The Columbia History of British Poetry (110 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
3.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 438
"utter all myself into the air" ("The Soul's Expression"). In an 1844 letter to Browning she worked toward a female poetics even as she regretted her lack of worldly experience. Her very isolation offered "a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life& from the habit of selfconsciousness of selfanalysis, I make great guesses at Human Nature in the main." Barrett occasionally compared herself to Tennyson's Mariana in her moated grangelike the feminine subjectivity characterized in Tennyson's early poems, the intensity of her poetically melancholy feelings was a direct result of her loneliness. She was compelled to be the subjective poet described by Browning, to dig where she stood, but she was also, as she recognized, condemned to work within the limited sphere of her isolated experience.
Not surprisingly, her most enduring poetry was written after her elopement and marriage to Robert Browning had freed her from the confinement of her father's home. The poems first published in 1850 show her speaking out with greater confidence, and speaking out explicitly of women's concerns and in a woman's voice. For example, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" was, as she said, a "ferocious" antislavery poem. But the most important new works were the love poems to Robert Browning, thinly disguised under the title
Sonnets from the Portuguese
. Although many modern readers find these poems maudlin, they were popular in their time, and they represented a genuinely impressive innovation. Barrett Browning entirely renovated the conventional uses of the Petrarchan sonnet simply by adapting it to a modern woman's voice and concerns. Christina Rossetti, whose sonnet sequence "Monna Innominata" was one of many Victorian sequences influenced by
Sonnets from the Portuguese
, remarked that Barrett Browning had not adopted the point of view of the conventional beloved in courtly romance because she was ''happy" rather than "unhappy" in love, but Barrett Browning was consciously revising the tradition. Her sequence begins with the courtly notion that Rossetti was to use in
Monna Innominata
, that love of God forbids love of man, but it proceeds boldly toward the modern notion that human love is in itself a sufficient end: "I who looked for only God, found
thee
! / I find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad." Further,
Sonnets from the Portuguese
marks a definitive turning point in Barrett Browning's poetry, a turning away from what she characterized as the "melancholy music" of her confined life, and toward a more vigorous encounter with the world.
 
Page 439
The title of her next major poem,
Casa Guidi Windows
, may suggest a still-confined poetic vision, but the vision was now directed outward onto the world instead of inward in Mariana melancholy. The first part of
Casa Guidi Windows
, written in 1848, was inspired by the revolutionary fervor of that year, and by the mass demonstrations that occured in the piazza overlooked by the windows of the Brownings' apartments in Florence. In this rallying cry for Italian independence Barrett Browning called forand in part tried to embodya Carlylean hero to lead the Italian masses to freedom. The movement failed, and the second part of the poem, written in 1851, was a scornful, bitter retrospectivebut it was also a bold attack on the nations of Europe that were celebrating their new commodities at the Crystal Palace, while offering no help to the victims of society, the poor or the "women sobbing out of sight / Because men made the laws."
Barrett Browning spoke out even more fully in her next major poem,
Aurora Leigh
(1857), which she described as "a sort of novel-poem . . . running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing rooms and the like 'where angels fear to tread'; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly." The poem is a sort of novelized, third-person, female
Prelude
, a story of the growth of the woman poet's mind, but whereas the Wordsworthian poet grew up in harmony with nature, Aurora Leigh grows up within the social restraints imposed upon women, and within the dissonance and perplexities of the modern age. For Barrett Browning, however, the current "age of mere transition" "spends more passion, more heroic heat, / Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, / Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles." The present state of civilization was, in short, an opportunity not an obstacle for the poet, and especially for the woman poet, whose particular province was the drawing room. Modern critics are divided about the extent to which
Aurora Leigh
is a feminist poem (the heroine ultimately finds her highest vocation in marriage), but there is no doubt that it was courageously outspoken in its day, both in the representation of such social problems as the poverty and squalor of the slums and of prostitution, and in the depiction of a specifically female poet.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was unquestionably the most celebrated woman poet of her day, but the poetry of a number of other Victorian women deserves more attention than it has usually received. The feminist poet Augusta Webster, for example, has been almost entirely for-
 
Page 440
gotten, although her dramatic monologues skillfully combined the manner and matter of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the effort to represent modern life. Other women poets of the time tended to be less outspoken, although their poetry movingly records the inner life that was intensified by socially imposed confinement. The very beautiful poetry of Christina Rossetti, for example, remained for the most part confined to the melancholy and devotional themes expected of women. As she put it, with characteristic self-deprecation, she could not sing out to her "one-stringed lyre. It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs. Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I."
The sense of confinement, even imprisonment, is even more powerfully present in the poetry of the Brontë sisters, whose childhood in the remote parsonage at Haworth intensified their sense of isolation. Emily Brontë's enigmatic poems, especially, reflect the desolating sense of imprisonment that characterizes much of the women's poetry of the Victorian period. Often Brontë, like Barrett Browning, could see her isolation as a kind of poetic boon, conferring a greater intensity of inward vision: "So hopeless is the world without, / The world within I doubly prize." But as these lines suggest, turning the vision inward increases the isolation of the self, and Brontë's poems often express the anguish of the solitary self brooding upon its own memories. The only escape from the stifling prison of personal identity seems to be into a visionary realm where the ordinary self is dissolved into "only spirit wandering wide / Through infinite immensity." The dissolution of individual identity reflects a Romantic legacy of vaguely mystical aspiration, but it probably also reflects the yearning to escape the constraints of Victorian womanhood.
More often than not, indeed, Brontë's lyrics are spoken in the voices of the men and women who populated the dungeons of Gondal, the melodramatic fantasy kingdom that provided imaginative escape for Emily and her sister Anne. Taken as a whole, Brontë's poems express a profound ambivalence about the enforced inwardness of her life, but the overriding tone of her poems is melancholyoften, in fact, the desire to escape the entrapment of earthly life is expressed simply as a desire for death. At their best, these poems are remarkable for their lyric intensity, but perhaps it is not surprising that the Brontë sisters found wider range for expression in their novels than in their poetrythe novel not only allowed but compelled them to look beyond their own
 
Page 441
isolated sensibilities, just as the "novel-poem"
Aurora Leigh
helped Barrett Browning to represent the "heroic heat" of the present age.
Certainly George Eliot, whose poetic aspirations included the novel-length narrative
The Spanish Gypsy
, was able to achieve a far suppler, more broad-ranging voice in her novels than in her poems, although her poetry should not be entirely neglected. Unlike Christina Rossetti and Emily Brontë, Eliot's poems are not conspicuous for their lyrical grace, but the closet drama "Armgart" offers interesting insights into the difficulties besetting women as artists, and "A Minor Prophet" presents both an amusing character study and insights into Eliot's own beliefs.
Victorian women had, perhaps, a dubious poetic advantage in their almost enforced need to restrict their poetry to the realm of personal feeling, but in an insistently masculinist, activist age, men could hardly avoid contending with the "many-sidedness" of contemporary life. No one did so more emphatically than Arthur Hugh Clough, who was accused by his friend Matthew Arnold of "Plung[ing] and bellow[ing] in the "Time Stream." Yet as Clough's example indicates, "manly" contention with the multitudinousness of modern life could be strangely incapacitating. Although various contemporaries explicitly noted the ''manliness" of Clough's works, his ceaseless questioning seemed to epitomize the age's tendency to vacillate in uncertainties. As a writer in
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
put it in 1874, the life and writings of Clough provided the "most striking illustration . . . of the manner in which the poetical faculty may be overridden and paralysed by doubt." From our much later perspective, Clough's questioning spirit and intellectual honesty may better be seen as the sources of his poetic successand of his continuing modernity.
The star pupil at Thomas Arnold's Rugby School, Clough had been vigorously indoctrinated in the Victorian ideals of earnestness and devotion to duty. As a young man at Rugby and then at Oxford, he was something of a moral and political activist, particularly in the period from 1846 to 1848, when he wrote a series of Carlylean pamphlets on issues ranging from education to political and economic reform. But the decisive single act of this period, the determining act for Clough's future life, was an act of consciencein 1848 he resigned his comfortable and somewhat influential position at Oxford rather than subscribe to the dogma of the Church of England, and in order to immerse himself in the "actual life," which, he said, "is unknown to an Oxford stu-
 
Page 442
dent." Yet his effectiveness in "actual life" was limited by his deep uncertainties about how best to act. The Carlylean positions he had adopted early in life could only carry him so faras he said to Emerson in 1848, "Carlyle has led us all out into the desert, and he has left us there." Clough turned the modern problem into the primary subject matter of a poetry characterized by its tough-minded refusal to acquiesce in orthodoxies or to settle prematurely for definitive answers in the intellectual wilderness.
Although Clough's poetry questioned all received dogma, it was not without a kind of faith and hope. In "When Israel Came Out of Egypt," for example, Clough implicitly compared the Victorian age with the Biblical Jews in the wilderness, exiled as it seemed from God. As the Jews had worshipped a false god in the desert, so the Victorians, having lost any true faith, were tempted to worship the mere scientific "truths" that reduce the "heart and mind of human kind" to "a watch-work." But though the poem urged its readers not to worship false gods, it did not offer any alternative worthy of reverence, only the typical Cloughian counsel to ''wait in faith" for some future basis for belief. Science may shake traditional faith, it cannot replace it, and as Clough argued in "Epi-Strauss-ium," the same is true of the skeptical higher criticism epitomized by Strauss's
Life of Jesus
. The debunking of the Gospels is, apparently, accepted in the opening lines: "Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John / Evanished all and gone!"
While Clough denied the literal truth of the Bible, he maintained a faith that it expressed some kind of spiritual truth, and that when the higher criticism had done its utmost, "the place of worship" remained "if less richly, more sincerely bright." And he repeatedly affirmed a faith in ultimate though inapprehensible truth in such poems as "Why should I say I see the things I see not," "Uranus," and the brief untitled poem beginning: "It fortifies my soul to know / That, though I perish, Truth is so." At times, this attenuated faith seemed a sufficient basis for action, for finding a basis to do one's duty, as in "I have seen higher holier things than these": "The Summum Pulchrum rests in heaven above; / Do thou, as best thou may'st, thy duty do." And at times, as in "Qui Laborat, Orat," he adopted the Carlylean and Rugbeian position (the school motto was "Orando Laborando") that work, the fulfillment of duty, was the best approach to spiritual truth.
Yet in such poems as "Hope evermore and believe" it is clear that the poet's most enthusiastic exhortations to action are troubled by the sense
 
Page 443
that to do one's duty "is good, though there is better than it." Often the failure to find the "better" leads to a sense of the painful futility of existence, as in ''To spend uncounted years of pain," which expresses the frustration of forever fearing "the premature result to draw" and so acting on a false basis. Unlike the Romantic poets, Clough certainly did not believe that a true basis could be found within the self, where he doubted his ability to find even "one feeling based on truth" ("How often sit I, poring o'er"). And in "Is it true, ye gods, who treat us" he suggested that poetic inspiration is no more than a "Peculiar confirmation, / Constitution, and condition / Of the brain and of the belly." Not surprisingly, Cloughs distrust of poetic inspiration coupled with his sense of the need to leave all questions open made him a deeply ironic, and occasionally satiric poet. Frequently, his satire was a blatant and bitter mockery of contemporary life, as in "In the Great Metropolis," "Dutythat's to say complying," and "The Latest Decalogue," a witty updating of the Ten Commandments that decrees, for example, that "No graven images may be / Worshipped, except the currency."
Although still not as widely read as they deserve to be, Clough's major poetic achievements were his long poems,
The Botbie of Tober-Na-Vuolich, Amours de Voyage
, and
Dipsychus
all of which brilliantly combine his questioning temperament, his analyses of the malaise of contemporary life, his doubts about all things, including the self, and his corrosive irony. Through such characters as the "Tutor, the grave man, nicknamed Adam," Philip Hewson, "the Chartist, the poet, the eloquent speaker," and various other students,
The Bothie
an account of an Oxford reading party spending the long vacation in Scotlanddiscusses all manner of contemporary issues, particularly concerning the relations among the social classes and between the sexes. The dialogic structure enabled Clough to take a number of perspectives on the central actionPhilip's falling in love with a peasant girl and eventually marrying her. Adam, who has much in common with Clough, is sympathetic, but inclined to fight God's fight in the battles of modern life, while maintaining the distinctions of class: "Let us to Providence trust, and abide and work in our stations." But Hewson, who has still more in common with Clough, doubts the possibility of discerning a providential scheme: "I am sorry to say your Providence puzzles me sadly." For Hewson, as for Clough, the difficulty was to find the battle at all, to identify a cause to fight for: "Neither battle I see, nor arraying, nor King in Israel, / Only infinite jumble and mess and dislocation."

Other books

Six Women of Salem by Marilynne K. Roach
Skellig by David Almond
The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi
The Dead Letter by Finley Martin
Perfectly Unpredictable by Linda O'Connor
My Best Friend by Ancelli
Call Me Killer by Linda Barlow
The Hunt Ball by Rita Mae Brown
Midnight Awakening by Lara Adrian