Let us through the breathless air
Soar insuperable, where
Audibly in mystic ring
The angel orbs are heard to sing;
And from that bright vantage ground
Viewing nether heaven profound,
Mark the eagle near the sun
Scorching to gold his pinions dun;
With fleecy birds of paradise
Up floating to their native skies:
Or hear the wild swans far below
Faintly whistle as they row
Their course on the transparent tide
That fills the hollow welkin wide.
Light-skirt dancers, blithe and boon,
With high hosen and low shoon,
’Twixt sandal bordure and kirtle rim
Showing one pure wave of limb,
And frequent to the cestus fine
Lavish beauty’s undulous line,
Till like roses veiled in snow
’Neath the gauze your blushes glow;
Nymphs, with tresses which the wind
Sleekly tosses to his mind,
More deliriously dishevelled
Than when the Naxian widow revelled
With her flush bridegroom on the ooze,
Hurry me, Sisters! where ye choose.
GEORGE DARLEY.
Paradise may be the imagination of what we have not, or else the apotheosis of what we have. Rimbaud’s million of golden birds were his own vigour of body and mind, his own passionate life, refined and indefinitely intensified. In Bateau Ivre he affirmed himself.
Hopelessly imprisoned within his stammer, timid, a sedentary, Darley created his paradise by a process, not of affirmation, but of negation. All that was not his actual physique, character and way of living was heaven. The two poets set out in diametrically opposite directions; their destination, however, was the same.
Misery
The Teacher’s Monologue
The room is quiet, thoughts alone
People its mute tranquillity;
The yoke put off, the long task done,—
I am, as it is bliss to be,
Still and untroubled. Now I see,
For the first time, how soft the day
O’er waveless water, stirless tree,
Silent and sunny, wings its way.
Now as I watch that distant hill,
So faint, so blue, so far removed,
Sweet dreams of home my heart may fill,
That home, where I am known and loved. . . .
Sometimes I think a narrow heart
Makes me thus mourn those far away,
And keeps my love so far apart
From friends and friendships of to-day;
Sometimes I think ’tis but a dream
I treasure up so jealously;
All the sweet thoughts I live on seem
To vanish into vacancy;
And then this strange coarse world around
Seems all that’s palpable and true,
And every sight and every sound
Combine my spirit to subdue
To aching grief; so void and lone
Is Life, and Earth—so worse than vain
The hopes that, in my own heart sown
And cherished by such sun and rain
As Joy and transient Sorrow shed,
Have ripened to a harvest there:
Alas! methinks I hear it said,
“Thy golden sheaves are empty air.”
CHARLOTTE BRONTË.
Though but a shadow, but a sliding,
Let me know some little joy;
We that suffer long annoy
Are contented with a thought,
Through an idle fancy wrought:
O let my joys have some abiding!
FRANCIS BEAUMONT.
To toil, to think, to long, to grieve—
Is such my future fate?
The morn was dreary; must the eve
Be also desolate?
Well, such a life at least makes Death
A welcome, wished-for friend;
Then, aid me, Reason, Patience, Faith,
To suffer to the end!
CHARLOTTE BRONTË.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked, “No lingering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief!”
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS.
Alliteration; successions of consonant-clotted monosyllables; Lydgate-like breakings and prolongings of the line—it is by such devices that Hopkins contrives to render (with what terrible adequacy) the sobbing and spasmodic extremes of unhappiness.
Charlotte Brontë was but an indifferent poet. The two extracts quoted above happen to be admirable; but that is more by luck than good management. All her verse has a deadness and a flatness about it. It so happens that the subject matter of the pieces I have quoted demands a dead, flat treatment. Charlotte Brontë gives it this treatment, for the good reason that she can give it no other. In a work of art, success is always admirable, whatever the means by which it is achieved. The long-drawn dreariness of a day-to-day existence felt to be uncongenial and degrading has seldom been better rendered than in “The Teacher’s Monologue.”
In some ways, I think, this dull chronic misery is worse than the paroxysms of unhappiness expressed by Hopkins. Griefs “pitched past pitch of grief” are, by the very extremity of their sharpness, quickening; the daily dreariness mutes and muffles the life within us till we feel ourselves hideously diminished, less than human. There are worse pangs than this sense of sub-humanity; but, just because they are worse, preferable. Yes, preferable; for a moment at least, until our “small durance” is exhausted and we fall, for a moment we shall be as superhuman as the ordeal through which we have to pass. It is by his superhuman moments that man lives.
Escape
The wind sounds only in opposing straits,
The sea, beside the shore; man’s spirit rends
Its quiet only up against the ends
Of wants and oppositions, loves and hates,
Where, worked and worn by passionate debates,
And losing by the loss it apprehends,
The flesh rocks round, and every breath it sends
Is ravelled to a sigh. All tortured states
Suppose a straitened place. Jehovah Lord,
Make room for rest around me! out of sight
Now float me, of the vexing land abhorred,
Till in deep calms of space my soul may right
Her nature, shoot large sail on lengthening cord,
And rush exultant on the infinite.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
For thousand-fold are the troubles that the body gives us . . . It fills us full of loves and lusts and fears, with all kinds of delusions and rank nonsense; and in very truth, as men say, it so disposes us, that we cannot think wisely at all . . . We must set the soul free of it; we must behold things as they are, and then, belike, we shall attain the wisdom that we desire and of which we say we are lovers; not while we live, but after death, as the argument shows . . . For then, and not till then, will the soul be parted from the body and exist in herself alone.
PLATO.
I love all waste
And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
We spun
A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun
Of this familiar life, which seems to be
But is not—or is but quaint mockery
Of all we would believe, and sadly blame
The jarring and inexplicable frame
Of this wrong world:—and then anatomize
The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes
Were closed in distant years;—or widely guess
The issue of the earth’s great business,
When we shall be as we no longer are—
Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war
O winds, and sigh, but tremble not.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.
Fuir! là-bas fuir! je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres
D’être parmi l’écume inconnue et les cieux!
Rien, ni les vieux jardins reflétés par les yeux
Ne retiendra ce cœur qui dans la mer se trempe,
O nuits! ni la clarté déserte de ma lampe
Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend,
Et ni la jeune femme allaitant son enfant.
Je partirai! Steamer, balançant ta mâture,
Lève l’ancre pour une exotique nature!
Un Ennui, désolé par de cruels espoirs,
Croit encore à l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs!
Et, peut-être, les mâts, invitant les orages
Sont-ils de ceux qu’un vent penche sur les naufrages
Perdus, sans mâts, sans mâts, ni fertiles îlots. . . .
Mais, ô mon cœur, entends le chant des matelots!
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ.
Fuir, là-bas fuir—it is what all of us aspire to do at certain moments, what some of us are trying to do all the time. The world in which our bodies are condemned to live is really too squalid, too vulgar, too malignant to be borne. There is no remedy save in flight. But whither?
There are various possible retreats. The safest of them, as Plato insists, is death.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
For most people, however, death seems to be too finally sovereign a remedy for the evils of living. They know that, sooner or later, it will duly be administered; but they are not prepared to make the ultimate escape before escape is forced upon them. What they want is a death-surrogate in their lives—a state of being that combines the advantages of being alive with those of having removed to another world.
There are escapes into drink, into sensuality, into play, into day-dreaming. None of these, however, provides the perfect refuge. Lust exhausts itself; there are nights of self-questioning insomnia after the day-dreams, mornings of sick repentance after the alcohol; as for play, only an imbecile could bear to play away his existence. No; of all the death-surrogates incomparably the best is what is called—rightly, after all—the higher life. Religious meditation, scientific experiment, the acquisition of knowledge, metaphysical thinking and artistic creation—all these activities enhance the subjective sense of life, but at the same time deliver their practitioners from the sordid preoccupations of common living. They live, abundantly; and they are, in the language of religion, “dead to the world.” What could be more satisfactory?
“Do you not hear the Aziola cry?
Methinks she must be nigh,”
Said Mary, as we sate
In dusk, ere stars were lit or candles brought:
And I, who thought
This Aziola was some tedious woman,
Asked, “Who is Aziola?” How elate
I felt to know that it was nothing human,
No mockery
