I only knew one poet in my life:And this, or something like it, was his way.
You saw go up and down Valladolid,A man of mark, to know next time you saw.His very serviceable suit of blackWas courtly once and conscientious still,And many might have worn it, though none did:The cloak, that somewhat shone and showed the threads,Had purpose, and the ruff, significance.He walked, and tapped the pavement with his cane, 10Scenting the world, looking it full in face:An old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels.They turned up, now, the alley by the church,That leads no whither; now, they breathed themselvesOn the main promenade just at the wrong time.You’d come upon his scrutinizing hat,Making a peaked shade blacker than itselfAgainst the single window spared some houseIntact yet with its mouldered Moorish work,—Or else surprise the ferrel of his stick 20Trying the mortar’s temper ’tween the chinksOf some new shop a-building, French and fine.He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,The man who slices lemons into drink,The coffee-roaster’s brazier, and the boysThat volunteer to help him turn its winch.He glanced o’er books on stalls with half an eye,And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string,And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall.He took such cognizance of men and things, 30If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;If any cursed a woman, he took note;Yet stared at nobody,—you stared at him,And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,He seemed to know you and expect as much.So, next time that a neighbor’s tongue was loosed,It marked the shameful and notorious fact,We had among us, not so much a spy,As a recording chief-inquisitor,The town’s true master if the town but knew! 40We merely kept a governor for form,While this man walked about and took accountOf all thought, said and acted, then went home,And wrote it fully to our Lord the KingWho has an itch to know things, he knows why,And reads them in his bedroom of a night.Oh, you might smile! there wanted not a touch,A tang of…well, it was not wholly ease,As back into your mind the man’s look came.Stricken in years a little, such a brow 50His eyes had to live under!—clear as flintOn either side o’ the formidable noseCurved, cut and colored like an eagle’s claw.Had he to do with A.’s surprising fate?When altogether old B. disappeared,And young C. got his mistress,—was’t our friend,His letter to the King, that did it all?What paid the bloodless man for so much pains?Our Lord the King has favorites manifold,And shifts his ministry some once a month; 60Our city gets new governors at whiles,—But never word or sign, that I could hear,Notified, to this man about the streets,The King’s approval of those letters connedThe last thing duly at the dead of night.Did the man love his office? Frowned our Lord,Exhorting when none heard—“Beseech me not!Too far above my people,—beneath me!I set the watch,—how should the people know?Forget them, keep me all the more in mind!” 70Was some such understanding ‘twixt the two? I found no truth in one report at least—That if you tracked him to his home, down lanesBeyond the Jewry, and as clean to pace,You found he ate his supper in a roomBlazing with lights, four Titians on the wall,And twenty naked girls to change his plate!Poor man, he lived another kind of lifeIn that new stuccoed third house by the bridge,Fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise! 80The whole street might o’erlook him as he sat,Leg crossing leg, one foot on the dog’s back,Playing a decent cribbage with his maid(Jacynth, you’re sure her name was) o’er the cheeseAnd fruit, three red halves of starved winter-pears,Or treat of radishes in April. Nine,Ten, struck the church clock, straight to bed went he. My father, like the man of sense he was,Would point him out to me a dozen times;“St—St,” he’d whisper, “the Corregidor!” 90I had been used to think that personageWas one with lacquered breeches, lustrous belt,And feathers like a forest in his hat,Who blew a trumpet and proclaimed the news,Announced the bull-fights, gave each church its turn,And memorized the miracle in vogue!He had a great observance from us boys;We were in error; that was not the man. I’d like now, yet had haply been afraid,To have just looked, when this man came to die, 100And seen who lined the clean gay garret sides,And stood about the neat low truckle-bed,With the heavenly manner of relieving guard.Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief,Thro’ a whole campaign of the world’s life and death,Doing the King’s work all the dim day long,In his old coat and up to knees in mud,Smoked like a herring, dining on a crust,—And, now the day was won, relieved at once!No further show or need of that old coat, 110You are sure, for one thing! Bless us, all the whileHow sprucely we are dressed out, you and I!A second, and the angels alter that.Well, I could never write a verse,—could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time. “Transcendentalism”:
A Poem in Twelve Books.
— * Transcendentalism: a poem in twelve books. It must be understood that the poet addressed has written a long poem under this title, and a brother-poet, while admitting that it contains “true thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up”, raises the objection that they are naked, instead of being draped, as they should be, in sights and sounds. —
Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak?’Tis you speak, that’s your error. Song’s our art:Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughtsInstead of draping them in sights and sounds.—True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up!But why such long prolusion and display,Such turning and adjustment of the harp,And taking it upon your breast, at length,Only to speak dry words across its strings?Stark-naked thought is in request enough: 10Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears!The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark,Which helps the hunter’s voice from Alp to Alp—Exchange our harp for that,—who hinders you?But here’s your fault; grown men want thought, you think;Thought’s what they mean by verse, and seek in verse;Boys seek for images and melody,Men must have reason—so, you aim at men.Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth, ’tis true;We see and hear and do not wonder much: 20If you could tell us what they mean, indeed!As German Boehme never cared for plantsUntil it happed, a-walking in the fields,He noticed all at once that plants could speak,Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.That day the daisy had an eye indeed—Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes!We find them extant yet in Jacob’s prose.But by the time youth slips a stage or twoWhile reading prose in that tough book he wrote, 30(Collating and emendating the sameAnd settling on the sense most to our mind)We shut the clasps and find life’s summer past.Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss—Another Boehme with a tougher bookAnd subtler meanings of what roses say,—Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?He with a “look you!” vents a brace of rhymes,And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, 40Over us, under, round us every side,Nay, in and out the tables and the chairsAnd musty volumes, Boehme’s book and all,—Buries us with a glory, young once more,Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.So come, the harp back to your heart again!You are a poem, though your poem’s naught.The best of all you showed before, believe,Was your own boy-face o’er the finer chordsBent, following the cherub at the top 50That points to God with his paired half-moon wings. — 22. German Boehme: Jacob Boehme (or Behmen), a shoemaker and a famous theosophist, b. 1575, at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz; d. 1624. The 24th verse of the poem, “He noticed all at once that plants could speak”, may refer to a remarkable experience of Boehme, related in Dr. Hans Lassen Martensen’s ‘Jacob Boehme: his life and teaching, or studies in theosophy: translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans’, London, 1885: “Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendor that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things. He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out upon the green. But here he remarked that he gazed into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and that actual nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen.” Martensen, in his biography, follows that by Frankenberg, in which the experience may be given more in detail.
37–40. him of Halberstadt, John: “It is not a thinker like Boehme, who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, conjure roses up.”
“The ‘magic’ symbolized, is that of genuine poetry; but the magician, or ‘Mage’, is an historical person; and the special feat imputed to him was recorded of other magicians in the Middle Ages, if not of himself. ‘Johannes Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadht in Germany, after he had performed a number of prestigious feats almost incredible, was transported by the Devil in the likeness of a black horse, and was both seen and heard upon one and the same Christmas day, to say mass in Halberstadht, in Mayntz, and in Cologne’ (‘Heywood’s Hierarchy’, Bk. IV., p. 253). The ‘prestigious feat’ of causing flowers to appear in winter, was a common one.” —Mrs. Sutherland Orr’s ‘Handbook to the works of Robert Browning’, p. 209.
It may be said that the advice given in this poem, Browning has not sufficiently followed in his own poetry. On this point, a writer in the ‘British Quarterly Review’ (Vol. 23, p. 162) justly remarks: “Browning’s thought is always that of a poet. Subtle, nimble, and powerful as is the intellect, and various as is the learning, all is manifested through the imagination, and comes forth shaped and tinted by it. Thus, even in the foregoing passages {cited from ‘Transcendentalism’ and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’}, where the matter is almost as purely as it can be the produce of the mere understanding, it is still evident that the method of the thought is poetic. The notions take the form of images. For example, the poet means to say that Prose is a good and mighty vehicle in its way, but that it is not Poetry; and how does the conception shape itself in his mind? Why, in an image. All at once it is not Prose that is thought about, but a huge six-foot speaking-trumpet braced round with bark, through which the Swiss hunters help their voices from Alp to Alp— Poetry, on the other hand, being no such big and blaring instrument, but a harp taken to the breast of youth and swept by ecstatic fingers. And so with the images of Boehme and his book, and John of Halberstadt with his magic rose—still a concrete body to enshrine an abstract meaning.”
Apparent Failure.
“We shall soon lose a celebrated building.”—Paris Newspaper.
1.
No, for I’ll save it! Seven years since,I passed through Paris, stopped a dayTo see the baptism of your Prince;Saw, made my bow, and went my way:Walking the heat and headache off,I took the Seine-side, you surmise,Thought of the Congress, Gortschakoff,Cavour’s appeal and Buol’s replies,So sauntered till—what met my eyes?
— St. 1. To see the baptism of your Prince: the Prince Imperial, son of Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugenie, born March 16, 1856. the Congress: the Congress of Paris.
Gortschakoff: Prince Alexander Michaelowitsch Gortschakoff; while representing Russia at the Court of Vienna, he kept Austria neutral during the Crimean War.
Cavour: Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, Italian statesman, b. 1810; at the Congress of Paris, brought forward the question of the political consolidation of Italy, which led to the invasion of Italy by the Austrians, who were defeated; d. 6th June, 1861.
Buol: Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein, Austrian diplomatist, and minister of foreign affairs from 1852 to 1859.
2.
Only the Doric little Morgue!The dead-house where you show your drowned:Petrarch’s Vaucluse makes proud the Sorgue,Your Morgue has made the Seine renowned.One pays one’s debt in such a case;I plucked up heart and entered,—stalked,Keeping a tolerable faceCompared with some whose cheeks were chalked:Let them! No Briton’s to be balked!
— St. 2. Petrarch’s Vaucluse makes proud the Sorgue: Fontaine de Vaucluse, a celebrated fountain, in the department of Vaucluse, in Southern France, the source of the Sorgues. The village named after it was for some time the residence of Petrarch.
3.
First came the silent gazers; next,A screen of glass, we’re thankful for;Last, the sight’s self, the sermon’s text,The three men who did most abhorTheir life in Paris yesterday,So killed themselves: and now, enthronedEach on his copper couch, they layFronting me, waiting to be owned.I thought, and think, their sin’s atoned.
4.
Poor men, God made, and all for that!The reverence struck me; o’er each headReligiously was hung its hat,Each coat dripped by the owner’s bed,Sacred from touch: each had his berth,His bounds, his proper place of rest,Who last night tenanted on earthSome arch, where twelve such slept abreast,—Unless the plain asphalte seemed best.
5.
How did it happen, my poor boy?You wanted to be BuonaparteAnd have the Tuileries for toy,And could not, so it broke your heart?You, old one by his side, I judge,Were, red as blood, a socialist,A leveller! Does the Empire grudgeYou’ve gained what no Republic missed?Be quiet, and unclinch your fist!
6.
And this—why, he was red in vain,Or black,—poor fellow that is blue!What fancy was it, turned your brain?Oh, women were the prize for you!Money gets women, cards and diceGet money, and ill-luck gets justThe copper couch and one clear niceCool squirt of water o’er your bust,The right thing to extinguish lust!
7.
It’s wiser being good than bad;It’s safer being meek than fierce:It’s fitter being sane than mad.My own hope is, a sun will pierceThe thickest cloud earth ever stretched;That, after Last, returns the First,Though a wide compass round be fetched;That what began best, can’t end worst,Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.