, As if still ignorant of counterpoint; We call the Muse ... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’– As if we had seen her purple-braided head. With the eyes in it start between the boughs As often as a stag’s. What make-believe, With so much earnest! what effete results, From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes From such white heats!–bucolics, where the cows Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud In lashing off the flies,–didactics, driven Against the heels of what the master said; And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps A babe might blow between two straining cheeks Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh; And elegiac griefs, and songs of love, Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road, The worse for being warm: all these things, writ On happy mornings, with a morning heart, That leaps for love, is active for resolve, Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood. The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped, Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in. Spare the old bottles!–spill not the new wine. By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young,–(the life of a long life, Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn For ever;) by that strong excepted soul, I count it strange, and hard to understand, That nearly all young poets should write old; That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen, And beardless Byron academical, And so with others. It may be, perhaps, Such have not settled long and deep enough In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,–and still The memory mixes with the vision, spoils, And works it turbid. Or perhaps, again, In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx, The melancholy desert must sweep round, Behind you, as before.– For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true. Because myself was true in writing them. I, peradventure, have writ true ones since With less complacence. But I could not hide My quickening inner life from those at watch. They saw a light at a window now and then, They had not set there. Who had set it there? My father’s sister started when she caught My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say I had no business with a sort of soul, But plainly she objected,–and demurred, That souls were dangerous things to carry straight Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world. She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you done Your task this morning?–have you read that book? And are you ready for the crochet here?’– As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong, I know I have not ground you down enough To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust For household uses and proprieties, Before the rain has got into my barn And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re green With out-door impudence? you almost grow?’ To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task, And verify my abstract of the book? And should I sit down to the crochet work? Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teased The patient needle til it split the thread, Which oozed off from it in meandering lace From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad; My soul was singing at a work apart Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight, In vortices of glory and blue air. And so, through forced work and spontaneous work, The inner life informed the outer life, Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms, Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams, And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks, Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass, And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong. The dogs are on us–but we will not die.’