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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=383779" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Aurora Leigh (excerpts)</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">[Book 1]<br> I am like,<br>They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows<br>Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth<br>Of delicate features, -- paler, near as grave ;<br>But then my mother's smile breaks up the whole,<br>And makes it better sometimes than itself.<br>So, nine full years, our days were hid with God<br>Among his mountains : I was just thirteen,<br>Still growing like the plants from unseen roots<br>In tongue-tied Springs, -- and suddenly awoke<br>To full life and life 's needs and agonies,<br>With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside<br>A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,<br>Makes awful lightning. His last word was, `Love --'<br>`Love, my child, love, love !' -- (then he had done with grief)<br>`Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone,<br>And none was left to love in all the world.<br>There, ended childhood. What succeeded next<br>I recollect as, after fevers, men<br>Thread back the passage of delirium,<br>Missing the turn still, baffled by the door ;<br>Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives ;<br>A weary, wormy darkness, spurr'd i' the flank<br>With flame, that it should eat and end itself<br>Like some tormented scorpion. Then at last<br>I do remember clearly, how there came<br>A stranger with authority, not right,<br>(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up<br>From old Assunta's neck ; how, with a shriek,<br>She let me go, -- while I, with ears too full<br>Of my father's silence, to shriek back a word,<br>In all a child's astonishment at grief<br>Stared at the wharf-edge where she stood and moaned,<br>My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned !<br>The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,<br>Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,<br>Like one in anger drawing back her skirts<br>Which supplicants catch at. Then the bitter sea<br>Inexorably pushed between us both,<br>And sweeping up the ship with my despair<br>Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.<br>Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep ;<br>Ten nights and days, without the common face<br>Of any day or night ; the moon and sun<br>Cut off from the green reconciling earth,<br>To starve into a blind ferocity<br>And glare unnatural ; the very sky<br>(Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea<br>As if no human heart should 'scape alive,)<br>Bedraggled with the desolating salt,<br>Until it seemed no more that holy heaven<br>To which my father went. All new and strange <br>The universe turned stranger, for a child.<br>Then, land ! -- then, England ! oh, the frosty cliffs<br>Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home<br>Among those mean red houses through the fog ?<br>And when I heard my father's language first<br>From alien lips which had no kiss for mine<br>I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,<br>And some one near me said the child was mad<br>Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.<br>Was this my father's England ? the great isle ?<br>The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship<br>Of verdure, field from field, as man from man ;<br>The skies themselves looked low and positive,<br>As almost you could touch them with a hand,<br>And dared to do it they were so far off<br>From God's celestial crystals ; all things blurred<br>And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates<br>Absorb the light here ? -- not a hill or stone<br>With heart to strike a radiant colour up<br>Or active outline on the indifferent air.<br>I think I see my father's sister stand<br>Upon the hall-step of her country-house<br>To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,<br>Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight<br>As if for taming accidental thoughts<br>From possible pulses ; brown hair pricked with grey<br>By frigid use of life, (she was not old<br>Although my father's elder by a year)<br>A nose drawn sharply yet in delicate lines ;<br>A close mild mouth, a little soured about<br>The ends, through speaking unrequited loves<br>Or peradventure niggardly half-truths ;<br>Eyes of no colour, -- once they might have smiled,<br>But never, never have forgot themselves <br>In smiling ; cheeks, in which was yet a rose<br>Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,<br>Kept more for ruth than pleasure, -- if past bloom,<br>Past fading also.<br>  She had lived, we'll say,<br>A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,<br>A quiet life, which was not life at all,<br>(But that, she had not lived enough to know)<br>Between the vicar and the country squires,<br>The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes<br>From the empyrean to assure their souls<br>Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss<br>The apothecary, looked on once a year<br>To prove their soundness of humility.<br>The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts<br>Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,<br>Because we are of one flesh after all<br>And need one flannel (with a proper sense<br>Of difference in the quality) -- and still<br>The book-club, guarded from your modern trick<br>Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,<br>Preserved her intellectual. She had lived<br>A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,<br>Accounting that to leap from perch to perch<br>Was act and joy enough for any bird.<br>Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live<br>In thickets, and eat berries !<br>  I, alas,<br>A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,<br>And she was there to meet me. Very kind.<br>Bring the clean water, give out the fresh seed.<br>She stood upon the steps to welcome me,<br>Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck, --<br>Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool<br>To draw the new light closer, catch and cling<br>Less blindly. In my ears, my father's word<br>Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,<br>`Love, love, my child.' She, black there with my grief,<br>Might feel my love -- she was his sister once, <br>I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,<br>Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,<br>And drew me feebly through the hall into<br>The room she sate in.<br>  There, with some strange spasm<br>Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands<br>Imperiously, and held me at arm's length,<br>And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes<br>Searched through my face, -- ay, stabbed it through and through,<br>Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find<br>A wicked murderer in my innocent face,<br>If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,<br>She struggled for her ordinary calm<br>And missed it rather, -- told me not to shrink,<br>As if she had told me not to lie or swear, --<br>`She loved my father, and would love me too<br>As long as I deserved it.' Very kind.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">[Book 5]</div><div style="margin:10px 0">AURORA LEIGH, be humble. Shall I hope<br>To speak my poems in mysterious tune<br>With man and nature ? -- with the lava-lymph<br>That trickles from successive galaxies<br>Still drop by drop adown the finger of God<br>In still new worlds ? -- with summer-days in this ?<br>That scarce dare breathe they are so beautiful ?--<br>With spring's delicious trouble in the ground,<br>Tormented by the quickened blood of roots,<br>And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheaves<br>In token of the harvest-time of flowers ?--<br>With winters and with autumns, -- and beyond,<br>With the human heart's large seasons, when it hopes<br>And fears, joys, grieves, and loves ? -- with all that strain<br>Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh<br>In a sacrament of souls ? with mother's breasts<br>Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there,<br>Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres ? --<br>With multitudinous life, and finally<br>With the great escapings of ecstatic souls,<br>Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,<br>Their radiant faces upward, burn away<br>This dark of the body, issuing on a world,<br>Beyond our mortal ? -- can I speak my verse<br>Sp plainly in tune to these things and the rest,<br>That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,<br>As having the same warrant over them<br>To hold and move them if they will or no,<br>Alike imperious as the primal rhythm<br>Of that theurgic nature ? I must fail,<br>Who fail at the beginning to hold and move<br>One man, -- and he my cousin, and he my friend,<br>And he born tender, made intelligent,<br>Inclined to ponder the precipitous sides<br>Of difficult questions ; yet, obtuse to me, <br>Of me, incurious ! likes me very well,<br>And wishes me a paradise of good,<br>Good looks, good means, and good digestion, -- ay,<br>But otherwise evades me, puts me off<br>With kindness, with a tolerant gentleness, --<br>Too light a book for a grave man's reading ! Go,<br>Aurora Leigh : be humble.<br>  There it is,<br>We women are too apt to look to One,<br>Which proves a certain impotence in art.<br>We strain our natures at doing something great,<br>Far less because it 's something great to do,<br>Than haply that we, so, commend ourselves<br>As being not small, and more appreciable<br>To some one friend. We must have mediators<br>Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge ;<br>Some sweet saint's blood must quicken in our palms<br>Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold :<br>Good only being perceived as the end of good,<br>And God alone pleased, -- that's too poor, we think,<br>And not enough for us by any means.<br>Ay, Romney, I remember, told me once<br>We miss the abstract when we comprehend.<br>We miss it most when we aspire, -- and fail.<br>Yet, so, I will not. -- This vile woman's way<br>Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up :<br>I 'll have no traffic with the personal thought<br>In art's pure temple. Must I work in vain,<br>Without the approbation of a man ?<br>It cannot be ; it shall not. Fame itself,<br>That approbation of the general race,<br>Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,<br>Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)<br>And the highest fame was never reached except<br>By what was aimed above it. Art for art,<br>And good for God Himself, the essential Good !<br>We 'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,<br>Although our woman-hands should shake and fail ;<br>And if we fail .. But must we ? --<br>  Shall I fail ?<br>The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,<br>`Let no one be called happy till his death.'<br>To which I add, -- Let no one till his death<br>Be called unhappy. Measure not the work<br>Until the day 's out and the labour done,<br>Then bring your gauges. If the day's work 's scant,<br>Why, call it scant ; affect no compromise ;<br>And, in that we have nobly striven at least,<br>Deal with us nobly, women though we be.<br>And honour us with truth if not with praise.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Elizabeth+Barrett+Browning">Elizabeth Barrett Browning</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=383779" data-title="Aurora Leigh (excerpts) de Elizabeth Barrett Browning" data-description="[Book 1]
 I am like,
They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows
Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth
Of delicate features, -- paler, near as grave ;
But then my mother's smile breaks up the whole,
And makes it better sometimes than itself.
So, n..."></div>
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