Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)
English poet and the wife of fellow poet Robert Browning.
Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet,
From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low,
Lest I should fear, and fall, and miss Thee so,
Who art not missed by any that entreat.
That he, in his developed manhood, stood
A little sunburnt by the glare of life;
While I . . it seemed no sun had shone on me.
Whatever's lost, it first was won;
We will not struggle nor impugn.
Perhaps the cup was broken here,
That Heaven's new wine might show more clear.
I praise Thee while my days go on.
And that dismal cry rose slowly
And sank slowly through the air,
Full of spirit's melancholy
And eternity's despair;
And they heard the words it said,—
"Pan is dead! great Pan is dead!
Pan, Pan is dead!"
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.
Therefore to this dog will I,
Tenderly not scornfully,
Render praise and favor:
With my hand upon his head,
Is my benediction said
Therefore and for ever.
Good critics, who have stamped out poets' hope,
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state,
Good patriots, who for a theory risked a cause.
Nay, if there's room for poets in the world
A little overgrown, (I think there is)
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne's, — this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless.
Every wish
Is like a prayer—with God.
Hush, call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there's a voice within
That weeps . . . as thou must sing . . . alone, aloof.
The cypress stood up like a church
That night we felt our love would hold,
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
The olives crystallized the vales'
Broad slopes until the hills grew strong:
The fireflies and the nightingales
Throbbed each to either, flame and song.
The nightingales, the nightingales.
If I married him,
I would not dare to call my soul my own,
Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought
And every heart-beat down there in the bill,–
Not one found honestly deductible
From any use that pleased him!
And I said in underbreath —
All our life is mixed with death, —
And who knoweth which is best?
And I smiled to think God's greatness
Flowed around our incompleteness, —
Round our restlessness, His rest.
The face, which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love, is dimmed away —
And yet my days go on, go on.
Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which, if cut deep down the middle,
shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in't.
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow.
The heart which, like a staff, was one
For mine to lean and rest upon,
The strongest on the longest day
With steadfast love, is caught away,
And yet my days go on, go on.
Take from my head the thorn-wreath brown!
No mortal grief deserves that crown.
O supreme Love, chief misery,
The sharp regalia are for Thee
Whose days eternally go on!'