Browning's England: A Study in English Influences in Browning - Helen Archibald Clarke

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With the bean-flower's boon,

       And the blackbird's tune,

       And May, and June!

      II

      What I love best in all the world

       Is a castle, precipice-encurled,

       In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.

       Or look for me, old fellow of mine,

       (If I get my head from out the mouth

       O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,

       And come again to the land of lands)—

       In a sea-side house to the farther South,

       Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,

       And one sharp tree—'tis a cypress—stands,

       By the many hundred years red-rusted,

       Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,

       My sentinel to guard the sands

       To the water's edge. For, what expands

       Before the house, but the great opaque

      32 Blue breadth of sea without a break?

       While, in the house, for ever crumbles

       Some fragment of the frescoed walls,

       From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.

       A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles

       Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,

       And says there's news to-day—the king

       Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,

       Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:

       —She hopes they have not caught the felons.

       Italy, my Italy!

       Queen Mary's saying serves for me—

       (When fortune's malice

       Lost her—Calais)—

       Open my heart and you will see

       Graved inside of it, "Italy."

       Such lovers old are I and she:

       So it always was, so shall ever be!

      Two or three English artists called forth appreciation in verse from Browning. There is the exquisite bit called "Deaf and Dumb," after a group of statuary by Woolner, of Constance and Arthur—the deaf and dumb children of Sir Thomas Fairbairn.

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      A GROUP BY WOOLNER.

      Only the prism's obstruction shows aright

       The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light

       Into the jewelled bow from blankest white;

       So may a glory from defect arise:

      33 Only by Deafness may the vexed Love wreak

       Its insuppressive sense on brow and cheek,

       Only by Dumbness adequately speak

       As favored mouth could never, through the eyes.

      An English Lane

      There is also the beautiful description in "Balaustion's Adventure" of the Alkestis by Sir Frederick Leighton.

      The flagrant anachronism of making a Greek girl at the time of the Fall of Athens describe an English picture cannot but be forgiven, since the artistic effect gained is so fine. The poet quite convinces the reader that Sir Frederick Leighton ought to have been a Kaunian painter, if he was not, and that Balaustion or no one was qualified to appreciate his picture at its full worth.

      "I know, too, a great Kaunian painter, strong

       As Herakles, though rosy with a robe

       Of grace that softens down the sinewy strength:

       And he has made a picture of it all.

       There lies Alkestis dead, beneath the sun,

       She longed to look her last upon, beside

       The sea, which somehow tempts the life in us

       To come trip over its white waste of waves,

       And try escape from earth, and fleet as free.

       Behind the body, I suppose there bends

       Old Pheres in his hoary impotence;

       And women-wailers, in a corner crouch

       —Four, beautiful as you four—yes, indeed!—

       Close, each to other, agonizing all,

      34 As fastened, in fear's rhythmic sympathy,

       To two contending opposite. There strains

       The might o' the hero 'gainst his more than match,

       —Death, dreadful not in thew and bone, but like

       The envenomed substance that exudes some dew

       Whereby the merely honest flesh and blood

       Will fester up and run to ruin straight,

       Ere they can close with, clasp and overcome

       The poisonous impalpability

       That simulates a form beneath the flow

       Of those grey garments; I pronounce that piece

       Worthy to set up in our Poikilé!

      "And all came—glory of the golden verse,

       And passion of the picture, and that fine

       Frank outgush of the human gratitude

       Which saved our ship and me, in Syracuse—

       Ay, and the tear or two which slipt perhaps

       Away from you, friends, while I told my tale,

       —It all came of this play that gained no prize!

       Why crown whom Zeus has crowned in soul before?"

      Once before had Sir Frederick Leighton inspired the poet in the exquisite lines on Eurydice.

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      A PICTURE BY LEIGHTON

      But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!

       Let them once more absorb me! One look now

       Will lap me round for ever, not to pass

       Out of its light, though darkness lie beyond:

      35 Hold me but safe again within the bond

       Of one immortal look! All woe that was,

       Forgotten, and all terror that may be,

       Defied—no past is mine, no future: look at me!

      Beautiful as these lines are, they do not impress me as fully interpreting Leighton's picture. The expression of Eurydice is rather one of unthinking confiding affection—as if she were really unconscious or ignorant of the danger; while that of Orpheus is one of passionate agony as he tries to hold her off.

      Though English art could not fascinate the poet as Italian art did, for the fully sufficient reason that it does not stand for a great epoch of intellectual awakening, yet with what fair alchemy he has touched those few artists he has chosen to

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