Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language 9780773597662

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Introduction
1 An Essay on Mind: “Immortal Locke,” Bacon, and “Poesy’s Bright Beams”
2 “The Harmony of Verse”
3 Tongues of Angels, Echoes of Paradise
4 The Romance of English Poetry
5 Speech, Silence, and “Perplexed Music” in Poems (1844)
6 “My Rhymatology”: Rhyme, Rhythm, and World Harmony
7 The Language of Prophecy: Casa Guidi Windows
8 “The Rhythmic Turbulence / Of Blood and Brain”: Aurora Leigh
9 Blessings, Curses, and Sweet Music
Overview and Conclusion
References
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
W
Z

Citation preview

Fresh Strange Music

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Fresh Strange Music Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Language

D O NA L D S. H A I R

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston

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London

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Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isbn 978-0-7735-4593-9 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-9766-2 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-9767-9 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hair, Donald S., 1937–, author Fresh strange music : Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s language / Donald S. Hair. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4593-9 (bound).–isbn 978-0-7735-9766-2 (pdf).– isbn 978-0-7735-9767-9 (epub) 1. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806–1861 – Versification. 2. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806–1861 – Technique. 3. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806–1861 – Literary style. I. Title.

pr4198.h33 2015

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c2015-902342-4 c2015-902343-2

contents

Acknowledgments | vii Author’s Note | ix Introduction | 3

1 An Essay on Mind: “Immortal Locke,” Bacon, and “Poesy’s Bright Beams” | 26 2 “The Harmony of Verse” | 41 3 Tongues of Angels, Echoes of Paradise | 84 4 The Romance of English Poetry | 106 5 Speech, Silence, and “Perplexed Music” in Poems (1844) | 128 6 “My Rhymatology”: Rhyme, Rhythm, and World Harmony | 152 7 The Language of Prophecy: Casa Guidi Windows | 183 8 “The Rhythmic Turbulence / Of Blood and Brain”: Aurora Leigh | 205 9 Blessings, Curses, and Sweet Music | 253 Overview and Conclusion | 280

References | 287 Index | 295

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acknowledgments

Everyone who writes about Elizabeth Barrett Browning must be profoundly grateful to the scholars who have provided authoritative editions of her poems and letters. Her letters, which are an indispensable context for her poetry, first began to appear thirty years ago in the initial volume of The Brownings’ Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson. Kelley’s archival and editorial work, and that of Hudson, set the standard for that collection, now comprising twenty volumes and counting, and involving scholars who have collaborated with Kelley or have carried on his fine work: Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, and most recently Joseph Phelan and Rhian Williams. As for the poetry, critics like myself had to rely for many years on the 1900 edition of the Complete Works, edited by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, until Margaret Reynolds’ fine edition of Aurora Leigh appeared in 1992. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a team of scholars prepared an authoritative edition of the Works, which appeared in 2010. My profound gratitude to Marjorie Stone, Beverly Taylor, Sandra Donaldson, and Rita Patteson, the volume editors; and to associate editors Simon Avery, Cynthia Burgess, Clara Drummond, and Barbara Neri. Initial research for this book was carried out in the British Library, but most of the subsequent work was done in the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University, Texas. I am grateful to Rita Patteson, the library’s director, and especially to Cynthia Burgess, the curator of books and printed material, for matching the library’s resources with my scholarly interests. My own university, Western, has since my retirement generously provided me with library study space for both research and writing.

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Wellesley College Library, Special Collections, has given me permission to quote from EBB’s handwritten notes titled a “Short Analysis of Locke’s ‘Essay on the Human Understanding,’” and I am grateful to Mariana Oller, associate curator, for providing me with a photocopy of that manuscript. The “rhythmic turbulence / Of blood” – that richly suggestive line from Aurora Leigh – finds remarkable corroboration in the scientific observations of my long-time friend, Dr Gavin Hamilton, who is a radiologist. “Transition to turbulence” is a phenomenon in fluid dynamics in which Dr Hamilton has had a lifelong interest, and about which he has written extensively. In observing the phenomenon in the arteries and veins of his patients, he found, not the expected chaotic flow of the fast-moving blood, but “a beautiful simple harmonic stationary wave pattern,” rhythmic turbulence created by sound waves. EBB would, I think, have been fascinated with scientific proof of a phenomenon she only intuited. Thanks to my colleague Stephen Adams for our talks about Swedenborg and responses to him by an astonishing number of writers and poets, including EBB. I am deeply grateful to the two anonymous readers for McGill-Queen’s University Press for entering into a complex argument with such insight and understanding, and for providing perspectives on it and its presentation that my closeness to the materials when I was writing had blurred or obscured. Their suggestions have greatly improved the arrangement of the argument and its critical context. I am particularly grateful to the reader who provided unusually detailed notes on the manuscript; they were like a critical voice at my ear at every turn when I was revising. That same reader suggested my title: I needed a phrase that would focus attention on the main subject of this book, and RB’s (which I had forgotten about) is perfect. Mark Abley, my editor at McGill-Queen’s, has taken charge of the manuscript from the very beginning of our relationship. His guidance of it through the evaluation process has been both wise and astute, and his advice has been crucial in my revisions, especially of the introduction. I am deeply grateful to him for his editorial and scholarly expertise. It has been a pleasure working with the press’s production and marketing team, especially my eagle-eyed copy editor, Kate Baltais, and the managing editor, Ryan Van Huijstee.

author’s note

Everyone who writes about Elizabeth Barrett Browning faces the problem of naming her. Her full name before her marriage – Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett – and her full name after marriage – Elizabeth Barrett Browning – are simply too unwieldy to be repeated as often as a text like the present one requires. “Elizabeth” she rarely used for herself, and the name she and her family (and afterwards her husband) did use – “Ba” – is too familiar. She signed her early letters “EBB,” and she continued to use her initials in her correspondence in the 1830s and 1840s. When her marriage to Robert Browning was becoming a reality, her suitor reminded her that her initials would not change with their union. Marjorie Stone comments that “for a woman who had long signed her manuscripts ‘EBB,’ this continuity must have seemed propitious!” (Davies and Stone 152). So I have used “EBB” throughout this study, for (in Locke’s words) “quickness and dispatch sake,” and (I infer) with the authority of the poet herself.

Fresh Strange Music

introduction

My title is from Robert Browning. In the very first letter he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett – the famous letter in which the impulsive young poet not only asserted that “I love your verses with all my heart” but also “I love you too” (bc 10: 17) – RB named four “excellences” of EBB’s poetry. The first is its “fresh strange music.” It is unlikely that RB, who was, by this time (January 1845), a poet who had thought deeply about his art, is using the word “music” in its popular and sentimental sense, as anything that sounds nice and evokes tender feelings. Eight months before he wrote this letter, RB had sent two poems – “The Laboratory (Ancien Régime)” and “Claret and Tokay” – to the editor of Hood’s Magazine, asking him “How do you like these?” and then giving him unexpected advice for his first response: “Lilt them a little, for the music” (bc 8: 319). RB had a maker’s and technician’s understanding of the sound of his art, and he recognized in EBB’s poetry a command of, and expertise in, the music of poetry, which made her poems sound “fresh,” and unlike anything preceding them. For music, as I shall attempt to show in this study, is a key feature of EBB’s art – music in its technical sense, that is, as units of equal time (bars), each beginning with a strong beat. Music understood in that way is not only the essential aspect of EBB’s prosody, but has implications for her thinking about the social and political issues that were so important to her, and to which her readers have most strongly responded: gender, exploitation of women and children, slavery, her support for Napoleon III and for the Risorgimento in Italy – and her relations with RB. Music, and her sounding of it, is the unifying note of her career as a poet, tying together works that seem disparate and unrelated, from the early An Essay on Mind

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(1826) to the late Poems Before Congress (1860) and the posthumous Last Poems (1862). Her working out of the techniques and implications of music is the major subject of this book. And as a long-time teacher of poetry, I try to show, through some close analyses, how the poems actually work: how her prosody realizes her purposes, embodies her themes, and conveys their affect. In proceeding as I do, I am of course building upon the work of many scholars who have, especially in the past forty years, written about EBB, but at the same time my approach is a departure from much of existing criticism and scholarship. The issues that late twentieth-century critics chose to deal with were not (with some notable exceptions) technical matters and their implications, but rather issues of gender and sexual politics as they shape EBB’s experiments with genre and her struggle to find her own voice as a woman poet. In October 1843 EBB told Richard Hengist Horne that, if the public were to know anything at all about her, it must be not as “the heroine of a biography” but as “a writer of rhymes” (bc 7: 353). Her wish was certainly not granted in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. In all those decades, as Marjorie Stone shows in the final chapter of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1995), the poet’s “critical heritage” was “a handmaid’s tale.” Stone is appropriating the title of one of Margaret Atwood’s novels to make the point that, during that time, EBB was portrayed as wife, mother, and muse, but EBB “the poet was erased, even as many of her generic and technical innovations were appropriated” (193). “By the 1950s,” Stone writes, “Barrett Browning, the candidate for Poet Laureate in 1850 and the author of Aurora Leigh, had effectively disappeared from literary history, except in her capacity as the romantic heroine who laid bare her heart in the Sonnets from the Portuguese” (217). My own reading of the “critical heritage” is concerned largely with those critics and scholars who deal with technical and formal matters in EBB’s work. The first full-length twentieth-century study to focus primarily on the poetry was Alethea Hayter’s 1962 book, Mrs Browning: A Poet’s Work and Its Setting. Hayter begins by quoting the same letter to Horne that I quote above, and by assuring her readers that “this book is concerned with [EBB] as a writer of rhymes,” while “her life will be mentioned only when it has some bearing on her powers as a writer” (9). Hayter deals with the

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technical aspects of those powers in her third chapter, “Experiments in Poetic Technique,” and she discusses the same topics that I explore: her rhymes (“sight-rhymes,” full- and half-rhymes,“double rhymes”) and her prosody. The latter, she says, is “not as eccentric and experimental as her rhymes” (52). But because Hayter’s EBB is, for the most part, such a restless experimenter, Hayter sees no unifying thread – or, to use a more appropriate metaphor, hears no common note – in all EBB’s work. Poems (1844), for instance, have “no prevailing character” and in them EBB “seems to write like several different people” (69). Similarly, the collection entitled Last Poems “is so various and uneven that it might have been written … by three or four different poets” (222–3). But in her final chapter, “Case for Reassessment,” Hayter has advice for all who would write about EBB: “Literary historians might turn their attention to Mrs Browning’s technical experiments in versification, which time has not only justified but proved extremely influential” (245). One recipient who felt that technical influence was Emily Dickinson. This is not the place to explore the nature and extent of that influence, but were I to do so, a starting point would be Betsy Erkkila’s work in The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History and Discord (1992). There Erkkila gives the evidence for Dickinson’s reading of EBB in her formative years, and says, of one of her later poems, “In ‘I think I was enchanted’ Dickinson writes what amounts to a poetic manifesto invoking and inviting Browning as her first specifically literary muse,” in (what Dickinson calls) “Tomes of Solid Witchcraft” (69). Erkkila is not concerned with technical matters, but in the poem of Dickinson’s from which that quotation comes – Poems #593, written about 1862 – there is much to suggest that Dickinson heard EBB’s music in ways I explore in this book: Dickinson’s Nature murmurs “Tunes” that the poet takes “for Giants – practising / Titanic Opera,” and her days step “to Mighty Metres … As if unto a Jubilee.” As evidence of EBB’s “powerful effect” on Dickinson, Erkkila points to an 1854 letter of Dickinson’s in which the poet quotes one of EBB’s major poems in the volumes of 1844, “A Vision of Poets.” Dickinson wishes her correspondent “a pleasant journey,” and “Then ‘golden morning’s open flowings, shall sway the trees to murmurous bowings, in metric chant of blessed poems’” (Erkkila 68) – a slightly modified version of lines 811–13 in EBB’s poem (webb 1: 209).

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After Hayter, it was feminist criticism that provided the finest work on EBB. Its focus was on the issue of a woman poet finding her place in a tradition dominated by men. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar start their immensely influential study of nineteenth-century women writers with the powerful metaphor against which those women had to react: the identification of the pen and the penis as the creating power. On the binding of an elaborate nineteenth-century edition of the plays of Bulwer-Lytton – an edition I own – the design, gold on black, centres on the motto, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” the line being from Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 play, Richelieu. The designer has almost obliterated the space between “pen” and “is,” and thus (unintentionally, I assume) anticipates the issue identified by Gilbert and Gubar (who do not mention Bulwer-Lytton). They set the direction for the fine scholarly studies of EBB by Angela Leighton (1986), Helen Cooper (1988), Dorothy Mermin (1989), and Glennis Stephenson (1989). Angela Leighton focuses on the older men in EBB’s life, “her real and her literary fathers” (12), and quotes (on p 10) a sentence from a late letter by EBB that can be read as her answer to Bulwer-Lytton: “I have a stout pen, and, till its last blot, it will write, perhaps, with its ‘usual insolence’” (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 423). “The two major issues in [EBB’s] poems of and about love” are, Stephenson says,“the question of woman’s role in love relationships and the question of woman’s voice in love poetry” (3). Cooper similarly states the “central issue” in EBB’s work as “how a woman poet empowers herself to speak” (5) when “working within a male tradition” (1), and Mermin identifies that same issue as EBB’s “main subject” (8). Technical matters are subordinate to that issue, but not ignored. Cooper’s aim is to show “how an understanding of Barrett Browning’s contribution reshapes our conception of Victorian poetics” (1), understood in the context of both “anxiety of influence” and “anxiety of authorship” (190). Mermin does draw attention to EBB’s experiments in rhyme as “the chief technical means by which [she] was to try to make English poetry new” (32), and she does comment on assonantal double rhymes as “her main technical innovation” (112), but at the same time she remarks, about feminine endings, that they “tend to call forth [her] most questionable experiments in rhyme” (98). It was usual for critics to acknowledge

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EBB’s “restless formal experimentation,” as Mermin does (115), without undertaking an extended analysis of it. For a comprehensive and far more informed account of the reception history of EBB’s work than I have outlined here, one needs to turn to Marjorie Stone’s 1995 book. The “critical heritage” she sets out in her final chapter is an insightful and nuanced study of readers’ responses to EBB’s work from her death in 1861 on. And rather than setting EBB in the context of a male literary tradition, Stone locates her in two less familiar contexts: Romanticism (for EBB’s life coincided with the transition from Romantic to Victorian), and “an entire matrix of women writers whom she did not personally know who shaped her consciousness and textual practice” (35). EBB the restless experimenter and independent thinker came more and more to dominate scholarly treatments of her work at the millennium and after. In his 2002 essay on “Lyric” in Victorian poetry, Matthew Rowlinson characterizes EBB as “the most various and experimental of the major Victorian poets” (74). And in their 2003 book on EBB, Simon Avery and Rebecca Stott champion her as “a strong, powerful, dissenting thinker who frequently resisted established ideologies” (40) and as a “woman in full possession of her ‘poetic I’ from the moment she ventured into print as a young girl” (66). Stott’s view of EBB’s work as unified contrasts with Cooper’s: Cooper argues that EBB found her “poetic I” late in her career. Similarly, Stephenson does not find close ties between the last poems and the earlier ones, only “a number of formal and thematic links” (117). My argument is that music is as central to EBB’s poetics at the beginning of her career as it is at the end. Opening up new avenues of research and criticism in a major way was the 2010 publication of EBB’s Works, the first “complete works” since Porter and Clarke’s 1900 edition, which in fact was not “complete.” webb brings together juvenilia, unpublished poems and manuscripts, essays and reviews, as well as all published poems, and sets them in their context with thoroughly informed introductions, notes, summaries of relevant scholarship and criticism, and bibliographies. Alison Chapman, in welcoming that first genuinely complete and fully edited edition of EBB’s works, writes, “Finally we have an authoritative edition that firmly establishes EBB’s own

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editorial decisions at the center of her corpus, revealing a new EBB embedded within her complex intellectual, literary, and cultural networks: provocative, politicized, experimental, and modern” (611). Chapman’s four adjectives are exactly right. As a result of the appearance of this “new EBB,” the range of criticism greatly expanded to include new topics and issues, and texts previously neglected or ignored. That expansion was already under way when, in 2003, Marjorie Stone took over Victorian Poetry’s annual survey of “the year’s work” in EBB criticism. Her essays provide an unusually thorough and comprehensive overview of work on EBB’s poetry, and chart trends in the criticism – as does Simon Avery’s review essay, “Re-reading EBB,” in the first issue of the Journal of Browning Studies in 2010. The trend most relevant to this book is the interest in EBB’s – and Victorian – versification, metres, and rhymes. EBB’s practices in rhyming have always presented a particular challenge to reviewers, critics, and scholars. During her lifetime her rhymes were the one aspect of her art that came in for regular criticism. Too often the reviewers took EBB’s rhymes out of their context in her actual lines, catalogued them, and then judged them as “acceptable” and “correct” or “false” and “illegitimate,” on the shaky basis of shifting and changing pronunciation; alleged affectation, carelessness, or wilfulness on the part of the poet; and social and class distinctions that made some ways of saying things vulgar rather than “proper.” The significance of EBB’s experiments with rhyme was long in being recognized, despite a pioneering essay now seventy-five years old, Fred Manning Smith’s “Mrs Browning’s Rhymes” in pmla in 1939. There Smith credits EBB with being like MacLeish, Auden, and Day Lewis in the twentieth century, extending the possibilities of rhyming to a greater range of affect through half-rhymes, double rhymes, dissonances created by the same vowel being pronounced in different ways, and sound repetition of consonants rather than vowels. (Smith also mentions EBB’s influence on Emily Dickinson.) Scholars have been slow to follow Smith’s lead, but in 1999 two important essays on EBB’s rhymes appeared: Margaret Morlier’s “the politics of rhyme” in Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Tim Sadenwasser’s “Rhyme, Form and Sound” in “The Dead Pan.” (Both scholars acknowledge Smith as a predecessor.) The rhymes in the Sonnets, Morlier argues,“give an edge

Introduction

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to the sequence’s sentimentality” and provide it with “the kind of textured, realistic feminine voice that was part of Barrett Browning’s agenda throughout her poetic career” (98). Moreover, Morlier connects EBB’s rhymes with politics – an important critical move when the rhymes had for so long been considered in isolation. Her thesis is that EBB “derived her formal strategies from Victorian political poetry, her structure from the political sonnet and her near rhymes from the poetry of social reform” (98). EBB’s experiments, Morlier says,“indicate subversive and elitist poetic strategies that are at ideological cross-purposes” (98), so that the complex sounds one hears in her poetry demand close attention and a finely tuned ear. Sadenwasser’s essay provides detailed analyses of the rhymes in “The Dead Pan,” EBB’s “most ambitious experiment in rhyming” (522). He juxtaposes the “certainty” of some of the rhymes (the repetition of identical vowel sounds) and the “deficiency” of others (EBB’s “imperfect rhymes”), and relates them to the metre; to the construction of both the stanzas and the refrain; to the movement of thought in the poem; and to the range of emotions explored. He demonstrates fully EBB’s skill in matching rhyme and rhythm, and he throws down a challenge to critics of her practices in sound repetition: “The reader must be prepared either to dismiss Browning’s rhymes as the work of a mediocre and haphazard artist or to seek out interpretations for her extensive and studied use of deficient and, at times, strange rhymes” (535). One contemporary critic – Peter McDonald – argues (wrongly, in my view) for the first of Sadenwasser’s alternatives; I follow Sadenwasser’s lead in seeking out the links of sound and sense, sound and structure, sound and affect, in an analysis of her “strange music.” It is in dealing with EBB’s prosody that I depart most from earlier critics. The primary scholarly context for my argument is the upsurge, in the last ten years or so, of interest in Victorian versification and metres – what Marjorie Stone calls “the neo-formalist swerve in Victorian poetry studies” and its renewed attention to technical matters (Victorian Poetry 50 (2012): 346). Recent studies of Victorian metrics are rewriting the history of prosody in the period. The major shift has been in qualifying the claim that Coventry Patmore’s 1857 essay, “English Metrical Critics,” was a “landmark” inaugurating “the new era of Victorian metrical theory” (in the words of Dennis Taylor, 4, 49). The theory was not, in fact, new, though Patmore himself did seem to be claiming innovation in arguing for “the

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true view of metre, as being primarily based upon isochronous division by ictuses or accents” (128), a rhythm “as natural to spoken language as an even pace is natural to walking” (123). Coleridge had experimented with the fitting of varying numbers of syllables into units of equal time in “Christabel,” and in fact, as Joseph Phelan has recently shown, musical scansion is a continuing experimental technique in the nineteenth century, though it was obscured by the conventional scansion of the day, the eighteenth century’s powerful legacy of syllable counting. Phelan’s 2012 book, The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, makes the case for recognizing, and taking into account, continuing experiments with music in poetry. He points to“the renewed importance” of “the tradition of ‘musical prosody’ which inspired Coleridge and others” and identifies its central principle: “This tradition … is founded on the idea that poetry and music have a profound affinity of structure, and in particular that the basic temporal unit of musical composition – the bar – is analogous to the fundamental rhythmical unit of verse, usually (but not invariably) identified in traditional terms as the ‘foot’” (4). Phelan refers to “a letter on ‘the art of scansion’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning” (4) – it is the letter of April 1827, which I discuss in chapter 2 – and I too place EBB in this experimental context. Robert Stark anticipates my argument in his 2010 essay on EBB’s blank verse in Aurora Leigh. He hears the prosody as a tense interplay of metre and rhythm, which are like “two well-matched wrestlers, the bout favouring one and then the other opponent” (50). Both RB and EBB, Stark argues, depart “in systematic and calculated ways from an inert metrical paradigm” (65). For EBB that included rejecting the eighteenth-century’s method of maintaining a strict syllable count – the use of the apostrophe to indicate elision: her extra syllables are all to be pronounced and fitted into units of equal time. I cannot agree with Stark that the line “Reduced the irregular blood to a settled rhythm” (Aurora Leigh 1. 1059) is to be read as “Reduced th’irreg’lar blood t’a settled rhythm” (65) when the voicing of the extra syllables is crucial to the line’s “settling” into two trochees. (Stark hears the same effect in the line, though he comes at it in a different way.) One of the defining features of Victorian prosody is the link between poetics and the body. Jason Rudy, in exploring “the astonishing physicality of Victorian poetics” (2) in his 2009 book, Electric Meters, claims that

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“the history of Victorian poetry is in no small part a history of the human body” (2) – a claim that, at first glance, seems surprising, until one remembers Hallam’s poetry of sensation, the Spasmodics of mid-century, and the “fleshly school” of the 1870s. Though Rudy deals with EBB, it is in the context of her interest in spiritualism, which turns out, in Rudy’s treatment of it, to be not nearly so remote from physiology as one might suppose: “spiritualist communication,” Rudy argues, is the “flip side” (16) of “physiological poetics,” and shares the same paradoxes (174). As I try to show, EBB has a major role to play in any account of such poetics. That is why I discuss at length the meaning of her label, the “animal life” of poetry (bc 1: 258), and why I attribute the creation of Aurora Leigh to “the rhythmic turbulence / Of blood and brain” (1: 897–8) – the generating power of the poem that provides some justification for early critics’ linking the epic with the Spasmodics. Yet – such are the complexities and paradoxes of poetics – the reader’s sense of a “voice” in the poetry is more important than the physical reading aloud of the lines. Yopie Prins distinguishes between “voice” and “spoken utterance,” and argues that voice “resists being reduced to utterance” (92). “Utterance” can make audible only one metre or rhythm at a time; “voice,” which we hear silently, conveys multiple movements simultaneously. The mind’s response to that complexity and its embodiment of theme and affect is the primary source of our pleasure in the poet’s art. The burgeoning interest in Victorian prosody is apparent in two collections published in 2011: Jason David Hall’s Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, and Victorian Poetry’s special number on Victorian Prosody, edited by Meredith Martin and Yisrael Levin. The former includes Isobel Armstrong’s essay,“Meter and Meaning,” with its “four epistemologies of meter,” of which the third, binary ways of thinking about metre, was “powerful in the nineteenth century” (28) and the one that I find most useful in analyzing EBB’s practices. The latter includes an essay on EBB in which Caroline Levine links prosody and politics in a way that is crucial to the music of poetry: its handling of time. The “politics of prosody” (235), Levine calls her argument, and she proposes three models for the relation of prosody and politics: the “reflective,” where metrical forms mirror “lived temporalities”; the “expressive,” where prosody is a “purposeful expression of political positions or convictions” (235); and

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the Marxist, where literary forms are understood as “struggling to contain or repress the reality of social conflicts and contradictions” (236). She also draws attention to “another, less prominent tradition,” “that meter may itself exert or transmit power” (236–7). That is Rudy’s argument, and it is also an important aspect of the music of EBB’s poetry. Levine’s “reflective” model is Herbert Tucker’s primary strategy in his fine 2006 essay on the metrics of EBB’s poem “The Cry of the Children,” which I discuss at the end of chapter 5. “Industrial meter,” Tucker calls the prosody, and (in a later essay) “the poetics of fatigue.” The poem, with its aggressive agenda, proves the range and effectiveness of musical prosody in the service of social and political issues. Those issues were the conditions of work in mines and factories, wretched for everyone but especially for working-class children. EBB’s poem became, as the editors of webb point out, “one of the most influential texts of the industrial reform literature of the mid-Victorian period” (1: 431). There is another defining feature of the Victorian interest in prosody, and that is the intense interest in the English language itself: its grammatical forms, its sounds, and above all its history – its roots, its growth and development, and its relations to other languages. In introducing his study of performative language in Victorian poetry, Warwick Slinn says that “if … we are to understand fully the function of figurative language in cultural processes (of which poetry is the most sophisticated form), we need to restore attention to that language, no matter how specialized its use – without losing sight of its continuity with social and historical contexts” (1). The chief linguistic context for EBB’s career as a poet is, to borrow the title of Hans Aarsleff ’s groundbreaking 1967 book, the study of language in England between 1780 and 1860. His is an account of the scholarly work that led to the development of the discipline we now know as Victorian philology. It was the result of the comparative and historical studies of language initiated by Sir William Jones in the 1780s, developed in Germany by the brothers Grimm and others, and championed in England by (among many scholars) Richard Chenevix Trench, whose 1857 papers On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries led to the creation of that great monument of nineteenth-century philology, the Oxford English Dictionary. It was first published as A New English Dictionary, and its title page (in the first vol-

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ume in 1888) defined its newness: it was a dictionary based not on a philosophy of language (like Dr Johnson’s) but “on historical principles, founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society.” Those principles created a sense that words meant well beyond their current use. Words had roots, clustered in families, and were intertwined with all human thinking and all human activities, and their history was part of their meaning. That history could be exploited by poets, as it most certainly was by Hopkins, for instance, and later by Hardy. When in Aids to Reflection (1825) Coleridge had urged the study of etymology, he did so in a statement subsequently quoted by Trench and others, that “more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word, than by the history of a campaign” (Works 9: 17). And when one considers the nature of that history – the secondary senses of a word, characteristically metaphorical, carrying across the primary sense of the root to other human concerns – Trench was exactly right when he asserted that “many a single word … is itself a concentrated poem” (On the Study of Words 6). The new philology also gave new authority to national languages. Where scholars in the eighteenth century had concerned themselves with the search for a universal language or for the perfect language, the new philologists considered native tongues as the embodiment and expression of the character of the folk or people, and valuable for that reason. The brothers Grimm had collected their folk tales and fairy stories to preserve their national linguistic heritage, and when readers objected to the coarse language of the originals, Jacob Grimm defended their collection, saying that the stories were not meant for the amusement of children. In England, Augustus and Julius Hare repeated Grimm’s views on the value of the language of the folk (in Guesses at Truth, 1827), and so did others, including Richard Garnett, Frederick Denison Maurice, and Trench himself. Their views led, in the middle of the century, to the promotion of “purism” in the English language: the use of words of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic origin, that is, and the avoidance of words derived from French, Latin, and Greek. EBB had no direct contact with such philological work. Her sex denied her the opportunity Tennyson, for instance, had, to encounter it at Trinity College, Cambridge – which emerged as the centre of (what Aarsleff calls) “the philological spirit” (220), thanks to the influential scholars who matriculated there or taught there. There is no evidence that EBB read any of

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the grammarians who were promoting the work of German philologists, and while references in her letters (bc 7: 224) indicate that she did know Aids to Reflection, she seems to have read it as a theological work – which it is – and she does not comment on Coleridge’s making words and their etymology the key to the method – reflection – which he is teaching. Nonetheless, EBB had a sense of her native language that was parallel to that of the philologists of her day. Its nature, as she understood it, was her final authority, especially for her handling of both rhymes and rhythms. She seems to have approached sound repetition in poetry with something like “the philological spirit,” for she called her practice her “rhymatology,” a word she first uses in 1844. Hers was the age of “ologies.” The oed defines the suffix as “any one of the various sciences or departments of science,” a use dating from 1811, and ten years after EBB first used her neologism Dickens would have his Mrs Gradgrind complain of “Ologies of all kinds from morning to night” dominating the education of her children. EBB, like the philologists, would defend her “rhymatology” as empirical and historical rather than fanciful and arbitrary: it was based, she would insist, on the actual character of the spoken language, as she came to know it through intense study and unusually wide reading, especially of her predecessors in poetry in English, and the references she makes to them in her letters and essays indicate just how thorough and attentive and insightful that reading was. EBB had a comprehensive knowledge not only of texts from the Renaissance on, but of English poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as well, and those texts were her earliest evidence for the spirit and character of her native tongue. Her childhood home in Herefordshire was in the Malvern Hills, and they had an important literary association that was the starting point for her history of English poetry: “I begin from Langland of Piers Plowman & the Malvern Hills” (bc 5: 349). Langland’s contemporary, Chaucer, brought EBB even closer to the philological work of her day. The catalyst for EBB’s work on Chaucer was Richard Hengist Horne. He was a journalist, man of letters and poet, an acquaintance of RB from the mid-1830s on, and friend and correspondent of EBB from about 1839. (His work on a Royal Commission investigating the conditions of child labour prompted EBB’s “The Cry of the Children.” See bc 4: 319.) In 1840

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Horne asked EBB to translate some of Chaucer’s poems for a project he was undertaking, which was to “modernize” the fourteenth-century poet. That word suggests that he wanted to push aside Chaucer’s own language and poetical practices, but in fact Horne saw himself as supplementing the philological work on England’s first major poet: “the most careful collation of texts, the most elaborate essays, the most ample and erudite notes and glossaries” (vi), he said, were now available to scholars; still lacking were translations to make Chaucer’s “obsolete dialect” (ix) “intelligible to the general reader” (vi). EBB too refers to the work of philologists when she notes “our increasing acquaintance with [Chaucer’s] dialect and pronunciation” (webb 4: 447). And though Chaucer’s language could be, as Horne admitted, “improper,” and “calculated to startle a modern reader,” Chaucer could not be ignored: he “is a poet, and a founder of the language of his country” (viii). The aspects of language that most interested EBB in Chaucer, his contemporaries, and his successors, were matters peripheral to the work of the philologists: his rhythms and his rhymes. And though EBB refers to “our increasing acquaintance” with his pronunciation, she approached the sounds of Chaucer’s poetry with assumptions from the eighteenth century: Herder and others had thought that, prior to the highly developed and sophisticated language of any given country there had been a “language of nature” or Ursprache, a primitive but powerful language whose appeal was not so much cognitive but affective, a language expressing and moving the feelings and emotions. That sense of a modern language having within it a primitive but authoritative language had its parallel in EBB’s sense that modern prosody had within it a primitive but authoritative rhythm, obscured by the scansion of the day. In his preface to his edition of Chaucer’s “modernized” poems Horne deals, not with the philological questions that one would expect, but with Chaucer’s prosody, and he does so in ways that parallel EBB’s thinking. To the nineteenth-century ear, habituated to the syllable counting of the eighteenth century, Chaucer’s prosody was a challenge. Horne’s argument for an understanding of Chaucer’s versification might have been historical, a reflection of “the philological spirit” of his time, but it is in fact primarily an appeal for the recognition of something fundamental to all poetry, in every age:

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fres h st r a n ge mus ic Our position is, that Chaucer was a most harmonious and melodious poet, and that he was a perfect master of the various forms of versification in which he wrote; that the principle on which his rhythm is founded fuses and subjects within itself all the minor details of metre; that this principle, though it has been understood only by the few, and never systematically explained, is, more or less, inseparable from the composition of an harmonious versification in the English language; and that he, the first man if not unrivalled in the varied music of his verse, has scarcely been surpassed by any succeeding poet. (xxxviii)

Horne attacks the present “system of scanning – all the talk about hexameters and pentameters, iambics and trochees, dactyls and spondees” as the “pickings of dry bones” that are “totally inapplicable to the fundamental principle of English verse” (lxxxiv). That “fundamental principle,” that “primitive elementary principle” (lxxiii) of English verse, is the rhythm, in which syllables naturally organize themselves into units of equal time, like bars in music. Hence when Horne refers to “the varied music of [Chaucer’s] verse,” he is using the word “music” in its precise technical sense. Horne’s metaphor for that rhythm is the heartbeat, pulsations “varying with every emotion” (lxxxiv). EBB uses the same term – music – and the same physiological metaphor – the heartbeat – again and again, as we shall see, and links that rhythm with music in rich and complex ways. Her working out of the relations between music and poetry is the major subject of this book. The beat – the steady succession of strongly accented syllables marking units of equal time in a line of poetry – has momentous implications for EBB. Just as, in Shakespeare’s time, music was the key to the right ordering of the individual, of society, and of the state, so for EBB the beat, in her early treatment of it, is the basis of human relations, the promoter of kindness and sympathy in families and in society. Later on in her career she conceives of it as the basis of authority in the state, which she identifies with the democratic voice of the people in a way that parallels the authority philologists gave to national languages. But EBB was aware of other issues in the understanding of language, issues that belonged not to the philology of her day but to the eighteenth

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century and earlier. One was the relation of words and thoughts. EBB’s views on that issue must be deduced from an early story of hers entitled “A Thought on Thoughts,” which features two distinguished families, Words and Thoughts, and tells of their social relations, which are at first close and afterwards strained. But her main indebtedness to earlier theories is to Locke. We know, from notes she made on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that she was familiar with Locke’s language theory, even though that theory was at odds with the organic development of languages as understood by the philologists. For Locke, words are signs of ideas; ideas are generalizations from the experience provided by our five senses; and to those ideas we attach sounds. The connection between words and ideas is an arbitrary one, and words themselves are conventional rather than natural and inevitable. Locke’s linking of words and sensations troubled EBB, as we shall see, but at the same time she was aware that sensation was not the only source of language in Locke; that reflection, the mind’s awareness of its own operations, was just as important, and involved the activity of the mind rather than its supposed passivity. The popular understanding of Locke’s account of the mind was that it was passive in experience and simply attached names to things rather than ideas. But in fact Locke’s theory rests upon the mind’s creative activity. Language is “the workmanship of the understanding,” which sorts, distinguishes, and generalizes, and words are arbitrary: that is, they are the product of a judgment made by the mind, as the etymology of the word “arbitrary” indicates. So the mind, far from being limited by sensations and passive in receiving them, transforms “the shews of things” to its own desires, concerns, and purposes. My quotation, “the shews of things,” is from Bacon and, curiously enough, the label for the mind in creation during EBB’s lifetime was “Baconian,” even though Bacon and Locke were both empiricists. And while EBB did not dispute the Lockean view of language as conventional and arbitrary, derived as it was from sensation, she would eventually go well beyond the “Baconian” to affirm that there was in language an element that was real (rather than phenomenal), substantial (standing under everything else, if we think of the etymology of the word), pervasive (in all human speech), and natural (her version of the Romantics’ “language of nature”) – the element essential to “the use of vocal life” (Aurora Leigh 6:

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220).“Vocal,” note, rather than “written.” That element she would identify as a beat, but in An Essay on Mind, her first major poem, she includes it in what she calls (borrowing a term from the eighteenth century) “the harmony of verse.” So I begin this study where EBB begins, with Locke and Bacon and “the harmony of verse” – the subjects of my first two chapters. They are the foundation of EBB’s understanding of language. Chapter 1, which is short, defines EBB’s indebtedness to Locke and Bacon. She did not question Locke’s argument that sensations are the experiences to which words are arbitrarily attached, but she was troubled by it, because she believed in an invisible spiritual world lying behind and within the world apprehended by our five senses, and the problem of how to give voice to that world occupied her thinking as a young poet. Much later, she found one solution to that problem in the language of prophecy, which she uses in Casa Guidi Windows. Chapter 2, which is long, focuses on that key term from An Essay on Mind, “the harmony of verse.” “Harmony” was a central and characteristic word in eighteenth-century poetics, where it meant the strict alternation of accented and unaccented syllables in a line of verse. EBB adopts the word and redefines it. She detaches it from a strict syllable count and links it with strong, graceful, rhythmic movement, as in a dance. Among the adjectives she uses to define the appeal of such movement is “sweet,” which was wider in its meaning in her day than in ours: years later she would use “sweet” in a crucial way in her late poem,“A Musical Instrument.” The context for her early thinking about harmony was the ongoing debate about the writing in English of quantitative verse on the model of Greek and Latin poetry. She countered the widespread view that English metre was primarily accentual and insisted that “quantity is the essence of English poetry” (she was quoting her elderly correspondent Sir Uvedale Price; bc 2: 65). She also rejected the view that quantities were fixed, as in Latin poetry, for instance, where syllables had only two durations in time, long and short – and where, moreover, the quantities of syllables remained the same, whatever the context in which the words were used. She knew from her intense study of older texts that the quantity of English syllables varies greatly in a gamut from long to short, and – in an even more daring departure from conventional thinking – that quantity changes with the

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position of words in a clause or line of verse. For Price, with whom she corresponded on this issue, this was only “licence,” but she was in fact freeing English poetry to exploit the natural rhythm of the language. That natural rhythm was a musical one, with syllables organizing themselves into units of equal time. (For instance, in the second line of the “Three Blind Mice” nursery rhyme, we give half the time to the syllables “how they” without even thinking about it.) Each unit, as in music, begins with a strong beat, and that beat EBB called the “animal life” of poetry. (The units are not always identical with the conventional – and more familiar – feet; trochees and dactyls begin with accented syllables, but iambs and anapests do not. Moreover, the timing depends as much upon the pauses, the rests or silences, as it does on the voiced syllables.) The units themselves EBB called “cadences,” and “cadences” were much more than unvarying thump thump; thump thump. In one short lyric (webb 4: 143), EBB uses “cadence” as a verb in the imperative mood to promote “kindly, social love” in families and in society. In doing that, she is taking the ancient idea of universal harmony and the music of the spheres and modernizing it, making a physiological beat the key to the right ordering of human relations. The context for all that rethinking of “harmony” is a topic I explore in a number of ways: the question of a muse and of a source of inspiration. In unpublished birthday poems for family members, EBB frequently invokes Euterpe, the muse of music. In her published poems, she also invokes her father as well as allegorical figures such as the Past, Time, and Fame. But it is EBB’s literary relation with her father that is the most interesting. When EBB says that she is seeking “the tone” of her father’s words and the same tone in her own, we can see the emergence of a figure who will reappear in EBB’s work: the music master. We know his demonic version in the Phantom of the Opera, but in EBB he is a loved and benign figure who appears in Sonnets from the Portuguese, where EBB addresses RB as “chief musician” (Sonnet III), and in Aurora Leigh, where Aurora hears Romney’s voice “as some chief musician’s song” (9: 844). Moreover, EBB knew and admired George Sand’s 1853 novel about master musicians, Les Maîtres Sonneurs, which she judged to be “absolutely perfect” (Letters … to Arabella 2: 110) and “exquisite” (bc 20: 327). I conclude the chapter

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with the most important inspiration of all: divine. That is the concern of “Sounds” (1838) and, as Charles LaPorte has argued (26), it makes EBB a prophet and her poems “new religious texts” (23). Chapter 3 deals with two lead poems: The Seraphim, which headed EBB’s volume of 1838, and A Drama of Exile, which had the same position in Poems (1844). Each explores a central issue in EBB’s thinking about language and the place of music in it. The problem of dealing with heavenly matters in a language derived (as Locke taught) from the senses is a central concern of The Seraphim. EBB’s precedent is Paradise Lost and Raphael’s narrative of the war in heaven, in which the seraph explains that he must accommodate his language to Adam’s earthly understanding “By lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms” (5: 573). EBB’s solution differs. Her poem is a dialogue between two seraphs, and (what she calls) the “exaggerated difficulty” she faces is to command “the tongue / Of Angels” with nothing more than her own human tongue. The angelic dialogue can never be more than a “Counterfeit,” as EBB confesses in the epilogue to the poem, but at the same time she affirms that her own “hoarse music” (1039) with its “cadence all the while / Of sin and sorrow” (1039–40) participates ontologically in the seraphs’ “most sweet music’s miracle” (1046). Her music is, to use Coleridge’s terms, a copy and not an imitation, and I define some of the techniques of the angelic tongue as EBB presents it, such as having one seraph maintaining the rhythm by completing the cadences of the other. My analysis of A Drama of Exile, which makes up the second half of chapter 3, should be read alongside chapter 4, which is about EBB’s 1842 review of a new anthology of English poetry. The relation of the two is that of myth to history: A Drama of Exile is EBB’s myth of music, and The Book of the Poets is her history of music in English poetry. Myth, which is “Baconian” and the work of the imagination, feeds into history, which is factual and empirical, and which in turn feeds its materials back into the shaping powers of myth: each sustains the other. The myth EBB constructs in A Drama of Exile is her rewriting of Paradise Lost. She chooses to narrate the moment just after Adam and Eve have been expelled from the Garden of Eden, and she shapes the story with her version of the Arminian theology that underpins Milton’s poem. Unlike the Calvinists, who held that with the fall the reason of human

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beings became utterly depraved, the Arminians affirmed that, while human reason was indeed darkened and deprived, it was not wholly incapable, on its own, of a move back toward God. EBB’s epithets that parallel the Calvinist and Arminian positions are “lost” and “exiled.” The power that Adam and Eve retain in exile is the music of the garden, still heard though much diminished, “Shaded off to resonances” (294) and transposed to a different key, a “pathetic minor” (255). That music, however changed, keeps its original authority: “What sounds!”Adam exclaims: “I feel a music which comes straight from Heaven” (551–2). Such music is the focus of EBB’s history of English poetry, the subject of chapter 4, and one usually neglected by critics. The genre of her history is, as I explain, romance, which tells the story of the birth, youth, testing, death, and rebirth of the hero. Her hero is English poetry, which has many faces, and the power that her hero wields is that of music. The golden age of music in poetry is that of Shakespeare and Spenser; decline sets in with Dryden and Pope, until the rebirth of the hero in the late eighteenth century, and the flourishing of music in EBB’s contemporaries, notably Wordsworth and Tennyson. “A Vision of Poets,” with which I end the chapter, is a coda to her history. Written in octosyllabic triplets, it is (among other things) a series of succinct and insightful portraits of both European and English poets, a tour de force of criticism, judged by RB to be “perfect, absolutely perfect” (bc 11: 15). In it EBB makes an affirmation parallel to that of the earlier “Sounds”: “pilgrim-poets” on earth are the type, God is the antitype; God is a poet, and “pilgrim-poets” are his prophets. Among the pilgrim-poets commanding EBB’s attention was Robert Browning. From the beginning she welcomed him as a true poet but, paradoxically, she judged his poetry as lacking in music (in contrast to his immediate response to her “fresh strange music”). In October 1842 EBB told Mary Russell Mitford that she recognized in him “the palpable presence of poetic genius everywhere” but found him “defective in harmony” (bc 6: 105). She defended him against Mitford’s criticism, but at the same time asked, “Where is the ear?” (bc 7: 99). In 1845, when RB asked for her help with the poems that were to make up the collection he published that year, her principal responses were to admire his rhymes – especially in that tour de force of rhyming, “The Flight of the Duchess” – but to suggest a better fit between them and his rhythms, which she often found harsh or

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“clogging.” But at the same time she was writing Sonnets from the Portuguese, and in them her reservations about RB’s rhythms disappear: she apostrophizes him as “chief musician” and (because prosody, in her view, is never an isolated phenomenon but has implications for human relations) describes herself as “caught up into love, and taught the whole / Of life in a new rhythm” (Sonnet VII). Her early (1826) wish – “So would my tune of life be musical” – was being realized. The silences in music – the rests in a bar – are just as important to the rhythm as the sounded notes. So too in poetry: the caesuras (pauses) are just as important as the voiced syllables. In Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, which I consider at length in chapter 5, EBB brings her prosody together with the content and theme of the poem in a remarkable way. At the centre of the story is a statue of Silence, the meaning of which the lovers debate; at the centre of EBB’s long lines is a caesura, which plays a major role in that exchange. For EBB calls the caesura a “listening pause” (bc 11: 4–5), and it is not emptiness: it is the moment of the mind’s attention, intense activity, and creative response in this story of judgments and misinterpretations. In the rest of chapter 5 I consider a number of sonnets and shorter poems from the volumes of 1844, all of which explore, in one way or another, the complexities of handling rhythm in poetry. “Perplexed music,” EBB calls those complexities, and while there is an element of puzzlement in that label, the primary meaning is of something interwoven and intricate. One of the most challenging pieces of “perplexed music” in the volume is “The Cry of the Children,” with which I end the chapter: Edgar Allan Poe called it a poem that “cannot be scanned” (bc 10: 355). Chapter 6 is an extended examination of EBB’s practices in rhyming. My chief materials are EBB’s defence of her “rhymatology” in “The Dead Pan” against the criticism of Richard Hengist Horne, and her own criticism of RB’s rhymes and rhythms in the poems he was preparing for the collection he published in 1845. The English language is not rich in perfect rhymes, and EBB, with her philologist’s sense of the character of her native tongue, and after “much patient study of the great Fathers of English poetry” (bc 9: 66), championed “imperfect rhymes” (bc 2: 136) as an escape from (what she called) “the despotism of the final emphasis” (webb 4: 469), the full rhyme of the vowel sound on the accented syllable at the

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end of a line of poetry – and as relief from the monotony of such sound repetition, which she condemned as “a tinkling cymbal” (webb 4: 469– 70). She insisted that none of her rhymes were careless or haphazard, and all were consonant with “the spirit of the English language” (bc 9: 96). Moreover, unlike most of her critics, EBB never considered her rhymes in isolation: always she judged them in relation to the rhythm and metre of the lines in which they appeared. Hence I examine some of the sonnets in Sonnets from the Portuguese as good examples of her mature skill in matching rhyme and rhythm, form and meaning – by way of countering the charges still being made occasionally against her, of haste and recklessness. The link between music and nation building is an ancient one. Troy, for instance, was said to be built to the music of Apollo – a myth Tennyson uses in “OEnone” – and EBB, in her characteristic handling of inherited literary stories and conventions, updates that myth in her support for the Risorgimento in Italy. That updating, from the construction of a city to the establishment of a nation, is the subject of my chapter 7, which deals with Casa Guidi Windows. This long two-part poem is EBB’s eyewitness account of two major political and military events in Florence. The first is a grand success; the second is a disappointing failure. With the first, the music “came in gushes” (bc 14: 300); in the second, the music “dropped before the measure was complete” (II: 6). EBB makes music the key to Italian nationalism, and tells her Tuscan readers that “Your last rhythm will need your earliest key-note” (431–2). That idea has its origin in Carlyle’s “organic filaments,” where music is not (like the music of the spheres) something fixed for all time, but something developing, fading, growing louder, and eventually making the “nation,” already a beat to which Italians speak and act, a political reality. EBB’s language in this poem is the language of prophecy, and it is a solution to the problem she had, very early, found in Locke’s language theory, the “grossness” of words as the signs of sensible things. In this poem, that very “grossness” of material signs is the means of reading their significance for Italy’s future. The subject of chapter 8 is Aurora Leigh, “a sort of novel-poem” and a “completely modern” epic (bc 10: 102) into which EBB poured “much of myself … I mean to say, of my soul, my thoughts, emotions, opinions,” though she avoided “a personal line” (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 228). Her major work became a best-seller, attracting a wide audience of readers, provoking

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reactions both for and against its engagement with controversial social issues, and elevating its author to the first rank of poets. The epic is a remarkable combination of the “animal life” of poetry and of poetry’s inner spirit that is always moving, as EBB herself says, from inner to outer, from the hidden to the manifest, from the invisible to the visible, from the spiritual to the material. The poem’s “animal life” is the inspiration for the text Aurora herself is writing, and she labels it “the rhythmic turbulence / Of blood and brain” (1: 897–8) – a more energetic and paradoxical source than the ordinary pulses and heartbeats that EBB usually identifies as the physiological foundation of poetry. At the same time, that “primal rhythm” (5: 29), so firmly located in the body, is the beat of a nature that is “theurgic” (5: 29–30) – that has a god within it. And who is that god? In determining whether or not the epic has an invocation (it does, buried in the Seventh Book), I identify that deity as Christ – as EBB herself does. That is why she, usually reticent and modest about making large claims for her work, did not object to the critics’ labelling Aurora Leigh “Mrs Browning’s gospel,” for it is an inspired text that ends, like the Bible, with a vision of the New Jerusalem. Its music, which EBB calls “primal rhythm,” underpins the epic’s actions, the characterization, the theorizing about poetic composition, and the poem’s social and political purposes. “Rhythmic turbulence” characterizes EBB’s texts from 1857 on. She was passionately involved in the politics of France and Italy, especially in the decade between 1851 and 1861, and her response was a physical one that ultimately affected her health. “You know I can’t take things quietly,” she told Fanny Haworth (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 323). How that “rhythmic turbulence” expressed itself in Poems Before Congress is the subject of my final chapter. The volume begins with a blessing – “Napoleon III. in Italy” – and ends with “A Curse for a Nation” – works in which EBB makes her language “performative” (to use a term from the theory of our own day). In the former, EBB uses an unusual metre to create a political chant; in the latter, she makes the poem turn on a crucial imperative that turns out also to be a pun. That imperative is once again EBB’s representation of angelic language, this time in the context of her reading and study of Swedenborg. Swedenborg’s “great doctrine of corres[pon]dence … concerning the natural & spiritual worlds” (bc 19: 72) was for EBB, I argue, a modern version of the ancient idea of world harmony and the Pythagorean music

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of the spheres. But a full examination of her responses to Swedenborg is beyond the scope of this book. I end that chapter with an analysis of “A Musical Instrument,” a poem that, I argue, “sublimates” (her term) all EBB’s thinking about music in poetry, and realizes that music in a powerful way; it is both vividly physical and sensual and at the same time hauntingly revelatory. That remarkable combination depends upon her use of the word “sweet” and its place in the rhythm of her climactic lines, a rhythm that uses both sound and silence. This book, I hope, provides a desideratum in EBB scholarship. Her poetry has regularly been recognized as experimental, and the experiments as influential. I try to define the exact nature of those experiments, and to make clear their implications for her thinking about social and political issues; and I try to do so by using EBB’s own terms and words. The poet who emerges from this study is strong-minded, independent, and forwardlooking. Her wish to be modern was amply realized in poems of great power, and that power in turn rests on their “fresh strange music.”

1 an essay on mind: “immortal locke,” bacon, and “poesy’s bright beams” Elizabeth Barrett’s first extended statement on the nature of language, and of poetic language, is in her first major poem, An Essay on Mind, published in 1826 (webb 4: 82–131). The crucial passage is in Book II, where she begins with the need for language, shifts immediately to its imperfection, and then defends its usefulness: For thoughts uncloth’d by language are, at best, Obscure; while grossness injures those exprest – Through words, – in whose analysis, we find Th’ analogies of Matter, not of Mind: Hence, when the use of words is graceful brought, As physical dress to metaphysic thought, The thought, howe’er sublime its pristine state, Is by th’ expression made degenerate; Its spiritual essence changed, or cramp’d; and hence Some hold by words, who cannot hold by sense; And leave the thought behind, and take th’ attire – Elijah’s mantle – but without his fire! Yet spurn not words! ’tis needful to confess They give ideas, a body and a dress! Behold them traverse Learning’s region round, The vehicles of thought on wheels of sound; Mind’s winged strength, wherewith the height is won, Unless she trust their frailty to the sun. Destroy the body! – will the spirit stay? Destroy the car! – will Thought pursue her way?

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Destroy the wings! – let Mind their aid forego! Do no Icarian billows yawn below? Ah! spurn not words with reckless insolence; But still admit their influence with the sense, And fear to slight their laws! Perchance we find No perfect code transmitted to mankind; And yet mankind, till life’s dark sands are run, Prefers imperfect government to none. Thus Thought must bend to words! (631–59) The passage ends with the hope for “some sphere of bliss” Where spirits look on spirits, ‘face to face,’ – Where souls may see, as they themselves are seen, And voiceless intercourse may pass between, All pure – all free! (662–5) – an “intercourse” not unlike that of the angels in Paradise Lost. But though EBB might long for a “perfect code,” she deals realistically with our actual experience of language, imperfect, shifting, and a constant challenge to the understanding. The language theory that lies behind the passage just quoted is that of John Locke. Locke is one of two thinkers (the other is Bacon) to whom EBB refers most frequently in the Essay, and in fact she writes a glowing apostrophe to Locke near the end of Book II (876–907). In Locke’s theory, which appears in the third book of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, words are not natural and inevitable, but conventional and arbitrary. They are the signs of ideas,“not by any natural connexion,” Locke writes, “but by a voluntary Imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such an Idea” (Essay 3: 2.1). Ideas, in turn, rest upon our experiences, which have two sources in Locke’s epistemology: sensation, the perceptions carried into the mind by our five senses, and reflection, “that notice which the Mind takes of its own Operations” (Essay 2: 1.4). EBB uses both those terms in her own Essay, troping sensation as the window of the mind (740) and“a stream with dashing spray”(759), and reflection

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as “the cunning wheels” of a mill that arrest and “triumph” over the “unproductive force” of sensation (761–64). The part of Locke’s language theory that was of most concern to EBB was Locke’s insistence that words depend upon “common sensible Ideas,” and even those “which are made use of to stand for Actions and Notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence” (Essay 3: 1.5). In this same section of the Essay Locke voices a speculation that set the direction for subsequent studies in etymology: “I doubt not,” he writes,“but if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all Languages, the names, which stand for Things that fall not under our Senses, to have had their first rise from sensible Ideas” (Essay 3: 1.5). EBB focuses on that link between language and sense because she believed in the existence of an invisible spiritual world within and above our material and sensible world, and if language has its origin in sense, it is by its very nature inadequate to express that “holy place, / Where spirits look on spirits, ‘face to face’” (661–2). Words have a “grossness” (632) that distorts and makes “degenerate” our thoughts, and they “change” or “cramp” their “spiritual essence” (638–9). (Twenty-seven years later, EBB would still identify herself as someone “having strong convictions of the existence of a spiritual world” bc 19: 277.) A second source for that same understanding of language is Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning. EBB quotes from it in her notes and refers to Bacon by name in the body of the poem. “For words are but the images of matter,” in Bacon’s words,“and except they have a life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture” (1: 4.3). EBB echoes Bacon. When we analyze words, she writes, “we find / Th’ analogies of Matter, not of Mind” (633–4). That can lead to the “distemper” defined by Bacon: “When men study words and not matter.” The distemper EBB defines differs. “Some,” EBB writes, “hold by words, who cannot hold by sense; / And leave the thought behind, and take th’ attire” (640–1). The relation of thought and words was an ongoing concern of EBB, and her terms are the same as Locke’s: ideas are the data carried into the mind by sensation; thought is “the perception of Ideas” (Essay 2: 10); words are the sounds the mind in thinking arbitrarily attaches to ideas; words, the creation of thought, are discrete but thought, which is prior to

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words, is contextual and ongoing; as EBB writes in her “short analysis” of the Essay, “A waking Man … is never without thought ‘because it is the condition of being awake.’” But rather than doing her own analysis of the relation of words and thoughts, she made that relation the subject of a “descriptive narrative” and “biographical sketch” (her labels, bc 1: 180 and 181), which she rewrote several times, and titled “A Thought on Thoughts.” The earliest version of this little story was written in May 1823 and sent to Thomas Campbell, editor of the periodical where EBB hoped to publish it, the New Monthly Magazine. The sketch takes the form of a family history, that of “the ancient and respectable house of the Words” (181). Initially “Words were the most intimate friends of the Thoughts,” but the Thoughts were “of noble blood” while the Words were “a younger branch of the family.” Words and Thoughts quarrelled, Thoughts accusing Words of being “quite divested of natural talent” and Words refusing to be in the company of Thoughts (181). But, as in the Essay, EBB, here speaking as one of the Words, moves on to plead in their defence, and adds an ironic postscript in which Concise Thought charges her with “court[ing] the assistance of those very words whose authority you deprecate” (183). Campbell did not publish the sketch, but EBB did not simply set it aside and forget it. She sent a revised version to Hugh Stuart Boyd in June 1831, and it was published, revised yet again, in the Athenaeum in 1836 (see webb 4: 275–85). The appearance of the subject in An Essay on Mind was not an isolated matter. So, in spite of the difficulties and limitations of language, EBB turns, with the word “Yet” in the passage above, to the injunctions “spurn not words” and “fear to slight their laws!” Their usefulness she defines through a number of metaphors, all of which indicate the relation of words to thoughts: body, dress, vehicle or car, wheels, and wings. The first two have to do with making the invisible visible, the next four with the need for (what Locke defines as) “quickness and dispatch” (Essay 3: 3.10) in communication. Since the two sets of metaphors are familiar and conventional, both need to be set in context. First of all, “body” and “dress.” It is of some importance to note that, for EBB (as for Locke), words are the signs of ideas and not of things. Swift had satirized the view that words are only names for things in his Academy

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of Lagado, where he depicts two men carrying on a conversation by showing each other objects from bundles they carry on their backs, the point being that if words are only the names for things, things will do just as well in conversation. For Locke, however, “internal conceptions” are the referents of words, and those ideas are “all within [Man’s] own Breast, invisible, and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to appear.” Words are useful because they make the hidden manifest: words are “external sensible Signs” of “invisible Ideas” (Essay 3: 2.1). “Body” and “dress” are conventional metaphors for such a function of words, and EBB makes the point even more strongly when, using the pseudo-etymological meaning of the word “metaphysic” – above the physical – she refers to words “As physical dress to metaphysic thought” (636). The metaphors vehicle, car, wheels, and wings all refer to speed of communication, and are those used by the best-known and most influential etymologist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Horne Tooke. Winged Words, the Greek title of his Diversions of Purley, first appeared in 1786, and the metaphor indicates that he made speed of communication the cornerstone of his language theory. For him, words are not only general, as Locke had taught, but also elliptical, standing for several words that are operative in the meaning but left out in the expression. Tooke called such ellipsis “subaudition,” and it was his addition to Locke’s account of speed in communication, which depends upon the mind’s power of abstraction: “‘The use of words being to stand as outward marks of our internal ideas, & those ideas being taken from particular things, if every particular idea that we take in should have a distinct name, names would be endless. To prevent this, the mind makes particular ideas, received from particular objects, general ones.’ Which is effected by abstracting them from the ‘circumstances of real existence, as time, place, or any other concomitant ideas.’” I am quoting, not directly from Locke, but from an unpublished manuscript of EBB, which she titles “Short Analysis of Locke’s ‘Essay on the Human Understanding,’” and which has the date “1825” inserted in another hand. The manuscript is evidence of EBB’s careful and detailed reading of Locke’s Essay, and also (perhaps) of the limits of her study. For Locke’s language theory is in book III of the Essay; EBB’s “Short Analysis”

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deals with books I and II only. Still, book II, with its detailed account of the powers of the mind, is an important source for An Essay on Mind, and its references to words and language not only provide the essence of Locke’s language theory (as indicated in EBB’s “analysis” above) but suggest why Locke felt it necessary to write book III at all. And we should not assume, simply on the basis of this one manuscript, that EBB was unfamiliar with books III and IV of Locke’s Essay. In her own early autobiographical sketches, EBB mentions her reading of Locke, and does so in such enthusiastic terms that it seems unlikely that she would not have read the whole of his major work. “At twelve,” she says in “Glimpses into my own life and literary character,”“Metaphysics were my highest delights and after having read a page from Locke my mind not only felt edified but exalted” (bc 1: 351). According to Michael Meredith, she was at that time sleeping “with a copy of Locke’s works under her pillow” (1). At fourteen, “In accompan[y]ing Locke thro his complex reasoning & glorious subjects my mind seems more enlarged more cultivated & more enlightened!” (bc 1: 353). When she is comparing her character and her brother Bro’s, she quotes Locke twice in outlining her abilities in contrast to his: “I prefer in the sweet plains of literature Poetry Metaphysics & fanciful philosophy” (357). There is yet another early manuscript, this one unpublished and dating from about 1820, headed “Defence of the Bishop of Worcester’s Objection to Mr Lockes [sic] assertion ‘that possibly we shall never be able to know whether any mere material Being thinks or no’” (D1287 in Browning Collections). There EBB declares “with spontaneous sincerity of heart my profound admiration and almost mysterious reverence for the greatest of Metaphysicians” (webb 5: 421). All this early study stands behind EBB’s apostrophe to Locke in her Essay: “Oh! ever thus, immortal Locke, belong / First to my heart, as noblest in my song” (892–3). EBB’s injunction to “spurn not words” has yet another context, and that we can best understand if we return to Bacon, one of the four key men (the other three are Newton and Byron, in addition to Locke) who preside over her poem. From our twenty-first century perspective, Bacon and Locke belong in the same philosophical tradition, but for literary critics in the nineteenth century the two were opposites. The difference is summed up by the man who might reasonably be considered the first of the academic

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literary critics, David Masson, and my concern in quoting from an 1853 review of his is to establish the meaning of the adjective “Baconian” in the poetic theory of the first half of the nineteenth century. The key to understanding that adjective is the quotation EBB uses when she is annotating line 1045 in An Essay on Mind: “Nature’s ideal form in Nature’s place.” Here is her note: “Lord Bacon says of Poetry, that ‘it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind; whereas Reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things” (webb 4: 118; the quotation is from The Advancement of Learning 2: 4.2). “Submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind”: those phrases placed Bacon, in the minds of readers in the early nineteenth century, on the side of the maker (the root meaning of “poet”), and hence David Masson, using the same quotation EBB had used, sums up the binary in that passage with the words mimesis and poesis: “Aristotle makes the essence of poetry to consist in its being imitative and truthful; Bacon, in its being creative and fantastical.” For a poet, then – even a poet steeped in the tradition of British empiricism, as EBB was – the creative powers of the mind are crucial. When John Stuart Mill examined the legacy of “the two great seminal minds of England in their age” – Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge – he said that, for all their differences, they agreed “in perceiving that the groundwork of all other philosophy must be laid in the philosophy of the mind” (10: 77, 121). One might argue for a similar statement about EBB: the superstructure she raised was poetry rather than philosophy, but she too assumed that its foundations must be laid in the philosophy of the mind. Before EBB catalogues the powers of the mind, she asserts the nature of its being, and such ontological affirmations appear right at the beginning of the Essay. The opening couplet in the poem is “Since Spirit first inspir’d, pervaded all, / And Mind met Matter, at th’ Eternal call –,” and she completes the sentence with the couplet “Th’ ambitious soul her essence hath defin’d, / And Mind hath eulogiz’d the pow’rs of Mind” (5–6). What relation is she setting up among spirit, soul, mind, and matter? The couplets suggest that spirit is the pervasive creative power and soul, a particular and individual manifestation of spirit, sharing in it and drawing on it for its vitality and authority. What is soul’s “essence”? Spirit, presumably, which

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EBB calls a few lines later “the subtle cause, ethereal essence” (23), and which is the object of her invocation, expressed in conventional metaphors: “Thou thing of light! that warm’st the breasts of men, / Breath’st from the lips, and tremblest from the pen!” (19–20). The cosmos EBB is constructing she sums up neatly in the couplet at lines 59 and 60: “Her destin’d way, hath destin’d Nature trod: / While Matter, Spirit rules, and Spirit, God.” The summary is a neat one because EBB uses the scheme of anadiplosis, where a key word near the end of one clause appears as the key word near the beginning of the next. Here the repeated word is “Spirit,” and the anadiplosis shifts its grammatical function: as subject it “rules” matter in the first clause, and as object it itself is ruled by God in the second. For those relations EBB uses conventional metaphors: a scale and a chain. The scale appears near the end of the first book of An Essay on Mind: In Nature’s reign, a scale of life, we find: A scale of knowledge, we behold, in mind; With each progressive link, our steps ascend, And traverse all, before they reach the end; Searching, while Reason’s powers may farther go, The things we know not, by the things we know. (551–6) The chain appears in the preface to An Essay on Mind when EBB borrows an image from Paradise Lost (and Pope’s An Essay on Man) and speaks of “the golden links of that chain which hangs from Heaven to earth.” She cannot determine the nature of the links, but the chain “is placed there to join, in mysterious union, the natural and the spiritual, the mortal and the eternal, the creature and the Creator” (webb 4: 79). EBB is careful to indicate the limits of her ontological affirmations. In her preface to An Essay on Mind she says that “I have dwelt less on the operations of the mind than on their effects,” and “so I have not touched on that point difficult to argue, and impossible to determine – the nature of her substance” (webb 4: 78). The same sense of limits governs her central interest in the relations of body and soul, mind and spirit. “Absurdity of attempting to explain the mode of communication between Matter & Mind. How many philosophers have agreed in adverting to a half material half spiritual intermediate agent (an idea, species, forms, shadows,

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phantasms, images).” That there are such communications, however, she does not doubt, as her reading of yet another philosopher indicates. For the last quotation in the preceding paragraph is not from the preface to the poem but from another source for it, EBB’s unpublished notes on Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. (The notes are undated, but the paper is watermarked 1821. EBB’s notes indicate that she read not the first but the second edition, published in two volumes in 1814. There is no evidence that she read the third volume, devoted to language and not published until 1827.) Stewart has plenty to say about EBB’s characteristic concern with the relation of matter and spirit, mind and body, and in his introduction he sets out the limits of his enquiry, asserting the existence of both “Being” and “Spirit” but saying that we can know only their phenomena, not their essences. EBB summarizes that introduction: “The same evidence for the existence of Being which we have for the existence of Spirit – we are ignorant of the existence of either, & only know them by their modes. Folly of enquiring into those essences – we know them to be distinct beings but cannot know more.” What we do know, however, is sufficient for the purposes of human life and human creativity, and when EBB turns from ontology to epistemology her affirmations suggest fewer limitations. The sources of our knowledge, in EBB’s Essay as in Locke, are two, sensation and reflection. “Mind is imprison’d in a lonesome tower,” EBB writes in a passage that anticipates “The Lady of Shalott,” and “Sensation is its window” (739–40). Then, with “our first perceptions formed – we search, to find / The operations of the forming mind” (749–50), which reflection reveals to be the powers to abstract, “to discern, retain, compare, connect” (755). Unlike Locke, EBB asserts the ontological ground of those powers: “An essence, or a substance spiritual” (772). That last phrase may sound like an oxymoron, but she is using the word “substance” in its primary meaning, as that which stands under something else. Here, that which stands under reflection is spirit, which enables the mind to identify and name universals, in contrast to sensation, which carries into the mind only the experiences of particulars: For body clings to body – objects seen And substance sensible alone have been

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Sensation’s study; while reflective Mind, Essence unseen in objects seen may find; And, tracing whence her known impressions came, Give single forms an universal name. (775–80) In her notes on Dugald Stewart EBB had summarized much that Stewart had to say about universals in relation to a theory of naming. Names are indeed abstract and general, Stewart had asserted in his chapter “Of Abstraction,” and the issue they raise is one of ontology: are we to hold with the Nominalists, for whom “there are no existences in nature corresponding to general terms, and the objects of our attention in all our general speculations are not ideas, but words”? Or are we to agree with the Realists, who argue for the actual existence of universals? There is a middle position held by philosophers whom Stewart labels Conceptualists; it is the one on which EBB makes a note: “That the doctrine of the Conceptualists is an intermediate one, not holding with the Realists that Universals have a real existence, nor with the Nominalists that they are merely signs. Locke is supposed to lean towards it, stating as he does that we may without the help of words reason concerning universals. Reid also considered a Conceptualist.” And EBB too? She certainly would not hold that words are “merely” signs, but she would also affirm that we cannot know the nature of their substance – that which stands under them. EBB’s main interest is the Baconian one: the powers of the mind that enable it to bend the shows of things to its desires, to make something of the world outside us, rather than simply imitating it. Hence she begins book II of the Essay by signalling a turn from mimesis to poesis: “But now to higher themes! no more confin’d / To copy Nature, Mind returns to Mind” (601–2). Her purpose in that book: “we search, to find / The operations of the forming mind” (749–50). The adjective “forming” is of some importance: it indicates the active and shaping powers of the mind, the agents of its desires. Abstraction is one of those forming powers; “Hence to discern, retain, compare, connect, / We deem the faculties of Intellect” (755–6). In book I of the Essay she had used a parallel label, “the elements of intellect” (171), and her list there was Invention, Judgment, Memory, and Association. All are “forming” and active powers, even Association.

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The latter, as she treats it, is not a habit that governs our thoughts but rather a power that we control, and for it she uses the same chain metaphor that she uses for the relation of matter and spirit: And bold Association, not untaught, The links of fact, unites, with links of thought; Forming th’ electric chains, which, mystic, bind Scholastic learning, and reflective mind. (178–81) EBB attributes a similar “forming” power to reflection. She uses Locke’s terms – sensation and reflection – in her own way, implying a link between sensation and mimesis, reflection and poesis. Sensation, she says (in a passage I have already quoted) studies “objects seen / And substance sensible alone” (775–6), “while reflective Mind, / Essence unseen in objects seen may find” (777–8). The “essence unseen” may be universals, arrived at when the mind “Give[s] single forms an universal name” (780), such naming depending upon the mind’s power of abstracting. In EBB’s treatment of it, abstraction is an art. Her corollary to the injunction “spurn not words” (653) is “this perceptive truth” which “my page affirms – / Respect the technicality of terms!” (675–6). To a twenty-first-century ear her phrase sounds like a defence of jargon, understood in the good sense as the language needed by a particular science or art, discipline, profession, or trade, but I think her defence is more inclusive than that, and extends to all names. Her word “technicality” is the crucial one: its root, “technic,” means “pertaining to art,” “skilfully made or constructed” (according to the oed). And though she warns against the distemper Bacon had defined – studying words and not matter, or, in her words, “plac[ing] all wisdom in the alphabet” (680) – the next couplet affirms that naming is indeed an art: “Still let appropriate phrase the sense invest; / That what is well conceived be well exprest!” (681–2). (There is an echo of Pope in that last line.) Baconian creativity, as EBB treats it in the Essay, finds its chief expression in poetry. Book II includes “An attempt to define Poetry” (the quotation is from EBB’s analysis of the book), and the attempt begins with her contrasting poetry and philosophy.

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And while Philosophy, in spirit, free, Reasons, believes, yet cannot plainly see, Poetic Rapture, to her dazzled sight, Pourtrays the shadows of the things of light; Delighting o’er the unseen worlds to roam, And waft the pictures of perfection home. (908–13) “Pictures of perfection”: poetry thus makes up for the limitations of reasoning with which Locke deals in book IV of his Essay, where he constructs a scale from knowledge of which we can be certain down through various degrees of probability. Certain knowledge is limited and an insufficient guide to life. Hence reasoning must depend upon (what Locke calls) “Illation or Inference” (4: 17.2), the step-by-step sequence in which such things as belief or assent, faith, conjecture, guess, and doubt lead us to positions that we need to live our lives, though we cannot have sure or certain knowledge about their truth. Poetry, in EBB’s view, is crucial to inference, and “Thus Reason oft the aid of fancy seeks” (914), and “Poesy’s whole essence, when defined, / Is elevation of the reasoning mind” (944–5). That couplet appears in the middle of the passage in the Essay in which EBB “attempts” to define poetry. Her definition turns upon the conventional binary, that reason appeals to the mind while poetry appeals to the heart. “‘The sage may coldly think,’” she has the muse say in a later passage, but “’the bard must feel!’” (1090). “And hence, the natural passions all agree / In seeking Nature’s language – poetry” (948–9). How do the passions find expression in poetry? In “harmony,” a key word to which I will return at length in chapter 2, and in troping: “In metaphor, the feelings seek relief ” (956). With this line EBB anticipates the poetics of John Keble, but the main point of her definition of poetry is that it is a making and not an imitating. The poet may be attracted to nature as observed, but his or her characteristic concern is with “Nature’s poetry” (1029). By that label EBB means not nature as perceived by the five senses but “Nature’s ideal form” (1045) as created by the mind. To nature Mind brings “her dear impress” (1036), and by that term I think she means not only the stamping of a shape but also impresa or imprese, emblem or image – an image not

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copied from nature but made by the mind’s intuition of universals, which is spurred by images observed: None read, but Poets, Nature’s poetry! Its characters are trac’d in mystic hand, And all may gaze, but few can understand. (1029–31) The mind of the maker or poet, then, does not create ex nihilo. Its materials are the “characters” of nature, a written language, and reading them is a creative act that leads to universals – universals not above and beyond the actual (as her use of the adjective “mystic” might suggest) but embedded in it. In yet another unpublished manuscript, this one dated about 1830, EBB affirms that “I am a mystic” and characterizes the mystic thus: “I look into the simple things which are clasped in our hands and grow thickly at our feet: at the common things which we glance at and pass by, and I say of such things that God has said of them, altho’ his voice has become a common thing even as the subject of His speaking … ‘Behold I show you a mystery.’ I say of such common things that we do not understand them: that we confound concerning them, idealities & realities; & that what we call the ideal is in fact the real” (webb 5: 717). That fusion of the real and the ideal would become central to EBB’s art. The poem classifies itself in its title. It is an “essay,” an attempt rather than a fully worked out treatment of its topic, and its models are Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” and Bacon’s Essays. To Pope it owes its verse form – the heroic couplet – and to Bacon it owes its character as an essay. Bacon’s essays had their origin in a dissatisfaction with the deductive mode of reasoning and its chief tool, the syllogism, the dissatisfaction lying in the charge that deduction could deal only with what is already known, and could not discover new knowledge. The essay relies upon induction: it gathers together observations from experience and moves toward an hypothesis about them. Bacon’s chief material was aphorisms, proverbial observations about human experience which, at that time, one conventionally recorded in a commonplace book. When he grouped those aphorisms by topic, such as truth, the result was an open-ended and suggestive treatment of the topic rather than the final word on it. EBB’s Essay has the same generic characteristics. To the topic “mind” she brings observa-

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tions from her extensive reading, and she arranges that material not according to logic but according to her preoccupations. As a result, the poem anticipates most of the major ideas and concerns in her subsequent poetry, and it even seems to set the agenda for that work. Certainly it does so for her insistence on the fusion of the real and the ideal (the motive that propels Aurora Leigh) and for her activist and political concerns (in Casa Guidi Windows and Poems Before Congress, for instance). For that motive her phrase “the pictures of perfection” (913) is crucial, and so is her assertion of poetry’s appeal to the heart. The last 130 lines of the Essay (beginning with “I love my own dear land” 1133, and continuing with her love for Greece, “My other country – country of my soul!” 1147) anticipate the political concerns that were dominant at the end of EBB’s career: there are the references to Byron, the “pilgrim bard” (1191) and fighter for Greek independence, and to Tyrtaeus, about whom EBB’s own note reads: “The inspiriting effect of the productions of this Greek Poet, during the war between the Lacedaemonians and Messenians, is well known” (webb 4: 119). That note defines the practical influence of the kind of political poetry in which EBB was interested: its “inspiriting effect.” EBB’s adjective sums up the characteristic movement in all her narratives, from invisible to visible, from spirit to matter, from inner to outer. Aurora Leigh’s motto is “Inward evermore / To outward” (5: 227– 8), and her creator told John Kenyon in a letter of 1855 that the poem opposed “the practical & the ideal lifes” and showed “how the practical & real (so called) is but the external evolution of the ideal & spiritual – that it is from inner to outer, … whether in life, morals, or art” (quoted by Margaret Reynolds in her Norton edition of Aurora Leigh 331). In spite of its roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then, the essay genre retained an aura of the need for change, of the reaching out for something new, for something not yet wholly understood, for something desired. An Essay on Mind, for all its conventional appearance, was for EBB a forwardlooking work, and with its central move from imitating to making it set the agenda for her career as a poet. Yet EBB’s own judgment of the poem years later was not a favourable one. In October 1843 Richard Hengist Horne asked her for a “biographical sketch of yourself,” and though EBB objected to being “the heroine of a biography” and insisted that, if Horne were to say anything at all about

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her life, it must be about her as “a writer of rhymes,” she did nonetheless give Horne some details of her early work: “The love of Pope’s Homer threw me into Pope on one side, & into Greek on the other & into Latin as a help to Greek – and the influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards as in my ‘essay on mind,’ – a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or eighteen, & long repented of as worthy of all repentance. The poem is imitative in its form – yet is not without traces of an individual thinking & feeling – the bird pecks through the shell in it” (bc 7: 354). In July 1844 EBB made similar comments to Cornelius Mathews. He had mentioned An Essay on Mind, and EBB responded by referring to it as “the black-letter offence of my early youth”: “It is an imitation poem (after Pope & Campbell) as all young poems are apt to be, … & so very pert besides, that I groan in the spirit when I think of being haunted, in a state of maturity, by the ghost of it” (bc 9: 52). For John Kenyon, in August 1844, she compared the essay and “my present poems,” saying that the difference was not “between two schools” or “between immaturity & maturity,” but “the difference between the dead & the living … between a copy & an individuality; between what is myself and what is not myself ” (bc 9: 81). Much earlier – in May of 1828 – EBB had repudiated her apostrophe to Locke. In the poem, she addressed him as “immortal Locke” and said that he belonged “First to my heart, as noblest in my song” (892–3). Two years later she told Hugh Stuart Boyd that she wished the lines omitted because neither statement was true (bc 2: 138). What was true, and remained true, was EBB’s indebtedness to Locke and Bacon as the starting points in her thinking about the language of poetry. As we shall see, she would explore ways of overcoming the Lockean “grossness” of words, and she would insist on poetry as Baconian making rather than imitating. Her goal in making was “the harmony of verse,” the subject of the next chapter.

2 “the harmony of verse”

EBB’s volume of 1826, An Essay on Mind, With Other Poems, sets the agenda for her career as poet and, as we have seen, is her first major exploration of the nature of language, and especially of poetic language. Much of An Essay on Mind deals with (what might be called) the philosophy of language, but it also deals with an aspect of poetic language that is central to EBB’s thinking about her art. In the second book of An Essay on Mind – the Baconian book – there is an extended passage in which she advises poets to “Still keep the harmony of verse in view” (1074). “Harmony” is a key concept in her handling of prosody. The term is borrowed from music, and by insisting on it as a desired element in poetry, EBB is linking poetry and music in ways that (as we shall see) involved her with some major critical and scholarly controversies of her day. And when one turns to the “Other Poems” in the 1826 volume – poems that seem unremarkable and conventional – one discovers that most of them, in one way or another, deal with the topic of poetry and music. So do many of EBB’s unpublished poems from the period between 1814 and 1828, now gathered together and made available for study in the fifth volume of the 2010 Works. All of these pieces expand the concept of “harmony” that she champions in An Essay on Mind. A key term, as we shall see, is “cadence”; key metaphors are “diapason” and “octave”; her key ideas involve the relation of accent and quantity, and the primacy of quantity; her key images are the heartbeat and the pulse, which she calls the “animal life” of poetry; and her key assumption is that prosody is not an end in itself, but posits social and political views that the affect of poetry makes actual. Finally, the 1838 “Sounds” completes all that exploration of the nature of “harmony” by claiming divine

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inspiration for music. “Harmony,” in EBB’s understanding of it, is a complex power with momentous implications and far-reaching consequences. The word “harmony” was a much-used term in the critical vocabulary of the day, so frequently mentioned that it was a common criterion for judging poetry among all readers, and not just among critics and reviewers. Certainly it was part of the critical vocabulary of both EBB’s parents. Her mother wrote to her on 28 February 1826, on the arrival of the first copies of An Essay on Mind, praising the poem (particularly the second book) and identifying its merits: “its interesting variety, extensive allusions, & harmony of numbers” (bc 1: 237). A year later her father was chastising her for a want of harmony. In an “Untitled Essay” dated 4 February 1827, EBB recounts an incident that left her with “a marble heaviness at my heart” (359). For months she had been “employed on my work respecting the development of genius,”“months of anxious solitary thought,” “of apprehension mingled with rejoicing expectation” (358–9). At last she copied out eight sheets for her father, who was brutally critical: “He complained first of my illegibility, then of my obscurity.”“He then complained of my involved style & obsolete words.” Then he said: “‘Your harmony is defective – you who write so much about measure – (alluding to my correspondence with Mr Price) – I told you by writing on that subject you would destroy your style.’ ‘The lines you complain of, Papa, were written before I wrote on that subject at all’” (359). She then quotes a long speech of her father in which he says, among many other things, “Neither is your bad conception of a general plan redeemed by your poetry, which has less harmony than any thing you ever wrote” (359). We cannot know, of course, exactly what EBB’s parents meant by “harmony,” but their understanding of the term was almost certainly shaped by its widespread use in the eighteenth century. There it meant regularity of stress in a line of poetry, the “strict alternation of accented and unaccented syllables” (“J.D.” qtd. by Fussell 8). In the section on prosody prefixed to his Dictionary, Johnson quotes lines of four, six, eight, and ten syllables, and then says, “In all these measures the accents are to be placed on even syllables; and every line considered by itself is more harmonious, as this rule is more strictly observed.” And in one of his essays in The Rambler, Johnson writes that a line is pure when “the accent rests upon every second syllable throughout the whole line … The repetition of this sound or

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percussion at equal times, is the most complete harmony of which a single verse is capable” (qtd. by Fussell 24). The line of ten syllables – the basic unit of heroic poetry – was the norm, and the word “numbers,” frequently used in the critical vocabulary of the time, was “a direct reference to a count of the number of syllables in a line” (Fussell 7). When EBB’s mother praises her “harmony of numbers” in An Essay on Mind, she is referring to (what Fussell calls) “strict decasyllabism” (7). In the eighteenth century, such strictness meant that there could be no trisyllabic substitutions, and any variation in the placing of the stresses could result in the charge levelled by EBB’s father: “Your harmony is defective.” One accepted practice in maintaining harmony was the use of apocope. Johnson defines the word as “a figure in grammar, when the last letter or syllable of a word is taken away; as, ingeni for ingenii.” The Greek word means “a cutting off,” and in his book on eighteenth-century prosody, Paul Fussell has a whole chapter on the “theory of poetic contractions.” The cutting off was often the “e” of “the” before an open vowel, or the “e” of the “ed” and “est” endings of verbs, but there were many other common elisions and contractions (including synaeresis, a “drawing together” of adjacent vowels within a word): all of them were used to maintain the strict syllable count of the line. The resulting harmony was, in the view of many in the eighteenth century, the height of art and “an improvement of the irregularities of words in their state of nature” (76). Such was the historical context within which EBB’s parents formed their idea of harmony. EBB herself, well aware of the changing practices of the late eighteenth century and of the Romantic poets of her own day, would move far beyond that understanding of the word. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and especially Byron (who figures in a large way in An Essay on Mind), were the important figures for her, and Marjorie Stone’s chapter, “Romantic Revisionism,” is a fine guide to EBB’s relations with her near contemporaries. What exactly does EBB mean by “harmony”? And what exactly does she mean by a related term, “cadence,” which (among other terms from music) turns up not only in An Essay on Mind but also in one of the “Other Poems” in the volume, the one that has only the title “To – ” (webb 4: 143), and in which “cadence” is the key verb: “Cadence my simple line,” she says there. Clearly we need to recover the context of ideas within which EBB was writing.

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One principal context was the attempt to write in English quantitative verse on the model of Greek and Latin poetry. That the metre of English poetry depended upon accent while the metre of Greek and Latin poetry depended upon quantity was a commonplace observation, but since a literary education was an education in classical literature, the possibility of writing quantitative verse in English occupied scholars and challenged poets. And not just in EBB’s day. From the beginning of English prosodical criticism, T.S. Omond points out in his history of such criticism from the Elizabethan period to the twentieth century, serious attempts, both scholarly and practical, were made “to substitute for native measures the ‘quantitative’ structures of ancient Greece and Rome” (1). The history of these attempts is a tangled one, as Omond shows; accent and quantity were often confused; theories of prosody were often divorced from actual practice; and the whole issue of the nature of English prosody was muddied by the pedagogical issue of the “correct” pronunciation of Latin and Greek in the classical literature taught in the public schools and universities. EBB came in contact with that last issue through her brothers. “Bro” – her oldest brother Edward – had a tutor, and EBB learned Greek with him, but because she was a girl she was denied a formal education, and while Bro went to Charterhouse School, EBB stayed home. But she did not abandon her studies. She was aware of the teaching Bro received, and not only knew the pronunciation he was being taught but was aware of the scholarly disputes behind it. She helped Uvedale Price with his work on accent and quantity; she acted as an intermediary (with Bro’s help), forwarding Price’s manuscript to Dr John Russell, the headmaster of Charterhouse, and conveying to Price Russell’s response. Russell had replied as an educator. “The main point to which he looks, as teacher of those languages,” EBB reported to Price, “is the best mode of communicating a knowledge of the Quantity at the same time with the word itself. If Mr Price, or any other gentleman, will point out a more ready & sure mode than that which the Charterhouse pronunciation supplies, he, Dr Russell, will have little hesitation in adopting it” (bc 1: 278). EBB is critical of Russell: “he strives with a shadow of his own conjuring when he contends that accent & Quantity are not the same in the ancient languages” (279). EBB corresponded with Uvedale Price in 1826 and 1827, correspondence that was sparked by his interest in An Essay on Mind – “in the work,”

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he told her, “in the writer, & in all that belongs to her” (bc 1: 247). Price, who had made his mark with his book on the picturesque thirty years earlier, was at this time writing an essay “on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages,” and while he praised the “many excellencies” (248) of EBB’s poetry, he objected to some of her practices in prosody. She had, for instance, made “illustrate” a dactyl. Price thought the second syllable of that word should be long, on the grounds (derived from the “rules” of classical prosody) that a vowel before two or three consonants is long. EBB counters with the word “circumspect,” but her main objection is that one cannot ignore a word’s context: “I think it may be observed that among our old Poets – Spenser especially – the established accent of a word is often changed with its position in a line” (246). For Price this was only “licence,” and he charged EBB with stubbornness: “you are unwilling to give up your belief in the licence of changing the accentuation of words according to their position” (252–3). Price himself was unwilling to give up his belief that English syllables, like classical ones, had fixed quantities. He didn’t go so far as to assert that, in English as in classical prosody, there were only two kinds of syllables, long and short, the short being exactly half the duration of the long, but he did acknowledge that the English language is imperfect material for poets wanting to write quantitative verse. Very few three-syllable words in English qualify as dactyls, though the word “harmony” itself is one of them: it is “among the most perfect in the language, & a word in every way pleasing” (268). But Price is bothered by the fact that so many three-syllable English words that we pronounce as dactyls have unaccented syllables that end in two consonants: “firmament,” “government,”“clustering,”“murmuring,”“comfortless.”“Yet, being accented on the first syllable, they all pass muster as dactyls” (268). There are so many imperfect or defective dactyls in English, Price says, that “the attempt to make a poem in english [sic] hexameters is the idlest of all attempts: it is attempting to build a palace without proper or insufficient materials” (269). So Price understood, reluctantly, as EBB certainly did, without regret, that the English language has its own character and its own harmony, and the “rules” of classical prosody have only a limited application to it. Price was (rightly) not ready to abandon the idea of quantity in English – nor, as we shall see, was EBB, though for different reasons. She describes “the present established system of accentuation” as cui lumen

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ademptum – she is quoting the Aeneid 3: 658, “deprived of sight” – and goes on: “I am convinced that, of the two systems, Solomon’s judgement would not acknowledge a relationship to poetry in that system, whose object it is to destroy the animal life of poetry … the harmony” (258). Harmony was the reason for her position on the issue, and her metaphor – “the animal life of poetry” – seems startling. What did she mean? The primary context for EBB’s prosody – both theory and practice – is the parallel between poetry and music, and she thus anticipates Coventry Patmore’s essay of 1857,“English Metrical Critics,” now often recognized, as it is by Dennis Taylor in 1988, for instance, as a “landmark article” that inaugurated “the new era of Victorian Metrical Law” (4, 49). More recently, Joseph Phelan has shown that the essay was not quite so new as it seemed: though Phelan makes Patmore’s essay “something of a nodal point” (5) in his narrative in The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012), he also shows that “musical prosody,”“usually … regarded as a marginal and transitional theoretical development” (4), was a matter of both theoretical interest and actual practice throughout the century. Its central idea was “that poetry and music have a profound affinity of structure, and in particular … the basic temporal unit of musical composition – the bar – is analogous to the fundamental rhythmical unit of verse, usually (but nor invariably) identified in traditional terms as the ‘foot’” (4). A genuine “musical prosody,” Phelan argues, could be developed “only by recognizing the primacy of accent [over quantity] in English verse” (17): “It is the principle of ‘isochrony’ (or equal intervals of time) between metrical accents that underlies both the theory and the practice of musical versification in English. This principle liberates verse from the last vestige of syllable counting, by allowing an unregulated number of unstressed syllables between accents; and, even more crucially, it renders the pause or rest an integral part of the verse” (17). Just how liberating this principle could be is evident in Paul Fussell’s 1954 account of eighteenth-century prosody. In the early eighteenth century, as Fussell points out, the analogy between poetry and music “was mainly confined to non-technical generalities” (152) and was often metaphorical. But as the analogy developed and was better understood in both practice and theory, it became more and more technical, and the parallel between a foot in poetry and a bar in music eventually broke down the

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strict syllabism of eighteenth-century “harmony.” The word itself shifted in meaning from a static and inflexible pattern of prosody imposed on every line, whatever its content, to the relation defined by Phelan “between the meaning of a line of poetry and its metrical structure,” when harmony came to mean “‘the consonance or affinity between the sounds of words and phrases and their sense’” (Phelan 18). The “animal life” of poetry, its harmony, as EBB understands it, belongs in this continuing experimentation with “musical prosody,” and refers primarily to timing. In her view the spoken language naturally organizes itself into units of equal time, which are like bars in music, or, in EBB’s usual trope, like the beating of one’s pulse, the human heartbeat. Kinesthetic rhythms, matched by the beat that begins each isochronous unit, are the “animal life” of poetry. In his introduction to The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (1841) – a volume to which EBB contributed a translation of “Queen Annelida & False Arcite” – R.H. Horne uses the same trope as EBB when he is rejecting syllable counting as the chief tool of scansion. Horne (in a passage I have already quoted in my introduction) would go even further and identify isochronous units in purely physical terms: “It would be far nearer the truth were we to call our scanning gear by such terms as systole and diastole, – metre being understood as muscle, and pulsation as rhythm, – varying with every emotion” (lxxxiv). The art of poetry, and both its cognitive and affective powers, depend upon the skilful use of such units. That is the kind of harmony EBB wants in her poetry, and so she retained, like Price, a firm sense of quantity in English. She did so on the reasonable grounds that, since timing in music depends upon the duration of the notes, so timing in poetry must depend upon the duration of the syllables, however variable that might be. And (as we have already seen), she went even farther than Price by recognizing that quantity changes with the position of words in clauses or verses. The chief authority to whom Price and EBB both appeal is Foster. Dr John Foster, a classical scholar and headmaster at Eton, had published in 1762 An Essay on the Different Nature of Accent and Quantity. He prepared a second edition a year later, and a third, “corrected and much enlarged,” in 1820. EBB refers to “my edition of Foster” (bc 2: 53) in a letter to Price dated c. 15 April 1827, and (according to Kelley and Hudson, editors of The Brownings’ Correspondence) her quotations are from that third edition.

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“Foster on Accent” was long considered a standard work. Its appeal to EBB may have lain, in part, in Foster’s claim that he was basing his argument on actual speech, on (what he called in his introduction) “the nature and necessity of the human voice itself ” (xviii). Language is, by its very nature, musical, Foster argues, and he defines the common elements: accent (“the particular elevation or depression of [sounds] on certain syllables,” a high sound or pitch being the acute accent and a low one the grave), quantity (“the quantity of time taken up in expressing” sounds, lengthening or delaying producing a long syllable, hastening or quickening a short one), and “emphasis,” “a mode of sound requiring a greater profusion of breath” (2–5, 9–10; my quotations are from the edition of 1820). Even with such an apparently simple matter as providing clear definitions of key terms Foster’s work is an advance, since he points out that the controversy in which he is engaging has been plagued by ambiguity of terms. It has also rested on assumptions that simplify and distort. Chief among these is the assertion “‘that the true pronunciation of Latin and Greek is directed by quantity, and that of English by accent’” (14), and he notes “the popular error in regard to the English language having no quantity” (15). Quantity is the chief determinant of timing, and Foster is concerned with the nature of quantity in English. Citing the authority of Dr Johnson and his essay on prosody prefixed to the great dictionary, Foster argues that “we English cannot readily elevate a syllable without lengthening it, by which our acute accent and long quantity generally coincide, and fall together on the same syllable” (25). That view was disputed, the dispute often turning on the question of the extent to which the rules of classical quantity could be applied to English. Those rules worked better in theory and among scholars than in actual speech and among poets. In refuting the view that English metre “depends on accent and not on quantity,” Foster argues that “accent jointly with quantity doth direct it,” and he goes even further, saying that “I cannot help thinking, that the essence of it [English metre] is founded in quantity alone” (35). Speech itself is musical: “every sentence uttered, at the bar, on the stage, in the pulpit, or in conversation, is capable of musical notations” (254). Uvedale Price, in EBB’s understanding of him, held the same position – that “‘Quantity is the essence of English poetry’” (bc 2: 65) – and EBB

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agreed with Price, telling him that through his correspondence with a Mr Commeline she was “considerably confirmed in my convictions on your side” (54). As for James Commeline himself, EBB wrote to him directly: “What makes the corner stone of your doctrine; viz. ‘Quantity is not the essence of English poetry,’ – is the great stumbling stone in my way; for I can no more concieve [sic] poetry unregulated by time, than music unregulated by time” (63). Foster does not use the term “harmony” very often in his essay, but a follower of his did so in a central way. In 1774 William Mitford published An Essay upon the Harmony of Language, intended principally to illustrate that of the English language. Mitford, Mary Russell Mitford’s uncle and a historian whose principal work was a multivolume history of Greece, was certainly known to EBB, who refers to him both in a letter of 1837 (bc 3: 246) and in An Essay on Mind (291). She was critical of the history, saying (in a note to the Essay) that “prejudices … have deformed his work” (webb 4: 114). There is no evidence that she knew his essay on language, but her understanding of harmony is much the same as his. Moreover, he quotes Foster at length. Mitford’s own contribution was, he said, an extension of Foster’s argument, an explanation of “the particular nature of accent and quantity in the English language” (28). Mitford’s principal terms differ from Foster’s, and he borrows them from music, the relation of music and poetry being the topic of the first section of his essay. The “first two essentials of the harmony of human speech,” he says, “are the first two essentials of modern music,” and they are melody and cadence. “Melody” he defines as arising “from the various tones of the voice, which are called accents,” and “cadence” is “determined by the quantity of time employed in the pronunciation of syllables; whence arises a third incident to the harmony of human speech called meter, or measure” (10–12). Mitford thus links his terms with Foster’s, and calls accent and quantity “the two main pillars of poetical and rhetorical harmony in all languages which have any considerable share of such harmony to boast of ” (20). Cadence is the more important of Mitford’s two terms: it is, he says, “the grand bond of union between poetry and music” (262). Since EBB uses the word “cadence” frequently, we need a precise understanding of its meaning. As she uses it, and as Mitford uses it, it is a unit

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of time equal to each of the other units of time in a poetical or musical composition. As such, it is a synonym for a bar in music, a meaning that is only loosely related to the root of the word, the Latin verb cadere, to fall. When Dr Johnson defines the word in his dictionary, he provides five definitions, the first two derived from the root (“fall; state of sinking; decline” and “the fall of the voice”). He is vague about its meaning in poetry (“the flow of verses, or periods”), and only when he includes a meaning from horsemanship – his fifth definition of the term – does he define the word in the sense used by Mitford and EBB: there it is “an equal measure or proportion, which a horse observes in all his motions, when he is thoroughly managed.” One might infer a link between that definition of Johnson’s and EBB’s appeal to “the animal life” of poetry. For when the oed quotes Johnson’s fifth definition, it adds to it “rhythm, rhythmical construction, measure,” and goes on to “the measure or beat of music, dancing, or any rhythmical movement, e.g. of marching.” Both the understanding and practice of cadence were complicated by a shaky understanding of the relation between the conventional metres – iambs, trochees, anapests, dactyls – and the isochronous units. There was an assumption – unexamined and uninformed – that such metrical feet were identical with the musical bar, whether duple time (iambs and trochees) or triple time (anapests and dactyls). But a bar in music begins with an ictus or beat, and iambs and anapests do not. Mitford is unusual in distinguishing between cadence and metre. He considers an accented syllable as the beginning of a cadence (like the strong beat in a bar of music) and takes into account pauses as well as voiced syllables, the number of which may vary within each cadence. So what role does metre play? It is, Mitford argues, the expressive element of cadence, and should be freely varied to fit with the meaning and emotion of a line. After a section on Anglo-Saxon poetry, he criticizes the “moderns”: “Having for the general purposes of poetry adopted the common cadence, the best and the most difficult to excel in, because the most simple in its fundamental principles, yet capable of the greatest variety both of harmony and expression [it is the equivalent of duple time in music], they have prescribed themselves in one instance stricter bounds than seem necessary: they scrupulously number their syllables, while they are wholly inattentive to meter, which can alone furnish the proper means of introducing variety in the number of sylla-

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bles” (265). Metre, Mitford says, “is not the fundamental efficient of English poetical harmony, but a means of variety, and a powerful instrument of expression. In either light it is incapable of being reduced within certain rules” (135). The English pentameter line, for instance,“admits various feet: the spondee, iambic, and trochee without reserve: the pyrrhic, dactyl, anapest, and tribrachys, and sometimes other trisyllabic feet under some restrictions which the ear alone can determine” (134). The various kinds of feet are expressive: “if the expression requires peculiar gravity of slowness, a line composed intirely [sic] of spondees will produce the effect. If a more spirited majesty of expression be required, the dactyl and anapest are introduced with vast advantage among spondees. The same extraordinary number of times is preserved; vigor is added by the rapid flow of short syllables, and the harmony becomes much more pleasing” (134–5). EBB’s view of metre in relation to cadence is the same as Mitford’s (though I am not arguing that she derived it from him): within the isochronous units metre is the means of variety and the instrument of expression. That position is clear in her discussion with Price on the nature of dissyllables in English heroic verse. Price had argued that there are no true dissyllabic spondees in English, “every dissyllable having an accent either on the first or the last, – & accent (you must give me credit till I can bring my full proofs) always making the accented syllable the longest” (bc 1: 264). From that view EBB dissents, arguing (as already noted) that position within a line determines the length of syllables, and position may in fact make an English dissyllable a spondee in a line of English heroic verse. Her example is the word “uproar” in Milton’s line, “Confusion heard his voice, & wild uproar / Stood ruled” (Paradise Lost 3: 710). She acknowledges that “roar” is probably more accented than “up” but argues that “I still think that this organic preference should be surmounted as much as possible, in deference to the expression.” She then provides a wonderfully insightful analysis of Milton’s line: “The expression appears to me to depend entirely on contrast – on the distinct preservation of the different characteristics of the first & second parts of the line: the first representing the restlessness of startled confusion by the heaving of the voice – the second representing the firmness of order by the firmness & decision of the voice” (bc 1: 271) – an effect which would be lessened by Price’s reading of the word. Then she goes on: “To return to English spondees, I do

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not think that your able statement of the identity of what we call accent and the ancient quantity, bears very hard on my opinions, because, as in the case of ‘uproar,’ I would not shift but multiply the accent” (272). What does she mean by that? It has to do with the interplay or tension between (what she calls) “the organic preference & the metrical necessity” (272). Her example is again from Milton, this time from Arcades, “Under the shady roof / Of branching elm star-proof,” “where the expression obliges us to rest on star, the metre on proof! In these predicaments what recourse have we but the acknowledgement of spondees?” (272). EBB’s understanding of prosody coincides with the third epistemology of metre distinguished by Isobel Armstrong in her taxonomy of prosody included in her 2011 essay on “Meter and Meaning.” It is a “binary account of meter,” and “binary ways of thinking about meter were powerful in the nineteenth century. The commonest,”Armstrong points out,“is that in which an ideal and embodied stress pattern are in play” (28). The ideal pattern rests upon our kinesthetic rhythms (usually the pulse, in EBB), and hears units of equal time, each beginning with an accented syllable. The “embodied” pattern is the metrical relation of the sounds and involves not only accents and feet but variations such as substitutions, counterpointing, and syncopation. The relation between the “ideal” and the “embodied” may be, as Armstrong says, “conflict and opposition” (29) when one focuses on “law” and its “transgression,” but it may also be complementary and enriching both to the ear, which finds pleasure in a complex pattern, and to the mind, for which the sounds and rhythms make meaning beyond the lexical significance of individual words and their grammatical relations. Hence, Armstrong says, of her third pattern,“the binary depends on the expectation of a primary rhythm and the detection of a secondary one” (30), and the result is a reading which is double, at least, but more often multiple. EBB’s close reading of Milton provides us with a model for the analysis of her prosody, an unfamiliar model, at least from the perspective of the classroom, where metrical analysis alone is the norm. It involves two kinds of scansion and the play between them. There is, first of all, the scansion of the metrical feet – iambs, trochees, and so on – and the understanding of them as expressive of both emotion and meaning; and there is, second,

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the marking of the cadences, the units of equal time, which do not necessarily coincide with the feet, and which include elements not taken into account by an analysis of the metre: the pauses or caesurae, the relation between the ending of one line and the beginning of the next, and (what EBB called) the “doctrine of atonics” (examined below). The pointing of a line – the commas and other punctuation marks – are like rests in music, and are just as important to the timing as the notes or syllables; the space at the end of a line may be “part of a suppressed foot between the lines, silently continuing the underlying ‘tune’ into the next verse” (Phelan 31). And the “doctrine of atonics” is EBB’s understanding of syntax as a shifting determinant of accent. In her continuing discussion with Uvedale Price, this time in an April 1827 letter, EBB undertakes an analysis of another line from Paradise Lost, and in doing so provides a guide for subsequent critics. The crucial element of that analysis is a clear understanding of the difference between, and the interaction of, metre and cadence. The line she chooses is 866 from book 6 of Paradise Lost, “a line expressive of the lost Angels’‘ruining’ from Heaven”: “Eternal wrath / Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.” EBB freely identifies both quantity and accent. She scans the syllables in the first half of the line quantitatively, as long or short: “burnt af ” are long, “ter them” short, and she indicates the caesura with a vertical slash after “them.” Then she scans the last six syllables metrically, as two anapests. Her purpose is to illustrate the “difference in the character of the anapaestic and dactylic rapidity,” so her concern is with both timing and affect. For the latter she quotes Marmontel:“le dactyle s’elance, et l’anapeste se precipite” (“the dactyl soars up, and the anapaest hurries on,” as translated in bc 2: 55n4). The line, EBB says, is a “forcible illustration of Marmontel’s position”: “by the grand situation of the first long monosyllable we have revealed to us, first the Avenger with fixed foot on the battlement of Heaven, – & then the dactylic out-darting of the scorching thunderbolt – & then the headlong & precipitate descent of the condemned” (47–8). But the analysis of the effect is not complete without attention to the cadence, which includes the caesura: “The intermediate monosyllable which, as you observe, is necessary in a hexametral union of the two rhythms has been omitted by Milton, and perhaps with a view to

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the expression. For the pause by which we compensate the metre, adds, I concieve [sic], very singularly to the effect of this sublime line; by giving something unusual to the cadence that arrests the attention with the voice; as if our fear made us take breath a moment before we could turn from the contemplation of power to its terrible effect” (48). EBB then goes on to argue that “the remarkable construction of this line is not accidental,” but rather modelled on a description of “the sublime combat of the immortals in the Theogony, where Hesiod has made use of the very same cadence.” She quotes Hesiod’s Greek line, says that Milton’s line “is one instance out of the thousand he offers us,‘Of English cut on Greek and Latin,’” and advises Price to “not be ungrateful to Milton, & try to resolve his verse into iambi & trochees” when the effect depends upon a rhythm that must be revealed by adding an analysis of cadence (48). Ten years later EBB makes the same distinction between metre and rhythm as she does in analyzing the Milton passage, when she is praising a play written by Mary Russell Mitford and dismissing a possible defect that Mitford had mentioned, “the roughnesses or irregularities in the numerical syllables.” But, EBB counters, “there is nothing whatever in them that I do not like. On the contrary the versification seems to me harmonious & graceful. A great deal has been written & talked about the difference between rhythm & metre. My doxy is different. At any rate, metre is nothing nobler than the guardian of Rhythm, & if Rhythm can take care of herself, & she is often Heaven-inspired to do it, where is the objection to the act?” (bc 3: 230). Pauses are crucial elements of cadences, and so are atonics, in EBB’s view. She refers to the “doctrine of atonics” when she is discussing pyrrhics with Price: “I believe that English pyrrhics exist much in the same word [sic, for way] that Latin unaccented words may be said to exist by the doctrine of atonics” (bc 2: 52). The term comes from Foster. Foster has a section on “the doctrine of Enclitics and Atonics vindicated,” and defines them as “certain words, which if taken singly have an accent, as all others have, but by their constitution in a sentence either transfer or entirely lose it” (326). Then he deals with two objections, the second of which is that to pronounce a word differently when it stands alone and when it is part of a discourse is “a great absurdity” and “contrary to the nature of all

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languages.” Not so, Foster argues, and certainly not contrary to the nature of the English language. His example is “is” in the sentence “the man is virtuous” (328). EBB’s example is the word “very” in Cowper’s line “You speak very fine & you look very grave” (bc 2: 52). Foster and Mitford, the early eighteenth-century ideal of “harmony” and the correspondence with Price, all enable us to understand in a more precise way EBB’s dictum on harmony in An Essay on Mind: While thus to character and nature, true, Still keep the harmony of verse in view; Yet not in changeless concord, – it should be Though graceful, nervous, – musical, though free; Not clogg’d by useless drapery, not beset By the superfluous word, or epithet, Wherein Conception only dies in state, As Draco, smother’d by the garments’ weight – But join, Amphion-like, (whose magic fire Won the deep music of the Maian lyre, To call Boeotia’s city from the ground,) The just in structure, with the sweet in sound. (1073–84) “Changeless concord” is EBB’s label for regularity of accent, the “strict alternation of accented and unaccented syllables,” and her subsequent adjectives sum up her own understanding of “harmony.” “Graceful” suggests movement that is felicitous and becoming, as in the dance of the Three Graces. In 1818 EBB had written a “lay” for her sister Henrietta’s birthday, which begins with an extended apostrophe to Euterpe, the muse of music, and proceeds through a catalogue of the other Muses, all of whom are engaged in a “quarel dread” [sic], but who cannot prevail against the power of Euterpe. The Graces appear in the third last stanza: Then forth appeared the graceful three With dimpled smiles The fair beguiles [“]With all the soul of Harmony” (bc 1: 57 and webb 5: 259)

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The editors of the letters do not identify the source of the quotation, and the editors of the 2010 Works, citing Milton and Ovid, say only that it is “a common poetic phrase” (webb 5: 259), but the link between “graceful” and “harmony” is clear. The link is the physical movement of the dance, performed to units of time that are equal in duration, however many steps are included in each unit. The dance is another version of EBB’s “animal life.” So is the epithet “nervous.” It does not mean, as its dominant twentyfirst century sense might suggest, an excited or neurotic state, but rather one that is vigorous and powerful, as the etymology of the word “nerve” – a sinew or tendon – indicates. So strength, which pushes against boundaries, and discipline, which underlies grace, combine to create something that is seemingly effortless, harmony. The last two of EBB’s adjectives for the “harmony of verse” in An Essay on Mind – “musical” and “free” – appear in a line in which meaning and prosody coincide, a fine example of the harmony that she is championing: “Though graceful, nervous, – musical, though free.” In the line’s first five syllables, the accented syllables alternate regularly with the unaccented ones, and so meet the criterion of early eighteenth-century harmony, but the disyllables cut across the iambic feet, and push “nervously” against their boundaries. Then comes the trisyllabic “musical,” which would simply be unacceptable in an earlier period, but EBB “freely” uses it because it fits into the line’s isochronous units. The first of those units begins with an accented syllable – “grace” – and has three more syllables, with a secondary accent on “nerv” and including the pauses, signalled by the commas and the dash. Then comes the next unit, beginning with the accented syllable “mus” and encompassing not only three more syllables but also a rest. The sense is one of freedom within discipline: various syllables and rests within units of equal time. Moreover, EBB uses differing metrical feet for expressive purposes. The spondee that begins the next line – “Not clogg’d” – fits the sense in an obvious way, and the apocope, that eighteenth-century technique for maintaining a strict count and alternation of accented and unaccented syllables, here is implicitly condemned for creating a cluster of plosive consonants difficult to pronounce but coinciding exactly with the sense. “By useless drapery” begins in a sprightly enough way with two iambs (“by use | less drap”) but soon lapses into two

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unaccented syllables (“ery”) and a pause, the falling off supporting the sense, “useless.” With such an understanding of “harmony” in poetry, one might expect EBB to be able to set words to music without any difficulty. But in her diary for 27 September 1831 she records a failed attempt to compose “a Greek song, for an air to the guitar.” She was “unsuccessful” because “the harmony has been torn to pieces, by [my] looking first to the musical measure, & next to the poetical measure” (142), separating them instead of integrating them, making them in composition consecutive rather than concurrent. The last line in the passage from An Essay on Mind is EBB’s summary definition of harmony: “the just in structure, with the sweet in sound.” EBB seems to be using “just” in the sense defined by Dr Johnson, “complete without superfluity,” as the lines I have just analyzed,“Not clogg’d by useless drapery, not beset / By the superfluous word, or epithet” indicate. Complete “without … defect” is the rest of Johnson’s definition, and he also provides the meanings “regular; orderly” and “exactly proportioned.” EBB echoes that last meaning earlier in An Essay on Mind when she asserts that nature clings “to just proportion” (312).“The sweet in sound” is a more problematic phrase, since to a twenty-first century ear it suggests something sentimental, but again I think EBB is being precise in her meaning. Yes, sound is the essential element of poetic harmony, and its primary appeal is to the ear, which sound should please. But Johnson begins his entry on “sweet” with the definition, “pleasing to any sense,” and the quotation he uses makes clear the fact that the appeal is not just to the senses but to the mind and feelings as well: “discourse,” “counsel,” and “meditation” can all be appropriately described as “sweet.” EBB, I think, extends the cognitive and affective meaning of “sweet” to nation-building as well, and I shall return to her apparently conventional reference to Amphion in this passage, but before we turn to that topic we must deal with the first thing one might think of with “the sweet in sound,” and that is rhyme. EBB uses rhyme throughout the 1826 volume. Shouldn’t rhyme be a major aspect of harmony? Not according to Mitford. When he reaches the point in his essay when he can confidently assert that “we are now possessed of every requisite

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for analysing any piece of English poetry whatsoever,” for the purpose of discovering “the rationale of harmony in English speech” and ascertaining “the rules of English versification,” he chooses blank verse for his analysis, “not only because it admits greater variety of harmony, but also because it subsists by the strength of harmony alone: and of our poems in blank verse none can be more proper than those of Milton” (79). Similarly, EBB praises Milton in An Essay on Mind for his “Full cadence, solemn pause, and strength divine!” (1051). Harmony does not depend upon rhyme, Mitford insists, and later he says that rhyme is “the grossest imposition upon the ear to atone for deficiency of harmony, of which the human voice is capable” (167). EBB too is critical of rhyme as compensation for deficient harmony: Oh! silent be the withering tongue of those Who call each page, bereft of measure, prose; Who deem the Muse possest of such faint spells, That like poor fools, she glories in her bells; Who hear her voice alone in tinkling chime, And find a line’s whole magic in its rhyme (916–21) The rhyme-chime pairing is, in EBB’s hands, a criticism of rhyme, of sound repetition for its own sake, chiming in campanology being mechanical and “tinkling” suggesting something trivial, lightweight, and deficient in some crucial way, as in Paul’s “tinkling cymbal” trope (1 Cor. 13:1). EBB is not, however, rejecting rhyme; she is only censuring readers who “find a line’s whole magic” in sound repetition. Such readers forget, she goes on to say, “if the gilded shrine be fair, / What purer spirit may inhabit there!” (922– 3). “There” may be not only the rhyme itself, but the line’s cadences and all the other sounds that make up its harmony. Prosody, as Paul Fussell long ago reminded his readers, does not exist in isolation, but is based upon “certain often-unconscious assumptions about the nature of the universe and the nature of man’s condition in it. In the same way that every different world-view will possess its own unique prosody, so every distinct prosodic system will be discovered, I think, to proceed ultimately from its own metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic sup-

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positions. The history of prosody is thus inseparable from the history of ideas, so-called” (37). The “purer spirit” to which EBB refers is, I think, a world view, and it is the task of the critic to define that view and show how it works in her actual practice. EBB’s world view is a modern version of one with a long history: it is the idea of world harmony which Leo Spitzer in his Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (1963) defines in such a comprehensive way. That idea, as Spitzer shows, begins with Pythagoras and with the cult of Apollo, the god of poetry and music, whose attribute was the lute. The Pythagoreans observed the movement of the stars and planets, saw in it order and proportion, imagined such order as producing harmonic sounds, and linked that harmony with the lute’s seven strings. The first lines of Thomas Campion’s song from his Fourth Book of Ayres (1617) sum up the connections: To his sweet Lute Apollo sung the motions of the Spheares, The wondrous order of the Stars, whose course divides the yeares, And all the Mysteries above … In an unpublished fragment dated August 1818, EBB herself refers to this cluster of ideas: the fragment was “occasioned by imagining the music of the spheres.” EBB tried another version of the fragment a month later, titled it “A Fragment Written in Four Minutes,” and supplied a subtitle: “On Music” (webb 5: 268). The noun she uses for the music is “numbers,” and the adjective she uses to describe them is “magic.” It is their affect that makes them magical: “Oh! t’was a soul inspiring strain / A heart enchanting note! – ” For the harmony of lute and heavenly bodies had long ago led to the broadening of the idea of harmony, in which a musical order characterized – or ought to characterize – the body, the mind, the soul, and the state. Not to be trusted, says Lorenzo in Act 5 of The Merchant of Venice, is “The man that hath no music in himself ” (V.1.89); such a man is fit only for “treasons, stratagems and spoils.” For EBB, the chief manifestation of world harmony is not the movement of heavenly bodies but the human heartbeat and its shaping of time as isochronous units. EBB certainly wants music in herself and in her poetry, music that beats in time

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with “the pulses of my heart” – that in turn beats in time with the rhythms of the universe and participates in the being of all creation. “So would my tune of life be musical” (16), she says in “The Prayer,” one of the short poems in this volume of 1826 (though I am wrenching the line out of its context; webb 4: 150). The epigraph she chooses for a poem in the volumes of 1844 – it is “Rhapsody of Life’s Progress” – is another version of the same idea: “Fill all the stops of life with tuneful breath” (webb 2: 209). The line is from the American poet Cornelius Mathews, who had championed EBB’s work in the United States. His metaphor for life is the pipe organ, with its multiple stops through which air passes to produce a variety of tones and sounds simultaneously. EBB uses that simultaneity of sounds – the diapason – as one of her recurring metaphors, as we shall see, and she retained the idea of making life musical throughout her own career as a poet. In “Nature’s Remorses,” one of her last poems (published posthumously in 1862), she was still voicing the same imperative: “Beat sweet time to the song of life” (24; webb 5: 110). EBB’s ontology coincides with that of Carlyle, whom EBB describes in an 1845 letter to RB as “the great teacher of the age” and “also yours & mine” (bc 10: 101). In his lecture “The Hero as Poet” (1840) Carlyle had updated the Greek concept of world harmony in terms of his own transcendentalism. “The Greeks,” he says,“fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music” (Works 5: 83). Now, he affirms, pointing to poets and poetry, “All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things” (83). Song is “a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech,” he goes on, and it is transcendent: it “leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!” (5: 83). The poet is the hero who leads us to that point.“See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it” (84). I shall return to EBB’s linking of nature and song and of the various ways in which she sings in tune with that combination, but I do not want to leave the passage on harmony in An Essay on Mind without first noting her reference to Amphion and her linking of music and nation-building

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– a link that will become increasingly important in EBB’s career as poet and in her support of the Risorgimento in Italy. The link is a conventional one. Amphion’s is one of several myths in which a city is created by music, the walls literally rising to the sounds. So Troy rose to the music of Apollo: “yonder walls / Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed” (39–40), says Tennyson’s OEnone. Tennyson alludes to the myth again in “Tithonus” and uses it in “Ilion, Ilion.” Amphion was responsible for Thebes, “Boeotia’s city,” and Amphion was taught by Mercury, son of Maia: hence EBB’s reference to “the Maian lyre.” The lyre, however, is supplanted by the lute in the next section of the poem, where EBB has “Aonia’s muse” (1088) speak. (“Aonia” is “the ancient name” of Boeotia and “the seat of the Muses,” say Porter and Clarke in their notes on the poem: Works 1: 266.) For true harmony “smoothest numbers” (1086) are not enough, the Muse warns: “‘the bard must feel!’” (1090), and his heart – EBB uses the masculine pronoun – manifests itself in the conative effect of poetry. It warms readers’ hearts to “generous deeds” (1093), and to Virtue and Freedom – in short, to a harmony that is the basis of right order in society. EBB thus rewrites the myth of cities built to music, and she does so by giving her music a physiological base – sometimes her pulse, sometimes the “fervent throb” (1092) of her heart – which the poet must express. If the poet’s heart does not warm with sympathy for world harmony, and so warm listeners’ hearts, ‘Then hush the lute – its master string is broke! In vain, the skilful hand may linger o’er – Concord is dead, and music speaks no more!’ (1098–1100) There is a further point to be made about music as EBB treats it, and that is that it is a union of art and nature. Isochronous units are natural; metrics and rhyme are artful; harmony depends upon the skilful combination of the two. EBB makes this distinction explicit in one of the miscellaneous poems in the 1826 volume, the one that has only the title “To – ” (webb 4: 143). There rhyme is fashioned “by the cunning hand of Art” (14); cadence, on the other hand, is natural, “coming from my heart” (15), and the affective power of poetry depends primarily upon its nature, not its art. In an

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unpublished 1821 birthday ode for her father, EBB had begun with an apostrophe to Poesy, whom she addresses as “divine untutored maid,” and whom she bids exert her influence: Tis thine to elevate, and fire the breast, And bid exalted numbers wildly roll – Inspire the noble thought – and unreprest – Awake the energetic strenght [sic] of soul! (bc 1: 125 and webb 5: 368) Poesy inspires “music of the mind” (16) and it does so by speaking “the simple language of the heart” (23). Three years earlier, in the unpublished “Address to Poetry,” EBB’s apostrophe to her art focuses on the Muse’s inspiration of “the swelling heart,” and though the results are “polished numbers,” the effect is natural: “Sweet Poetry untutored art / Oh thou who soothes & moves the heart!” (webb 5: 267). EBB’s oxymoron – “untutored art” – sums up the union of art and nature that she is constantly exploring in poems from the 1820s and 1830s. In “The Poet’s Vow” (1836), for instance, EBB refers to “the nature at his heart” – the heart of the poet, that is – and characterizes it as “that quick tune along his veins / He could not change by art” (50–2; webb 1: 232).“Quick” here means “living,” and again EBB tropes the music of poetry as the pulse that expresses itself in cadences. In the 1826 poem that has only the title “To – ” (webb 4: 143) EBB uses “cadence” as a verb and extends its function to anyone who would live by universal harmony in “kindly, social love” (22). Since the poem is not a familiar one, and since it is important to my argument, I quote the whole of it here: mine is a wayward lay; And, if its echoing rhymes I try to string, Proveth a truant thing, Whenso some names I love, send it away! For then, eyes swimming o’er, And claspëd hands, and smiles in fondness meant,

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Are much more eloquent – So it had fain begone, and speak no more! Yet shall it come again, Ah, friend belov’d! if so thy wishes be, And, with wild melody, I will, upon thine ear, cadence my strain – Cadence my simple line, Unfashion’d by the cunning hand of Art, But coming from my heart, To tell the message of its love to thine! As ocean shells, when taken From Ocean’s bed, will faithfully repeat Her ancient music sweet – Ev’n so these words, true to my heart, shall waken! Oh! while our bark is seen, Our little bark of kindly, social love, Down life’s clear stream to move Toward the summer shores, where all is green – So long thy name shall bring Echoes of joy unto the grateful gales, And thousand tender tales, To freshen the fond hearts that round thee cling! Hast thou not look’d upon The flowerets of the field in lowly dress? Blame not my simpleness – Think only of my love! – my song is gone. (webb 4: 143–4) The poem is an apostrophe to an unnamed beloved friend, and it takes the form of a “lay” or “song” (she uses both labels) expressing the “kindly,

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social love” (22) she is championing – while she canvasses the adequacy of various ways of conveying that emotion. In an actual one-on-one physical encounter “eyes swimming o’er, / And claspëd hands, and smiles in fondness meant, / Are much more eloquent” (5–7) – more eloquent than “a wayward lay” (1) and “echoing rhymes” which prove “a truant thing” (2–3). So, as usual, EBB asserts the limitations of rhyme without dispensing with it altogether. In fact, she here uses (what would become known as) the In Memoriam rhyme – a b b a – but with alternating trimeter and pentameter lines (unlike Tennyson’s line lengths). The swift recurrence of the “b” rhyme and the delayed repetition of the “a” rhyme perhaps explain why she considers her rhymes “truant” and “wayward,” but her own judgment of them gives way to the response of her friend, for whom the rhyming will “come again” (9), but this time with a crucial additional element, cadence. So rhyming depends upon the wishes of the beloved friend – the relation between two people who love each other is a crucial aspect of harmony – and if those wishes coincide with her singing, the poet,“with wild melody, /…will, upon thine ear, cadence my strain” (11–12).“Cadence” rarely appears as a verb, but EBB repeats it here, and the repetition, with its suggestions of the imperative as well as the indicative mood, embodies a reciprocal action: Cadence my simple line, Unfashion’d by the cunning hand of Art, But coming from my heart, To tell the message of its love to thine! (13–16) The heartbeat, which EBB usually refers to as its “pulses,” measures time and is thus closer to music than rhyme, which is only sound repetition. While rhyme, as the myth of Echo teaches, can only repeat the last sound heard, cadence orders the whole of a line or grammatical unit, and it does so in a way that is analogous to the heart’s systolic-diastolic rhythm. The conventional trope for cadence is the wave. EBB does not explicitly name the wave when she provides a simile for her cadencing in this poem, but the lines strongly suggest it:

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As ocean shells, when taken From Ocean’s bed, will faithfully repeat Her ancient music sweet – Ev’n so these words, true to my heart, shall waken! (17–20) A cursory reading of this simile suggests sounds repeated – the conventional understanding of the experience of holding a seashell up to one’s ear – but EBB is precise about what is heard: sounds, yes, but “music,” which is measured sound, and which is, moreover, “ancient,” the suggestion being that it is from the beginning of time and that it is the essence and ground of creation.“My heart,”“these words,” and the “ancient music” are all in tune, and such harmony gives her words both power and authority. Not, however, the authority of a superior being but of someone who can sound in response to her friend’s name: “So long thy name shall bring / Echoes of joy unto the grateful gales” (25–6). EBB’s promise that she will cadence her lines raises a critical problem: how do we analyze them so that we can hear the interplay of all the elements in them? Her own analyses of Milton’s lines, discussed above, provide an answer and a model, but I want to move beyond that model and see what musical notation reveals. Let’s take the two lines at the beginning of the fourth stanza, “Cadence my simple line, / Unfashion’d by the cunning hand of Art.” Conventional scansion of the trimeter line would yield three feet, the first a trochee, the next two iambs. But if we hear the cadences, we must hear one and one-half units in that line: “Cadence my” begins the first, with three syllables, and “simple,” with a secondary accent, completes it; “line” is the beginning of the second cadence, which includes the pause (comma) at the end of the line and the unaccented syllable “un” at the beginning of the next line. The next cadence begins with the syllable “fash.” Here are those first two lines with the accented syllables – the ones that begin cadences – marked /: / / Cadence my simple line, / / / Unfashion’d by the cunning hand of Art …

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We can most clearly hear EBB’s cadences in those lines if we use musical notation, thus:



     














        



 

 

 

   


 




 
  






This notation clearly shows EBB’s desiderata in harmony. The lines are “musical” with their isochronous units, but “free” in their mixture of quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes (plus a rest); they are “graceful” because of the regularly recurring beat, and “nervous” in the strong way in which they hold together such a variety of quantities. And what of the role of rhyme in such harmony? When EBB introduces her lay as “wayward,” the problem lies, not in its rhymes, whose importance she (as usual) downplays with the adjective“echoing,” but in “stringing” them. “If its echoing rhymes I try to string” is the prosodical challenge she faces. The verb “string” may mean not only arranging repeated sounds in succession – stringing them out, as it were, like beads on a thread – but also playing upon rhymes as if she were playing a lyre, to sound them as part of a musical composition. If we hear the “string” – “thing” rhyme in that way, then those syllables are the plucked or accented sounds that mark the beginning of a cadence. EBB is thus anticipating Coventry Patmore’s argument, made thirty years later in his 1857 essay “English Metrical Critics,” that rhyme is a “time-beater,” the accented rhymed syllables marking the beginning of a measure or unit of equal time, like a bar in music. I turn now to a fuller examination of the place of nature in EBB’s understanding of music and of universal harmony. Cadence, we have seen EBB insist, is natural, and perhaps that is why, in An Essay on Mind, she calls poetry “Nature’s language” (949). Nature, she says in an oxymoron,

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has a “silent voice” (1001), and the poet makes that voice audible. That silent voice is the expression of world harmony, which affects the heart if not the ear: There is a music in the landscape round, – A silent voice, that speaks without a sound – A witching spirit, that reposing near, Breathes to the heart, but comes not to the ear! (1000–3) There is, however, a way in which that voice does come to the ear, and it is through beloved names associated with childhood and linked with childhood experiences, usually in an idealized pastoral landscape. In a passage in An Essay on Mind, EBB asserts the affective power of a name on the throbbing of the pulses – her usual metaphor for harmony: Oh! beats there, Heav’n! a heart of human frame, Whose pulses throb not at some kindling name? Some sound, which brings high musings in its track, Or calls perchance the days of childhood back, In its dear echo … (823–7) This same cluster of ideas turns up in some of the shorter lyrics in the 1826 volume. In them the past is almost invariably a time of joy and love and strong emotions, all of them bound up with the names of loved ones, like “the names that made our childhood dear” (22) in “To My Father on His Birthday” (webb 4: 133) or the name of her brother in “Verses to My Brother,” a name that “telleth of the past – calling from sleep / Such dear, yet mournful thoughts, as make us smile, and weep” (4–5; webb 4: 136). EBB hopes that her own name will play the same role for the (unnamed) addressee of the poem “Memory,” which she concludes with the lines, Then, if a thought should glad thy breast Of those who loved thee first and best, My name, perchance, may haunt the spot, Not quite unprized – nor all forgot. (40–3; webb 4: 142)

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“Nor all forgot” – that reference to memory suggests that names and inspiration are linked. Inspiration – its nature, its sources, its functioning – is a topic EBB explores, not only in the 1826 volume but in a great many earlier poems unpublished in her lifetime, and they give us yet another perspective on the harmony that is so central to her poetics. The myth of inspiration is the story of the nine Muses, whose mother was Memory (Mnemosyne). Not surprisingly, the one to whom EBB most frequently refers is Euterpe, the muse of music. Many of those unpublished works between 1816 and 1830 are birthday poems for various members of EBB’s family, and many of them involve an invocation to Euterpe. She appears, conventionally, with a lyre, associated with Apollo, not only the god of music but the director of the nine muses, and EBB associates her instrument in turn with fire, which is not earthly but “sacred” and “celestial” and is thus the emblem of inspiration. The figure in the unpublished poem of 1816 titled “The Muse” is not named, but she is clearly Euterpe, since EBB addresses her thus: “Come forth my Muse, & tune the lyre so bright” (webb 5: 207). In a poem for her sister Henrietta, the muse is the “awaker of the new tuned lyre” (210), which is “Apollo’s lyre” (212), in turn linked with “celestial fire” not just in this poem but in several others (210, 212, 224), or with “sacred fire” (235). EBB explicitly invokes Euterpe in 1818 poems for her sister Henrietta and for her father (257–9 and 262), again in an 1819 birthday poem, “To My Dearest Uncle Sam …” (301–2), and yet again in an 1820 birthday ode for her brother Henry (338), where she addresses Euterpe as “Divinest Maid!!!” The 1818 poem – “To My Dearest Papa on His Birthday” (262–3) – pictures Euterpe smiting “the echoing wire,” and begins with these quatrains: Euterpe! on Parnassus rocks Who loves to pass the hours And twine thy glossy raven locks With Helicons pure flowers. Where gently bending o’er thy shell Thou pliest the tuneful note,

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To Heaven the flowing numbers swell In mid air, trembling float. (1–8) In other poems EBB describes Euterpe’s playing as striking “the deep toned lyre,” striking “the chorded lyre,” and producing “magic numbers” (webb 5: 301–2, 304). The emotion appropriate to the striking of the lyre is joy. In an 1818 poem to her brother Storm, for instance, EBB characterizes the lyre as “Sacred to jollity and play,” while the role of the Muse is to “tune the joyful lay” (272). In an 1820 birthday poem for her sister Henrietta, EBB constructs a narrative about Apollo, his daughters, and the Three Graces, all by way of voicing an elaborate compliment to Henrietta. The “Ode” begins: Time was when Phebus self was young And music trembled from his tongue! And every Muse in youthful pride Tuned the sweet lyre on blest Parnassus side – (webb 5: 330) Fame then addresses “Apollos daughters” and bids them to “Go hence to Thracias wild and ample side” to meet their father. “The heavenly Sisters to his words assent”: Where Thracian Hebrus flows on golden sand The god of poesy they found While waiting his austere command Circling his throne and all around – (webb 5: 331) The figures circling him are “warriours high in lists of glory” and “The graces.” In that ceremonial setting the god pronounces “A happy boon” for Henrietta. He said and paused – the heav’nly muses raise The swelling strain to Henriettas praise; Their notes the lofty vaults of Heav’n rebound And earth rejoices in the welcome sound! (webb 5: 331)

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In that same year – 1820 – EBB constructed a birthday narrative about the Muses for her brother George. In this story she does not name Euterpe, and instead a Muse whom she calls “The Goddess Queen” bears the “soul inspiring lyre,” only to appall her Sisters with a “wild” and “cold” strain. The “Goddess Queen” is Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, and when she falls asleep, Urania, the muse of astronomy, snatches “the celestial lyre”: She siezed [sic] she grasped the sacred lyre And swept the echoing strings Those notes the joyous sisters fire And all Parnassus sings! (webb 5: 337) Besides such lyrics, there are other unpublished texts from this period, now available thanks to the exhaustive work of the editors of the 2010 edition of EBB’s Works. These texts all, in one way or another, involve music, and fill out our understanding of music in EBB’s thinking and poetics. Euterpe is, as I have already said, a central figure in the unpublished poems of this period, a time when EBB was beginning to experiment with storytelling. One of those experiments – the 1822 “Leila: A Tale” (webb 5: 374–87) – is full of EBB’s characteristic interests in music. Her model is Byron’s The Corsair, for Leila is “a Corsair’s Daughter,” and her father, Otho, tells her “strange tales of blood and treachery” (1: 74). EBB’s own story is one of “blood and treachery,” but it turns upon music and its effects. She sets the scene in Venice, and music pervades every aspect of city life. “The Spanish Lover wakes the sweet guitar, / Wreathing mild music with the moonlight air” (1: 21–2); the summer winds are “musical” (1: 33); fairies bear “sweet music from their airy Hall” (1: 35); even the “gondolet” (a small gondola) is “musical” (1: 27). The narrator asks about the source of the music: “Is it the choral shell of Ocean’s Daughters, / Whose tunes invade the purity of night?” (l: 37–8). Leila, the heroine of the tale, is linked with both music and dancing, and her father’s hall is a joyful place Where soft-toned lutes and youthful voices meet With Minstrel harps, the gayest notes of all, Till music swells so murmuringly sweet It seems the echoing sound of their light glancing feet! (l: 105–8)

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The story gets going when one of Leila’s maids tells her of hearing “exquisite” music from “the Northern Turret’s grated cell” (1: 134). The cell holds a father, a Greek known only as “the Captive,” and his son,“the Minstrel Boy,” who is responsible for the music. Leila demands that the minstrel be brought before her, to sing, and he does appear, bearing his manystringed lute. But instead of showing joy, he weeps and, in a melodramatic turn, dies in Leila’s presence: he had suffered much, but that is not the cause of his death. Rather, it is “the voice of kindness” (1: 205), which leads the minstrel to ask for his father’s release. In the second canto, Leila visits the father in his cell, and brings the son’s lute as evidence of his death. The narrator tropes Leila’s words as music: O Musical are the light, gay sounds that fall From woman’s lips, when joy those lips impart! Yet softest, dearest, loveliest of all Are her mild soothings of the aching heart, For kindness is her most delightful Art. (2: 91–5) But the father, the Captive, vows revenge on Leila’s father, Otho. Leila frees the Captive and is in the process of helping him escape when her father unexpectedly returns; the Captive slays the Corsair; Leila sinks and dies – of kindness: her “young and filial heart was broke / By its own tenderness” (2: 237–8). The last lines link music and affect: And as the music of the sighing chords, That weave her lone dirge with the passing gale, This little story of her grief affords. O! let its influence o’er thine heart prevail, And lend a pitying tear to Leila’s simple tale! (2: 239–43) Perhaps the most ambitious of the unpublished works from this period are the fragments, drafts, and manuscript versions of a major poem on “the development of genius” (bc 1: 358–9): the subject might well have become the title of the poem, and as such it would have been a companion to An Essay on Mind, for this poem was to be an essay on poetry and on the role of the poet. The chief version that remains – “The Poets’

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Enchiridion” (1827; printed in webb 5: 483–7) – is, as the title indicates, a handbook or guide for the composition of a new song and, as the word “song” indicates, EBB’s central tropes in this guide are all from music. EBB begins with an apostrophe: “my song! mine ancient song!” The adjective “ancient” leads her to construct a myth of loss and recovery: the song, once “a pleasant hope,” is now “a memory.” She links that “ancient song” with silence: it was, in her oxymoron, a “silent song!” made possible by solitude, which Did sit before me in a holy mood With brow of worship, preaching silently About the mighty things of earth and sky. (6–8) Both silence and solitude have a rich context in the thinking of the period. Silence, as we shall see in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” is both creative and revelatory, the state in which, as Carlyle says, “great things fashion themselves together” (Works 1: 174). And solitude is that elegiac mood explored by Jay Macpherson in her 1982 book, The Spirit of Solitude, a mood characterized by an overwhelming sense of loss. Macpherson traces that mood in its manifestations from The Prelude, “Dejection,” and Alastor to Pauline, In Memoriam, and Empedocles on Etna: “Much of this literature can be called elegiac, as marked by a sense of loss of some precious quality in one’s world or in oneself.” That literature draws “principally on the pastoral-elegiac tradition and its expansion in Paradise Lost.”“For Milton and his eighteenth-century following, solitude was the poet’s halo, signifying his converse with higher powers.” Later, Macpherson shows, solitude darkens in meaning: “Solitude now indicates loss, deprivation of a better state of being, the torment of happier memory” (121–2). The original song in EBB’s fragment is whole and comprehensive; the recovered song is partial. The recovery is analogous to Shelley’s account of poetic composition in “A Defence of Poetry”: “when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet” (Shelley 504). The recovery, however partial, is all that we have left, and EBB focuses on it. She tropes her soul as a harp (13), specifically St Dunstan’s harp:

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Lo! as St Dunstan’s harp, hung on the wall, Ceased not ev’n then its labour musical But went on with the same familiar lay Its master’s touch had lessoned it to play – So is my harp … my soul … (9–13) There has been a loss – “her theme is gone / Which was her master” (13– 14) – but crucial elements remain:“its spell and tone / And human sympathies and dreams of power / Cleave to her diapason at this hour!” (14–16). Each of those nouns is an important one for EBB; each indicates what remains of the ideal song, the original. A spell is an incantation or charm, from the Old English spell, “story, speech,” and means a set of words with magical powers. Those powers depend upon the words’ participation in the being of that which they name, that is, upon their symbolic function. Such is a theory of language to which EBB does not often refer, the idealist theory. She uses it explicitly only in a late poem, “The North and the South,” published in 1862 after her death, while here she refers to it only obliquely.“Tone” refers to the instinctive tightening or relaxing of the muscles of our vocal chords. Feelings and emotions produce tones, and they are not arbitrary and conventional but natural and inevitable, another lingering effect of the original song. “Sympathy” is a feeling at one with, the oneness being the crucial matter, as opposed to the scattering and division of the state of loss. Finally, “Dreams of power” are aspirations to affect. These two – “human sympathies and dreams of power” – are for EBB crucial elements retained from the original song. They foreshadow her activism on behalf of “fallen” or enslaved women, and her championing of the Risorgimento in Italy. Even at this early stage EBB wants her poetry to bring about social and political change – a much more vigorous response to loss than tears and hand-wringing. The passage ends with EBB’s crucial use of the word “diapason.” Etymologically, the word comes from a Latin word that is in turn based on Greek roots meaning “through all” – through all the notes, that is, “the concord through, or at the interval of, all the notes of the scale,” that concord depending upon the sounding of octaves. Materially, the diapason is the name of two stops on a pipe organ, “so called because they extend through the whole compass of the instrument.” Hence the metaphorical

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use of the word, to mean “a swelling sound, as of a grand burst of harmony” “a rich, full, deep outburst of sound” (oed).“Diapason,” as we shall see, becomes one of EBB’s key metaphors. What remains after loss is a “new song.” EBB characterizes it as “narrow” (21) in contrast to the comprehensiveness and completeness of the original, but it is the disciplined voicing of “gushings strong” (22), for which she uses the conventional trope for expression, the “rill” or flowing stream. Change and death challenge the “new song” she would sing, and she turns for inspiration “Unto the breath of God, the deathless soul” (73). Her aim is to take “the grossness of the things that be” (75) and, with her soul, turn it to “uses spiritual” (77): “I fain would bind / This theme immortal to my mortal song” (78–9). (“Grossness,” we remember, is her chief criticism of Locke’s language theory.) It is in this context that EBB defines Genius, her key term. It is the strong Desire of some strong soul to cast away Th’AEgyptian bonds, the manacles of clay, And follow o’er the deep truth’s pillared flame. The which desire, when passionate, men name By the proud name of Genius … (80–5) EBB goes on to link Genius with “discernment” of the good and the beautiful, and so sets her key term in a Platonic context. Such is her updating of the original meaning of the term, a guiding spirit or indwelling deity. There is more on genius in another fragment of that unfinished poem on its development, and it is the text entitled “Earth,” published in the volume of 1833 (webb 4: 237–8). Its subject is nature, presented as both beautiful and doomed to end. Her reaction to its beauty is to “sing symphonious” (3), and that word, like “diapason,” indicates the desired comprehensiveness of her music. That comprehensiveness includes campanology, which becomes her trope for the sounds of nature: “Meseemeth through the leafy trees to ring / A chime of bells to falling waters tuned” (10–1). The second half of the poem is the response of genius to the end of nature, proclaimed “with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth” (Rev. 10:3) by the

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angel with the book. This half of the poem deals with the end of time and the coming of eternity, but again EBB constructs a story about loss and partial recovery. The saints remember earth, and their memory is of sin, but with the reminder that earth was the scene of the Incarnation, so that Each looking on his brother, face to face, And bursting into sudden happy tears, (The only tears undried) shall murmur – ‘Christ!’ (51–3) In addition to the fragments I have discussed, there are also MS notes for the abandoned poem (webb 5: 489–90). The notes list all the things to which genius “tends.” These include “to divination of the unseen,” “& of first causes,” “to the apprehension of the spiritual – even in the material,” “to the apprehension of the Beauty which is in all things,” and “to an apprehension of the joy which is in all things.” For my purposes, the crucial tendency is “to the apprehension of the music which is in all things & hearkened to by God himself ” (489). Had EBB finished the poem, it would have been just as important for setting the agenda for her poetry as An Essay on Mind. For this new text she had in mind not an essay but a story, as she told Uvedale Price in December 1826: “I have been thinking of late that genius developped by circumstances & developped tardily might make a fine subject for a narrative Poem: but I have proceeded no further with my plan than the outworks.” Then she mentions her model which, like her published essay, focuses on the mind: “If the extraordinary history of Alfieri’s mind, as given in his memoirs, occur to you, you will know at once the character of my design” (bc 1: 273). She abandoned her plans at the beginning of February 1827, her interest withering under her father’s criticism. He not only criticized her want of harmony, but said, in effect, that she did not know what she was talking about: “You see the subject is beyond your grasp – & you must be content with what you can reach” (359). But in spite of such criticism, Mr Barrett played a crucial role in his daughter’s poetics. Who is EBB’s muse? is a question critics before me have asked and answered. I want to continue the present argument by proposing a number of answers to that question, based on the published poems in the volume of 1826. There those answers all belong in the context of music and world

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harmony, but Euterpe is barely mentioned, while the Past, Time, and Fame are all sources of inspiration. But the one source who is clearly associated with harmony, actually alive in the present, and clearly invoked by EBB at this stage of her life, is a man. He is her father. The question is: to what extent exactly can we consider Mr Barrett to be EBB’s muse? On first reading, “To My Father on His Birthday” (written 1824; webb 4: 132–4) seems a conventional enough occasional poem: EBB asserts her love for her father, remembers his praise for her earliest efforts in poetry, and anticipates further praise “to-day” when she presents him with his birthday poem. But we note that the poem is not addressed to “You,” as we would expect, and instead refers to “he” and “him” and “my Father,” and we begin to suspect that this gift is more about the giver than the recipient, and more about her poetry than it is about the historical Mr Barrett. EBB’s subject is names and her theme the affective power of names: “No name can e’er on tablet shine, / My father! more belov’d than thine!” (11–12). That name is at the centre of a pattern of associations held together by emotion, and established by the periodic structure of the opening section. Delaying the appearance of the main clause are three parallel phrases all beginning with the preposition “amidst,” and the parallelism establishes a connection among “the days of pleasant mirth” (1), “tender thoughts” (3), and “the silken words that move / To syllable the names we love” (5– 6). Why is her father’s name so important to her? The obvious answer is that she is his daughter; the hidden answer is that she is a poet and his name, like the names of all loved ones, in her view, is a source of harmony. Does that fact make Mr Barrett her muse? EBB does not explicitly label him as such. Instead, she refers to him as her Maecenas or patron (in keeping with her Horatian epigraph), under whose “gentleness of praise … rose my early lays” (33–4). And she talks in a conventional way about “woo[ing] the kind Muses” (37) at that time. That wooing is based upon the close connection between memory and inspiration. As I have already noted, Mnemosyne (Memory) was the mother of the nine Muses, and in the second (and longer) part of this poem EBB celebrates memory, which preserves a past that is not only idyllic but one that EBB keeps linking with magic and enchantment. Memory recalls an “enchanted world” (15), and it does so, not primarily through sight, as one would expect, but through sound, which provides the link with har-

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mony. “Sylphic sound” (19), EBB calls it, the sylphs being spirits inhabiting the air, and linked here, appropriately, with sound waves, and specifically the sound waves that repeat “The names that made our childhood dear” (22). EBB associates those names with Echo and with the conventional attribute of the poet, the lyre. The story of Echo, as EBB treats it, is not a sad one but a happy one. She uses Echo as a simile for Joy: For parted Joy, like Echo, kind, Will leave her dulcet voice behind, To tell, amidst the magic air, How oft she smiled and lingered there. (23–6) The lyre appears as the “Aonian shell” (27), so called because the Muses dwelt in Aonia, and the earliest form of the lyre had a tortoise shell for a sounding board. The “tuneful shell” (4), EBB calls it in another poem in this same volume of 1826, “Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron” (webb 4: 138–40). The sounds it produces are natural, like breathing (let it “Breathe tuneful numbers” (28), EBB says in the birthday poem), and they harmonize with “the glad Hours” and with Time itself. The birthday poem comes close to being EBB’s invocation to her father as her muse when she says that “I seek the tone / For magic that is more its own” (41–2) – the tone of her father’s words, that is. The invocation is here muted and cast in realistic terms: she waits for her father’s appearance, and links the visual – “my Father’s looks” (43) – with his role as patron (“best Maecenas”). She is ready to “read” his smile. But the aural supersedes the visual, and the poem ends with the wish “To hear him, in his kindness, say / The words, – perchance he’ll speak to-day!” (47–8). What words? Praise, if one takes the lines in a realistic way, but inspiration, if one focuses on her waiting and listening for the magic tone. Tone takes her back to the emotions she explored through names, and tone is a natural expression of emotion, as I have already said and as the etymology of the word indicates. Liddell and Scott in their Greek-English lexicon identify its root as “tan” or “ten,” and all the words derived from that root involve the action of stretching out or extending. In language, tones are produced by the instinctive tightening or relaxing of the muscles of our

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vocal chords, and are thus a natural rather than an artificial language. Here the tone she seeks is the expression of joy remembered from childhood, and the “words” of her father, sounding “perchance,” will evoke that longedfor reaction in her. “I seek the tone” is thus a neatly ambiguous statement: is the sound in his words, or to be realized in hers? The answer can only be: both. If we read the lines in this way, we can see “my father” as a benign version of a nineteenth-century figure discussed by Jay Macpherson in The Spirit of Solitude: the “demon music-master” (85–6), his best-known appearance occurring much later, at the beginning of the twentieth century: the Phantom of the Opera. But a “music-master” need not be demonic. EBB’s suggestive treatment of her father in this birthday poem anticipates Aurora’s simile for Romney’s voice in their climactic “hurtle of united souls” (Aurora Leigh 9: 835), when she hears his voice “as some chief musician’s song” (9: 844); and it anticipates an even more important relation for EBB personally when, in Sonnets from the Portuguese, she apostrophizes RB as “chief musician” (Sonnet III). But in the early days of the birthday poem, music sounds from loved names and family relations. Hence I do not go so far as Angela Leighton in arguing that Mr Barrett is EBB’s muse. In her 1986 book, Leighton examines the father’s role as a source of inspiration “both desired and threatening” (32): “it is he who haunts her poetic consciousness and against whom she wages the longest struggle for self-expression” (13). He is both an inspiring parent and a blocking figure. I cannot leave the question of EBB’s muse in this period without considering some other of the “Miscellaneous Poems” in the 1826 volume where EBB canvasses still more sources of inspiration: a personified Past, a personified Time, and a personified Fame. Time is male but the Past and Fame are clearly women. The Past (in the poem of the same name; webb 4: 148–9) is a woman with a “deathly face” (16), a cold hand, and a form that is fair “though awful” (17). Her attraction lies not in her appearance (in which there is “no changefulness” 19) but in her voice, which is “like a pleasant song” (21) and “which a joy on our souls will cast” (23). The power of her voice, like the power of Mr Barrett’s voice, lies in its tone, which is “low and holy” (28). At the end of this lyric, EBB asserts that she will “say, whate’er it be, / Every

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word she telleth me!” (31–2). For the past in these “Miscellaneous Poems” is almost invariably a time of joy and love and strong emotions, all of them bound up with the names of loved ones. (This poem came to have an unanticipated connection with a loved one. As Stone and Taylor note in their headnote to the text in webb 4: 148, “In December 1845, RB wrote to EBB that he had inscribed the closing lines of this poem (ll. 27–32) in ‘my book, which holds my verses as I write them’” (see bc 11: 247). Here are the lines he inscribed: She shall speak to me in places lone, With a low and holy tone. Ay! when I have lit my lamp at night, She will be present with my sprite; And I will say, whate’er it be, Every word she telleth me! So RB gives the lines a new context and a new meaning.) Time also functions as a muse. Time, as EBB personifies him, is male, in the birthday poem to her father, and in “The Dream. A Fragment” (webb 4: 155–7), where he is a “rude minstrel” whose power lies in the music he produces in her: I “did lay,” she says, The pulses of my heart beneath the touch Of the rude minstrel Time, that he should play Thereon, a melody which might seem such As musing spirits love – mournful, but not too much! (5–9) By “Time” EBB means the past – history as “the shadows of past deeds” (11) – but also “Time” as in beating or keeping time. For history has a rhythm, as EBB suggests in her summary of human experience in this poem, and it could be summed up in Miltonic terms: paradise, paradise lost, paradise regained. Or one might use the words by which she ends the poem: life, death, new life. What does this rhythm have to do with melody? EBB is, I think, using the word precisely. It is not (as it could be) a single line of music, the tune or air, but rather a chorus of sounds. When

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she is, in Lockean fashion in An Essay on Mind, treating sensations as particular and names as general, she defines “melody” as a generalization: “when particular sounds in concord rise, / Those sounds as melody, we generalize” (781–2). In the melody of Time, all particulars “in concord rise” and make history. Time as “the shadows of past deeds” is also EBB’s concern in “Riga’s Last Song” (webb 4: 158–60), which anticipates her political poetry. Riga was a Greek poet martyred in the cause of liberating Greece from Turkish control. In their notes Porter and Clarke explain the link between his music and political action: “It was said of him that dead he lived in his songs, which during all the years of waiting were nourishing a secret flame in the hearts of his countrymen. This was realized to the letter in 1821, for the whole Greek people rose in arms, singing his call to battle” (Works 1: 273). In the poem, which is an exercise in prosopopoeia or impersonation, Riga refers to himself as a minstrel plucking the strings of a lyre – a conventional enough portrait of the poet – but his “death-hour’s minstrelsy” (a label used twice in the poem) is in tune with the landscape of Greece (“I spoke my thought on Marathon’s plain, / And Marathon seemed to speak again!” 19–20) and with the children and peasants in whose eyes he sees “dark Greek pride” (26). When we examine Time as muse, we begin to glimpse the sources of EBB’s political poetry. Fame is the last muse EBB considers in the 1826 volume. Fame is clearly female, and the most dangerous of the three figures we have been examining, for she is the siren. The final short poem in the 1826 volume is “The Vision of Fame” (webb 4: 161–3), and it strikes a cautionary note in the midst of all this exploration of sources of inspiration. In it Fame appears to the poet as a “bright and lofty” woman, royal and majestic, with a “golden lute” in her hand. As she approaches the poet in the vision, Fame calls up “the sprite of Melody, / Which in her lute lay hidden” (31–2). What she produces the poet calls a “chant” (38), the kind of musical composition that foregrounds the beating of time. Fame’s melody is so natural that “you might have thought she only breathed, / And that her breath was song” (39–40). The vision contrasts conventional states of mind. The contented mind, in tune with creation and seeking “rest” (95), finds joy and peace in singing “ancient story” (10), “For the heart like a minstrel of old doth seem, / It

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delighteth to sing of glory” (11–12). The ambitious mind, by way of contrast, is motivated by the desire for fame, and the personified Fame in this poem is the nightmare version of the muse. She too produces melody that is as natural as breathing, but she counsels the poet to “Rifle thy pulsing heart / Of the gift, love made” (57–8), which sounds like a temptation to betrayal and finally self-destruction. So Fame gradually appears as the siren, a “ladye bright” (88) who becomes a skeleton: But still the vacant sockets gleamed With supernatural fires – But still the boney hands did ring Against the shuddering wires! (89–92) I have been examining a cluster of related topics – the “harmony of verse,” cadences in poetry, world harmony, the voices of nature, memory, and muses – but the underlying authority for all those music-related topics is not clear until the 1838 poem simply titled “Sounds” (webb 2: 49–54). In the first section, EBB focuses on the sounds of nature, the “many noises” (3) the “rapid river” carries underneath the ocean, “Sounds of inland life and glee” (6). Among those sounds is that of the “quick rains” (10), which “Count and visibly rehearse / The pulses of the universe” (12–13). The second section catalogues human noises, most of them the sounds of human sorrows and miseries, and the reader wonders about the parallel between human life in that section and nature in the first section. What the reader expects is consolation in nature’s voice, as in the 1838 “Cowper’s Grave” (webb 2: 323–9), where EBB describes “harmonious influences” from nature acting on the melancholy-afflicted poet; or the tying together “by chords he cannot sever” of man’s heart and the “solemn-beating heart / Of nature” as in EBB’s 1838 “A Sea-Side Walk” (webb 1: 525–8). So the third section is a surprise. There EBB affirms that all sounds are the instrument of divine revelation, that God speaks through both “the regular breath of the calm creation” and “the moan of the creature’s desolation” (110–11). After her imperative (“harken!”) comes the affirmation: God speaketh to thy soul, Using the supreme voice which doth confound

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Then comes a crucial parallel: As the seer-saint of Patmos, loving John (For whom did backward roll The cloud-gate of the future) turned to see The Voice which spake. It speaketh now … (106–9) That last adverb is crucial, as Charles LaPorte has shown: revelation is not a unique event in the distant past but an ongoing experience, if only we will attend to it; “God’s voice is everywhere present just as it was for the biblical author on the island of Patmos” (LaPorte 26). Hence EBB could claim for her texts the sort of authority usually reserved for the Bible (but which was being questioned by the Higher Criticism and undermined by advances in science), and while she continued to revere the scriptures, her ambition was nothing less than to “craft new religious texts” (LaPorte 23). The “harmony of verse” had for her far-reaching implications. It was in fact the chief mark of the Christian poet. In a March 1845 letter EBB told Hugh Stuart Boyd that “It certainly does appear to my mind that we are not, as Christians, called to the exclusive expression of Christian doctrine, either in poetry or prose.” Rather, “All truth, & all beauty & all music belong to God – He is in all things, – & in speaking of all, we speak of Him.” EBB is not referring primarily to the subject of poetry, but instead to its harmony or music: “In poetry, which includes all things, ‘the diapason closeth full in … God.’ I would not lose a note of the lyre – & whatever He has included in His creation, I take to be holy subject enough for me. That I am blamed for this view, by many, … I know, but I cannot see it otherwise” (bc 10: 139). Diapason is again the key word, and the source of EBB’s quotation is, as the editors of the 2010 Works tell us, a familiar text, Dryden’s “A Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687.” There Dryden celebrates the origin of “this universal Frame” in “heav’nly Harmony” and uses the word “diapason” in the same way as EBB uses it. He describes music as running “From Harmony to Harmony / Through all the com-

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pass of the Notes … The Diapason closing full in Man.” But EBB changes Dryden’s climactic word: her diapason closes in God. There is an April 1845 letter in which EBB undertakes “to define the true nature of poetry.” “Poetry is truth,” she says, “primitive absolute and universal truth.” She defines the partial truths told by the botanist, the geometrician, and the painter, but the poet, she says, will tell you “something different from all these, larger than them all,” and that larger truth takes the form of music, for the poet’s truth “shall strike into the deep relations of truth, octave upon octave, as far off as the soul can hear music.” When “the relations of God’s universe” are “tuned up to music,” then “they are poetical” (bc 10: 167).

3 tongues of angels, echoes of paradise

EBB’s volumes of 1838 and 1844 each contains a major poem that is, in Charles LaPorte’s terminology, a “new religious text,” and each explores a question about language raised by EBB’s earlier thinking on the topic. In The Seraphim it is the problem of dealing with heavenly matters in a language that (as Locke taught) is derived from the senses; and in A Drama of Exile it is the issue of continuing human access to the harmony of paradise after the Fall.

The Tongues of Angels: The Seraphim (1838) EBB’s 1838 volume was the first to bring her wide critical attention, in part because of her daring in presenting the crucifixion, in her own phrase, “under a less usual aspect” (webb 4: 290): not as seen by human witnesses, but “as dilated in seraphic eyes,” those of two angels. Of the nine orders of angels, the seraphs are the highest in the hierarchy used by Milton in Paradise Lost and are distinguished by their ardent love of God (Milton’s Abdiel, whose steadfast obedience to God in the face of overwhelming opposition is a model of Christian heroism, is a seraph), and EBB’s dialogue in The Seraphim focuses on topics appropriate to seraphs, love and obedience. But her main concern in making her central characters angels is the exploration of two kinds of language and the relation between them. In choosing seraphs as her main characters and in constructing their dialogue, EBB sets herself a linguistic challenge: angelic speech, as characterized by Milton, is not subject to the limitations of human speech, and so human speech can be only an approximation of angelic. For angelic lan-

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guage is not tainted by sense, and so when Raphael (who is a seraph) relates to Adam the story of the war in Heaven, he must accommodate his language to Adam’s earthly understanding “By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms” (Paradise Lost 5: 573). In her An Essay on Mind, EBB had complained about the “grossness” of words, derived as they are from sense rather than spirit, and the challenge she sets for herself in The Seraphim – the “exaggerated difficulty” of her subject, as she says in the Preface (webb 4: 290) – is to present the spiritual through the medium of human language. Milton’s Raphael had defined his difficulty: for who, though with the tongue Of Angels, can relate, or to what things Liken on Earth conspicuous, that may lift Human imagination to such highth Of Godlike Power … (Paradise Lost 6: 297–301) EBB’s “exaggerated difficulty” is to command “the tongue / Of Angels” with nothing more than human tongue. And so the angelic dialogue in the poem can be only an imitation, a fiction rather than the thing itself. “Counterfeit,” EBB calls it in the epilogue to the poem: And I – ah! what am I To counterfeit, with faculty earth-darkened, Seraphic brows of light And seraph language never used nor harkened? (1020–3) There follows an apostrophe to the seraphs whose visible appearance in her poem is a fiction: Forgive me, that mine earthly heart should dare Shape images of unincarnate spirits, And lay upon their burning lips a thought Cold with the weeping which mine earth inherits. (1035–8) If the language of the dialogue is only a “counterfeit” of seraphic language, what truth or authority can it claim? The answer lies in music. EBB char-

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acterizes the discourse of the angels as “your most sweet music’s miracle” (1046) and her own poetry as “hoarse music” in which one hears two rhythms: the angelic one, and “a cadence all the while / Of sin and sorrow” (1039–40). Nonetheless, that “hoarse music” is “wrought / To copy yours” (1039–40). Copy, not imitate. EBB chooses her words carefully, and seems to be using the word “copy” in the same way as Coleridge used it in his central and reiterated distinction between a copy and an imitation. A copy, as Coleridge explained, is ontologically the same as its original, while an imitation is ontologically different, though likeness to the original characterizes both. By asserting that she is copying angelic music, EBB is claiming that her music, however imperfect, participates in the essential being of that greater music. The common element is the cadence: And though ye find in such hoarse music wrought To copy yours, a cadence all the while Of sin and sorrow – only pitying smile! (1040–2) Moreover, copying seraphic music determines the genre of her poem: it is, she says in the preface,“a dramatic lyric, rather than a lyrical drama” (webb 4: 290), and though the result is necessarily “this poem of imperfect form,” the very imperfection allows us to hear something of the perfection of the angelic music. The problem for the critic is to define the techniques EBB uses for her copy, which she refers to, again in the epilogue, as a “song” (1006). One technique, which is immediately apparent at the beginning of the poem, is echo. Ador begins the dialogue and Zerah keeps it going by echoing phrases of his fellow. Here are the first ten lines: ador.

O seraph, pause no more. Beside this gate of heaven we stand alone. zerah. Of heaven! ador. Our brother hosts are gone – zerah. Are gone before. ador. And the golden harps the angels bore To help the songs of their desire,

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Still burning from their hands of fire, Lie without touch or tone Upon the glass-sea shore. zerah. Silent upon the glass-sea shore! Echo, as EBB uses it here, is not simply the empty repetition of sounds from which, like the nymph in the myth, Zerah can never escape, but rather Zerah’s cadencing of Ador’s lines, his filling out of the units of equal time, and hence his active participation in the music that he hears and in its meaning that he advances. So, for instance, Ador begins a cadence in his second line with the syllable “lone,” and Zerah completes the bar with the pause and the syllable “Of ” before beginning his own cadence with the first syllable of “heaven.” That cadencing is also not a mere repetition of the word but a shift in meaning of the phrase “Of heaven.” In Ador’s speech it is an adjectival modifier of “this gate” and does no more than specify their location; in Zerah’s repeating it is an adverbial modifier of “alone,” and it draws attention to the issue that sets the story going: the seraphs’ hesitation – theirs only among all the angelic host – in obeying God’s latest command. So EBB’s “dramatic lyric” is, in fact, a “song,” and the dialogue antiphonal singing. Just as EBB’s music is a copy of the seraphs’, their music is a copy of God’s. Ador characterizes the divine fiat as music, and the specific command they have just received (and with which EBB begins her narrative) is for “the pomp angelical, / Cherub and seraph, powers and virtues, all” (18–19) to descend to earth and witness the crucifixion: HIS voice, His, that thrills us so As we our harpstrings, uttered Go, Behold the Holy in his woe! (43–5) The angelic action following that divine fiat has a musical dimension, which EBB (typically) tropes as pulses. The other angels drop rapidly down, so quickly that they blur to the sight, showing “Only pulses in the air / Throbbing with a fiery beat” (36–7). Zerah, who uses this trope, immediately connects those pulses with creation,

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fres h st r a n ge mus i c As if a new creation heard Some divine and plastic word, And trembling at its new-found being, Awakened at our feet (38–41)

Ador, who was a witness of creation “And heard the God-Breath move / Shaping the words that lightened, ‘Be there light’” (60–1), tries to account for the moving force of the divine command: either it was “the stormpathos of the tone / Which swept through heaven the alien name of woe” (51–2) or “the subtle glory … Bearing to my finite essence … Infinite imaginings” (53, 55, 57). Zerah would hesitate to obey, but Ador warns him to “gaze not backward through the gate!” (68), since to look at Godhead means losing both language and music, to be “God-stricken to seraphic agony!” (87). But there is another threat to both as well. Zerah’s fear is, he says, “the fear of earth” (129). Even though earth is, as Ador affirms, “God-created” (131), it is a place of “blind matter” (156) that bows “the spiritual things / To the things of sense” (158–9), as in EBB’s understanding of Locke’s language theory, and where, moreover, there is the “fearful mystery” (165) of Death and of evil. The two seraphs explore the mystery of the incarnation and through their speaking arrive at its meaning. Their insight is a surprise to them – “What do I utter? what, conceive?” (244) – but they affirm that their understanding is the operation of their “angel ken” (317), God-given, like Adam’s “sudden apprehension” (Paradise Lost 8: 354) when he names bird and beast. At the end of “Part the First,” the seraphs obey the divine command, like the unfallen angels in Paradise Lost, not because they must, but because they choose to do so, with “love … bearing us along” (321). In “Part the Second,” the scene shifts from heaven’s gate to “Mid-air, above Judea,” from a comic (in the sense of a successful completion of an action) to a tragic mode (just as Milton in book 9 of Paradise Lost “now must change / Those Notes to Tragic” 5–6) and from a celebration of the music of the divine fiat to the threat of silence. There is also a shift in the relation of the seraphs, from stronger (Ador) and weaker (Zerah) to teacher (Ador) and student (Zerah). Ador challenges Zerah with the recurring question, “dost thou see?”

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and Zerah’s “seraph’s witness” (360) is initially a vision of a fallen nature. Anticipating Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Zerah looks at nature and asserts “He is not there” (419). That affirmation has serious consequences for language: he fears it may be “a double portent, that / Dumb matter grows articulate / And songful seraphs dumb” (429–31). Their silence is also suffering, but “I constrain / The passion of my silence” (433–4), Ador says, his diction linking their state with the passion being enacted below them, where the central figure “hangest mute of speech” (448). Zerah describes what he sees, and the sight threatens to extinguish his speech. “Why dost thou pause?” (539) Ador asks, and Zerah reiterates the question: “Why do I pause?” (548). The rest of the dialogue, as Linda Lewis has pointed out, contrasts speech and silence (41), and speech and silence are major topics in this study, in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, for instance, and in EBB’s concept of the “listening pause” (bc 11: 4), where silence is a generating power. Here EBB fashions that subject into a paradox: there is a silence that speaks. When Zerah asks himself why he pauses, Ador instructs him: “There is a silentness / That answers thee enow” (548–9), and it is Zerah’s duty to “Hear it” (552). Ador counters Zerah’s earlier affirmation that he gazed on nature and did not find God; the “silentness / That answers” is not from nature, and Ador’s anaphora “It is not from” excludes the skies, the sun, the hills, the sea – and graves and tombs, the human place of (what Ador calls) “common Silence” (565). Instead, there is “a silence” that “keeps / (Not death’s, nor sleep’s) / The lips” (573–5) of Christ, and the absence of the sustaining word threatens to “make the pulse of thy creation fail” (580). Ador challenges Zerah on the meaning of that silence: “Doth it say to thee – the name, / Slow-learning seraph?” (586–7). With the “sudden apprehension” Milton attributes both to the angels and the unfallen Adam, Zerah answers, “ I have learnt” (587). But Zerah’s education is not yet complete. Ador continues his instruction by pointing to “The sea of ill” (624), to which Zerah responds, “I have an angel-tongue – I know but praise” (654). Beyond praise is (what Ador calls) “The passion-song of blood” (656), and he instructs Zerah to “blend / Both musics into one” (658–9). The admonition could be taken as the motto for EBB’s prosody.

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The last part of the dialogue in “Part the Second” is a pleading by both seraphs for a response to their appeals for intervention. Zerah addresses the earth, calling on it to awaken and not to tolerate That the Master-word should lie A mere silence, while His own Processive harmony, The faintest echo of His lightest tone, Is sweeping in a choral triumph by? (771–4) (“His own / Processive harmony” is the angelic host, moving, as the editors of webb point out, like the parade “in ancient Rome honouring victorious heroes” 1: 116.) Both Ador and Zerah also call upon God to appear and “tarry not!” (881). The response from earth is “scornful voices” (836): there is no response from God the Father. “Thou has no answer, Zerah” (917), Ador says, and Zerah comes close to accusing God: “No reply, / O unforsaking Father?” (917–18). But there is a reply, and the answering voice is an unexpected one for the seraphs: it is the voice of Christ, and the words are those he uttered on the cross. The language is that of the incarnate Christ, and is hence a human voicing, different in scope though not in nature from the language of the angels. And – this is the paradox of the incarnation – that human voice turns out to be just as effective in bringing the seraphs to an understanding of the crucifixion as the voice of God the Father. The move toward that understanding is a three-part process that repeats the experience of Christ on the cross. To the first “Voice from the Cross,”“my god, my god, / why hast thou me forsaken?” the seraphs respond with the same sense of abandonment, with Zerah saying “I perish” (939) and “I seek His will” (941) and Ador, still the stronger, saying “He cannot fail” (945). With the second “Voice from the Cross,” “it is finished,” the seraphs recognize victory in defeat. “Like a victor, speaks the slain” (959), says Zerah, and Ador strengthens that rather tentative simile with “His breath, as living God, createth, / His breath, as dying man, completeth” (966–7). With the third “Voice from the Cross,” “father! my spirit to thine hands is given!” the seraphs voice their sense of an action that is tragic, but with reminders of an ultimately comic out-

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come. Ador tells Zerah to “Hear the wailing winds that be / By wings of unclean spirits made!” (986–7), and he focuses on the tragedy of the rebel angels becoming one with earthquake and thunder, as if death were the end, until there is a turn in his speech: What time, from the splitting tombs, Gleamingly the Dead arise, Viewing with their death-calmed eyes The elemental strategies, To witness, Victory is the Lord’s. (1000–4) The elements – earth, air, fire, and water – may seem in their roaring and hurtling to be the fallen angels at their desperate work, but the word “strategies” reverses that understanding.“Strategy” is derived from a Greek word meaning the office or command of a general in a military campaign, and it is (as the oed points out) “usually distinguished from tactics, which is the art of handling forces in battle or in the immediate presence of the enemy.” The defeat of the fallen angels was the tactic; the strategy is in Ador’s witness, “Victory is the Lord’s” (1004). By analogy, the crucifixion is the tactic; life after death is the strategy. Ador’s last words are not just an affirmation of faith (that is, a human affirmation without supporting evidence) but a statement of someone who knows. Zerah has the last word in the dialogue, and his final line is at once more tentative, more ambiguous, and more human: “I hear alone the memory of His words” (1005). The antecedent of that possessive pronoun is not specified: whose words? God’s, as paraphrased by Ador? Or those of Christ on the cross? Or both, so that the ending is like that of Paradise Lost, a tragedy, but with reminders of an ultimately comic outcome? And that adjectival phrase “of His words” is also ambiguous. Is it a subjective genitive, meaning that Zerah retains in his memory the words of both God the Father and God the Son? Or is it an objective genitive, the words possessing within themselves their meaning and efficacy? And what about the meaning and grammatical function of that word “alone”? Is it an adjective (Zerah is alone in hearing) or an adverb (Zerah apprehends with no other sense but hearing)? And then there is the central paradox of that line: how can one “hear” a “memory”? One answer might be that hearing a

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memory resolves the tension between speech and silence, which characterizes the second part of this dialogue. Words have been heard in the past but are no longer heard; memory silently preserves them and operates on the sense of hearing, preserving the sound – and its meaning – without actually repeating it. EBB ends her “epilogue” in a parallel way, expressing a wish for eternal life “for his remembered sake” (1047). The crucial elements in this drama are the cadencing, and the relation of speech and silence, which EBB will explore again in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship. To repeat: silence is not simply the absence of sound. It is the pause in which future words and actions (and the understanding behind them) shape themselves. I have already quoted EBB’s label for silence, the “listening pause” (bc 11: 4), and “listening” is the key response of her seraphs.

Echoes of Paradise: A Drama of Exile If The Seraphim can be read as EBB’s exploration (and resolution) of the difficulty in Locke’s language theory, A Drama of Exile is the culmination of her construction of a myth of prosody. The core of that myth appears in the 1838 “An Island” (webb 1: 489–501), the island being the form of Paradise after the Fall. The reader will remember the fate of Milton’s Garden of Eden: it is swept away by a flood to “take root an Island salt and bare, / The haunt of Seals and Orcs, and Sea-mews’ clang” (Paradise Lost 11: 834– 5). EBB reverses that myth: for her the garden does not become “salt and bare,” but remains an unfallen Eden, a dream island whose sounds preserve the state of original creation. The island is “all awave with trees” (31), and has “Pleiades of flowers” (45), “grass and mosses green” (54) and “brooks” (55), plus animals and birds, and all of these make up a totality that is “musical” (119) and that, in spite of our fallen state, we can hear and put to work to “change man’s voice and use” (111): Ourselves to meet her faithfulness, Shall play a faithful part: Her beautiful shall ne’er address

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The monstrous at our heart; Her musical shall ever touch Something within us also such. (115–20) (The awkwardness of that last rhyme reflects EBB’s difficulties with the text and her not-quite satisfactory reworking of it. See the headnote in webb 1: 489–91.) EBB tropes the music as the moon’s influence on tides, but that simile suggests a single motion, while the music is multiple and polyrhythmic, and so she replaces the tide simile with “a harp of many lays”: Yet shall she not our mistress live, As doth the moon of ocean, Though gently as the moon she give Our thoughts a light and motion: More like a harp of many lays, Moving its master while he plays. (121–6) “Our” response to such sounds is poetry. “Sounds sweet as Hellas spake in youth / Shall glide into our speech” (147–8), and “We, through our musing, shall let float / Such poems” (153–4) as Pindar might have written, or Aeschylus, Homer, and even “Poet Plato, had the undim / Unsetting Godlike broke on him” (161–2). In EBB’s treatment of it, the loss of Eden is not absolute, and human beings retain vestiges – or, more accurately (because the appeal is primarily to the ear rather than the eye) echoes and resonances and rhythms – of their unfallen state. The second scene of A Drama of Exile, EBB’s rewriting of Milton’s Paradise Lost and the major work in the volumes of 1844, is the clearest expression of that myth. The time of the action is immediately after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden. EBB was precise about the time: before she settled on the present title, she referred to the work as “A day from Eden” and “The First Day of Exile” (webb 1: 3). In a letter of December 1843 to Hugh Stuart Boyd she used the latter title, explaining that the subject is “the sorrows of our first parents when cast out, & especially the grief of Eve, under that

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reproach of her soul which must have afflicted her with so peculiar an agony. It is a poem in the dramatic form – a sort of Masque; & is, like Comus, in blank verse, with lyrics interspersed” (bc 8: 83–4). The “Chorus of Eden Spirits” gives the myth. They are heard “chanting from paradise, while adam and eve fly across the Sword-glare,” and they urge the fallen couple to “let your souls behind you / Turn, gently moved!” (227–8). That turning, that being moved in response to voices, will be the basis of the longing that will characterize fallen humanity, and the crucial element of those voices is their rhythm, troped as throbbing (“Voice throbs in verse” 234) and heard in many another beat, such as spirits’ tears “dripping coldly” (249). The longing is both a blessing and a curse; it is a continuing link with paradise and a reminder of their vanished state: In all your music, our pathetic minor Your ears shall cross; And all good gifts shall mind you of diviner, With sense of loss. (255–8) The word “throbbing” is in itself a trochee, and when EBB makes her sound match her sense, she switches from an iambic to a trochaic metre to evoke the memory-triggering rhythm of which the spirits of the trees speak. They say that they are responding to creation in their “throbbing”: Each still throbbing in vibration Since that crowning of creation When the God-breath spake abroad, Let us make man like to God! (271–4) The agent of creation is, as the first lines of Genesis affirm,“the God-breath” or “the awful word” (276), and its creative power manifests itself as vibrations, like those of the plucked string of a musical instrument, as EBB says in a crucial simile: And the pine stood quivering As the awful word went by,

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Like a vibrant music-string Stretched from mountain-peak to sky. (275–8) EBB’s own trochaic lines are symbolic of such vibrations; that is, they participate ontologically in the rhythm of creation itself. But not, as one might (mistakenly) expect, with an unvaried thump-thump. Instead, meaning and variation go hand in hand to suggest the exuberant variety of the divine creative power. Consider, for instance, the lines “And the cedar’s strong black shade / Fluttered brokenly and grand” (281–2). EBB has already appealed to her reader’s kinesthetic sense with her dominant trochaic metre. We expect a trochee in the first foot and don’t get one (“And the”); instead, that foot functions as an anacrusis, leading into the trochaic “cedar.” The spondee “strong black” reinforces the meaning of “strong,” but we continue to hear the trochaic metre with the word that ends the line, “shade,” because the pause at the end of the line takes the place of the unaccented syllable (trochaic tetrameters in English are often catalectic). The next line, “fluttered brokenly and grand,” breaks the strong trochaic beat just at the end of “brokenly,” where an unaccented syllable takes the place of the expected accent and reflects the meaning of the word where it occurs. Such are the metre and its variations in this passage. What about sound repetition? EBB uses full rhymes, such as “vibration” and “creation,”“abroad” and “God,” but she often avoids their clinching effect by separating them with one or more intervening lines; more frequently there are half-rhymes (“stirring” and “hearing”) or the rhyming of an accented and an unaccented syllable (“fir” and “juniper”). The effect of such variations in sound repetition is to suggest the full harmony of an unfallen world, of which the sounds of this world are a partial echo. More importantly, the steady beat and units of equal time that are the defining characteristics of the music of Eden can be copied in our fallen world, and while sound repetition will eventually fail as a continuing reminder of an unfallen world, beating time will not. The spirits of the trees define the response to creation as Milton does, as “emotion jubilant” (284), and that emotion manifests itself in rhythm that can still be sensed in nature in the fallen world:

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fre s h st r a n ge mus i c Which divine impulsion cleaves In dim movements to the leaves Dropt and lifted, dropt and lifted In the sunlight greenly sifted, – In the sunlight and the moonlight Greenly sifted through the trees. (285–90)

Just as the “dim movements” of the leaves manifest a “divine impulsion,” so the trees of Eden wave With a ruffling of green branches Shaded off to resonances, Never stirred by rain or breeze. (293–5) How well the half-rhyme, “branches” and “resonances,” serves EBB’s purpose here! And that line,“Shaded off to resonances,” is in effect her definition of the Fall. The chorus of the tree spirits ends with a refrain that will be used by other spirits in Eden as well. Its operative word is (like that of Poe’s raven) “nevermore,” and its message is that the loss of each feature of Eden is absolute. Two sets of lines state the tragedy:“The sylvan sounds, no longer audible, / Expire at Eden’s door” (297–8) and “Farewell! the trees of Eden / Ye shall hear nevermore” (301–2). Between those lines are two lines that, at first glance, affirm that total loss, but that, in their ambiguity, suggest deprivation rather than something never to be recovered: “Each footstep of your treading / Treads out some murmur which ye heard before” (299–300). “Treads out” can mean obliterate, but it can also mean that the rhythm of the footsteps retains the music of the murmur, and allows us to access it in a fallen world. (The link between walking and feet in poetry is another dimension of poetry’s “animal life,” the link depending on the etymology of “pedestrian.”) Those lines, with their double meaning, form the repeated chorus of each of the groups of spirits: the spirits of the trees first, then the riverspirits, the bird-spirit (which is the nightingale), and the flower-spirits. The nightingale affirms that the “warden angels” allow its song to pass “Over the gate and after you!” (337), and it defines its music thus:

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And I build my song of high pure notes, Note over note, height over height, Till I strike the arch of the Infinite, And I bridge abysmal agonies With strong, clear calms of harmonies, – And something abides and something floats, In the song which I sing after you. (341–7) “Something abides” – yet another hint that the Fall is not absolute. But the hint is even stronger in EBB’s handling of the prosody of those lines. A metrical analysis reveals no one dominant metre: she combines iambs, trochees, anapests, and spondees to produce “strong, clear calms of harmonies” that are supported by the rhetorical schemes she uses (the parallelism of “something abides and something floats,” the double epanalepsis of “Note over note, height over height,” where she neatly contrasts the word repetition with the trochee-iamb combination of each scheme). All of these varying elements she holds together with the music of the lines. To hear that, one needs to identify the bars – the units of equal time – and to remember that they do not coincide with the metrical feet. Thus, in lines 346 and 347, for instance, a bar begins (if one assumes a 2/4 time signature) with the accented syllable “some” of the first “something”; the next bar begins with the accented syllable “bides,” the next with the second “some,” and the next with “floats.” That bar includes the pause at the end of line 346 and the first two unaccented words of the next line (“In the”). Yet another bar begins with the word “song,” and another with “sing.” But the sounds are more complex than this fairly straightforward analysis of accent and beat would suggest. For instance, how are we to hear the end of line 347, “which I sing after you”? Two voicings are possible. One makes “sing after” a bar and “you” the beginning of the next bar, with the pause at the end of the line filling out the unit. But there might also be a pause after “sing,” and if so, then “sing” and the rest following it make a complete bar, and the next bar begins with the accented syllable “af.” The meaning is also double. “After” may mean simply a temporal sequence, in which Adam and Eve sing and then the nightingale sings; but it more likely means “after” in the sense of copy, the nightingale picking up the “abysmal agonies” of the Fall and integrating them into its own more

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comprehensive harmonies. “After” may even have the sense of “in pursuit of,” as the nightingale, “nearest” of the bird-spirits in Eden, flings its song “Over the gate and through the mail / Of the warden angels marshalled strong” (335–6). These last readings suggest that the final bar of music begins with “af.” When we read the line, we hear in our minds both patterns, and several meanings. Whatever the voicing of those lines, EBB’s prosody embodies her version of the Arminian theology that underpins Milton’s Paradise Lost. Unlike the Calvinists, who held that with the Fall the reason of human beings became utterly depraved, the Arminians affirmed that human reason was indeed darkened and deprived, but not wholly incapable, on its own, of a move back toward God. EBB’s terms that parallel the Calvinist and Arminian positions are “lost” and “exiled.” She ends her drama with the words “exiled, but not lost!” (2270), a line that defines the theme of the piece, and the dramatic action is the way in which Adam and Eve gradually come to understand, and accept, the difference between being utterly “lost” and being “exiled.” EBB embodies that difference in her characterization of Adam and Lucifer: Adam is “exiled,” but Lucifer is “lost.” Lucifer is, EBB says in her preface, “an extreme Adam” representing “the ultimate tendencies of sin and loss,” while Adam and Eve embody “the Idea of exile.” With that idea, EBB’s drama is, like Milton’s epic, a tragedy, but with the promise of a comedic ending, and that promise is bound up, in EBB’s design, with the contrast between Lucifer and Christ. But she muddies our understanding of the difference by using the word “exile” for both. When the volume was in press, she called its major poem “Masque of Exile,” and she called it that, she explained to Hugh Stuart Boyd in March 1844, “because it refers to Lucifer’s exile, and to That other mystical exile of the Divine Being, which was the means of the return homewards of my Adam & Eve” (bc 8: 267). So “exile” is both an antonym for loss and a label for life out of heaven, a death-dealing one for Lucifer, a life-giving one for Christ. In spite of EBB’s statement in her preface to Poems (1844) that the form of A Drama of Exile “approach[es] the model of the Greek tragedy,” its genre is (as her earlier title indicates) principally a masque, like Milton’s Comus, though EBB treats the masque elements freely for her own purposes. Comus was social entertainment for a ceremonial occasion, and its

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purpose was to compliment a nobleman on an official appointment. The main movement of the masque is to bring the complimenters to the complimented. That movement is the structural principle of the genre, which is, as A.S.P. Woodhouse long ago argued, “an artistically retarded procession. Drama and spectacle … poetry, music and song, declamation and debate, are all parts” of this stately and complex action (57). But the procession in this masque is hardly conventional and certainly not ceremonial. Rather, it is the flight of Adam and Eve from the angels and the flaming sword that shut them out of paradise, and it is a movement “between the glory and dark” (476), “across / This desolating radiance cast by swords” (520–1). But, as is conventional in the masque, the movement, however unusual, is arrested, first by the Chorus of Eden Spirits, and the stopping of their flight is the dramatic enactment of EBB’s theme, that Adam and Eve are exiled but not lost. In spite of their sin, they are in fact the complimented in this masque, and the complimenters remind them not just of what they have lost but of how much they retain. The formal elements that arrest the flight are those conventional in the masque: choruses and music, dialogue and debate, and spectacle that culminates in the appearance of Christ. Early on in the drama, Adam and Eve themselves stop the action to debate their response to their plight: Eve, reiterating her confession of sin in book 10 of Milton’s poem, asks Adam to repudiate her; Adam, also expressing again his confession of sin, affirms their solitude – that is, their togetherness (their “solitary way,” in Milton’s words). Eve thinks better of her prayer that she be allowed to die, and says that, as she was “the first / In the transgression” she will be “first to tread from this sword-glare / Into the outer darkness of the waste” (546– 9). These decisions and these vows are the expression of reason not utterly depraved, and of liberty not utterly lost, and when they are voiced, Adam apprehends sounds that not only stop their flight but alter its character: What sounds! what sounds! I feel a music which comes straight from Heaven, As tender as a watering dew. (551–3) Note that he “feels” the music rather than hearing it, and the word “feels” suggests a kinesthetic response as well as an emotional one. Eve confirms

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that the sounds are not from the angels guarding paradise and shutting them out, but from the “love-angels” (555) – seraphim, that is – arresting their progress toward “the outer darkness of the waste” and keeping them connected with the world they have lost. The “Chorus of Invisible Angels” confirms that continuing connection: “Farewells evermore may, / Blessing in the teaching, / Glide from us to you” (580–2). EBB asserted, in her preface to Poems (1844), that A Drama of Exile was “the longest and most important work (to me!) which I ever entrusted into the current of publication” (webb 2: 567), and while the preface suggests reasons for that claim, not least among them her desire to make “expressible by a woman”“Eve’s allotted grief,” the working out of ideas about music and language in relation to the Fall is another reason for her presenting the work as a major one. Feminist critics have definitively examined EBB’s approach to “Eve’s allotted grief ”; I want to focus on EBB’s chief dramatization of her ideas about music and language – the scene with Adam, Eve, and Lucifer in the middle of the piece. At first the appearance of Lucifer seems a conventional threat: Eve asks Adam to hold her hand (the crucial “solitary” gesture at the very end of Milton’s epic) and says that “we have love to lose” (647). What that has to do with language gradually becomes evident when Lucifer speculates on the nature of beauty, or, more accurately, on how he names beauty: What is this thought or thing Which I call beauty? is it thought, or thing? Is it a thought accepted for a thing? Or both? or neither? – a pretext – a word? (769–72) Speculating on the nature of the relation between “thought” and “thing” suggests the empiricist theory of language, from Locke as transmitted by Horne Tooke. Is the relation an arbitrary one (as Locke argued), or may the thing simply be substituted for the name (as in the misreading of Locke that identifies the thing – a physical object – with our idea of the thing – a mental construct)? In the crucial part of the dialogue, Lucifer says of the word “beauty,” Its meaning flutters in me like a flame

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Under my own breath: my perceptions reel For evermore around it, and fall off, As if it too were holy. (773–6) “Which it is,” Eve asserts, and Adam explains: The essence of all beauty, I call love. The attribute, the evidence, and end, The consummation to the inward sense, Of beauty apprehended from without, I still call love. (777–81) We might have expected Adam to do what he does later in the drama, voice the Adamic theory of language, derived from his naming of the beasts, where his instant apprehension of the nature of each creature results in a name participating ontologically in that nature, but instead he voices a theory in which the substance of language – that which stands under it and gives it its power and truth – is love. Love is a creative and sustaining force, like the divine fiat, and in a linking that is perhaps Neoplatonic, Adam identifies love as that which holds together the true and the beautiful (and, presumably, the good). Adams piles up the nouns for love in relation to beauty: love is its “essence,” “the attribute, the evidence, and end,” “the consummation of the inward sense.” “The inward sense” suggests the powers of the mind itself, “mind” as in Leibnitz’s well-known qualification (quoted by Coleridge in Aids to Reflection (Works 9: 226) and the Biographia Literaria (Works 7 (part 1): 141) and quoted by EBB herself in the notes on Carlyle that she prepared for R.H. Horne in 1844, bc 8: 353), his addition to Locke’s assertion that there is nothing in the mind prior to sensation – except the mind itself. A conventional result of the Fall is the inability of human beings to hear the music of the spheres, but as Lucifer fades away, no more substantial than the arbitrary language that is the only kind of language he can understand, music grows stronger on the ears of Adam and Eve. Eve describes how it first manifests itself: It throbs in on us like a plaintive heart,

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As the music grows stronger, it “gather[s] itself unto uncertain articulation” and then into words. The sequence is a critique of the empiricist theory of language, arbitrary sounds fading away to nothing and substantial sounds becoming clearer and more articulate. The sounds become the “Song of the Morning Star to Lucifer,” and the relation between those two characters is a crucial part of EBB’s drama. Lucifer was once, of course, the morning star, but now his name has separated from his original being. He is male; she is female, and her song is a lament or complaint in which the chorus is, as the editors of webb point out,“a modernization of the Greek formulaic expression of woe” (1: 72n32). She defines what she has lost: once he breathed “communicable grace / Of life into my light” (836–7), and as a result she moved with the circular movement of the spheres in a state of ultimate unity similar to that which Yeats would later define in “There,” and that she suggests in the sound repetition of “wound” and “interwound” and “around”: I wound and interwound, While all the cyclic heavens about me spun. Stars, planets, suns, and moons dilated broad, Then flashed together into a single sun, And wound, and wound in one … (860–4) Such identity was lost in the sublunar world with the Fall, and it is lost to Morning Star as well, but she will regain it, as a passage at the very end of the Drama affirms, when she “will give / Her name of ‘Bright and Morning-Star’ to HIM” (2230) – to Christ, that is, who at the end of the Book of Revelation claims oneness with “the bright and morning star” (Rev. 22:16). The spheres, with their music and circular movement and ultimate identity with the sun, have their fallen counterpart in “the zodiac of the

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earth” (975), and while the music of the spheres is substantial and real, the signs of the zodiac appear to Adam and Eve as a nightmare world of insubstantial sounds and appearances:“Strange phantasms of pale shadow!” (973),“Shadows without a body, which contract / And lengthen as we gaze on them” (906–7). Adam explicitly makes the “twelve shadowy signs of earth” (977) the fallen version of “those celestial, constellated twelve” (979) and says that they “[foreshow] life and death” (990). Eve asks the crucial question: “By dream or sense, / Do we see this?” (990–1). Adam responds with an affirmation of their continuing ability to apprehend meaning beyond sensory experience: Our spirits have climbed high By reason of the passion of our grief, And, from the top of sense, looked over sense, To the significance and heart of things Rather than things themselves. (991–5) He then takes Eve through the signs of the zodiac, with each one assuaging“the terror of the shadows” with “suggestions of the creatures” (999–1000) provided by “stricter apprehension of the sight” (998). His naming goes beyond sensory experience of the creatures, but the hope embodied in his continuing ability to do so is challenged by two spirits,“of organic and inorganic nature,” who lament their being with sounds Adam describes as “bleak” and a “phantasm of thin sound” (1042–3). The spirits blame Adam and Eve for their present state and berate them as “Accursed transgressors!” (1122). Like the ouroboros, they curl round the guilty pair and shut them in (1144–6). The reader might expect Adam to answer the spirits’ charge, but it is Eve who does so, as part of EBB’s agenda to focus on “Eve’s allotted grief … imperfectly apprehended hitherto, and more expressible by a woman than a man.” In a long speech, during which she brushes aside Adam’s attempts to speak for her, Eve asks for “such pardoning grace as can go forth / From clean volitions toward a spotted will” (1188–9). Eve carries with her a faded rose, plucked in Eden “This morning as I went forth” – a later version of the roses Adam had woven into a garland for the unfallen Eve in Milton’s poem, “faded” when he hears of her

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trespass – and it becomes an emblem of both memory and hope. The movement at this juncture in the masque is circular, as EBB’s stage directions indicate, “a bleak wind … spins around the earth-zodiac … and then wailing off into the east, carries the rose away with it” (webb 1: 51). Eve’s response is to fall upon her face. Then “the wind revolves from the east, and round again to the east, perfumed by the Eden-rose, and full of voices which sweep out into articulation as they pass.” Eve responds to the voices by saying “I hear life” (1581), an interpretation that matches the etymology of her name. There are “infant voices,” “youthful voices,” “poet voices,” “philosophic voices,” and several others, all of them affirming life but expressing doubt “Lest it be all in vain,” as the earth spirits threaten. The only figure who can guarantee life is Christ, and EBB daringly has him appear – “in the midst of the zodiac, which pales before the heavenly light. The Earth Spirits grow greyer and fainter” (webb 1: 56). Christ rebukes the Spirits of the Earth, and then exhorts Adam to bless Eve, saying it is his “office” to do so. Adam pronounces a “full-leaved prophecy” (1831) – it is that Eve’s seed shall bruise the serpent’s head – and he does so by linking this moment with his naming of the beasts: Lo, my voice, Which, naming erst the creatures, did express (God breathing through my breath) the attributes And instincts of each creature in its name, Floats to the same afflatus … (1825–9) The words of the prophecy, then, are not arbitrary (as in the Lockean theory of naming) but necessary and natural (as in the Cratylian view). At the end of the Drama, the Earth Spirits vanish, “the stars shine out above,” and a “chorus of invisible angels” affirms an ultimate, inclusive, and comprehensive “harmony.” The chorus sings of welcoming the souls of Adam and Eve after death, Floated on a minor fine Into the full chant divine, We will draw you smoothly, –

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While the human in the minor Makes the harmony diviner. (2081–5) The minor key is EBB’s trope for life on earth, and it is yet one more indication of the continuing link she is asserting between a fallen and unfallen world. A major key and a minor key are of course part of the same harmonic system, the only difference being in the interval of the third, which in a minor key is one semi-tone less than the major. Popular views of minor keys linked them with something plaintive, sadness mingled with longing, and perhaps those emotions are suggested here, only to be superseded by the hallelujah chorus of “the full chant divine.” So EBB constructs a myth of musical prosody. In the next chapter, I examine how she constructs its history in her review of English poetry. Chronologically, that review precedes A Drama of Exile, but her history had already been preceded by a text where she explores the myth, “An Island” (webb 1: 489–501). So myth and history are two poles constantly interacting in EBB’s thinking about her art.

4 the romance of english poetry

In 1842, at the invitation of the editor of the Athenaeum, EBB wrote what was ostensibly a review of an anthology of poetry, The Book of the Poets, but what was in fact her history of English poetry from medieval times up to the present. Hers is a true literary history. Not a recitation of names, years of birth and death, titles of works, and dates of publication, but an account of the nature and spirit of English poetry and its evolving forms. She spells out her chronology at the end of her “Third Notice,” where she defines “five eras of English poetry: the first, the Chaucerian, although we might call it Chaucer; the second, the Elizabethan; the third, which culminates in Cowley; the fourth, in Dryden and the French school; the fifth, the return to nature in Cowper and his successors of our day” (webb 4: 466). The five eras, EBB insists,“have each a characteristic as clear in poetry as in chronology” (4: 466), the distinctions among the eras resting upon that element of poetry most important to EBB: its music, and all the aspects of prosody that create it – the handling of quantity and accent, cadence, and rhyme. In our own time, Hayden White has argued that the determinant of meaning in history is the literary shape or plot that the historian brings to his or her material. The narrative EBB uses to shape her history is one of the most popular kinds of storytelling in the nineteenth century, the romance, and it takes the form of the birth, youth, testing, death, and rebirth of the hero, who in her narrative is poetry itself, which has many faces. The hero is conventionally linked with the sun god, and EBB starts her history in that way: “Our poetry has an heroic genealogy,” she begins; “It arose where the sun rises, in the far East” (webb 4: 445).

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The age of Chaucer is the youth of English poetry. Chaucer himself “was made for an early poet, and the metaphors of dawn and spring doubly become him” (webb 4: 446). In this first era, the characters in the story are Chaucer and Gower, Occleve and Lydgate, and when the latter “ceased his singing, none sang better; there was silence in the land” (449). And so began “the long silence from Chaucer and his disciples down to the sixteenth century” (450). EBB’s metaphors for this “long silence” are drawn from fairy tales, a major form of romance: it is “the trance of English Poetry,” a “deep sleep” before an awakening that is in fact a rebirth, as EBB’s allusions to the life of Apollonius of Tyana make clear. The age of Elizabeth and the first half of the seventeenth century are the summertime of English poetry and drama: “full were they of poets as the summerdays are of birds” (457). “Never before nor since has such a crowd of true poets uttered true poetic speech in one day!” (457). The two “master-souls” (457) are Shakspeare [sic] and Spenser. In the romance that she is constructing, EBB associates Spenser not only with summer, but also with laughter and cheerfulness. With him are “singers in every class” (457), including translators and satirists,“lyrists and sonnetteers” (459), dramatists and, of course, Shakespeare, though “it is hard to speak” of him. But speak of him EBB does: he is the model, the ideal, the fullest realization of the hero that is English poetry. EBB characterizes him in several contexts. When she, as usual, defines “the poetic temperament” as “half way between the light of the ideal and the darkness of the real” (455), she asserts that Shakespeare attained “to the highest vision of the idealist, which is subjectivity turned outward into an actual objectivity” (456). On the issue of Nature and Art, EBB affirms that Shakespeare was “a great natural genius,” as “nobody … has doubted,” and also, by necessity,“a great artist” (462). For “Art lives by Nature, and not the bare mimetic life generally attributed to Art: she does not imitate, she expounds. Interpres naturae – is the poet-artist; and the poet wisest in nature is the most artistic poet!” As such, Shakespeare is “the greatest artist in the world” (462). The third era is the beginning of a decline, and the change comes about through “the idol-worship of rhyme” (webb 4: 466). EBB’s metaphors for this and the next era are corruption, disease, and violence. “The corruption of the versification” in the third era “is only the preparation for

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the fourth consummating one – the hesitation before the crime – we smell the blood through it in the bath-room!” (467). In the Augustan age (her fourth era) both Art and Nature “were at least maimed and dejected and sickening day by day,” and “our poetry stood still” (474–5). In the midst of the general decline and near-death of English poetry, one figure, like the “one just man” in every generation foretold by Michael in Paradise Lost, preserves the true spirit of poetry, and he is Milton. “This divine poet” (webb 4: 470), EBB calls him.“There never lived a poet in any age … more isolated in the contemporaneous world than he” (470), and “his music, like the spherical tune, [was] inaudible because too fine and high” (471). “He stood in the midst of those whom we are forced to consider the corrupt versificators of his day, an iconoclast of their idol rhyme, and protesting practically against the sequestration of pauses” (471). By this point EBB is beginning her fourth notice – the final one – and being “benighted in our wandering and straitened for room” (webb 4: 475), hastens to her end, which is (as is conventional in romance) the hero’s recovery. This notice opens with “the generation of Dryden and … Pope his inheritor” (472), and for that age,“pet-named the Augustan” (474), EBB uses, as already noted, metaphors of physical and mental decline and disease. And in her survey of the poets of the second half of the eighteenth century, her governing metaphor is again disease, but “it was the sickness of renewal rather than of death,” and “the new era was alive in Cowper” (476; I have amended webb’s “then” to the Athenaeum’s “than”). And not only in Cowper, but in Beattie and Burns and Percy’s Reliques: “It was the revival of poetry – the opening of the fifth era, – the putting down of the Dryden dynasty – the breaking of the serf bondage – the wrenching of the iron from the soul” (477). So EBB ends her romance, at least insofar as her history is a review of The Book of the Poets, but she continues it in a review of Wordsworth, published in the Athenaeum in the same month – August 1842 – as the last of her four previous notices. It appeared, she tells Thomas Westwood many months later,“soon after the last of the papers on the English poets, I think, – & serving as a sort of corollary to that subject, upon the editor’s suggestion” (bc 8: 123). In it she picks up her romance where she left off, with “a change – a revival – an awakening” (webb 4: 508), and with the naming again of Cowper, Burns, and Percy – and, beyond them, with “a

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group of noble hearts,” among them Coleridge (508). EBB characterizes the change as a return to nature, and the chief figure in this “re-dawning” is Wordsworth. He is the “poet-hero of a movement essential to the better being of poetry” (510). Her last paragraph is an account of the “true poet,” whose art requires “the whole man,” and so she carries her history down to her own day, when “the Tennysons and the Brownings, and other high-gifted spirits, will work, wait on” (516). The naming of Robert Browning, as the editors of webb point out (519n32), is EBB’s first published reference to him, and predates her (far better known) naming of him in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship. And, in the romance that EBB is constructing, the hero with many faces that is English poetry now finds his embodiment in two of her contemporaries, one of whom will become the hero not only of EBB the critic, literary historian, and fellow poet, but also of EBB the woman. Such is the literary shape of EBB’s history. Romance is the determinant of that shape but the subject of her history is the music of poetry, which depends upon the nature of the language itself. When poets make artistic use of the music inherent in the English language, poetry flourishes; when they allow foreign influences (which EBB, along with others of her generation, labels “French”), poetry declines. A typical statement of hers is in an 1843 letter to Hugh Stuart Boyd, in which she refers to “the old masterpoets, English poets, those of the Elizabeth & James ages, before the corruption of French rhythms stole in with Waller & Denham, & was acclimated into a national inodorousness by Dryden & Pope” (bc 7: 332). EBB nowhere says explicitly that her views depend upon her understanding of the character of the English language itself, and there are only hints here and there that she was aware of the new philology that was transforming the study of languages in her own day. One such hint is in her comments on Chaucer, whose music she praises as the “true height” of her first era: he “utters as true music as ever came from poet or musician; … some of the sweetest cadences in all our English are extant in his” (webb 4: 446). EBB contrasts him with the syllable-counters of the “French” school: “Not one of the ‘Queen Anne’s men,’ measuring out a tuneful breath upon their fingers, like ribbons for topknots, did know the art of versification as the old rude Chaucer knew it. Call him rude, for the picturesqueness of the epithet; but his verse has, at least, as much regularity in the sense of

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true art, and more manifestly in proportion to our increasing acquaintance with his dialect and pronunciation, as can be discovered or dreamed in the French school” (447).“Our increasing acquaintance with his dialect and pronunciation”: those were the concerns of the new philologists, of Charles Richardson, for instance, who had published his New Dictionary of the English Language in 1836–7. There is an unspoken assumption behind EBB’s comment: that the spoken language, if we understand it properly, is naturally musical, and falls into units of equal time, with the voice naturally rising and falling in each cadence. If we are to understand fully EBB’s characterization of Chaucer as the hero of her first era of English poetry, we must take into account her contributions to a collection of Chaucer’s poems published in London in 1841. It was The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized, under the initiative of Richard Hengist Horne and others, and the purpose of the collection, Horne’s editorial principles, and the nature of EBB’s translations all fill out our understanding of Chaucer as hero. As Karen Hodder points out,“transposing Chaucer’s poetry into more accessible linguistic forms and hence reaching a wider audience in contemporary terms” has a long history, but in 1841 the concern was not so much with unfamiliar words in Chaucer’s vocabulary as it was with (in Hodder’s words) “unravelling the complexities of Chaucer’s metre, of separating it from neo-classical norms of heroic verse, and in finding a context for it among the adaptations of heroic poetry by Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley” (Book Collector 223). Those concerns Horne explores in his introduction to Chaucer’s poems. Like EBB, he rejects the view of Chaucer as rough and rude in his versification (in a quotation already used in my introduction to this book): “Our position is, that Chaucer was a most harmonious and melodious poet, and that he was a perfect master of the various forms of versification in which he wrote; that the principle on which his rhythm is founded fuses and subjects within itself all the minor details of metre; that this principle, though it has been understood only by the few, and never systematically explained, is, more or less, inseparable from the composition of an harmonious versification in the English language; and that he, the first man, if not unrivalled in the varied music of his verse, has scarcely been surpassed by any succeeding poet” (xxxviii). Horne goes on to analyze a great many of Chaucer’s lines, and concludes by saying that he hopes “the fundamental principle

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of Chaucer’s rhythm is made plain” (l), but since he rarely uses the word “quantity,” and does not talk about long or short syllables or about isochronous units, the reader may perhaps be excused for wondering exactly what that “fundamental principle” is. The clue lies in the adjective Horne does use: “musical.” It points to units of equal time, and hence when Chaucer adds syllables for variety, “laws of contraction by apostrophe, syncope, &c.” (lxxxv) preserve those units, and are “the secret of Chaucer’s rhythm in his heroic verse, which had been the baffling subject of so much discussion among scholars” (lxxxiv). Earlier, Horne quoted a statement by George Darley that he calls “the finest theory ever yet broached on poetical rhythm” (lviii). The words are from Darley’s introduction to his two-volume edition of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, published in 1840, and while the diction sounds soft and sentimental, Horne is, I think, quoting it as precise and technical: “Every true poet has a song in his mind,” and “that poet who has none of this dumb music going on within him, will neither produce any by his versification, nor prove an imaginative or impassioned writer: he will want the harmonizer which attunes heart, and mind, and soul” (lviii). Of what does that “dumb music” consist? In a footnote Horne links such music to the heartbeat: “I submit … that this system of scanning, – all the talk about hexameters and pentameters, iambics and trochees, dactyls and spondees, and other pickings of dry bones, – are totally inapplicable to the fundamental principle of English verse. It would be far nearer the truth were we to call our scanning gear by such terms as systole and diastole, – metre being understood as muscle, and pulsation as rhythm, – varying with every emotion” (lxxxiv). Kirstie Blair quite rightly quotes that statement when she is showing how writers from the 1830s onwards described the affective function of poetry as regulating the heartbeat (79). In letters to Mary Russell Mitford, EBB speaks of affect in the same way. “The poet’s power over the pulses” is a phrase she uses in a letter of 12 November 1841 – a power she finds missing in “a long poem of Miss Garrow’s” in the most recent edition of The Keepsake (bc 5: 169); and she reiterates that criticism on 1 December, when she says that “it is not a poet’s poetry – & leaves the reader’s pulses at leisure” (176). EBB’s own 1842 comments in The Book of the Poets on Chaucer’s versification echo those of Horne in his introduction. She too condemns the

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conventional scansion of the day, and points to a more fundamental principle: Critics indeed have set up a system based upon the crushed atoms of first principles, maintaining that poor Chaucer wrote by accent only! Grant to them that he counted no verses on his fingers; grant that he never disciplined his highest thoughts to walk up and down in paddock – ten paces and a turn; grant that his singing is not after the likeness of their singsong – but there end your admissions. It is our ineffaceable impression, in fact, that the whole theory of accent and quantity held in relation to ancient and modern poetry stands upon a fallacy; totters rather than stands; and that when considered in connexion with such old moderns as our Chaucer, the fallaciousness is especially apparent. Chaucer wrote by quantity, just as Homer did before him, just as Goethe did after him, just as all poets must. Rules differ, principles are identical. All rhythm presupposes quantity. (webb 4: 447) EBB then makes explicit the parallel between poetic rhythm and music: “Organ-pipe or harp, the musician plays by time. Greek or English, Chaucer or Pope, the poet sings by time” (webb 4: 447). And she makes clear the fact that the units of equal time include not only the voiced syllables or sounded notes, but the pauses or rests as well: “What is this accent but a stroke, an emphasis, with a successive pause to make complete the time?” (447). Then she provides musical metaphors for accent and quantity, metaphors that parallel her use of the words “diapason” and “symphony”: “what is the difference between this accent and quantity but the difference between a harp-note and an organ-note? otherwise, quantity expressed in different ways?” (447; in the usually impeccably edited 2010 webb, the first “quantity” in my quotation appears as “quality,” but a check of the original text in the Athenaeum indicates that the word is “quantity”). EBB thus advocates a rich and complex-sounding poetry, where poets exploit, and readers hear, “quantity expressed in different ways,” simultaneously. When Horne is dealing with the principles of translation in his introduction, he sets out the two conventional extremes – rendering the spirit rather than the letter, and retaining the existing substance as far as possi-

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ble – and opts for the latter as “the safest method, as the most becoming” (xxxiii). So does EBB. The text she chooses to translate is certainly a less familiar one (in keeping with the declared editorial policy of the volume), and it is the most complex, in terms of metre and rhyme, of all Chaucer’s texts: “Queen Annelida and False Arcite.” It begins as rime royal and continues (in the complaint that makes up the bulk of this apparently incomplete poem) in a nine-line stanza with only two rhymes. EBB’s main concern is to retain Chaucer’s music. She does, of course, translate unfamiliar Middle English words, such as “elde” (“Time” in line 12) – that is the popular understanding of the task of the translator – but she takes great pains to preserve the rhythm of his lines. Her main obstacle in doing so is the difference in pronunciation between Chaucer’s English and nineteenth-century English. The most frequently recurring difference is the final “e” and the endings “es” and “en,” pronounced in Chaucer’s day but not sounded from the fifteenth century onwards. EBB’s solution is to retain Chaucer’s vocabulary insofar as it coincides with modern English, and to add an unaccented syllable or two to replace the no-longer-sounded endings. In the very first line, for instance, she manages the loss of the final “e” of “ferse” and the final “es” of “armes” (“Thou ferse god of armes”) by adding an “O” at the beginning of the line (“O thou fierce God of armies”) and by shifting from “arms” to “armies,” to take advantage of the modern pronunciation of the plural ending. Somewhat more problematic is her apparent regularizing of those lines of Chaucer that begin with an accented syllable, such as line 4, “Honoured art, as patroun of that place.” This becomes, in EBB’s text, “Art honoured as the patron of that place,” and she seems to be replacing Chaucer’s trochees with her own more regular sounding iambs. But Chaucer’s units of time do not necessarily coincide with his line endings; line 3 is enjambed, and the rhyme word “drede” has a final pronounced “e” that precedes the accented “Hon” in the next line, so by adding “Art” EBB is preserving exactly the rhythm of the original. Chaucer’s rhymes present less of a difficulty for EBB: if Chaucer’s rhyme words end in an “e” (such as “rede” and “drede” in the first lines), EBB does not try to add a syllable to each of those lines, but allows the pause at the line end to fill out the isochronous unit. We can see how closely EBB follows Chaucer if we place their texts side by side. Here, for instance, is an early stanza in the complaint, where EBB

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retains Chaucer’s rhyme words (so long as they are familiar in modern English) and, more importantly, his rhythm: I ought to know it well as any wight,

I wot myself as wel as any wight; For I loved one with all my heart For I loved oon with al and might, myn herte and myght, More than myself a hundred-thousand More then myself an fold, hundred thousand sithe, And calléd him my heart’s dear life, And called him myn my knight, hertes lif, my knyght, And was all his, as far as it was right; And was al his, as fer as hit was ryght; His gladness did my blitheness make And when that he was of old, glad, then was I blithe, And in his least disease my death And his disese was my was told; deth as swithe; Who, on his side, had plighted lovers’ And he ayein his trouthe plight, hath me plyght Me, evermore, his lady and love to hold. For evermore, his lady me to kythe. In the fourth quoted line here EBB uses her usual technique of adding a syllable (“dear” in “heart’s dear life”) to replace the no-longer sounded “es” in the original (“my hertes lif ”). In the last two lines she adds her own complications to the rhythm with a pause before and after the parenthetical phrase in the second-last line and with two unaccented syllables (“y and”) in the last line, those syllables to be pronounced at twice the speed of “la” and “love” and corresponding to nothing in Chaucer’s line, though sounding very much like the freedom Chaucer himself sometimes takes with pauses and extra syllables. EBB’s translation of Chaucer provides a fuller context for understanding her account of the music of English poetry and its basis in the music of the language itself. Chaucer is her first hero, as we have seen. The next, who ushers in EBB’s second era, is a relatively obscure poet, Stephen Hawes,

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whose life she treats as a romance: his education, his courtship and marriage, his being happy “‘all the rest of his life,’” his writing about his own death and funeral, and his composing of his own epitaph. Others may be amused by him, she writes, but she quotes a passage of his and says, “it ‘ringeth’ in our ear with a soft and solemn music to which the soul is prodigal of echoes. We may answer for the poetic faculty of its ‘maker’” (webb 4: 451). So the music of English poetry revives in Hawes, and her comment on two of Hawes’s lines is high praise. The lines are these: “Was never payne but it had joye at last / In the fayre morrow.” EBB’s comment: “There is a lovely cadence!” (451). If she is referring to that final line – and I think she is – the voice rises to two accented syllables (“fayre” and “mor”) and then falls to the last unaccented syllable and the silence that follows, all in expressive contrast to the iambic regularity of the preceding line. And if we understand “cadence” as an isochronous unit, it is the last three syllables of that line (“fayre morrow”) and the rest that is indicated by the period. With Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, and their contemporaries EBB runs into some difficulties in maintaining her narrative of the reawakening of music in English poetry, but she simply tosses aside possible objections. Skelton is “strong” and “rough,” but “we do not doubt his influence for good upon our language” (452). Surrey may be considered by others to be “‘our first metrical writer,’” but that view “lies not in our creed” (453). Nonetheless, his is “a high name” (453), but not so high as that of Wyatt, “the first songwriter (that praise we must secure to him) of his generation” (453). EBB acutely observes Wyatt’s transitional place in her history: “as if the language, consciously insecure in her position, were balancing her accentual being and the forms of her pronunciation” (453). The music of English poetry, in EBB’s scheme of things, manifests itself most powerfully in blank (rather than rhymed) verse, and she traces the emergence of the form that finds its most skilful practitioners in Shakespeare and Milton. Surrey wrote the first blank verse, in his translation of two books of the Aeneid. “Sackville, Lord Dorset, takes up the new blank verse from the lips of Surrey, and turns it to its right use of tragedy” (webb 4: 454). Gascoigne wrote “the second blank verse tragedy” and “the first blank verse original poem” (454). But neither learned “the secret of the blank verse of Shakspeare, and Fletcher, and Milton,” which was “the arched cadence, with its artistic key-stone and underflood of broad continuous

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sound” (454). That sentence is EBB’s definition of the music of blank verse, and we need to examine her terms and metaphors. Cadence is natural to the English language. Every syntactical unit in the language is rhythmical, with the voice rising to the point of highest emphasis and then falling away to a pause. For that movement the metaphor of the wave is an obvious trope, but EBB’s explicit metaphor is the more static arch (“arched cadence”), which enables her use of a related metaphor, the “artistic key-stone.” It is the syllable that receives the greatest emphasis, the strongest propulsion of air through the vocal chords, and the art of the key-stone consists in making that syllable coincide with meaning and effect. What then does she mean by her other metaphor, the “underflood of broad continuous sound”? It seems to be something like the drone sound in bagpipe music, and the picture the metaphor creates is of a stream flowing under a stone arch. The “artistic key-stone,” the syllable with the greatest emphasis in the cadence, also marks the beginning of a unit of equal time (as bars in music begin with an ictus or beat), but there is no segmentation, and the sound is continuous, a powerful movement (“flood”) that carries the cadence forward. EBB’s combination of something fixed – arch and key-stone – and something moving – flood – sums up the dynamic relation of structure and freedom that is the essence of her poetics. Such an understanding of cadence is the basis of EBB’s judgments. Marlowe, whom Jonson praised for his “mighty line,” sounds monotonous to EBB: “his cadence revolves like a wheel, progressively, if slowly and heavily, and with an orbicular grandeur of unbroken and unvaried music” (webb 4: 454–5). Spenser is the pre-eminent poet, for his music: “never issued there from lip or instrument, or the tuned causes of nature, more lovely sound than we gather from our Spenser’s Art” (456). Shakespeare “is the most wonderful artist in blank verse of all in England, and almost the earliest” (463). EBB can only characterize his prosody in paradoxes: “his artlessness of art” (463), “a happy mystery of music” (464). “The idol-worship of rhyme” (webb 4: 466) undermined the music of poetry. Prior to the third era, rhyme was only a part of the music of poetry, “a felicitous adjunct, a musical accompaniment, the tinkling of a cymbal through the choral harmonies” (466–7). EBB defines its right re-

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lation to two elements of the music of poetry, the pause, which fills out the isochronous unit, and the “chant,” which is a musical beater of time. Prior to the third era, she says, “You heard [the rhyme] across the changes of the pause, as an undertone of the chant, marking the time with an audible indistinctness, and catching occasionally and reflecting the full light of the emphasis of the sense in mutual elucidation” – this in contrast to “the new practice [that] endeavoured to identify in all possible cases the rhyme and what may be called the sentimental emphasis; securing the latter in the tenth rhyming syllable, and so dishonouring the emphasis of the sentiment into the base use of the marking of the time” (467). And so emerged (what EBB calls) “the despotism of the final emphasis,” for which she blames Dryden (469–70). But rhyme may acceptably be a “timebeater” (to use Coventry Patmore’s 1857 label) if it does so “with an audible indistinctness.” By that she seems to mean if it is combined with enjambement, as opposed to the continuous use of end-stopped lines. She is not suggesting that poets avoid end-stopping altogether, however. The final accented syllable and the rhyme may (to repeat a quotation already used above) “[catch] occasionally and [reflect] the full light of the emphasis of the sense in mutual elucidation” (467). “The despotism of the final emphasis” made enjambement suspect. EBB reports that Boyd said to her that she “should wear the crown in poetry, if I would but follow Pope – but that the dreadful system of running lines into one another, ruins everything” (bc 13: 71). Along with this “unnatural provision” went the use of the pause: “‘Away with all pauses,’ – said the reformers, – ‘except the legitimate pause at the tenth rhyming syllable’” (webb 4: 467). Such were the practices that EBB, with her strong sense of the music of poetry, reacted against. “Counting their syllables” is the fashion EBB attributes to “the poets of Queen Anne’s time” (webb 4: 457). That fault EBB calls “French,” and she was certainly not the first to do so. Arthur Hallam in his 1831 review of Tennyson’s poems had referred to “the French contagion and the heresies of the Popian school,” but EBB is fuller and more precise than Hallam in defining just what “the French school” and “the French contagion” mean. While the life of English poetry depends upon quantity, the decay of English poetry comes of writing “by accent only.” She characterizes “the

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French school” (in words I have already quoted) as counting verses on one’s fingers, disciplining “highest thoughts to walk up and down in a paddock – ten paces and a turn,” and “singsong” (447). The kind of scansion she is describing fails to take into account (what she calls) “making complete the time.” By that phrase EBB understands that the units of equal time in poetry do not coincide with the line divisions; that those units often straddle the line endings, beginning with the “stroke” or “emphasis,” including the pause that follows (if the line is end-stopped), and continuing through any lesser accented syllables at the beginning of the next line until there is another ictus or beat. Among the extracts EBB selects from Wordsworth is a complete poem from his volume of 1842, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years. It is “Airey-Force Valley,” sixteen lines of blank verse, which she quotes in their entirety. What attracts her to these lines? “The charm of the loveliest, freshest landscape-making … in the world,” plus “The prospect presently of a ‘little breeze’” (webb 4: 515), for she is reading Wordsworth while “the sun and air” of Florence “are heavy on us”: she knows that the breeze is not only the best-known image in Wordsworth but the governing image of the “landscape-making (oh, never say painting)” in this poem. The oaks do not feel the breeze, but “the light ash” does, and it in seeming silence makes A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs, Powerful almost as vocal harmony, To stay the wanderer’s steps and soothe his thoughts. “Eye-music”: the word, and the images that make it real, are a remarkable example of synaesthesia; and it is the beat – the “slow-waving boughs” – which make it possible for the eye to hear music. “Charmed writing,” EBB calls these lines (webb 4: 516), no doubt with the etymology of “charm,” from the Latin carmen, song, in mind. Comments in letters fill out EBB’s romance of English poetry. Its heroes of her own day are Wordsworth, Carlyle (“ a great prose poet”), Tennyson, and Browning, and while her notices were appearing in the Athenaeum EBB was telling Mary Russell Mitford that “I am … a hero & heroine-worshipper by religion,” and being a hero-worshipper has con-

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sequences: “it is difficult, nay, impossible for me to believe that the hero, the true genius, is not morally greater, more generous, more faithful, more tender-hearted than the troop of vulgar men” (1 August 1842; bc 6: 50). Wordsworth is “the king-poet of our times,” she tells Hugh Stuart Boyd (7 July 1842; bc 6: 28), and subsequent letters to Boyd (31 August–3 September 1842; 14 September 1842) are a defence of Wordsworth.“Wordsworth is a philosophical & Christian poet, with depths in his soul to which poor Byron could never reach”(31 October 1842; bc 6: 127). Among the Wordsworth poems she recommends to Boyd is “a fine ode upon the Power of Sound” (bc 6: 127). It is “Stanzas on the Power of Sound,” and the core lines are at the beginning of the twelfth stanza: “By one pervading Spirit / Of tones and numbers all things are controlled” (177–8). The “argument” glosses these lines with the words “The Pythagorean theory of numbers and music, with their supposed power over the motions of the universe.”We have seen how EBB appealed to that theory in her earlier poetry, and though she does not often mention that “theory” specifically, there is no evidence that she ever abandoned it. The words “poet” and “hero” are interchangeable in EBB’s vocabulary (they are “my heroic idea of the true poet,” she tells Mary Russell Mitford; bc 10: 7), and she is consistent in naming Wordsworth, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning as “poets,” though she sometimes adds other names, such as that of Milnes (bc 6: 77). In EBB’s scheme of things, the heroic element common to all poets is their music, and the defining characteristic of the poet is his or her “power over the pulses,” the affective power of poetry being the guarantor of its truth. She criticizes “poor LEL” (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) for believing “that great lie, that poetry is fiction – and it was fatal to her not merely as a poet but as a woman. It is a creed desecrative of the soul, & of nature, & of ‘supernal spirits.’ The ruin of it, extends beyond literature” (bc 5: 97). And even though EBB had said, in 1836, that she admired Landon for “her very brilliant imagination & her nature turned towards music” – marks of the true poet – at the same time she found her limited and “a little wearisome”: “the striking of one note does not make a melody” (bc 3: 193–4). “She is like a bird of few notes” – true notes because “nature gave them!” (bc 3: 159) – but still few. In contrast, EBB praises Tennyson for his abundant music, saying, in notes she prepared for R.H. Horne (who used them in his A New Spirit of the Age 1844), that “the first

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spell cast by Mr Tennyson, the master of many spells, he cast upon the ear”: “The measures flow softly or roll nobly to his pen; as well one as the other. He can gather up his strength, like a serpent, in the gleaming coil of a line; or dart it out straight and free. Nay, he will write you a poem with nothing in it except music; and as if its music were everything, it shall charm your soul” (bc 8: 362). “Soul-language” is a phrase EBB uses to describe Carlyle’s prose style, and she uses it in conjunction with the phrase “a still grave music” heard by those listening to him (bc 8: 353). He is “a great prose poet” (bc 5: 301), whose The French Revolution is “a great poem” (bc 8: 356). The uniqueness of Carlyle’s prose style is, she tells Mitford, the result of his writing thoughts that, like the music Adam and Eve continue to hear in A Drama of Exile, come from an unfallen world: “There is something wonderful in this struggling forth into sound of a contemplation bred high above dictionaries & talkers – in some silent Heavenly place for the mystic & true. The sounds do come – strangely indeed & in unwrought masses, but still with a certain confused music & violent eloquence, which prove the power of thought over sound” (bc 5: 301). The label “soul-language” appears in the context of an assertion about the kind of truth Carlyle can claim: “If it was not ‘style’ and ‘classicism,’ it was something better; it was soul-language. There was a divinity at the shaping of those rough-hewn periods” (bc 8: 353). How does that divinity manifest itself amid “the clashing of these harsh compounds”? In the vowels. For Carlyle wrote what EBB calls “a true language … the significant articulation of a living soul: God’s breath was in the vowels of it” (353). EBB thus expands on the label she uses in A Drama of Exile,“the God-breath,” there the agent of creation, here the life-giving power to dead consonants. The relation between consonants and vowels was one of the central topics of the new philology of EBB’s day: for some, consonants were the objective, vowels the subjective element of language; for others, such as the brothers Augustus and Julius Hare, vowels were the expression of feelings, consonants of the will and understanding. EBB provides her own “take” on the binary: consonants are the matter, vowels the spirit of language. Hence EBB writes, with great enthusiasm,“I am an adorer of Carlyle”: “He has done more to raise poetry to the throne of its rightful inheri-

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tance than any writer of the day, – & is a noble-high-thinking man in all ways. He is one of the men to whom it wd. be a satisfaction to me to cry ‘vivat’ somewhere in his hearing. Do you recognize the estate of mind when it waxes impatient of admiration & longs to throw off at the feet of the admired? I have felt it often!” (bc 5: 281). Although EBB regularly calls Browning a “poet,” she is also regularly critical of his practice, claiming that he is “defective in harmony” (bc 6: 105). For instance, she tells Mary Russell Mitford in October of 1842 that “I have a high admiration of Mr Browning & recognize all the poet in him, if a little of the riddle-maker, – & often great thoughts, which while they love the cloud, have the glory of the lightening. He is defective in harmony it strikes me: but the power of objecting dies away before the palpable presence of poetic genius everywhere, from Paracelsus to these last dramatic scenes” (105). In another letter written that same month, EBB defends Browning, objecting to Mary Russell Mitford speaking “more severely of Mr Browning, than I can say ‘Amen’ to.”And she defends Pippa Passes: there is “a unity & nobleness of conception …which seems to me to outweigh all the riddles in riddledom.” If she had to choose “between Mr Milnes’s genius & Mr Browning’s … you will see I don’t take the last & say ‘thank you’” (111). There are similar comments in three subsequent letters (129, 142, 148), and there are similar comments in earlier letters. In July 1841 EBB reported that she had read Bells and Pomegranates, including Pippa Passes: “There are fine things in it – & the presence of genius, never to be denied! – At the same time it is hard … to understand – isn’t it? – Too hard? – I think so! – And the fault of Paracelsus, – the defect in harmony, is here too. After all, Browning is a true poet – & there are not many such poets … the genius – the genius – it is undeniable – isn’t it?” (bc 5: 75). So she is quite ready to forgive Browning for his riddles – “his very obscurities have an oracular nobleness about them which pleases me” (bc 7: 99), she says – but she is clearly bothered by his prosody and keeps returning to it. In a letter to Mitford of July 1841, EBB sums up her critical response to Browning: “After all, what I miss most in Mr Browning, is music. There is a want of harmony, particularly when he is lyrical – & that struck me with a hard hand, while I was in admiration over his Paracelsus” (bc 5: 79). In May 1843 EBB elaborates on Browning’s “worst fault – a want of harmony,”

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and she tells Richard Hengist Horne that she means that “in the two senses, spiritual & physical. There is a want of the softening power in thoughts & in feelings as well as words – everything is trenchant, – black & white without intermediate colours, nothing is tender – there is little room in all the passion, for pathos – And the verse … the lyrics … where is the ear? Inspired spirits should not speak so harshly, – & in good truth, they seldom do – What! From Paracelsus down to these Bells & Pomegranates, … a whole band of angels, white-robed & crowned angel-thoughts, with palms in their hands, … & no music !!!” (bc 7: 99–100). But in spite of such criticism, she consistently refers to Browning as a true poet, to Mary Russell Mitford, and to her brother George, when she is telling him that John Kenyon is trying to arrange a meeting between Browning and her: “You are aware how I estimate … admire (what is the sufficient word?) that true poet – however he may prophecy [sic] darkly” (bc 5: 290). And to Mary Russell Mitford: “Certainly Mr Browning does speak in parables – & more darkly than … even … some other of your friends. But he is a true poet. I estimate him very highly – & so do you – & so must all who know what poetry is” (bc 5: 301). As for his treatment by reviewers, EBB reported to George a conversation with Kenyon: “Mr Kenyon says that he is a little discouraged by his reception with the public – the populace, he shd. have said. ‘Poor Browning,’ said Mr Kenyon. ‘And why poor Browning?’ – ‘Because nobody reads him,’ – ‘Rather then, poor readers!’ Mr Carlyle is his friend – a good substitute for a crowd’s shouting!” (bc 5: 290). EBB’s shaping of the history of English poetry (and, indeed, of the history of European poetry as well) takes another form in “A Vision of Poets” (webb 1: 179–223), which was the lead poem in the second volume of Poems (1844), and which EBB identified, along with A Drama of Exile, as the “principal” texts in the two volumes (bc 9: 11). But her shaping this time is not in terms of the poets’ handling of language and music. Instead, she focuses on their moral and spiritual qualifications, insisting (as she says in her preface to the two volumes) upon “the necessary relations of genius to suffering and self-sacrifice” (webb 2: 569). Nonetheless, some of the concerns that I have been examining are still evident in this text. The foremost image for the harmony EBB is always affirming is a cathedral organ – an important addition to the “diapason” and “octave” she has often used.

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But it is a lute that appears first in “A Vision of Poets,” not as part of the setting of the story but as a simile. The poet whose dream-vision is the central action of the piece wanders into the forest “With sweet rhymes ringing through his head” (5), rhymes that are a part of the harmony that characterizes his nature: His aimless thoughts in metre went, Like a babe’s hand without intent Drawn down a seven-stringed instrument. (22–4) The “seven-stringed instrument” is the lute, linked by the Pythagoreans with the music of the spheres and with world harmony, and here treated by EBB as part of the poet’s nature. Hence, when the “apparition fair” appears, the poet is not startled: He might have feared another time, But all things fair and strange did chime With his thoughts then, as rhyme to rhyme. (28–30) EBB’s triplet makes the conventional link of “rhyme” and “chime,” the campanological metaphor for sound-alike words being a conventional one for world harmony, as I indicated in an earlier chapter. The chief manifestation of that ringing or chiming is EBB’s triple rhymes, one purpose of which is to make us hear the harmony that prevails in creation and that pervades all the specific sights and sounds of the poet’s experience. The poet’s vision is of an angel standing before the central altar of a “great church.” A “strange company” (271) surrounds the altar, a company of poets, and there follows the descriptive catalogue of English, Greek, Latin, and European writers for which EBB was much praised. All are “God’s prophets” (292) of Beauty and Truth – that idea is the organizing principle of her catalogue – while their language and music are subordinate concerns. Nonetheless, music is present in such details as the “vibrative emotion” (374) she attributes to Camoens, emotion that, in Camoens’ handling of it, links nature and art: And Camoens, with that look he had,

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fres h st r a n ge mus i c Compelling India’s Genius sad From the wave through the Lusiad, – The murmurs of the storm-cape ocean Indrawn in vibrative emotion Along the verse. (370–5)

And the word “cadence” turns up when Coleridge appears: And visionary Coleridge, who Did sweep his thoughts as angels do Their wings, with cadence up the Blue. (415–17) At the end of the catalogue, EBB links music and suffering: she brings together beating and blood, this time not as pulse but as wound: But where the heart of each should beat, There seemed a wound instead of it, From whence the blood dropped to their feet, Drop after drop … (427–30) The pilgrim poet then learns from the lady the meaning of the sight (much as Christian receives instruction in the House of the Interpreter in The Pilgrim’s Progress), and the interpretation depends upon the cathedral organ. In “A Vision of Poets,” the organ appears initially as a “phantasm” that “booms” (267), but it is in fact the instrument of the poet’s enlightenment, as the lady explains: ‘His [the angel’s] organ’s clavier strikes along These poets’ hearts, sonorous, strong, They gave him without count of wrong, – ‘A diapason whence to guide Up to God’s feet, from these who died, An anthem fully glorified.

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‘Whereat God’s blessing ibarak Breathes back this music – folds it back About the earth in vapoury rack …’ (442–50) The note on “diapason” provided by Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor, the editors of the first volume of webb, is exactly right. They give the musical meaning of the term, and then say, “more figuratively, a complete concord or rich outburst of sound made up of all tones or notes; also the foundation stops in an organ” (webb 1: 221n64). For in “A Vision of Poets,” the music combines joy and sorrow, suffering and exaltation, and the angel’s playing – his fingers “[float] across the organ-keys” (469) – leads poets upward from “The incomplete and the unfixed” (477) to a comprehensive “Harmony.” The upward movement is characterized by throbbing and “surges” (481), initially uncertain and running “This way and that” (482) until they sound as one, “An Aphroditè of sweet tune” (483). The controlling metaphor is that of Aphrodite rising from the sea, but this harmony rises much farther: it is “sublime and plain” (490), and it soared at once And struck out from the starry thrones Their several silver octaves as It passed to God. The music was Of divine stature – strong to pass. (494–8) The poets’ task: “To make the world this harmony” (555). “My instrument,” the angel tells the poet,“has room to bear / Still fuller strains and perfecter” (575–6), and so he issues a challenge to the poet. The procession that follows is also a challenge to the poet, for it is made up of figures who are parodies of poets. They can beat time, for they walk with “measured step” (585), but their music is a parody of genuine harmony, the parody being clearest in the triplet picturing a poet as the conventional figure of the fool, with bells: And some, with conscious ambling free, Did shake their bells right daintily

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fres h st r a n ge mus i c On hand and foot, for harmony. (601–3)

But this harmony is a “maniac mockery” (618), and what follows is a catalogue that is a parody of EBB’s earlier catalogue. The spokesman for this company rejects harmony that is the result of effort and pain: Because your scald or gleeman went With seven or nine-stringed instrument Upon his back – must ours be bent? (658–60) In response to this sight,“our pilgrim-poet” (679) makes a vow to the angel, rejecting wages and fame and asserting, I only would have leave to loose (In tears and blood, if so He choose) Mine inward music out to use. (706–8) The narrator claims not to know the angel’s response to this vow, nor the results of it, but the sound of the organ suggests success: “A strain more noble than the first / Mused in the organ, and outburst” (737–8). There follows a lengthy description of the sound of the organ, each detail indicating the harmonious fusion of many disparate sounds. The music is a “giant march” of “full notes” (739–40); “concords of mysterious kind” fuse “sense and mind” (743–4); “wavelike sounds” (748) enlarge “liberty with bounds” (750). And every rhythm that seemed to close Survived in confluent underflows Symphonious with the next that rose. (751–3) The whole vision,“Angel and organ, and the round / Of spirits, solemnised and crowned” (769–70) rises up, glorified, to vanish, as the lady herself does in the morning light, leaving the pilgrim-poet alone in the landscape where he began. His prayer on his homeward journey is an affirmation of the lesson he has learned: his apostrophe is to “thou, Poet-God,” (816), the great original of all the figures he has met.

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EBB’s musical vocabulary, and its significance, should by now be clear. When she wants to indicate the keeping of time, she uses the word “beat” or the metaphor “pulse.” When she wants to indicate the gathering up of many disparate things in a comprehensive harmony, she uses the words “octave” and “diapason” (with their doubling of notes and pitches), “anthem” and “symphony,” and (from campanology) “ring” and “chime.” And when she writes a true history of English poetry, the music of the verse, as indicated by all those terms, is the guarantor of its truth. Finally, all who are pilgrim-poets on earth are types who find their completion in their antitype, God who is “Poet-God,” and the pilgrim-poets are his prophets, creating inspired texts whose music is the link between heaven and earth. Such is EBB’s concept of the poet, a strongly held “heroic idea” that will underly the major texts she has yet to write.

5 speech, silence, and “perplexed music” in p oems (1844)

The first volume of Poems (1844) begins with A Drama of Exile, which I have discussed in chapter 3, and the second volume ends with “The Dead Pan,” which I will discuss in chapter 6. Between those two major texts is another, Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, which EBB placed at the end of her first volume. It is a story of misinterpretation in courtship; its subjects are speech and silence; and its prosody makes the silence material in its pauses – a brilliant fusion of form and content. Along with this poem are several sonnets and shorter poems that explore the difficulties of realizing the beat that is the essence of all creation.“Perplexed music,” EBB calls the resulting poetry. And no poem seems to sound music more “perplexed,” in the ears of its readers and critics, than “The Cry of the Children,” the reading of which I discuss at the end of this chapter. But first, Lady Geraldine’s Courtship. The circumstances of the poem’s composition, and the consequences of EBB’s mentioning Robert Browning in the text, have overshadowed the reading of the poem itself and have obscured the complex ways in which the story runs “into the midst of our conventions” (bc 10: 102). Readers are familiar with the facts of publication: the publisher’s demand for something to fill out a second volume in 1844, and EBB’s response, her hurried writing of 142 lines in a single day, all the while resigning herself, with many reservations, to people’s liking for a story when she herself loved stories. Readers are familiar, too, with EBB’s reference in the poem itself to Browning’s Bells and Pomegranates,“which, if cut deep down the middle, / Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity” (163–4), a reference that became the occasion of RB’s first letter to EBB and the beginning of their courtship. Early on in that courtship, she told RB that she was

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thinking of writing “a sort of novel-poem – a poem as completely modern as ‘Geraldine’s Courtship’” (bc 10: 102), one engaging the “conventions” of the day and meeting the age as it is, face to face. Borrowing a phrase from Carlyle, EBB had (in July 1844) described Lady Geraldine’s Courtship to Hugh Stuart Boyd as a “romance of the age,” anticipating Aurora Leigh by “treating of railroads, routes, & all manner of ‘temporalities,’ – and in so radical a temper, that I expect to be reproved for it by the conservative reviews round” (bc 9: 65). The “conventions” she confronts so radically in this “ballad-romance” (Stone 102) are those of class and sex, but her treatment of the story carries her far beyond the obvious objections to barriers both social and gender-related. What carries her beyond the obvious? The role of speech and silence in the story, the use of symbol, and her handling of the caesura or pause within the long lines. The title is the first indication of complexity. The name of the central figure appears in the genitive case, and the etymology of the word “genitive” links it with birth and generation. We do not yet know what is being born here, but the ambiguity of the case introduces the doubleness of the story. That doubleness, as Glennis Stephenson says, is “a deliberate confounding of traditional lovers’ roles,” and the title raises the issue “in providing us with no context by which to ascertain whether this is grammatically an objective or subjective genitive” (54). Is it the latter – where Geraldine is the subject managing her own courtship – or is it the former – where Geraldine is the object of male pursuit, the goal of courtship? The poem leads us to understand the title in both ways. The second indication of complexity is the metre. Critics mention Poe’s response to the poem (see the headnote in webb 1: 383–90) and quote his comments on the metre of “The Raven” in his “The Philosophy of Composition”: trochees and catalexis characterize that metre, and the originality of “The Raven,” Poe claims, lies in his combination into stanzaic form of trochaic lines with varying numbers of feet. “Nothing even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted.” But EBB’s stanza does “approach this combination.” Hers is a four-line stanza rhyming a b a b. The dominant foot is the trochee. The lines are octameters with a strong caesura, usually after the fourth foot, so that the ear keeps hearing two tetrameter lines separated by a pause. I shall return to the crucial role of that pause, its function being related not only to the dramatic action in

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the narrative, but also to the use of acatalexis and catalexis. The first and third lines (with the a rhyme) are acatalectic (that is, no syllable is lacking, and each line has a full sixteen syllables) while the second and fourth lines (with the b rhyme) are catalectic (the final unaccented syllable is missing, leaving fifteen syllables in the lines). In English poetry, catalexis occurs frequently in trochaic lines (think of “Mary had a little lamb”), and Stephen Adams defines its effect: “trochaic meters seem unstable, wanting to slip back into iambic patterns” (Poetic Designs 56) (think of the nursery rhyme’s second line, “Its fleece was white as snow”). Such instability is crucial to EBB’s purpose. The octameter lines keep breaking in half, while the trochees keep reversing to iambs, and that doubleness embodies the instability of the narrative itself: an apparently conventional love story (“romance”) gradually reveals itself as a “romance” in Carlyle’s sense: the bodying forth of the life of the hero. The subtitle is “A Romance of the Age,” and that seems to promise something modern and realistic, but this is not a story with which the reader can feel comfortable: the conventional keeps dissolving into the unconventional, and expectations keep confronting the unexpected. Moreover, as we shall see, that same doubleness characterizes the symbol that is at the heart of the story: the statue of Silence as a sleeping woman. The narrative convention that EBB uses in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship is that of epistolary fiction (“A Poet writes to his Friend”), and the “I” is the male poet, Bertram, who tells the story from his point of view. Hence the reader’s initial understanding of the title is that the possessive is an objective genitive. Moreover, the opening stanzas apparently establish a conventional situation between the lover and his lady: this “romance” is a story of courtly love. “She is proud” (5) and beautiful, and her attitude toward her suitors is one of “disdain” (14); the lover remains constant and faithful in spite of the lady’s cruelty, claiming that he has “competence to pain” (16). The conventional spatial metaphors govern their relation: she is “so high above me” (19) and he is low in “my abasement” (19). Her smile, he says, is “Far too tender, or too cruel far” (23). But note the antimetabole in that line: antimetabole is the scheme of reversal, where the words change direction and turn back on themselves, and that scheme is related to the plot: “I am humbled who was humble” (3). That hint of reversal carries

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through to the story itself: it is the lady who makes the first move in the courtship, and invites Bertram as her guest at Wycombe Hall. EBB describes the invitation and its effect in musical terms: “When a sudden silver speaking, gravely cadenced, over-rung them [the dinner guests and their scorn], / And a sudden silken stirring touched my inner nature through” (47–8). The key words in those two lines – “silver,”“gravely cadenced,” “stirring” – are ones that EBB is, as always, using with a precise sense of their meaning and implications. “Stirring” suggests EBB’s characteristic understanding of music: one nature vibrating or pulsing in response to another. “Cadence” is, of course, a musical term she has used elsewhere, but poetics is a better context for understanding the term here. If one refers to Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (2nd ed., 1785) and his analysis of the placing of the caesura in Pope’s pentameters in The Rape of the Lock, one finds Blair using the same diction: “When the pause proceeds to follow the 6th syllable, the tenor of the Music becomes solemn and grave. The Verse marches now with a more slow and measured pace … But the grave, solemn cadence becomes still more sensible, when the pause falls after the 7th syllable, which is the nearest place to the end of a line that it can occupy … It produces that slow Alexandrian air, which is finely suited to a close” (3: 107–8). EBB’s lines in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship are an embodiment of the effect she is naming. In “When a sudden silver speaking, gravely cadenced, over-rung them” (47) the first caesura comes in the expected position, after the fourth trochaic foot, but the second is late, after the sixth foot, and the tempo slows as a result, and slows even more with the two accented syllables at the end of the catalectic line,“rung them.” There is no punctuation to guide our hearing of a caesura in the next line, “And a sudden silken stirring touched my inner nature through” (48). Instead, the grammar – subject, verb, object – pushes the line forward at a stately pace, and there is just the slightest pause in the last possible position in the line, before the final one-syllable word. Such a late occurrence of the pause is rarely used, according to Blair, but is “finely suited to a close” (3: 108). Blair’s analysis of the effects of the various placings of the caesura help us to understand what EBB means when she told John Kenyon that she was “playing at ball with the pause” in the poem, the result being an

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“apparent roughness” in her long lines (bc 9: 177). How is one to understand her metaphor? Any “play at ball” involves a tossing or movement of it back and forth, a rhythmic action. If her metaphor is from tennis, then she may be thinking of the pause as the net, across which her half lines, as the ball, are driven back and forth with varying speeds and directions. Her chosen form gave her scope for such action: “Long lines too,” she told Hugh Stuart Boyd, “with fifteen syllables in each!” (bc 9: 65). The syllables, of course, are voiced; the pause is not. It is the silence at the centre of the line, and as such it is the material embodiment of the silences that are central in the story: the statue in the garden, the unspoken words between Geraldine and Bertram. The “silver speaking” that is part of the lines I am analyzing is an allusion to Carlyle. In his chapter “Symbols” in Book 3 of Sartor Resartus, Teufelsdröckh quotes (what he calls) the “Swiss Inscription”: “Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden)” (Works 1: 174). EBB’s narrative is her working out of the full meaning of that proverb. When EBB characterizes her story as “running into the midst of our conventions” (bc 10: 102), she is referring primarily to social conventions, but she might well be referring to literary ones too. The prevailing strategy in her storytelling is to use literary conventions in an apparently conventional way, and then to reverse or upend them. For instance, in courtly love, the lady’s eyebrows are conventionally troped as bows and her eyes as arrows that wound or slay the lover. And sometimes these tropes expand into an elaborate hunting metaphor. Bertram invokes those conventions when he apostrophizes the “woods of Sussex” (the location of Wycombe Hall), “where the hunter’s arrow found me, / When a fair face and a tender voice had made me mad and blind!” (71–2). In the story’s climactic scene, Bertram invokes the same conventions when he misreads Geraldine’s face: “‘There, the brows of mild repression – there, the lips of silent passion, / Curvèd like an archer’s bow to send the bitter arrows out’” (387–8). But Bertram’s apostrophe to the “woods of Sussex” occurs in a stanza with an antithetical structure (“Oh, the blessèd woods of Sussex” and, two lines later, “Oh, the cursèd woods of Sussex”), and the shift from joy to sorrow anticipates the story’s climactic shift from sorrow to joy.

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The chief literary convention EBB uses in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship is the hortus conclusus: the metaphorical identification of the loved woman with an enclosed garden. It appears (disguised by the realism of the narrative) at the beginning of Bertram’s visit: “Thus she drew me the first morning, out across into the garden” (105), “‘this swarded circle’” (109) that Geraldine herself describes: it is surrounded by beeches and limes; there is a fountain at its centre, ringed by lilies. (The alert reader might remember that Bertram had earlier, in line 58, used a fountain simile for Geraldine’s smile.) As the story develops, the garden will be associated with music, but at this point Geraldine excludes all music from it, with one exception: “I will let no music enter, saving what the fountain sings us” (111). Alongside the fountain “lies a marble Silence, sleeping” (115) in “white reposing” (140) – EBB’s central and multifaceted symbol. In realistic terms, the pose of the sculpture suggests only sleep: the index finger on the left hand “droppeth from the lips upon the cheek” (118) while in the right hand is a rose “held slack within the fingers” (119); that hand itself “Has fallen backward in the basin” (120). Those are all realistic details, and yet EBB makes each serve her purposes. The index finger held against the lips is a conventional gesture for silence and means “Hush!” (Tennyson, for instance, uses the same gesture for Silence in his unfinished poem “Reticence”), but the dropping of the finger suggests either that she is “So asleep she is forgetting to say Hush!” (116) or that she is ready to speak – which is why Geraldine comments, at the end of the stanza, “‘yet this Silence will not speak!’” (120). The rose is, in the courtly love tradition, the conventional metaphor for woman, and the statue does hold it rather than discarding it (as Bertram points out, 126), but the slackness with which it is held suggests (in retrospect) a letting go of its conventional associations. For EBB is using the statue, at least initially, to image the construction of woman and her role in nineteenth-century society: beautiful, but silent; seen and admired, but not heard; precious, like the marble of which the statue is made, but fixed and unthreatening – not on a pedestal here, but just as effectively set apart. EBB undermines these conventions, not by rejecting them outright, but by transforming them. That is why she has Bertram and Geraldine debate the nature and meaning of symbol, and why she

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chooses as her central symbol a statue of Silence: for both she owes a great deal to Carlyle. The first allusions to Carlyle in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship could easily be missed: they are, as I have already pointed out, the troping of Geraldine’s speech as silver, “silver-speaking” (47) at the beginning of the story, then “silver-corded speeches” (85) during the gathering at Wycombe Hall, when Bertram says that “she would bind me” with such talk. I have already quoted Carlyle’s use of the Swiss proverb contrasting speech as silver and silence as golden, and though EBB does not use gold, she certainly does suggest that silence gives speech – the chief form taken by the “courtship” of the title – its character and efficacy. Carlyle (using the voice of Teufelsdröckh) explains: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule” (Works 1: 174). Hence silence characterizes the hero, who is “creating and projecting,” and it is like work (the prescription for which Carlyle is better known): both open the doors of perception, so that “how much clearer are thy purposes, and duties” (174). EBB’s use of Carlyle gives us a new and subversive way of reading that statue of Silence. She is not the woman of the age relegated to her inferior position by men, but the hero who, thanks to the discipline of silence, has come to know her own mind, and is now ready, through speech, to body forth her ideas and make them actual. Carlyle reworks the Swiss proverb in transcendental terms, identifying speech with the phenomenal and silence with the noumenal: “Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity” (174). In a parallel way, EBB reworks the repressive ideal of a silent woman, and makes her a revolutionary force: is not a symbol, Teufelsdröckh asks, “‘a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in her?’” (175; I have changed the pronoun from “him” to “her”). Silence is not just the subject or content of Lady Geraldine’s Courtship; it is also part of its material form. I have already commented on the metre, and it is time now to deal with the pauses that characterize every line: those pauses are the embodiment of the silence that is so important in the evolving relations of Geraldine and Bertram. A “listening pause,” EBB will call the caesura a few years later when she is advising RB on the handling of a line in “The Flight of the Duchess” (bc 11: 4–5), and “listening” indicates attention and mental activity: the pause is full of potential for both Geral-

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dine and Bertram. What Josie Billington says of the pauses in Aurora Leigh could also be said of the pauses here: “even the most summary narrative passages seem neither finished nor complete, but alive with movement and possibility” (102). That is because those pauses, brief as they are, are the intervals when the characters think and respond (with all the complexity of the inner life implied in those verbs). Billington quotes Shakespearian critics on the function of the pauses in Shakespeare’s mature blank verse: “a location … for an invisible process of coming to terms with the world, for slight shifts in attitude and orientation … a mind discovered at the edge of volition,” the silent awareness of “rival lives and possibilities” (qtd. on pages 98 and 100). An actor can do wonderful things with such pauses; so can a narrator. “Coming to terms with the world”; “shifts in attitude and orientation”; “the edge of volition”; “rival lives and possibilities” – all of those phrases are applicable to the silence, the pauses, of the lovers in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship. Just how much is held in silence is suggested by something Bertram says about the silence in the garden: “the silence round us flinging / A slow arm of sweet compression” (169–70). “Compression” indicates complex forces or energy squeezed into a small space; and “sweet” (in the original sense of the adjective) is that which appeals to all the senses, and to the mind. “Sweet compression” is the potential in silence. Though Geraldine is silence, she necessarily works through speech, and her conversation with Bertram on the nature of symbol is crucial. Symbol, as EBB has Geraldine and Bertram use the term, is close to Carlyle’s treatment of it; that is, a symbol is a phenomenon that both hides and reveals the spirit – the noumenon – and makes it manifest to the five senses. EBB would not disagree with the Coleridgean understanding of symbol – its ontological identity with spirit – but wants the doubleness of Carlyle’s “hides and reveals” to underpin a story about misinterpretation. The lovers’ debate begins with an interpretation, when Geraldine states the meaning of the statue of Silence: “‘That the essential meaning growing may exceed the special symbol, / Is the thought as I conceive it’” (121–2). She is in effect defining the function of the mid-line pause: it is a “thought” that is invisible, and the “thought” is a response to the sight of “the special symbol,” a response that is both definitive – the recognition of “the essential meaning” of the symbol – and incomplete – “growing.”

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The pauses both before and after “growing” are the silences for both Geraldine and Bertram to think, and Geraldine then expresses her “thought” tentatively – “as I conceive it.” Her conception, however, is far in advance of Bertram’s, which needs to grow. When she expresses her views of class – “‘Our true noblemen will often through right nobleness grow humble, / And assert an inward honour by denying outward show’” (123–4) – Bertram is deaf to Geraldine’s adjectives “true” and “right”: he hears only references to the phenomena of class, ermine-wearing nobles, and the “social law.” For him those are appearances only, not substantive things, and he criticizes life “in these British islands” as a society in which substance “wanes” and symbol “exceeds” – that is, has become a show without substance. Geraldine’s answer: “‘when all is run to symbol in the Social, I will throw you / The world’s book which now reads drily, and sit down with Silence here’” (135–6). She does not deny that symbols may wear out and should be discarded, but they can also be renewed, and she is confirming what Carlyle calls their “wondrous agency”: “In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here, therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be! Thus in many a painted Device, or simple Seal-emblem, the commonest Truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis” (Works 1: 175). So Geraldine will “sit down with Silence.” Bertram, misinterpreting her words, thinks she is being half playful, half indignant. The others “laugh […] her words off ” (138). Talk, day after day, characterizes their courtship. Geraldine knows, as Bertram does not, that her talk is the union of speech and silence that is the Carlylean ideal, and she has to teach Bertram to recognize her speech as such. She asks him to read poetry: Spenser, Petrarch, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning. Lying behind that part of their courtship is Teufelsdröckh’s assertion that “all true Works of Art” have an intrinsic value: there one can “discern Eternity looking through Time; the Godlike rendered visible” (Works 1: 178). When they grow “tired of books” and fall silent, Geraldine breaks out in sudden song, and that art leads Bertram to a new account of her face. No more brows as bows and eyes as arrows. Her looks and gestures are expressive of light and music – EBB’s usual metaphors for the divine:

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Oh, to see or hear her singing! scarce I know which is divinest – For her looks sing too – she modulates her gestures on the tune; And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are finest, ’Tis the eyes that shoot out vocal light and seem to swell them on. (173–6) In short, Bertram is learning to see Geraldine’s face symbolically rather than metaphorically, and the linguistic evidence of such seeing is the label “vocal light,” which replaces the arrow metaphor. “Vocal light” is synaesthesia in which two senses are acting together, a version of the union of speech and silence that Bertram must come to understand. Bertram moves closer to that understanding by characterizing Geraldine’s talk as both musical and natural: “Then we talked – oh, how we talked! her voice, so cadenced in the talking, / Made another singing – of the soul! a music without bars” (177–8). “Music without bars” is an ambiguous phrase. It could mean dispensing with the isochronous units that for EBB are the essence of music, but I think the more likely meaning is music without obstacle or impediment to its expression. It is “natural,” like the thoughts Geraldine expresses (181), and even when she is being playful the spirit shines through: “In her utmost lightness there is truth” (185). So “she talked on – we talked, rather! upon all things, substance, shadow” (189). Among all the topics of their conversation, Geraldine praises Bertram for his comments on the “wondrous wondrous age” (202) in which they are living, for though the chief thing to be wondered at is the steam engine, Bertram criticizes the times for “‘Little thinking if we work our souls as nobly as our iron’” (203). Bertram’s not giving up the conventional metaphors from the courtly love tradition precipitates the crisis in their relationship. In spite of all that talk, and in spite of his moves toward true understanding, Bertram agonizes over his own silence – “Love’s silence” (218) – and reverts to the hunting simile: “the stag is like me – he, that tries to go on grazing / With the great deep gun-wound in his neck, then reels with sudden moan” (219– 20). By accident he overhears the talk of Geraldine and the earl who is courting her. Geraldine’s rejection of her suitor takes the form of words Bertram has heard before:“‘Whom I marry shall be noble, / Ay, and wealthy.

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I shall never blush to think how he was born’” (264). Geraldine’s diction is the same as that she used to interpret for Bertram the statue of Silence, when she had talked about “true noblemen” and “right nobleness.” Bertram had been deaf to “true” and “right” then, and he now misinterprets both “noble” and “wealthy” as Geraldine uses those words. When he confronts her in an impassioned speech, he asserts the equality of all human beings, each stamped with “God’s image” and each animated by “God’s kindling breath within” (300). He also affirms his own love for her, saying “I am worthy as a king” (316). Geraldine’s only response to Bertram’s outburst is to name him. There is a moment of silence, she says “Bertram!” and (in a response that gives physical embodiment to his silence) he falls unconscious at her feet. The pauses in that climactic stanza are crucial: But at last there came a pause. I stood all vibrating with thunder Which my soul had used. The silence drew her face up like a call. Could you guess what word she uttered? She looked up, as if in wonder, With tears beaded on her lashes, and said “Bertram!” it was all. (325–8) The pause after the word“pause” is obvious. It is the moment when Bertram’s response is taking shape, while he is “vibrating with thunder” – with anger, that is, but “vibrating” is one of EBB’s usual words for a response to music. The pause in the middle of line 326 is another moment when Bertram is thinking, and the result is an interpretation of silence: “The silence drew her face up like a call.” The simile is his right interpretation of the absence of speech, and it is followed by spoken confirmation of his thought: the call is to him. Geraldine’s naming of Bertram is the moment when the hero is born, and Geraldine is the agent of his birth (so that the story has two heroes). She is in effect calling forth his true self, which is indeed as “noble” and “wealthy” as he says it is, but he still has no hope that his love will prevail. When he tells his correspondent that “I shall leave her house at dawn” (359), he uses a curious line: “How my life is read all backward, and the charm of life undone” (358). Why the passive voice? Who is doing the reading?

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And does he know that “charm” is derived from the Latin carmen, song, and hence the “charm of life” is its music? In the “Conclusion,” EBB abandons the epistolary convention of her narrative and changes to the third-person point of view. In the crisis, Bertram had described himself as “vibrating with thunder” (325), and now he finds himself vibrating again, this time in response to Geraldine’s silent presence. She is standing “’Twixt the purple lattice-curtains” (374), and the vibrations are sound waves made by the curtain itself, in onomatopoetic lines admired and imitated by Poe: “With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air, the purple curtain / Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows” (381–2). Bertram is not yet fully ready to respond to such music, and reverts (as I have already said) to the metaphors of courtly love: “There, the brows of mild repression – there, the lips of silent passion, / Curvèd like an archer’s bow to send the bitter arrows out” (387–8). The arrow metaphor, as Bertram uses it, is now words rather than the more conventional looks, and Geraldine wisely avoids words altogether. Her response is silence, an approach to him “in a gliding measured pace,” and a gesture of supplication. Bertram reads the response correctly, though he refuses to believe that it is anything but a dream, until Geraldine speaks and confirms his new understanding. Sound vibrations and a “measured pace” – elements of music and of the “animal life” of poetry – make the vision actual. Lady Geraldine’s Courtship is a masterful narrative that needs to be read like a palimpsest. The reader must be constantly aware of a conventional situation (courtly love) as the appearance or phenomenon of the story that both hides and reveals something else entirely: the story of a hero (Geraldine) projecting the divine spirit within her outward into the forms of courtship and thereby renewing them; and the story of the forging of the hero (Bertram), already a hero because he is a poet and worthy of Geraldine’s love, but still caught up in the phenomena of gender and class and needing to be born into his new role as Geraldine’s accepted lover. The auditory version of the palimpsest is the relation of speech and silence. An afterword: with some hesitation, EBB had sent the Poems of 1844 to Carlyle, telling him that they came “of honest admiration” from “one of the most grateful of his readers” (bc 9: 99). He in turn wrote “kind letters” (her description) to thank her. He wrote before he had read all the poems

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but, EBB reported to Mary Russell Mitford, he “singled out ‘Geraldine’s Courtship’ as his favorite so far” (122). “The Lay of the Brown Rosary,” published four years before Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, uses the same elements of speech and silence as the later poem, but in a way that lets us see the “lay” as a parody of Lady Geraldine. In the “lay,” Onora’s silence is death-dealing rather than life-giving, and her muting of the speech of others is the negation of our obligations to God and to others in society. “The Lay of the Brown Rosary” is a not-quite-successful mixture of Gothic elements: the ghost of a rebellious nun who was buried alive, a brother’s charge of “vileness” against his sister on her wedding day, a groom who kisses his bride and immediately falls down dead. The central figure is Onora, and her story is the story of her punishment for consorting with “the ghost of the nun with a brown rosary” (64). Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, who is frozen within his “rime,” Onora too is linked with cold; and where the ancient mariner has a baleful influence on his listeners (detaining the wedding guest and keeping him from the celebration of life), Onora also renders others unable to continue with their lives. For at crucial moments in the story Onora remains “mute” – a key word in the ballad – and she renders others mute as well: at her wedding, when she is “Gazing cold at the priest without gesture of prayer” (308), the priest finds himself unable to speak “the Great Name” (312). “And aye was the silence where should be the name” (318). Being mute or dumb is the result of Onora’s error in judgment: “I would not thank God in my weal, nor seek God in my woe” (207). She makes this vow on the brown rosary of the title, a rosary “never used for a prayer” (57) and linked with the ghost of a nun in a story of Gothic horror: in the ruins of the old convent A nun in the east wall was buried alive Who mocked at the priest when he called her to shrive, – And shrieked such a curse … (46–8) In the fourth part of the story, Onora confesses her sin and provides an expanded version of her vow, now with the crucial addition of the word “dumb”: “Ay sooth, we feel too strong in weal, to need thee on that road, / But woe being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on ‘God’” (390–1).

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The rosary’s effects reach their climax in the story when bride and groom, “who knelt down together, arise up as one” (321), and the groom kisses Onora: “His lip stung her with cold; she glanced upwardly mute” (327) – and he falls dead at her feet. Onora then does call upon God (348–9) and flings the rosary away. The narrator’s simile sums up the central concern of the story: the rosary makes not a sound when she dashes it against the marble pavement, but “fell mute as snow” (356). And Onora herself falls dead at Saint Agnes’ shrine, and “perished mute” (400). The lay’s last line challenges the reader to draw a lesson (“some sweetness”) from the events of the story, and that seems to be that turning away from “the Great Name” is to render oneself (and others) mute when speech is most needed. Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, which EBB placed at the end of her first volume of Poems (1844), and “The Dead Pan,” which she placed at the end of the second, are, along with A Drama of Exile and “A Vision of Poets,” the major poems in those volumes, and the ones (aside from “The Cry of the Children”) that have had the most critical attention. But I want to look briefly at some of the sonnets and the shorter poems in those volumes, the ones in which she explores the difficulties of writing in harmony with the music of creation. “Perplexed music,” she calls her efforts. There are twenty-eight sonnets in Poems (1844), and the one that stands first and introduces all the rest – “The Soul’s Expression” – is EBB’s most succinct statement of her understanding of music and of the epistemology that underpins it. Here is the whole sonnet: With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right That music of my nature, day and night With dream and thought and feeling interwound, And inly answering all the senses round With octaves of a mystic depth and height Which step out grandly to the infinite From the dark edges of the sensual ground! This song of soul I struggle to outbear Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole, And utter all myself into the air. But if I did it, – as the thunder-roll

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The turn, late as it is in coming (not after the octave but at the beginning of the twelfth line), marks a shift from the poet’s conventional confession of inadequacy with which the sonnet begins, to a surprising expression of fear, a movement EBB had earlier (in a letter of January 1841 to Richard Hengist Horne) characterized as a “break”: “the awe of this self consciousness, breaking with occasional sudden lurid beats through the chasms of our conventionalities has struck me …as a mystery of nature … There are moments when we are startled at the footsteps of our own Being, more than at the thunders of God” (bc 5: 7). Such a break is only conditional here – “if I did it” – but its note – “occasional sudden lurid beats” – can be heard, and in a precise way. EBB usually identifies music with a beat or pulse, and an uttering that is musical is suggested in the seventh line, in the verb, stepping out. But in this sonnet she gives, with more technical precision than elsewhere, the epistemology for expressing “the music of my nature,” the “song of my soul.” Expression has its source in sensation (“all the senses round”), which is, as in Locke, one source of our knowledge; the other is reflection, which EBB here characterizes as an inward answering of sensation, and that inward response is a musical one: “octaves of a mystic depth and height.”“Octaves” is the key word. An octave is an interval in which a higher note vibrates at exactly twice the sound-wave frequency of a lower note (so that, while the A above middle C vibrates at 440 cycles per second, for instance, its octave above vibrates at 880); an octave can also be a lower note vibrating at one-half the frequency of its associated note. Octaves are both the same and not the same as the original note: they sound the same, and the ear hears them as qualitatively the same note, but their pitch is different. EBB allows for octaves that are both higher and lower than the first sounded note (“octaves of a mystic depth and height”), and octaves become “mystic” and “step out grandly to the infinite” when the pitch is either higher or lower than the human ear can hear. So long as “portals of the sense” limit the expression of a song that is “sublime and whole,” no such song can be sung, but what is actually sung – that “insufficient sound” – nonetheless vibrates with that

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which cannot be sung, and that which cannot be sung gives the actual song both its character and its authority. A second sonnet among those of 1844 – the one entitled “Perplexed Music” – also explores the relation between uttering “the music of my nature” and sounds “sublime and whole,” and here the key words, also drawn from music, are “minor” and “cadence”: experience, like a pale musician, holds A dulcimer of patience in his hand, Whence harmonies we cannot understand, Of God’s will in his worlds, the strain unfolds In sad, perplexed minor. Deathly colds Fall on us while we hear and countermand Our sanguine heart back from the fancy-land With nightingales in visionary wolds. We murmur, – ‘Where is any certain tune Or measured music, in such notes as these?’ – But angels, leaning from the golden seat, Are not so minded: their fine ear hath won The issue of completed cadences, And, smiling down the stars, they whisper – sweet. (webb 2: 92) Plexus (Latin) is “plaiting, twining, braid” (oed), and that which is “perplexed” is interwoven and hence “entangled, involved, intricate” (oed). The word as EBB uses it is a visual metaphor for an auditory experience, which in turn is a metaphor for “God’s will” – always difficult to apprehend in “his worlds”: EBB characterizes that difficulty musically as a “minor.” In music a minor key is conventionally (though not always justifiably) associated with sadness, and it does not stand on its own, but is related to a major key, of which it is a diminished evocation – diminished, that is, because while the third above the tonic in a major key is a full interval, the third above the tonic in a minor key is a semitone less. Moreover, because a minor key may share the same key signature as a major key (for instance, A minor has the same signature as C major), it might therefore be described as a musical entry into the major, but in her octave

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EBB celebrates no such access, and instead laments the minor’s closing off of the understanding, which is faced with an “unfolding” that promises to reveal something but that is sadly limited. In the sestet EBB shifts her perspective to that of angels – she is never shy about doing that – and her key word is “cadences.” In music a cadence – here is another sense of the word – is the resolution of a musical phrase or piece and provides a sense of an ending. It typically does so by finishing on the tonic – major – chord. Hence, if only we had the “fine ear” of angels, we could hear in this limited “strain” the complete piece and apprehend a whole, with beginning, middle, and end. The word of approbation for experiencing the whole – “sweet” – is one the angels use in its full meaning: pleasing not only to the ear but to the mind, which by encompassing the whole, is a witness to “harmonies” closed to the human understanding. EBB’s rhymes in this sonnet neatly support the content. She uses the conventional Petrarchan rhyme scheme – a b b a a b b a in the octave, c d e c d e in the sestet – and the a and b rhymes – “olds” and “and” – are full and uncomplicated rhymes. But the c and d rhymes are not. She rhymes “tune” with “one” and “these” with “cadences,” and the second pairing goes even farther in linking an accented (“these”) and an unaccented (“ces”) syllable. Yet the e rhyme – “eet” – is a full matching of sound. The effect of the c d e sequence parallels that of a cadence in music, where chords that to the ear cannot be a resolution lead to one that clearly gives a sense of an ending. The c and d rhymes suggest something unfinished, while the e rhyme is like a tonic chord, an ending delayed or suspended by c and d (which seem to struggle toward identity) and at last achieved in “sweet” and its perfect match with “seat.” In other sonnets, both from the 1844 volume and later, EBB presents music as the essential element of (what she calls) “the reflex act of life” (“Love,” webb 2: 154). The phrase, from a sonnet of 1847, is EBB’s synonym for Locke’s reflection, in him a conscious bending or turning back to an awareness of the actions of the mind itself, but in her a reaction excited by pulsations or vibrations, between human being and human being, or human being and higher being. In “Life,” the 1847 companion to “Love,” she explores that network of sounds: each creature holds an insular point in space;

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Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound, But all the multitudinous beings round In all the countless worlds, with time and place For their conditions, down to the central base, Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound, Life answering life across the vast profound, In full antiphony, by a common grace? (webb 2: 152) When the soul does succeed in expressing itself, it does so rhythmically, and with a sense of striving upward: when I attain to utter forth in verse Some inward thought, my soul throbs audibly Along my pulses, yearning to be free And something farther, fuller, higher, rehearse, To the individual, true, and the universe, In consummation of right harmony. (“Insufficiency,” webb 2: 138) Souls can be “aspirant souls” (“Cheerfulness Taught by Reason,” webb 2: 119) because God is a deity who “canst intercept / Music with music” (“Heaven and Earth,” 2: 156). Hence in “Futurity” (1844) she asserts that “belovëd voices” are not lost but rather “raised, complete,”“glorified / New Memnons singing in the great God-light” (the statue of Memnon at Thebes “was fabled to give forth a musical sound when touched by the dawn” webb 2: 96n). Human life is essentially such a reflex act: WE cannot live, except thus mutually We alternate, aware or unaware, The reflex act of life; and when we bear Our virtue outward most impulsively, Most full of invocation, and to be Most instantly compellant, certes, there We live most life … (“Love,” webb 2: 154) EBB goes even farther in the sestet of this sonnet, identifying the “reflex act” with love:

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Various elements of the myth of music turn up in some other poems in the volumes of 1844: the harmony of human sounds and the sounds of nature; the broader harmony of all things divine and human; and the revelatory harmony of the poet, whose songs, she claims, echo the music of an unfallen paradise. Her diction – “music,” “song,” “sweet,” “divine” – seems sentimental and conventional, especially in the shorter and less ambitious poems. In the twelve lines of “The Poet and the Bird. A Fable” (webb 2: 228), for example, the poet sings of “divine” things and his poem is a “song.” What he creates is “music,” and it is the harmony of all things: his “highest harmony includes the lowest under sun” (8). Her readers might hear nothing out of the ordinary in those words, but EBB has a precise understanding of them, and uses them with an out-of-the-ordinary sense of their meaning and implications. For instance, in “The Lost Bower” (webb 2: 167–87), which is her memory of Hope End, the home of her childhood, and of the Malvern Hills in which it is set, there is the landscape, of course, but it is pervaded by “music” and “song.” The conventional pastoral ideal – the countryside itself – becomes in her treatment of it a harmonious fusion of sights and sounds. The most interesting line is one about the vale “Over which, in choral silence, the hills look you their ‘All hail !’” (35). The oxymoron – the hills are silent, yet speak – is strengthened by the historical associations of the Malvern Hills, with Langland and Piers Plowman – with a poet, that is, whose speech (in EBB’s usual myth) is song and an echo of divine music. That music lingers on in her own experience of the bower, for there “Came a sound, a sense of music, which was rather felt than heard” (175). She questions the source of the music, and canvasses birds (lark, nightingale, blackbirds, thrushes, finches) without giving a definitive answer. Then she moves on to link the music with another poet, Chaucer. The conjunction of nature, poet, and music is typical of EBB’s myth, and that configuration leads to a moment of revelation:

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In the song, I think, and by it, Mystic Presences of power Had up-snatched me to the Timeless, then returned me to the Hour. (218–20) Though the poem is about paradise lost, its last lines confirm an ongoing relation of the “lost bower” and “God’s Eden-land unknown” (367). Angels conventionally guard the entrance to that Eden and prevent a return of human beings, but here “an angel at the doorway” (368) looks up rather than down, while “a saint’s voice in the palm-trees” is “singing – ‘All is lost … and won!’” (370). “A Lay of the Early Rose” (webb 2: 217–26) explores the parallel between the early bloom in her “loneness” and “oneness” and the poet, also in “loneness” and “the nobler for that oneness” (124). The poet’s prayers, EBB asserts in a prophetic strain, win “an upper music” (188) and songs of “Promised things which shall be given / And sung over, up in Heaven” (203–4). The success of such songs is more tentative in “A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress” (webb 2: 207–15). There we hear the sweet calling Of spirits that speak in a soft under-tongue The sense of the mystical march. (101–3) We try to reproduce such songs, but we cannot know that we succeed: And we sing back the songs as we guess them, aloud; And we send up the lark of our music that cuts Untired through the cloud, To beat with its wings at the lattice Heaven shuts … (113–16) EBB’s label for this poem – “rhapsody” – confirms that sense of a song that is only a part of a much larger song. As Stone and Taylor explain in their headnote, “a rhapsody was a selection from epic literature … sung by a ‘rhapsode’ … a wandering minstrel or a court poet” (webb 2: 207). There is another text from the mid-1840s in which EBB greatly extends

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the range and affect of musical prosody, this time as the instrument of her activist and reformist agenda. It is “The Cry of the Children,” first published in Blackwood’s in 1843, and its subject is child labour and the conditions under which working-class children were employed. Aside from the social and political issues in the poem, the portrayal of which had a considerable impact, some reviewers commented on the prosody, and were puzzled by it. EBB, who in her prefaces and comments often anticipated criticism and sought to deflect it, did so in a letter to Hugh Stuart Boyd, written a month after the appearance of the poem. Boyd had apparently questioned the prosody, and EBB’s response is typical: “you are right in your complaint against the rhythm,” she says, and “the whole crime of the versification belongs to me!” She concedes the fault: “There is a roughness, my own ear being witness! & I give up the body of my criminal to the rod of your castigation.” The trope she uses to explain the origin of the rhythm is both an excuse and a defence: “The first stanza came into my head in a hurricane, & I was obliged to make the other stanzas like it”(bc 7: 331).“Hurricane” is not quite so richly suggestive as the “rhythmic turbulence” that would produce Aurora Leigh, but it does anticipate that later phrase, and one can guess the grounds of EBB’s defence of her rhythm when she elaborates on her response to Boyd’s criticism. He had objected to what he called “jumping lines.” She defends them on the grounds of “the deeper study of the old master-poets, English poets, those of the Elizabeth & James ages, before the corruption of French rhythms stole in with Waller & Denham, & was acclimated into a national inodorousness by Dryden & Pope” (332). She is objecting, as usual, to syllable counting, and arguing for a return to a rhythm inherent in the language itself, regular beats with varying numbers of syllables and rests between the icti. There may be a “roughness” in such prosody, but there is also a native energy that she exploits to enhance the force and affect of her conviction. The language matches the prosody: “In 1859, G.P. Marsh noted its exceptionally high degree of AngloSaxon diction (92 per cent …)” (webb 1: 434). So how are we to hear the rhythm of the poem? We might begin with Edgar Allan Poe’s response to it in his January 1845 review in the Broadway Journal. Poe praises the poem’s affect – it “is full of a nervous unflinching energy – a horror sublime in its simplicity – of which a far greater than Dante might have been proud” (bc 10: 352) – but criticizes, in all EBB’s

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poems he is reviewing, her “deficiencies of rhythm.” In some, he says, “it is nearly impossible to determine what metre is intended,” and “The Cry of the Children” is one of those puzzles: it “cannot be scanned” (355). Poe may have thought (since he was also discussing Lady Geraldine’s Courtship) that EBB was imitating the metre of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” and the opening lines of the poem do indeed use trochees as the dominant metrical foot: there are six trochaic feet in the first line (“Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers”) and four in the second line, with catalexis in the final foot (“Ere the sorrow comes with years?”). But the trochees falter with the accented second syllable in the fourth line (“And that cannot stop their tears”), where EBB italicizes the word “that,” pairs the accented syllable with the accented syllable of “cannot,” and so sharply disrupts the comfortable forward movement of the trochees.“Countermetrical italicization,” Herbert Tucker calls EBB’s accent on “that,” suggesting that “the mechanical trochaic juggernaut,” if not “unstoppable,” is at least “resistible” (“Over Worked” 125). That line gives way to other kinds of feet in lines 5 through 8, beginning with “The young lambs are bleating in the meadows.” The difficulties in scansion indicate that there is another kind of rhythm entirely, one not dependent upon syllable counting or one dominant kind of foot. For there are regular beats – three in the first line, two in the second – and the beats mark units of equal time: / / / Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, / / Ere the sorrow comes with years? The first line begins with an anacrusis (“the striking up of a tune” with one or two syllables not part of an isochronous unit) before the first ictus, “hear,” which marks the beginning of a bar with three more syllables in it before the next ictus, “weep.” The second bar has, like the first, three more syllables after the ictus, but also a pause or rest marked by the comma. The third bar begins with “bro,” and that unit, which straddles the line division, has two syllables and a rest, again marked by the comma. My reading of the lines is essentially the same as Herbert Tucker’s. For he too finds scansion by trochees “unsustainable,” and instead “take[s] the

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lines in double time,” each with “three or two strong stresses”:“hear,”“weep,” and “broth” in line 1, “sor” and “years” in line 2 (“Tactical Formalism” 87). The units might be labelled first paeons, Tucker suggests (“hear the children” – / x x x), and the continuing of those units over the line ends anticipates Hopkins’ “rove over” technique (88, 92; see MacKenzie 237). Tucker does not label such scansion as musical, but his characterization of EBB’s prosody as “metronomically merciless” (88) clearly points to units of equal time. Tucker’s reading is especially valuable because he hears the connection between the prosody and the poem’s “unmistakably aggressive purpose” (87). In other contexts, EBB makes music liberating and revelatory; here its strict marking of time parallels the children’s daily experience. EBB, Tucker says, “could hardly have implied a clearer analogy between the regulation of verse and of lives” (88), and hers is “an exceptionally confrontational prosody” (87). “Industrial meter,” Tucker calls it in his 2006 essay on the poem, “evidently designed for reading to a metronome or stopwatch (analogous to the work-place punch-clock)” (“Tactical Formalism” 88, 91); “the poetics of fatigue” is his label in his 2010 essay on the same lines (“Over Worked” 124). The real test of this kind of scansion comes with lines 5 through 8, where the juxtaposed accented syllables with which the lines begin frustrate the ear’s expectation of intervening unaccented syllables: “The young lambs are bleating in the meadows.” The beats might fall as follows: / / / / The young lambs are bleating in the meadows This scansion makes the single syllable “young” a complete isochronous unit, and while the tempo of the line resists such a foreshortening, the juxtaposed accents promote it. Tucker’s suggestion is a musical analogy: “given ‘young’ … we make the metrical deficit good by lengthening the monosyllable into, as it were, a half-note amid the staccato clatter of quarter-notes” (89). That lengthening suits EBB’s purpose, which is to contrast two states of being young: that of lambs, birds, fawns, and flowers with that of the children, the contrast being confirmed by the repetition of the adjective in the ninth line (“But the young, young children”). There are four beats in that line:

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/ / / / But the young, young, children, O my brothers … For it is the age of the children that EBB wants to draw attention to, not just as a fact but as something felt, and those strong beats with their intervening rests have the weight of protest and sympathy both. Even if, in the actual reading aloud of those lines, one does not quite stretch out “young” to an isochronous unit equal to the rest, there is a pressure in the rhythm to do so, and that pressure is certainly felt, even if it may not be fully realized. Such is EBB’s aligning of affect with the native rhythm of the language. And such is the result of the “hurricane” with which the opening lines came into her head. The metre and rhythm of “The Cry of the Children” are a good indication of the range and flexibility of musical prosody in EBB’s hands. Just as silence can be life-giving in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship but death-dealing in “The Lay of the Brown Rosary,” so “measured music” can sound “octaves of a mystic depth and height” or be one with “the wheels of iron / In the factories,” “droning, turning” (75–7). No wonder she called the music in her poetry “perplexed”: not something evoking a puzzled response, but interwoven and intricate. So the major texts of Poems (1844) are all, in one way or another, concerned with music – music in poetry, and music in human relations. The one dimension of that music that I have not yet discussed in any sustained way is rhyme. It is the subject of chapter 6. “The Dead Pan,” the remaining major text from Poems (1844), belongs in that context.

6 “my rhymatology”: rhyme, rhythm, and world harmony

It is time now for an extended examination of EBB’s practices in rhyming. As I have indicated in my introduction, my chief materials are EBB’s defence of her “rhymatology” in “The Dead Pan” against the criticism of Richard Hengist Horne, and her own criticism of RB’s rhymes and rhythms in the poems he was preparing for the collection he published in 1845. She had, after “much patient study of the great Fathers of English poetry” (bc 9: 66), championed “imperfect rhymes” (bc 2: 136) as an escape from (what she called) “the despotism of the final emphasis” (webb 4: 469), the full rhyme of the vowel sound on the accented syllable at the end of a line of poetry – and as relief from the monotony of such sound repetition, which she condemned as “a tinkling cymbal” (webb 4: 469–70). By the 1840s she had a much fuller and more confident sense of rhymes that were consonant with “the spirit of the English language” (bc 9: 96). Moreover, unlike most of her critics, EBB never considered her rhymes in isolation: always she judged them in relation to the rhythm and metre of the lines in which they appeared. Hence I examine some of the sonnets in Sonnets from the Portuguese as good examples of her mature skill in matching rhyme and rhythm, form and meaning – by way of countering the charges of haste, affectation, and carelessness often made against her in reviews of her day – and still being made occasionally. Even though EBB makes rhyme – or at least the “idol-worship of rhyme” – the anti-hero in her romance of English poetry, she told Richard Hengist Horne that, if the public were to know anything at all about her, it must be not as “the heroine of a biography” but as “a writer of rhymes” (bc 7: 353). She was using the word “rhymes” not in the conventional way, as a synecdoche for poetry, but rather as an aspect of her art worthy of seri-

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ous consideration: she thought deeply about how rhyme worked and how it might work. For rhyme had an association that appealed to EBB: its appearance coincided, historically, with the advent of Christianity, and her reading of Chateaubriand confirmed the link – a richly generative link – between poetics and Christ. Spitzer calls rhyme “a typically Christian device” (46), and in it we hear something of the world harmony that was so important to EBB: “Both polyphony and rhyme are Christian developments, patterned on world harmony; in the ambiguity of the word consonantia in the Middle Ages (‘chord’ or ‘rhyme’) we may grasp the fundamental kinship of the two meanings. Rhyme is now redeemed from intellectualism, it is an acoustic and emotional phenomenon responding to the harmony of the world” (46). One source for EBB’s historical understanding of rhyme is Henry Hallam’s Introduction to the Literature of Europe (London, 1837–9), which she refers to in her review of The Book of the Poets as “an excellent and learned work” (webb 4: 468). The four volumes of the Brownings’ copy of that “introduction” are now in the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University, and while EBB has written “Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning” on the title page of the first volume only, her pencil markings – crosses, vertical lines, and marginalia – are throughout all four volumes. Early on Hallam deals with the shift from quantitative to accentual verse, and includes a paragraph on “Origin of rhyme in Latin”: rhyme was “the peculiar characteristic of the new poetry” (1: 41). “It has been proved by Muratori, Gray, and Turner, beyond the possibility of doubt, that rhymed Latin verse was in use from the end of the fourth century” (1: 42). EBB has marked that sentence with a pencilled vertical line. EBB’s reading of Chateaubriand provided her with a further Christian context for her sense of the importance of rhyme. For Chateaubriand, who had published his Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity) in 1802, and whom EBB had read and was referring to in the early 1840s, argues for the vital conjunction of Christianity and the arts. He was reacting against the view “que le christianisme était un culte né du sein de la barbarie, absurde dans ses dogmes, ridicule dans ses cérémonies, ennemi des arts et des lettres, de la raison et de la beauté” (469; that Christianity was a creed born from the bosom of barbarism, preposterous in

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its dogmas, ludicrous in its ceremonies, enemy of arts and letters, of reason and beauty). The second part of his work is titled “Poétique du Christianisme,” and there he deals with “poésie, beaux-arts, littérature” (poetry, fine arts, literature), all of them inspired and fostered by the Christian religion. Charles LaPorte has shown just how important that argument was for EBB: it gave her “a sort of intellectual platform for the religious poetics that she pursued in her most ambitious poetry of the 1830s and early 1840s” (37). In 1842 EBB looked forward to “a nobler ‘Genie du Christianisme’ than has been contemplated by Chateaubriand” and (in LaPorte’s words) “out-Chateaubriand[s] Chateaubriand” (39) by calling for the direct inspiration of poets because “Christ’s religion is essentially poetry – poetry glorified” (bc 5: 220). What we want, she says in her essays on “The Greek Christian Poets,” is “the touch of Christ’s hand upon our literature” and “the saturation of Christ’s blood upon the souls of our poets” (webb 4: 372). In that context the craft of poetry is crucial, and the skilful handling of it might go far toward recreating in English what had once been the strength of Greek: “the subtlety of the ancient music, the variety of its cadences, the intersections of sweetness in the rise and fall of melodies, rounded and contained in the unity of its harmony” (webb 4: 369) – and not just recreating such strengths, but surpassing them through the new dispensation. EBB’s reservations about Chateaubriand – “I do not like him,” she tells Mary Russell Mitford in 1844, because he is wordy, he “puffs & blows through his imaginative utterances,” and he is “scarcely a writer of high genius” (bc 9: 181) – but her dislike did not stop her from absorbing his central ideas, as Charles LaPorte has shown. When EBB talks about (and defends) her rhyming, it is nearly always in the context of a reaction against authority, an avoidance of the conventional, and some kind of assertion that she is writing in tune with world harmony. In 1837 she told a correspondent that she was “resolute to work whatever little faculty I have, clear of imitations & conventionalisms which cloud & weaken more poetry (particularly now-a-days) than would be believed possible without looking into it” (bc 3: 278–9). In rhyme the conventional meant the repetition of a vowel sound on the accented syllable at the end of a line of poetry, a convention she attacks as “the despotism of the final emphasis” and condemns as “a tinkling cymbal” (webb 4: 469– 70), the conventional (biblical) metaphor for sound without meaning. As

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early as the 1820s she was defending (what she calls) “imperfect rhymes” against the criticism of Hugh Stuart Boyd, for instance. He had picked out from An Essay on Mind the couplet, “But, when the sun of blinding prejudice / Glares in our faces, it deceives our eyes” (332–3). Yes, she says, “prejudice & eyes do make an imperfect rhyme, – but I think that imperfect rhymes relieve the ear from a monotonous impression. They are sanctioned by the practice of the most uniformly correct poets – by the frequent practice of Pope himself ” (bc 2: 136). Her appeal to authority disguises her independence – Boyd and others might even say her wilful independence – in rhyming, but in fact her final authority was not only her predecessors in English poetry but, more importantly, the ontological power she called world harmony. Just as “roughnesses or irregularities in the numerical syllables” might make the metre difficult to scan but the rhythm “harmonious & graceful” because it is “Heaven-inspired” (bc 3: 230), so imperfect rhymes might not satisfy those who expect full sound repetition but are nonetheless consonant with world harmony. There is a delightful letter of 1837 that takes the form of a poem addressed to her correspondent’s canary and written by EBB as a dove, and for all the playfulness in that epistle, she (as dove) does affirm a practice about which she (as poet) was serious: Creation’s self ’s a poem, written In lovelier rhymes than I can hit on; And I was taught by winds pathetic Thro’ shaken woods, to be poetic. (bc 3: 236; also in webb 5: 534–5, lines 241–4) The dove affirms that her mistress “still … learns in nature’s college, / And has a little sound Dove-knowledge” when it comes to rhyming. Part of EBB’s practice of being “poetic” was her experiments with “double rhymes.” By that term she meant (what we would refer to as) feminine rhymes, where the rhyming words are disyllabic and the accent falls on the penultimate syllable. EBB’s attitude toward double rhymes was, at least on one occasion, itself double, for she told Mary Russell Mitford in October 1842 that the practice was one she tried to avoid, but at the same time she considered double rhymes “natural,” an adjective we can under-

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stand explicitly as fitting the character of the English language and implicitly as consonant with world harmony.“In these new poems,” she writes to Mitford,“a few double rhymes have escaped me – but they came so naturally that I cd. scarcely say ‘no.’ Miss Landon overflows with ‘double rhymes’ – & I do not quite understand the objection” (bc 6: 99). A week later she sent new verses to Mitford, saying that “They ran away from me with their double rhymes, before I considered properly; but as you did not object to the last I sent you, & as the double rhyme does certainly always seem to me to give an appropriate lightness to the short lyric, I venture to leave the verses as they are, – in their natural state” (bc 6: 110). The volumes of 1844, she told Hugh Stuart Boyd in August of that year,“have more double rhymes than any two books of English poems that ever to my knowledge were printed, – I mean, of English poems not comic” (bc 9: 96). Her defence of double rhymes rests upon their usefulness: “what an admirable effect in making a rhythm various & vigorous, double rhyming is, in English poetry.” At the same time, she reminds Boyd that, “of double rhymes in use, which are perfect rhymes, you are aware how few there are,” and hence she claims “a certain license” in pairing them, though not without “much thoughtful study of the Elizabethan writers.” Her final appeal, however, is to the nature of English itself: “And do you tell me, you who object to the use of a different vowel in a double rhyme, … why you rhyme (as everybody does, without blame from anybody) ‘given’ to ‘Heaven,’ when you object to my rhyming ‘remember’ and ‘chamber’? The analogy surely is all on my side – and I believe that the spirit of the English language is, also” (bc 9: 96). Double rhymes affected EBB’s classification of verses. Hugh Stuart Boyd had objected to her calling lines of ten syllables “octosyllabic,” and she fired back by asking, Do you not observe, my dearest Mr Boyd, that the final accent & rhyme falls on the eighth syllable instead of the tenth; & that that single circumstance determines the class of verse? that they are in fact octosyllabic verses with triple rhymes? “Hatching Succession apostolical With other falsehoods diabolical.”

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Pope has double rhymes in his heroic verses – but how does he manage them? Why he admits eleven syllables – throwing the final accent & rhyme on the tenth – thus … “Worth makes the man, & want of it the fellow – The rest is nought but leather and prunella.” (bc 7: 122) And she continues with a barrage of further examples. She repeats these points when Richard Hengist Horne criticizes her double rhymes in “The Dead Pan.” EBB had invited his criticism, being concerned about reaction to “certain passages” (bc 9: 10) and specifically to “my rhymes” (10), so she had Horne read the poem in manuscript: “Enclosed is ‘Pan,’ at your service” (14). Horne’s initial response was tentative: “May I make a pencil mark or two, on the Dead Pan in returning it?” (18). Her response: “Certainly … mark as much as you please! They will all be marks of kindness, coming from you, whether depreciative or otherwise” (19). On 20 June 1844 EBB responded to Horne’s criticism. Her defence of her rhymes was more spirited than might have been expected from this early exchange. Far from saying that she had tried to avoid double rhymes, she asserts that she was experimenting with them and attempting to exploit them, and didn’t go far enough: they are “scarcely as various as they might be” (bc 9: 26). But then, rather than asserting her independence and the novelty of her experiment, she appeals to authority and defends her practice “by the analogy of received rhymes.” Here Pope turns up again: “Perhaps … there is not so irregular a rhyme throughout the poem of Pan, as the ‘fellow’ & ‘prunella’ of Pope the infallible” (26). A few sentences later, she dispenses with authority and defines the goal of her experiment: “there are so few regular double rhymes in the English language, that we must either admit some such trial, or eschew the double rhymes generally – & I for one, am very fond of them, & believe them to have a power, not yet drawn out to its length of capable development, – in our lyrical poetry especially” (26). We can only guess exactly what “power” lies in double rhymes, but it undoubtedly involves world harmony. “The Dead Pan” was the poem in which EBB felt it most necessary to defend her rhymes. The subject is one closely tied to rhyming: the coming

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of the Christian era with (as in Chateaubriand) its new and greater poetics. The Pan whose death the poem laments is, EBB told her brother George, “not your Pan of the rural districts & flocks & herd, but mine of the lyrical poem” (bc 7: 36).“Pan signifies ‘all,’ besides his individual goat-godship” (70). Hence the poem is both a lament for a dead god and silenced voices, and a palinode (“We will weep not!”) celebrating a greater source of inspiration. Conventionally, Pan might be considered the “false” god and Christ the “true” one (in fact in stanza XXVIII EBB refers to the “false gods”), but in relation to poetics typology is the more accurate context: Pan is the type, the pagan counterpart of Christ, who is the antitype. The first twenty-six stanzas mourn the death of the type and explore the silence “Now Pan is dead!” The last stanzas, on which, EBB said, the poem “leans its whole burden,” celebrates “the Saviour Himself; who is ‘the High Priest of our profession’” – of poets, that is – and the poem as a whole has a typological structure, since the last stanzas were not, she told John Kenyon, “thrown in,” but “were in my mind to say, – & all the others presented the mere avenue to the end of saying them” (bc 8: 261). “Thrown in” suggests that EBB was responding to a charge of carelessness, of a structure not fully thought out, and when she was responding to Horne’s criticism of her rhymes, it was explicitly “to put by any charge of carelessness which may rise up to the verge of your lips or thoughts” (bc 9: 26). Her rhymes, she insists, have all been worked at and thought out, and all of them are “meant for rhymes”: “Know then,” she tells Horne, “that my rhymes ARE really meant for rhymes – & that I take them to be actual rhymes – as good rhymes as any used by rhymer – & that in no spirit of carelessness or easy writing, or desire to escape difficulties, have I run into them, – but chosen them, selected them, on principle, & with the determinate purpose of doing my best, in & out of this poem, to have them received!” (25). EBB is magnanimous in expressing her gratitude to Horne “for all your kindness about the poem” but, she adds, “You are a bloody critic nevertheless” (27). We know exactly which rhymes Horne objected to because, long after EBB’s death, he published their correspondence on the topic in the Contemporary Review. The position Horne takes on rhyming in English seems at first to be, in his own words, one of “liberalities and allowances” (451), sanctioned by the nature of the English language itself. At the beginning

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of the second instalment he tells the story of Sir Walter Scott challenging a gathering at a “Christmas merry-making” to find a rhyme for the word “silver,” only to inform them, after “comical mental struggles,” that there was no such rhyme in English. That leads Horne to list other two-syllable words – “shadow,”“planet,” and so on – for all of which, he says,“there was not a single perfect rhyme to any one of them!” (449). So he comes to his conclusion: “Finding there are so many words of one, two, and three syllables (i.e. the vast majority of our words) which have no rhymes at all to them, a reasonable number of allowable rhymes should be recognized, – that is to say, rhymes of consonants, where the actual vowels differ, or have different sounds, and other words which do not assume to be rhymes, but which rank with the Spanish rima asonante and have a pleasing effect when judiciously and sparsely mingled with perfect rhymes” (451). In spite of such a liberal approach to rhyme, Horne also thinks “that some line of demarcation should be drawn,”“and this line, I think, has been passed more boldly, defiantly, and persistently by Miss E.B. Barrett than by any other English poet” (451). He refers to “received principles of English rhyme” (451) without saying exactly what those principles are, but one can deduce some of them from the specific rhymes in “The Dead Pan” to which he objects. “I did not like ‘tell us’ as a rhyme for Hellas; and still less, islands as a rhyme for silence” (452). His comments focus on the nature of the language itself: “The only excuse for them, was the difficulty with regard to the first, and the impossibility of the second, as there was no perfect rhyme for either of them in the English language. I suggested that perhaps they were not intended as absolute rhymes at all, but euphonious quantities of the rima asonante class? – or was it considered that the rhymes being on the first syllables (Hell and tell, si and I) instead of the last, they were to be regarded as fair exchanges?” (452). Horne then continues: In verse IV., I accepted ‘rolls on’ and ‘the sun,’ and ‘altars’ and ‘welters’ on the principle of allowable rhymes, as they were quite as good as ‘corses’ and ‘forces’ where the letters were all right, and recognized as true rhymes – which they really are not. In verse VI., I objected to ‘flowing’ and ‘slow in,’ (the rhyme being only on the first syllable), and in verse XII, to ‘golden’ and ‘enfolding,’ for the same reason. In verse XIII.,‘iron’ was very badly rhymed by ‘inspiring,’ being only

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fres h st r a n ge mus i c a rhyme on ir. ‘Panther’ and ‘saunter’ in the next verse were bad. In verse XVI.,‘driven’ and ‘heaving’ were not admissible. In verse XIX. ‘turret’ and ‘chariot’ could only be excusable on the equivocal grounds that there was no rhyme to either of them in the language, and it might seem generous to wed them for that reason, if not quite justifiable. The words ‘o’er her’ and ‘horror,’ – ‘angels’ and ‘candles,’ – ‘nothing’ and ‘truth in,’ could only be excused on the same grounds, as there were no rhymes in the language to ‘nothing,’‘angels,’ or ‘horror.’ (452–3)

The grounds on which Horne rejects EBB’s rhymes are the same grounds on which she pronounces them acceptable: the repetition of the vowel sound (with all its range of voicings) on the first syllable of two disyllabic words; and (what Horne calls) “consonant rhymes with different vowels (like march, lurch, torch, &c., which are all allowable)” (459). As for disyllables for which there is no rhyme in English, Horne seems to be suggesting that they should therefore never be rhymed, but EBB’s view of the matter is quite different: if there are words in the language that do not rhyme with any other words, that fact suggests that the harmony in which she placed so much faith was not universal, not “world harmony”; or it suggests a failure of the human ear to hear a harmony which is, however quietly, present. EBB’s goal is to make her readers hear harmony where none is obvious. She defended every one of the rhymes Horne criticized, and she changed none of them. “I maintain that my ‘islands’ & ‘silence’ is a regular rhyme in comparison” to Pope’s “fellow” and “prunella” she wrote defiantly (bc 9: 26). And “Tennyson’s ‘tendons’ & ‘attendence’ [sic] is more objectionable to my mind than either” (26). But she keeps returning to the wider issue of limited rhymes in the English language and the means by which harmony might be heard in spite of that limitation: “You who are a reader of Spanish poetry,” she says to Horne, “must be aware how soon the ear may be satisfied, even by a recurring vowel. I mean to try it” (26). And Horne himself refers to the licences sanctioned by “the only systematic rhyming authority in the language” (460), John Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary (first published in 1775), and the rhymes Walker pronounces “admissible” or “allowable” because used by the best poets: “tree” and “by” by Oldham; “form” and “man” by Dryden; “views” and “boughs” by

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Addison, and “vice” and “destroys” by Pope, this last “rather bold” but “nevertheless admissible” (460–1). Horne was unwilling to give up boundaries – “some kind of line should be drawn” (461) – but he was more liberal than this insistence would suggest, for he told EBB in June 1844 that “Your defence of your own theory and practice in rhymes is allowable and good. Only when anybody attempts to show that ‘dawn’ does not rhyme to ‘morn’ – there ends all the possible chances of mutual understanding of ears, – so far, and more” (bc 9: 37). “How soon the ear may be satisfied” in “The Dead Pan” depends to a large extent upon her full rhymes in juxtaposition with her experimental ones. She uses “sunken” and “drunken,” “shiver” and “river” in stanza II, “slumber” and “number” and “wine” and “fine” in stanza III, for instance, and they are so conventional as to sound largely without notice. But in stanza X she rhymes “unloaded” with “godhead,” and in stanza XI she pairs “glory” and “evermore, thee.” The “unloaded”-“godhead” rhyme is certainly noticeable: it sums up the decline that is the subject of the lament. It is the “a” rhyme in that sexain: the “b” rhyme is a full one – “prevail” and “pale” – but the line in which that last word appears – “Thou art staring the stars pale!” – is a little masterpiece of vowel variation. The shift in the “a” sound, from the open “a” of “art” through the different “a” of “staring” and the different (yet again) “a” of “stars” to the closed “a” of “pale” seems to parallel the change taking place in Jove himself. Moreover, the “b” rhyme lines – 2 and 4 – are catalectic, but the cutting short of the trochaic metre in the fourth line is more absolute with the iambic substitution in the third foot (“the stars”), so that the line ends with two accented syllables. In his 1999 essay, which is the fullest and most detailed analysis of the relation between rhyme and meaning in the poem that we have, Tim Sadenwasser does what I do: juxtapose (what he calls) the “certainty” of some of the rhymes – the exact repetition of vowel sounds – and the “deficiency” of others – EBB’s “imperfect rhymes” – and then considers them in relation to structure, meaning, and effect. I continue along the same lines. EBB’s juxtaposition of full and imperfect rhymes has a structural function as well as a semantic one. At the climax of the lament, in stanza XXVI, the “a” rhyme is imperfect – “slowly,” “melancholy” – while the “c” rhyme of lines 5 and 6 is a full one: “said” and “dead.” The “mute” – the plosive consonant at the end of those words – coincides with the finality of the

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statement and its summary of the “silence” that is the subject of the first twenty-six stanzas: in that “d” meaning and sound coalesce. Moreover, stanza XXVI is the only stanza in which the words of the refrain appear in the sexain, and the stitching together of the two suggests that the refrain is shifting from a lamentation to a factual statement in which a death makes room for the new poetics of the Christian era. The change is confirmed in the change in the refrain in stanza XXVII: “Then, Pan was dead.”“Then” is the moment of Christ’s sacrificial death, and that triumph coincides with Pan’s receding into the past. (But not according to Sadenwasser, who finds the shift to the past tense troubling and argues that it “throws into uncertainty the universal cry of ‘Pan is dead’” (524), the uncertainty lying in the suggestion that Pan was dead but now lives on in some way or other. He focuses on the tense of the verb; I focus on the meaning implied in the sound of the rhyme.) EBB’s “rhymatology” (her word; bc 9: 26) met with appreciation and support from an unexpected source. In the letter in which she defends herself against Horne’s strictures, she encloses “a note which a poet whom we both admire, wrote to a friend of mine who lent him this very Pan. Mark! – No opinion was asked about the rhymes, – the satisfaction expressed was altogether impulsive … from within” (bc 9: 26). The “poet whom we both admire” was Robert Browning, whom EBB had not yet met; the “friend of mine who lent him this very Pan” was John Kenyon. In a letter to Kenyon (and dated by the editors of bc as 19 May 1843), RB commented on “the noble verses” he had just read: “And what famous versification! The grand rhymes pair in virtue of their essential characteristics only, and the accidents (of a mute or a liquid) go for nothing: just as tree matches with tree in a great avenue, elm-bole with elm-bole, let the boughs lie how they may: in a spruce park ring-fence, knob-head-rail must needs go with knob-head, and spear-point with spear-point, – or retired-citizen Snodgrass would never hear the last of his bad taste” (bc 7: 137). RB’s analysis of how the rhymes “pair” is both more precise and more subtle than any we have yet met with. He distinguishes between the “essence” and the “accidents” of rhyme. By “essential characteristics” I think he means the repetition of a key vowel sound, with the understanding that each vowel in English – the letter – stands for a range of related sounds, so that the pairing of different soundings of the same vowel is rhyme that takes ad-

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vantage of the nature of the language itself – like EBB’s “on”-“sun” rhyme in her fourth stanza, or the “rows”-“brows” rhyme in her third. He himself defines “accidents”: a mute or a liquid. Not enough to hold together a rhyme in themselves (hence they “go for nothing”), they nonetheless contribute to the effect. His simile makes clear their relation to the essentials: the “accidents” are like boughs lying “how they may” on trees in a “great avenue” where, in spite of the boughs,“tree matches with tree.”What exactly are the liquids and mutes? They are consonants. The liquids are l, m, n, and r, defined in Johnson’s Dictionary as those “pronounced without any jar or harshness,” but by the oed as “having an indeterminate or unstable character between consonant and vowel.” The mutes are stopped consonants – consonants, that is, where the passage of breath through the vocal organs ends abruptly in a little explosion – and they are b, c, d, g, h, k, p, q, and t. They are called “mute” because they have no sound without the assistance of a vowel. In RB’s analysis, then, the“essential characteristics” of rhyming are vowel sounds in all their considerable range; the “accidents” are consonants of varying kinds. In a letter of 20 June 1844, EBB told Horne how much RB’s opinion pleased her, “so much & naturally on various accounts, & not least, from the beauty of the figure used to illustrate my rhymatology” (bc 9: 26). EBB’s defence of her rhymes often involves reiterated statements about the extent to which she has worked on them. For though they are echoes of nature, they do not come naturally or occur spontaneously. “It is a mistake,” she tells a correspondent in October 1843, “to think that a true poet (whatever his gifts!) can sing like a bird; he must work on the contrary like an artist” (bc 8: 16). In December of that same year, she tells Thomas Westwood that “This poet’s work is no light work. This wheat will not grow without labor, any more than other kinds of wheat – and the sweat of the spirit’s brow is wrung by a yet harder necessity” (124). Her specific subject in this exchange with Westwood is rhyming. In January 1844 she laments “how the plague of rhymers, & of bad rhymers, is upon the land,” and she condemns a “Reverend somebody Stoddart” who gave a talk in the Literary Institute of Brighton, in which he said that “‘poets made a mystery of their art, … but that in fact, nothing except an English grammar & a rhyming dictionary & some instruction about counting on the fingers, was necessary, in order to make a poet of any man.’!!!!” (160).

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EBB could never accept such a limited view of “this poet’s work,” in part because she knew that simply finding a rhyme in a rhyming dictionary was far from enough. For rhyme affects rhythm. In all her thinking about rhyme, EBB knows that it cannot be considered in isolation, and she is always conscious that the rhyming words are part of the rhythm of the line. And while her goal in rhythm is harmony, and while she is always insisting that harmony cannot be achieved without art, she does not allow her art to run counter to the nature of the English language itself. The balance is a delicate one: always she aims for the skilful handling of the language without forcing it into rhythmical and syntactical patterns not already inherent in it. How she maintained that balance is evident in her handling of the “nuts and bolts” of composition. Syllable-counting, for instance. She was not primarily concerned with maintaining feet with equal numbers of syllables, insisting that “metre is nothing nobler than the guardian of Rhythm” and saying, for instance, of “roughnesses or irregularities in the numerical syllables” in Mary Russell Mitford’s play that “there is nothing whatever in them that I do not like.” For “Rhythm can take care of herself, & she is often Heaven-inspired to do it” (bc 3: 230), such inspiration being the poet’s authority for not being consistently smooth and regular when she wants a rhythm that is “various & vigorous” (bc 9: 96). In that same spirit she told Hugh Stuart Boyd in 1844 that “you will find me a little lax perhaps in metre – a freedom which is the result, not of carelessness, but of conviction, … & indeed of much patient study of the great Fathers of English poetry … not meaning Mr Pope” (bc 9: 66). Such apparent laxness in metre included her refusal to use contractions. Though doing so was “the style of the day,” “I have cut away in the text, none of my vowels by apostrophes. When I say ‘To efface,’ wanting two syllable measure, I do not write ‘T’efface’ as in the old fashion, but ‘To efface’ full length” (bc 9: 66). And in the same letter to Boyd in which she exclaims about the “admirable effect” of double rhyming in English poetry and says her “certain license” in using it is in “the spirit of the English language” (96), she asks him also to “see my principle” in refusing to use contractions. The line in question is from “Wine of Cypress”: “It is tawny as Rhea’s lion” (51). “I know,” she says to Boyd, “(although you dont say

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so) you object to that line. Yet consider its structure. Does not the final ‘y’ of ‘tawny’ suppose an apostrophe & apocope? Do you not run ‘tawny as’ into two syllables naturally?” (97). “Apocope” means “a cutting off.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines it as the “omission of one or more letters from the end of a word, e.g. ‘t’other’ for ‘the other.’” EBB’s strong sense of the relation between rhyme and rhythm is most in evidence in her comments on the poems RB was preparing for the collection he published in 1845. That collaboration is the subject of the dialogue between Corinne Davies and Marjorie Stone, both of whom believe “the Brownings strongly influenced each other’s experiments with genre and poetic technique” (153). And Mary Sanders Pollock deals briefly with that collaboration in her book on the “creative partnership” of EBB and RB, saying rightly, of the letters and notes I am about to discuss, that EBB and RB “created together a dialogic space in which new ideas and meanings could emerge and find their way back into both bodies of poetry” (64). To fill out our understanding of that collaboration, we need to pay close attention to EBB’s actual comments on RB’s rhymes and rhythms. He heard in her poetry “fresh strange music”; she heard in his lapses between his virtuoso rhyming and the rhythms of his lines. EBB’s earliest criticism of RB is his “defect in harmony” (bc 5: 75). Her attitude was inescapably double: she recognized him as a “true poet” and at the same time shrank from his “want of harmony.” Here is the doubleness as she expressed it in a letter of May 1843 to Richard Hengist Horne – a letter I have already quoted in another context: Browning however stands high with me … Mr Browning knows thoroughly what a poet’s true work is – he is learned, not only in profane learning, but in the conduct of his genius – he is original in common things – his very obscurities have an oracular nobleness about them which pleases me – his passion burns the paper! But I will guess at the “worst fault” – a want of harmony – I mean it in the two senses, spiritual & physical. There is a want of the softening power in thoughts & in feelings as well as words – everything is trenchant, – black & white without intermediate colours, nothing is tender – there is little room in all the passion, for pathos – And the verse … the lyrics … where is the ear? Inspired spirits should

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fres h st r a n ge mus i c not speak so harshly, – & in good truth, they seldom do – What! From Paracelsus down to these Bells & Pomegranates, … a whole band of angels, white-robed & crowned angel-thoughts, with psalms in their hands, … & no music!!! (bc 7: 99–100)

By 1845, after EBB had met RB, she modified her criticism and acknowledged that there was music in RB’s lines. In July of that year she was reading “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” “The Boy and the Angel,” and the two “Garden Fancies.” In one of the “Fancies” she praised “some of the stanzas about the name of the flower, with such exquisite music in them, & grace of every kind – & with that beautiful & musical use of the word ‘meandering,’ which I never remember having seen used in relation to sound before. It does to mate with your ‘simmering quiet’ in Sordello, which brings the summer air into the room as sure as you read it” (bc 10: 315). But EBB was not ready to give up entirely her reservations about RB’s music, and of “The Laboratory” she writes, only I object a little to your tendency …, which is almost a habit … & is very observable in this poem I think , … of making lines difficult for the reader to read … see the opening lines of this poem. Not that music is required everywhere, nor in them certainly, but that the uncertainty of rhythm throws the reader’s mind off the rail … & interrupts his progress with you & your influence with him. Where we have not direct pleasure from rhythm, & where no peculiar impression is to be produced by the changes in it, we shd. be encouraged by the poet to forget it altogether, should we not? (315–16) Hence it is not surprising that, when RB asked EBB for help with his new poems – the ones to be published later that year as Dramatic Romances and Lyrics – she was torn between the “roughnesses or irregularities” that she heard as consistent with “the spirit of the English language” and its rhythms, and the “roughnesses and irregularities” that she shrank from as going too far – this in spite of her liberal (by the standards of others) approach to rhythm. Many of her comments – and they are extensive and detailed, and accessible in Appendix IV of the eleventh volume of bc (pages 375–401) –

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are on the rhymes and rhythms of “The Flight of the Duchess,” that tour de force of rhyming. For the most part, EBB approves of the rhymes, and is in fact enthusiastic about them, but she has reservations about their relation to the rhythm. “You are not to think,” she tells RB, “that I have not a proper respect & admiration for all these new live rhymes & that I would not make every sacrifice in reason for them” (bc 11: 376). And again she exclaims, “Yet the rhymes! Which shd. not be hurt for the world!” (377). But the rhymes must “assist the rhythm” (376), and she finds fault with many of RB’s lines, pointing to their abruptness, the frequent elisions and omissions and ellipses, and (what she calls) the “clogging rhythm” (378). She does not object to abruptness per se, and in fact says of line 228 (“Oh, and old books they knew the way of it”) that “I like the abruptness” (376). (In spite of that comment, RB revised the line.) But the abruptness had to have a reason. Of another two lines EBB says,“I like these short lines sometimes … when anything is to be expressed by abruptness – but not here, I think” (377). The abruptness is frequently the result of RB’s omission of conjunctions (especially “and”) and relative pronouns (often “that”). For instance, EBB says of the line “And if day by day, week by week” (which became line 272 in “The Flight of the Duchess” as it was published) “ Should it not be ‘and week by week’ – ? Also I do wish those following ‘ands,’ written by your hand & erased, in the next lines, both back again. Your ear’s first impulse led you to them, & rightly according to mine” (376). RB restored the “ands.” For line 300 RB had first written “That there ran half round our lady’s chamber,” and then omitted the relative pronoun. EBB wanted it restored: “The ear was right at first, I am nearly sure … I feel so, I mean” (377). EBB made similar comments on improving the music in another line: “In the incantation … a little attention to the rhythm seems necessary – and another word here & there, especially in the early part of it. It ought to be musical – ought it not? – / ‘And art ready to say & do …’ Should it not be / And all thou art ready to say & do” (379). “Really,” EBB writes later in her notes,“I could almost make a general & unexcepting remark of it, that whenever you erase a word, you should immediately put it back again” (380). EBB’s suggested revisions may seem like an attempt to fill out the required number of syllables in the metrical feet, to make them more regular, but in fact her ear was far subtler than that, and she was critical of mere

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regularity. She asks, for instance, of two lines she quotes, “Is there not a sameness in the fall of the accents which you wd. choose to avoid” (bc 11: 377). At the same time, she is prepared to accept many of RB’s roughnesses. Of one short line she says, “I cant quite like [it],” and then adds, “But all this is so characteristic & strong & fresh” (378). Her criticism was often astute and led RB not only to an improvement in the rhythm but to a better fusion of rhythm and meaning. Of line 323, for instance – “And you may fancy how her tongue ran on” in RB’s first version of it – EBB says, “I do not like the rhythm – though harmony is not required, – to be sure” (377). RB rewrote the line, adding syllables that speed up the tempo and suggest the running-on itself: “And then you may guess how that tongue of hers ran on!” Then there are EBB’s objections to (what she calls) the “clogging rhythm,” and again her criticism led RB to better lines. For example, the line that became 403 in the finished poem: RB’s first version was “So that his foolish horse well nigh reared up.” “Do you like that clogging rhythm?” EBB asks (bc 11: 378). She is apparently referring to the sequence of five accented syllables (“horse well nigh reared up”), which slow down the line and don’t quite fit the sudden reaction of the horse. RB added unaccented syllables that speed the line up and are appropriate to a quick and unexpected test of the Duke’s horsemanship: “So that the horse of a sudden reared up.” “You are so fond of elisions” (bc 11: 378), EBB writes, and her objection to the practice has to do with what she calls “keeping the tune” or “reading in tune” – by the poet, but more importantly (in her view) for the reader. Of two lines she says that “there seems to me an effort necessary on the part of the reader to keep the tune … on account of a want of a word here & there” (378). Of line 489 (in the finished poem) she says that the first version “is difficult to read in tune – And lower still, ‘So they went in,’ I shd. be inclined to write ‘So they went along,’ or ‘And so they went in’ … for a like reason” (378). The word “tune” may seem to be the wrong word when EBB is in fact talking about rhythm, but she had used the word in the same sense in “The Poet’s Vow.” When she is there talking about “the nature” at the poet’s heart, it is “that quick tune along his veins” (51) – his pulse, that is, which is the basis of all rhythm.

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EBB takes particular note of RB’s rhyming of two- and three-syllable words, and her objection is not, as we might expect, to the pairing of unlike vowel sounds but rather to a repeated rhythm. For instance, she comments on the lines that would become 600 to 602 in the published version of the poem, and begins with RB’s first draft of 601: “With the fortitude those eyes assure.” “The meaning is apparent,” she writes, “but ‘eyes assuring fortitude’ is forced in the mode of expression perhaps, & looks as if the rhyme were troubling you. And then, if it is not hyper-criticism, there is a rather objectionable sameness in the form of ending those three lines … with the words ‘endure’ … [‘]assure’ … & ‘essay’ … to my ear – all dissyllables & similarly accented” (bc 11: 380). Each of the three words, in short, is made up of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. EBB does not object to the rhyming of “assure” and “assay” (wrongly quoted by her as “essay”), even though the rhyme is on the unaccented syllable. Rather, it is the lack of variation in the rhythm that troubles her. RB’s published version of the lines drops one of the disyllables and substitutes a more daring rhyme: “are sure” and “assay”: Thou shalt victoriously endure, If that brow is true and those eyes are sure; Like a jewel-finder’s fierce assay … RB sometimes varies his metre by switching from lines predominantly iambic to ones predominantly trochaic. He signals the shift by placing an accented syllable at the beginning of a line (a shift that draws attention to itself when we remember that English sentences do not usually begin with an accented syllable). But a trochaic line, especially a catalectic one, is inherently unstable, as I observed in chapter 5, and keeps wanting to reverse itself into iambs. EBB, for reasons she does not specify, sometimes objects to the trochaic lines and suggests they would be better as iambic. For instance, in a passage beginning at line 647, RB has an iambic line (“Thy future portion, sure and well”) followed by a line that begins with two anapests and ends with two spondees (“But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true”). The next line is trochaic (“Let them say what thou shalt do!”) and the next begins with a trochee (“Only”), so that one hears

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the next two lines as trochaic: “In its peace or in its strife, / Never shall be unobserved.” EBB asks, would that last line not be “better written, for the general rhythm,” as “Shall never be unobserved” – in other words, would it not be better as a sequence of iamb, anapest, iamb? Her reason – “general rhythm” – is itself too general, but she gives it in the context of her objections to RB’s elisions. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust, by sweeping away your little words” (bc 11: 380). The line she points to is 658, drafted by RB as “Shame to feel & pride to show.” “Why not write it ‘With our shame to feel’ &c.? for rhythm and clearness” (380). RB did change his original catalectic trochaic line to an iambic one: “Our shame to feel, our pride to show.” But he left “Never shall be unobserved” as a catalectic trochaic line. Perhaps EBB felt that the shifts between iambic and trochaic lines, and the frequent uses of anapests, left the reader unsure of the rhythm and made it difficult for him or her to “keep the tune.” Still, at the end of her detailed notes she praises the poem and RB “for keeping such true measure with nature” (381) – “nature” being the human pulse that is the basis of all music in poetry. There is another instance of EBB criticizing RB’s shifts of metre, and it is in her notes on “Saul,” where her reasons for wanting to maintain the iambs are clearer. When the poem was first published in 1845, the long lines of the final text of 1855 were printed as two short lines. EBB focuses on the following: One after one seeks its lodging As star follows star Into the blue far above us, – So blue & so far! – (lines 40 and 41 in the final text) EBB’s comment: “It appears to me that the two long lines require a syllable each at the beginning, to keep the procession of sheep uninterrupted. The ear expects to read every long & short line in the sequences of this metre, as one long line – & where it cannot do so, a loss … an abruption … is felt – & there should be nothing abrupt in the movement of these pastoral, starry images – do you think so?” (bc 11: 389). Here EBB clearly ties the metre to the meaning and the effect, and RB took her advice in the text of 1855 (though he varies the iambs with a trochee in the second foot

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of line 40: “And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star / Into eve and the blue far above us, – so blue and so far!” There is one other disyllabic rhyme EBB questions, and it is the pairing of “vaticinate” and “innate” in lines 861 and 862 of “The Flight of the Duchess.” “The rhyme does seem to me & persist in seeming to me, to be overstrained. You cant get a rhyme without distraining the accents too!” (bc 11: 381). RB simply dropped that rhyme altogether. It is one of the few EBB criticizes. For the most part, she is excited by the “originality” of the poem, and she says it is “quite wonderful for the mechanism & rhyming power of it” (381). She even mentions the authority for the rhymes and rhythms: “the right divine,” she calls it, the basis of “originality” that she links to “parts of Christobel [sic]” (381), alluding (perhaps) to Coleridge’s pioneering handling of metre in relation to rhythm in that poem. EBB is enthusiastic about the passage describing the Gypsy’s speech in “The Flight of the Duchess”: “was it singing, or was it saying [?]” (512). In RB’s first version of that line, there was no “or.” EBB comments: “I rather doubt … just doubt … whether an ‘or’ might not with advantage precede the “was it saying” – but this is very musical, (I dont ask “was it singing, was it saying.”) & a worthy beginning to a passage of extreme beauty, & power too – The whole expression & picture of it, quite exquisite, & one of the worthiest things you have done I think -” (bc 11: 379). In spite of the fact that RB added “or” in the final version of the text, EBB changed her mind: “Thinking of it at a distance, it grows clear to me that you were right, & that there shd. be & must be no ‘or’ to disturb the listening pause. Now shd. there?” (4–5). “The listening pause”: I commented on this label in the previous chapter because it is one of the rare occasions when EBB suggests a broader function for the rest in a line of poetry, other than keeping the beat. Far from being an emptiness or absence, it is, like Carlyle’s silence, full of mental activity and alive with something being created, something taking shape, something being interpreted. “The generative effects of silence” (85) is Rhian Williams’ wording in her fine analysis of the phenomenon in Sonnets from the Portuguese (which were being written at the same time that EBB referred to “the listening pause”). Silence in the Sonnets, Williams persuasively and perceptively shows, is in fact the lovers’ move toward marriage: “marital bonding” (99) she calls it. In “The Flight of the Duchess,” the

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silence is something less being decided – singing or saying – but again the decision involves a great deal: the authority that the retainer hears in the old Gypsy’s sounds, the motives for the flight of the duchess, the reasons for the effect of both on the narrator. So EBB praised both rhyme and rhythm in RB’s poem.“You have right of trove to these novel effects of rhythm,” she tells RB in October 1845 (bc 11: 134), and in December she speaks of “The Flight of the Duchess” as a model for others: “the versification is a study for poets” (224). She borrowed a line from the first of RB’s “Garden Fancies” to describe the rhythm of “The Duchess”: “Speech half asleep, or song half awake.” For her there was no question about the music in the part of the poem dealing with the Gypsy’s singing/saying, nor in a later part: “And where the lady prepares for her flight & flies, I like it all much – the very irregularity & looseness of the measure having a charm of music – falling like a golden chain, with links fastened though loose” (381). In November 1845 she summed up her response to both rhyme and rhythm in the poem: “the rhythm of that ‘Duchess’ does more & more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks called pedestrian metre, – between metre & prose … the difficult rhymes combining too quite curiously with the easy looseness of the general measure” (167). The editors of The Brownings’ Correspondence gloss “pedestrian metre” as “a modification of the iambic trimeter ending in a spondee or trochee,” but one also needs to take into account the rhythm of walking, another version of the steady rhythm of the pulse (and of the “animal life” of poetry). Into the units of such a steady rhythm one can fit varying numbers of syllables and rests, of rhymes and “listening pauses,” but each step or each heart beat, by its very nature, preserves that “tune” (in EBB’s diction) that is the music of creation itself. EBB’s “rhymatology” is hardly a settled system with firm rules and welldefined limits. Instead, each time she rhymes is also a time for a judgment on her part, and she must decide whether or not the rhyme, and its place in the rhythm of the lines, is consonant with the nature of the English language as she understands it, and with the harmony that, in her view, underpins it. A judgment is necessary because there are relatively few full rhymes in English (in comparison to Italian, for instance), and there are many words with the same written vowel but with different voicings

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of that letter – voicings that are related but nonetheless distinct. Then there are the disyllabic words, where rhyming is complicated by the rhythm, especially when the related vowel may be in the unaccented syllables, and the judgment she must make necessarily involves rhythm as well as sound repetition. When EBB was discussing rhymes with Boyd and Horne in the early 1840s, she had a firm and independent understanding of allowable rhymes, and the validity of that understanding was confirmed when she came to know Robert Browning, and especially when she was responding to his request for criticism of the rhymes and rhythms of “The Flight of the Duchess.” By mid-October 1845 she was labelling RB’s rhymes in that poem as “perfect” – that is, “perfectly new, & all clashing together as by natural attraction” (bc 11: 125). Her diction in this letter is telling. “Clashing together” suggests rhymes not considered “allowable”; “by natural attraction” indicates the surprise discovery of a consonance in sound, so that the rhyme is a revelation. The exercise of responding to RB’s innovations in rhyme was a liberating one for EBB. She had always had a streak of stubborn independence when it came to rhyming; now she had a fellow poet to support her. Robert Browning became her “chief musician.” Such is her label for him in Sonnets from the Portuguese, written (as everyone knows) while RB was courting her, and reflecting in art the letters that passed between them during that period – including her criticism of RB’s rhymes. The label, as I have already said in my introduction, points to a nineteenthcentury type identified by Jay Macpherson, the music master, and the nature of his appearance in EBB’s work needs to be defined carefully. EBB is not simply sounding music dictated to her by the master. Rather, she is appropriating his expertise with the use of her own judgment, and sounding her own music that is, like his, part of universal harmony, now heard more fully thanks to the master’s teaching and example. The sonnets are good examples of EBB’s mature skill in rhyming, and in matching rhyme, rhythm, and meaning. For instance, Sonnet XXII, the turning point in the sequence that begins, “When our two souls stand up erect and strong,” and that, as Williams says, is such an intense gathering of “intimations of promises and vows” (98): as EBB often does when she talks about souls, she also talks about the “ministering two angels” (Sonnet III) that, in her view, accompany

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every soul and, among other things, link souls with “some golden orb of perfect song.” But in this sonnet, she rejects such aspiring: “Let us stay / Rather on earth,” she tells RB. That imperative is the turning point of the sonnet, and it comes in an unconventional spot, the middle of the ninth line. The rhyme makes the turn even more unconventional. It contrasts with the octave: there the “a” rhyme is “strong,”“wrong,”“long,” and “song,” and the “b” rhyme “nigher,” “fire,” “higher,” and “aspire.” Regular and unremarkable rhymes, those – and so is the “c” rhyme in the sestet: “stay,” “away,”“day.” But the “d” rhyme is daring: “”unfit,”“permit,”“rounding it.” That rhyme is associated with earth rather than with “perfect song” in heaven, and it is linked with “contrarious moods” rather than the contentment suggested by “our deep, dear silence.” The disyllabic “unfit” – one of those controversial spondees, perhaps? – fits uneasily with the disyllabic “permit” – an iamb – and even more uneasily with “rounding it,” which is less certainly iambic. Moreover, the rhythm of line 10 – its music – is a deliberate departure from harmony. There are eleven syllables rather than ten in the line, and the word “unfit” occurs just at the point where we hear an extra and unwanted syllable crowd into the line, which as a result ends in an awkward-sounding bacchic foot. So both rhyme and rhythm coincide with the meaning, for both appear “unfit” and “contrarious.” Sonnet VII (“The face of all the world is changed, I think”) is the sonnet in which EBB talks about being “caught up into love, and taught the whole / Of life in a new rhythm.” Here EBB’s life and art come together in the music that pervades both. She refers to her own poetry as “this lute and song,” which she links, as usual, with “the singing angels.” She returns to the proper names of loved ones she had celebrated in her early poetry, and says that she loves both song and angels “Because thy name moves right in what they say.” And she uses the word “sweet” in the expanded sense I have already explored. But it is the “new rhythm” that is both the subject of the sonnet and the character of its art. The sonnet begins with a perfectly regular iambic line (“The face of all the world is changed, I think”). The agent of change is RB’s “footsteps,” here the footsteps of his soul, the trope being one of EBB’s usual ones for the animal life of poetry and, by extension, for the units of equal time that characterize all of nature and all of creation. That first line, with its regular alternation of accented and unaccented syllables, fits the early eighteenth-

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century understanding of “harmony” in poetry – a rhythm EBB establishes here so that she can break away from it and move on to her own understanding of “harmony.” In the second line (“Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul”), she reverses the regularity of the two iambs with which it begins (“Since first I heard”) with the disyllabic “footsteps,” a spondee cutting across the iambic feet. The next line is even more of a change: “Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole / Betwixt me.” The accented syllables (“move,” “still,” “oh”) combined with the pauses (signalled by the commas) and followed by two more accented syllables (“side me”) are indeed a “new rhythm,” while the double meaning of the adverb “still” makes that newness seem even more pronounced. “Move still” appears, on first reading, to be an oxymoron – movement without movement – and some of that paradoxical sense stays in the mind when it moves on to another meaning of the adverb – always, with the implication of faithful attendance, steadiness, and constancy. Lines 5, 6, and 7 twice repeat the sonnet’s initial shift from a regular iambic metre to a “new rhythm.” “Where I, who thought to sink” is the iambic metre that is the starting point in line 5; the first change – “Was caught up into love” – is signalled by the sequence of accented syllables – “caught up in” – that coincides with the vigorous physical action. There follow three iambs (“and taught the whole / Of life”) that give way to “in a new rhythm,” where an anapestic substitution (“in a new”) is followed by the trochaic word “rhythm,” the reversal coinciding neatly with the meaning. This is another sonnet in which the final lines move toward balance and harmony. The antepenultimate line is predominantly iambic (“And this … this lute and song … loved yesterday”) but with pauses that are part of the cadence. The penultimate line is perfectly regular in its alternation of unaccented and accented syllables, but trochaic words (“singing angels,”“only”) cut across the iambic feet. There is no such cutting across of feet in the final line, where the words are all monosyllables (except for the initial“because”). The monosyllables – with the exception of “in” – all seem to be accented, or hover between varying degrees of accent, and so suggest balance, contentment, and a sense of things being “right.” Such is EBB’s strategy in revealing “a new rhythm”: she plays off regularity of accent – the eighteenth-century understanding of “harmony” – against “a new rhythm” – her own understanding of “harmony,” with its skilful fitting together of sound, sense, and affect.

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That “new rhythm” has one source in her responding to the man and poet whom she labels “chief musician.” That epithet is in the third sonnet where, even though she contrasts the two of them – “Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!” – they have music in common, and she is the “singer” in relation to his music making. Her rhymes are daring. The “a” rhyme is initiated by the word “Heart,” which she then rhymes fully with “art” and “part” but only partly with “athwart.” The “b” rhyme is even more daring. It begins with the word “destinies,” which she then rhymes (unexpectedly, surprisingly, and appropriately) with “surprise,” and thus not only links different voicings of the “i” but also links a rhyme on an unaccented syllable with one on an accented one. She does the same thing in the second half of the octave, when she rhymes “pageantries” and “eyes.” The rhythm is also daring. She maintains ordinary English syntax, and she begins with an exclamation, so that the rhythm is that of ordinary speech. The sonnet begins with a spondee (“unlike”) that she repeats in the first line, where the dominant metre is iambic. But the second line, after the repeated “Unlike,” has only two accented syllables (“use” and “des”), and a musical prosody comes to the fore, with three unaccented syllables fitted in the unit after “use” and two, plus a rest, in the unit after “des.” The shift to a musical prosody fits with her description of RB as “chief musician” and herself as “a poor, tired, wandering singer.” Both are accompanied by “ministering angels,” whom EBB usually associates with music: they are the agents of contact with the original harmony of creation, a contact partly broken and diminished by the fall. But RB’s music is closer to restoring that contact than hers. When she contrasts RB “With gages from a hundred brighter eyes” and her own music, the line I have just quoted (predominantly iambic) is followed by “Than tears even can make mine,” with its irregularly spaced and juxtaposed accents.“Chief musician” is a label for RB that fits the iambs of the line;“poor, tired, wandering singer” – EBB’s label for herself – has three juxtaposed accented syllables that suggest both weariness in keeping the rhythm and a “wandering” from it. The last line in the sonnet – “And Death must dig the level where these agree” – uses a rhythm that fits brilliantly with the meaning. The metre is iambic, and it is regular, with the exception of the trochaic word “level” that cuts across the iambic feet, so that “the level” has the effect of a balance beam, teetering between iamb and trochee.

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Sonnet XVII is another sonnet in which RB appears as “chief musician,” as the opening line suggests: “My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes.” And his being able to do so gives EBB the opportunity to expand on the myth that underpins her understanding of harmony. The poet is capable of creating music that plays on the “notes” of God’s original creation, “all the notes / God set between His After and Before.” EBB contrasts those notes with the sounds that followed mankind’s expulsion from Eden, “the general roar / Of the rushing worlds.” Because the poet can “touch on” God’s notes, he creates “a melody that floats / In a serene air purely.” EBB suggests that such a melody compensates for the Fall, and is capable of reversing its effects. “Antidotes / Of medicated music,” she calls such melodies. Moreover, she says that the poet, in making such music, is doing God’s will: “God’s will devotes / Thine to such ends.” In the octave, EBB offers herself for RB’s “most use,” and catalogues the ways in which she might advance his ends. Sonnet XXXII (“The first time that the sun rose on thine oath”) continues the idea of “use.” There EBB tropes herself as more like an out of tune Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste, Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note. She immediately rejects the implications of that trope when she considers the skill of the “chief musician” who is her lover: I did not wrong myself so, but I placed A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float ’Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced, – And great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat. Woven into all this exploration of music making are the two elements that were crucial in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship: speech and silence, for instance, in Sonnet XIII – “And wilt thou have me fashion into speech.” She might provide “proof / In words, of love hid in me out of reach,” but instead she refers to “the silence of my womanhood” and expresses a wish: that that silence “Commend my woman-love to thy belief.” The situation parallels

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that in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, where silence is double: silence is the conventional female role, and silence is symbolic, as in Carlyle: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule” (Works 1: 174). Like Bertram in EBB’s earlier work, RB must read that silence right, and act upon it. And he does, as the first line of Sonnet XXXI indicates: “Thou comest! all is said without a word.” EBB returns to speech and silence, and to Carlyle’s proverb, in Sonnet XXI, “Say over again, and yet once over again.” “The word repeated” is “love,” in “I love you,” and the last three lines of the octave are a concentrated expression of the ideas the earlier narrative and the present sonnets share: speech is silver and has its immediate and practical uses; silence fosters great things, inwardly, invisibly, inaudibly. (On the richness of allusions in the metaphor “silver,” in addition to Carlyle, see the editors’ annotation to “silver answer” in Sonnet I, webb 2: 443n4.) Say thou dost love me, love me, love me – toll The silver iterance! – only minding, Dear, To love me also in silence, with thy soul. The volta or turn is in line 13, with the adverb “only.” It signals the turn from silver speech to golden silence. Speech in this sonnet is a matter of repetition, and the obvious repetitions are the imperatives in lines 1 and 12: “Say over again, and yet once over again,” and “Say thou dost love me, love me, love me.” Repetition has its dangers: it can be the mindless or empty sounding of the same word or note, and EBB explores that danger in her reference to the cuckoo, and in her handling of the technique that depends upon sound repetition, rhyme.“The word repeated” might “seem ‘a cuckoo-song,’” but its “strain” is the harbinger of spring, and spring never comes without it. (EBB simply ignores any cause-and-effect relationship.) So with the “spirit-voice” that she hears saying “I love you,” and that she labels “doubtful” – the doubt being in her response to it. She dispels any such doubt in her handling of the rhyme. The “a” rhyme – “again,”“plain,”“strain,” and “pain” – is straightforward sound repetition, and three of the four words are one-syllable.

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The “b” rhyme is another matter altogether. It consists of two-syllable words (“repeated,” “treat it,” “completed,” “greeted”), and the sequence defines the nature and effect of rhyme. Repetition is treatment that completes (as the cuckoo song – though characterized by simple repetition – completes the spring) and greets (established sound becomes familiar, like the acknowledgment of a welcome guest). Contrast this sequence with the semantics of the “a” rhyme: “again,”“plain,”“strain,”“pain.” There is in that repetition a sense of anxiety, a fear of losing sound altogether. That feeling dominates the rhyme in the sestet: “fear,” “roll,” “year,” “toll” – until “Dear” and “soul” restore well-being.

I have been exploring EBB’s skill in rhyming and her ability to integrate it with rhythm, structure, and meaning, but that kind of analysis runs counter to the comments of many of EBB’s reviewers of the late 1840s and early 1850s who, while usually praising the poetry and its creator, at the same time identified EBB’s practice in rhyming as a defect or fault. Horne’s charge that the line marking acceptable rhymes off from inadmissible ones “has been passed more boldly, defiantly, and persistently by Miss E.B. Barrett than by any other English poet” (451) defined EBB’s reputation. The accusation did not upset the poet herself, since she was confident in her own judgment and knew that every rhyme she used had been carefully considered. She also knew the reviewers were simply wrong when they attributed her poetic sins to haste, carelessness, and affectation, as they often did. Here is Charles Kingsley in 1851: “There are defects of metre and of rhyme here … and they seem, without exception, to have been struck off at once, and never polished afterwards” (bc 17: 283). In that same year another reviewer speaks of EBB’s “recklessness of rhyme and metre” and says that “there is not a writer of our time more obnoxious than herself to the charges of affectation and carelessness” (285). Few were willing to think that EBB’s rhymes might be the result of deliberate choice and informed judgment. Complaints about EBB’s rhymes were a staple of reviews from the mid1840s on, almost always in the context of praise for her work. For instance, Blackwood’s, in a lengthy and generally laudatory review of Poems (1844), says that “Miss Barrett’s lyrical compositions are frequently so inarticu-

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late, so slovenly, and so defective, both in rhythm and rhyme, that we are really surprised how a person of her powers could have written them” (bc 9: 358). That review includes a whole paragraph on EBB’s rhymes: “What can be worse than ‘Godhead’ and ‘wooded,’ ‘treading’ and ‘Eden,’ ‘glories’ and ‘floorwise,’‘calmly’ and ‘palm-tree,’‘atoms’ and ‘fathoms,’‘accompted’ and ‘trumpet,’ and a hundred others? What can be worse, do we ask? We answer that there is one species of rhyme which Miss Barrett is sometimes … guilty of … We allude to the practice of affixing an r to the end of certain words, in order to make them rhyme with other words which terminate in that letter.” EBB’s ear was tuned to the living language, always for her the ultimate authority for her rhymes, but the reviewer is a snob: the practice, he says, is “one of the vilest vulgarisms which pollutes the oral language of certain provincial societies.” He cites EBB’s rhyming of “Aceldama” and “tamer,”“Onora” and “o’er her,” and then exercises his wit: “When we think of these things, we turn to the following ‘stage-direction’ with which her ‘Drama of Exile’ concludes – ‘There is a sound through the silence as of the falling tears of an angel.’ That angel must have been a distressed critic like ourselves” (359). Henry Chorley was far less specific, and mentions only in passing “a very careless rhyme,” “the strained rhymes” and the “too great liberty of rhyme” (bc 10: 345, 346, 348) in his review of the two volumes of 1844. But the Gentleman’s Magazine, in a brief review in May 1845, devoted a full paragraph to the rhymes.“Miss Barrett holds accurate rhyming in sovereign contempt,” said the anonymous critic,“and has invented a kind of pseudo-rhyme, or imitation-rhyme, which answers the purpose as well as plated goods do that of silver. We asked a young lady of our acquaintance to look out one of those imperfect roses for us, and she brought us a little nosegay of them in a very short time, such as ‘opal and people, feasting and question, eagles and vigils, presence and peasants, doorways and poor was’” and so on through a lengthy list (bc 10: 389). This “nosegay” is an extreme example of the tactics typical of EBB’s critics: they extracted her rhymes from their context and so focused the reader’s attention on sound repetition alone that, in isolation, often did appear strained or odd, all the time ignoring the rhythm, affect, and semantics of the lines – the matters on which EBB based her judgment.

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The Gentleman’s Magazine reviewer at least characterized EBB’s rhymes as intentional. Not so the critic in the British Quarterly Review (November 1845), who described them as having “a sort of hit or miss, slap-dash air” about them, the result of “carelessness, or obtuseness” that is “really inexcusable,” since rhyming is not only “one of the very lowest elements of the art” but the easiest: “anybody can tell whether rhymes be legitimate or not” (bc 11: 347). This reviewer does not hesitate to offer suggestions for improvement: he advises EBB “to pay some attention to her rhymes, and adopt a more harmonious versification” (349). In November 1846, the Eclectic Review, in saying a “few words on Miss Barrett’s alleged faults,” named her rhymes as the subject of “the loudest complaint” (bc 14: 379–80). That complaint was still current in the reviews of Poems (1850). The Leader, for instance, objected to a mannerism “which amounts to a vulgarism,” “the laxity of pronunciation implied in such rhymes as ‘smiling and while in,’ – ‘enfolding and told him,’ – ‘coming and human.’ We are no great sticklers for rigour in rhyme, but smilin’, enfoldin’, and comin’, are vulgarisms of pronunciation” (bc 16: 320). The rhyme scheme of Casa Guidi Windows created special problems for the reviewers. In August 1851, the Prospective Review designated the rhyme as a “principal defect” of the poem, because the reader, said the critic, “will suppose that he is reading blank verse”: “The ear may be conscious of a rhyme sometimes by way of accident, but cannot, till aided by the eye, find out that there is rhyme throughout. This is a lamentable and vexatious effect” (bc 17: 328). For the English Review, the rhymes are “clever … and nothing more” (338). Reviewers outside Britain were equally critical: “wretched apologies for rhyme,” says an American critic in 1854 (bc 20: 389); “false rhymes, inappropriate expressions, and prosaic lines,” says the Calcutta Review in the same year (393). EBB was, in the eyes of some critics, setting a bad example for other poets. Charles Kingsley, for instance, in Fraser’s Magazine (December 1851), praised Casa Guidi Windows as “a most wise and beautiful and noble poem,” but worried about the example set for “many young writers” by EBB’s practices in rhyming: “she sees no reason against stringing three such rhymes together as ‘elemental,’ and ‘prevent all,’ and ‘ungentle’; and if she does it, why may not I?” (bc 17: 356). William Allingham, too, blamed EBB

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for infecting other poets. Here is EBB’s response to his charge, in an April 1854 letter to Mary Brotherton. EBB thanks her for “the Athenaeums,” one of which (the issue of 15 April 1854) contained a review of Frederick Tennyson’s Days and Hours. The anonymous reviewer – who was Allingham – criticized Tennyson’s rhymes: sun and soon, launched and glanced: “Such faults as these … are usually … the result of carelessness; but in some cases we suspect them to be adopted, or at least retained, from a notion of their carrying an air of fine negligence and rapid execution – a heresy for the spread of which among the poetic million Mrs Browning must perhaps stand partly accountable” (bc 20: 202n3). EBB’s comment: “It is curious – just before I came to my own name I was saying to myself … ‘Well! sun & soon are inadmissable [sic] certainly, but launched & glanced might at a pinch …’ – So that I perfectly deserved that rap over the knuckles!” (201). Even at this late date she was habitually deflecting criticism of her “rhymatology” by assenting to some objections, rejecting others – and most certainly not giving up her own independent judgment. For that she is still being criticized. Peter McDonald in his 2012 book Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, like reviewers 160 years earlier, talks about EBB’s “blunders” and her “wayward and sometimes outré pairings”while conceding that they are intentional, “committed on principle,” and experimental (317–18). I cannot agree with him that there is “little evidence” in EBB’s poetry for “the kinds of creative anxiety and ferment which questions of rhyme and repetition carried for Hopkins, for Christina Rossetti, for Tennyson, Keats, or Wordsworth” (317) – his saying that is a faint echo of the old charge of carelessness. Marjorie Stone’s review of Sound Intentions (in Victorian Poetry 2013) is a useful corrective, not least because it reminds us that EBB’s rhyming also earned praise and admiration – and from some knowledgeable readers, like Robert Browning.

7 the language of prophecy: casa guidi windows

Casa Guidi Windows, EBB’s “meditation” on Italian politics and her “impressions … upon events … of which she was a witness,” is in two parts, the first written in 1847–48 in response to the movements EBB observed from Casa Guidi in 1847, and the second written in 1850–1 to express her disappointment at the dashing of the hopes raised by the earlier stages of the Risorgimento. Hence the parts contrast with each other, the “discrepancy” between them guaranteeing, EBB says in the “Advertisement to the First Edition,” “the truthfulness of the writer” and giving evidence of the mingling of pain and shame she feels at the recognition of her errors in judgment. The contrast rests most obviously on two spectacles EBB actually saw from the windows of Casa Guidi: the great celebratory procession of 12 September 1847, after the Grand Duke had given permission for the formation of a Civic Guard – a procession described not only in the poem but at great length in EBB’s letter to her sisters the next day (bc 14: 300– 7) – and the march of Austrian troops into Florence on 25 May 1849 – recounted by EBB for her sister Henrietta (bc 15: 284–5). The contrast is one of sound and silence: in 1847, “the clapping of hands, & the frenetic shouting, and the music which came in gushes, & then seemed to go out with too much joy” (bc 14: 300); and in 1849, “the deepest silence … not a word spoken, scarcely a breath drawn” (bc 15: 284). That same collapse of sound is one of the ways EBB characterizes the difference between the two parts of the poem: the first is full of music; in the second, the music “dropped before the measure was complete” (II: 6). This is political poetry, and political poetry has an agenda. Its language is not the language of contemplation and detachment (in spite of EBB’s use of the noun “meditation” to describe her poem) but of partisanship

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and activism. Its purpose is to move and persuade two sets of readers: the Tuscans, whom she tropes as a musical instrument,“this people-organ” (I: 814), people with whom she identifies by using the pronoun “we”; and “My England” (I: 707), people at home for whom she is describing events in Florence, like the return of the Grand Duke and the Austrian troops: “how he came I will relate to you” (II: 282). As usual, she characterizes herself as a singer and her poetry as music, and she sets out a theory about its effectiveness: her music depends upon its growth out of past music: “Your last rhythm,” she tells her Tuscan readers, “will need / Your earliest keynote”(I: 431–2). That idea, which has its origin in Carlyle’s“organic filaments,” is the foundation of EBB’s understanding of the word “nation,” but where Carlyle uses the clothing metaphor, the master trope of Sartor Resartus, EBB focuses on the word “beat.” Events are of course seen from Casa Guidi windows but, more importantly, their rhythm is heard, both literally and metaphorically. Part I begins with the words “I heard,” and hearing is the sense primarily in play in a poem that is about a response to a word. The word is “libertà,” the key word for the Risorgimento, and in EBB’s hearing it is sung rather than spoken, and sung by a child. The singing is the key to the prosody of the poem, and the child is a key part of its design. Here is how EBB introduces both at the very beginning: I heard last night a little child go singing ’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church, O bella libertà, O bella! stringing The same words still on notes he went in search So high for, you concluded the upspringing Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green, And that the heart of Italy must beat, While such a voice had leave to rise serene ’Twixt church and palace of a Florence street! (I: 1–10) It is not a complete song the child is singing, nor is EBB quoting only the first words of such a lyric. Rather, his music is a lilt, music designed for the beating of time. A lilt has a tune but is usually without words, the place of

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words being taken by a repeated syllable such as “la, la.” Here the child “string[s] / The same words … on notes,” as one would expect in a lilt, but instead of a syllable with no particular meaning, he uses six syllables, one an exclamation, two an expression of partisanship and desire (“bella”), three for the defining noun “freedom,” and so gives his music a specific message to evoke a response in thinking, feeling, and action. The primary purpose of the lilt is still the sounding of a beat, which EBB suggests in her “nimble bird” trope: the “upspringing” of the bird, her metaphor for the child’s searching for high notes, causes the bush to “tremble” – a rhythmic reaction. The purpose of the beat of the lilt is to evoke a response primarily kinesthetic and conative: “the heart of Italy must beat.” There, in ten lines, is EBB’s theory of political poetry. It is summed up in her “beat”-“street” rhyme, which links the inner and outer lives, but later rhymes – “heat” (I: 409) and “heats” (I: 454) – will both confirm and qualify that pairing by sounding a note of caution. For halfway through part I, EBB will comment on the dangers of an affective response – “the Heavens forbid / That we should call on passion to confront / The brutal with the brutal” (I: 673–5) – and in part II she will condemn “inarticulate rage / And breathless sobs” (II: 228–9) when the word “libertà” is heard “trilling on an opera stage” (II: 226). But she herself is not immune from such an emotional response and not ready to reject it out of hand: when she describes the celebrations of 12 September 1847, she introduces the passage on the procession with the question,“Shall I say / What made my heart beat with exulting love, / A few weeks back?” (I: 444–6). So the heartbeat does evoke an affective response, which seems natural enough, and EBB is more ready to embrace it here than she is in part II: “I would but turn these lachrymals to use” (I: 442). The child’s lilt, new as it is, immediately leads EBB to meditate upon past music and older songs: Then I thought, musing, of the innumerous Sweet songs which still for Italy outrang From older singers’ lips, who sang not thus Exultingly and purely, yet, with pang Fast sheathed in music, touched the heart of us So finely, that the pity scarcely pained. (I: 14–19)

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EBB characterizes some of those earlier singers as “Bewailers for their Italy enchained” (I: 21), evoking “cadenced tears” (I: 35) and EBB’s impatience: “Of such songs enough, / Too many of such complaints!” (I: 40–1). Her concern is the “personating Image” (I: 30) of the country such songs suggest – Cybele, Niobe, Juliet, “mournful masks, and sad effigies” (I: 47) – instead of “real, live, weak creatures crushed by strong” (I: 48). EBB’s own choice for “personating Image” is one full of hope and promise, the child, heard at the beginning of the poem and represented by her own child at the end of part II. Music, as EBB presents it in the poem, is crucial in a country’s evolving history, and the agent of its coming to be a “nation.” It was, in EBB’s view, the expression of common sympathies, and evolved with the same understanding of change, the same interweaving of past and present, as Carlyle’s “organic filaments.” History may seem to be only one damn thing after another, event succeeding event without any necessary connection. “Far otherwise!” Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh exclaims: “Creation and Destruction proceed together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic filaments of the New mysteriously spin themselves: and amid the rushing and the waving of the Whirlwind-element come tones of a melodious Deathsong, which end not but in tones of a more melodious Birthsong” (Works 1: 195). I have quoted this passage already in another context, but here I want to draw attention to Carlyle’s casting of the idea in terms of music – “melodious Deathsong” and “melodious Birthsong” – and to his characterization of the “filaments” as a temporal process. In earlier periods world harmony was a fixed pattern, with which individuals and societies needed to be in tune if they were to function in an ideal way. Now, in the nineteenth century, world harmony is a power developing in time, with periods of advance and eras of backsliding, but all of them necessary to “plant the great Hereafter in this Now” (I: 299). For that “Your last rhythm will need / Your earliest key-note” (I: 431–2). EBB’s model for her own role in such an organic process is Miriam, who conceived of herself, as EBB did, as both poet and prophet. Chapter 15 of Exodus begins with a song of thanksgiving after the successful crossing of the Red Sea, and Miriam takes up the celebration: “And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam

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answered them, Sing ye to the Lord” (Ex. 15:20–1). To that biblical account EBB adds a significant gesture: Miriam “clashed her cymbals to surprise / The sun between her white arms flung apart, / With new, glad, golden sounds” (I: 314–16). The posture in which EBB depicts Miriam is that of Blake’s “Glad Day” etching (so named by Gilchrist in his 1863 biography of Blake, but more properly “Albion Rose” or “The Dance of Albion”), a naked figure with arms flung out against a sunrise: the figure is Albion, and his stance is an image of political awakening and freedom. But there is no evidence that EBB knew that print, though she certainly knew Blake. She had been reading him since at least 1837, when she quotes from Jerusalem in a letter to Julia Martin (bc 3: 219); she quotes from Jerusalem again in 1841 (5: 117), and she comments upon Songs of Innocence, which John Kenyon lent her in 1842 (5: 308). Closer to the time when she was writing the first part of Casa Guidi Windows, a regular visitor to the Brownings was a Mr Tulk, who had been a friend of Coleridge and a patron of Blake, and “in religion … an absolute Swedenborgian” (6: 128). At the end of February 1848, EBB reported to her sister Henrietta that “Mr Tulk comes here often, by himself – He lends us Swedenborg & Blake’s poems, & talks with a good benevolent face, as ever” (15: 16). At the same time she wrote to Mary Russell Mitford, specifically mentioning Blake’s drawings: “Mr Tulk often comes in to us to talk to Robert about Blake’s poems & drawings, and to enlighten us both, upon Swedenborg’s reveries on ‘Conjugal Love’” (15: 26). Whether or not the drawings included such early ones as “Albion Rose” we cannot know. Nonetheless, the details in EBB’s portrait of Miriam suggest the same ideas as Blake’s: a joyous release from danger and oppression and an advance into a newer and fuller life. Those details are the sun, the open arms, and the “new, glad, golden sounds” of the cymbals. EBB places her allusion to Miriam in an account of the music history of the children of Israel, where each piece of music is crucial to the appearance of the next – her version of Carlyle’s organic filaments. Here is the whole passage: Of old ’twas so. How step by step was worn, As each man gained on each, securely! – how Each by his own strength sought his own ideal, –

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fres h st r a n ge mus i c The ultimate Perfection leaning bright From out the sun and stars, to bless the leal And earnest search of all for Fair and Right, Through doubtful forms, by earth accounted real! Because old Jubal blew into delight The souls of men, with clear-piped melodies, If youthful Asaph were content at most To draw from Jubal’s grave, with listening eyes, Traditionary music’s floating ghost Into the grass-grown silence, were it wise? And was’t not wiser, Jubal’s breath being lost, That Miriam clashed her cymbals to surprise The sun between her white arms flung apart, With new, glad, golden sounds? that David’s strings O’erflowed his hand with music from his heart? So harmony grows full from many springs, And happy accident turns holy art. (I: 300–19)

The lesson of this music history is in those last two lines. She completes the lesson a bit later when she says, in lines already quoted, that “Your last rhythm will need / Your earliest key-note” (I: 431–2), and she offers as proof her own art: “Could I sing this song, / If my dead masters had not taken heed / To help the heavens and earth to make me strong” (I: 432–4). The references in EBB’s music history of Israel need some comment, and here I am indebted to the comprehensive notes of Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor in the second volume of webb. EBB begins her music history with Jubal. He appears in the genealogies in the fourth chapter of Genesis as the progenitor of “all such as handle the harp and organ” (Gen. 4:21). In further genealogies in the sixth chapter of 1 Chronicles, the writer names those “whom David set over the service of song in the house of the Lord, after that the ark had rest” (1 Chron. 6:31). One of those named is Asaph. EBB completes her history with David, presented not as king but as musician and poet: his “strings / O’erflowed his hand with music from his heart.” The heart reference and the phrasing here sound like the conventional way of describing expression, but we know, from the earlier poetry, that EBB usually means a beat when she refers to the heart.

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EBB presents her theory of history as organic filaments not only in terms of music but also in terms of painting, and here she uses her intimate knowledge of Florence, its buildings and piazzas, its customs and local rituals. The passage begins with a kind of tourist guide to one of the city’s best-known churches: “You enter, in your Florence wanderings, / The church of St Maria Novella. Pass / The left stair,” which is associated with an incident in the life of Machiavelli, and “Ascend the right stair from the farther nave, / To muse in a small chapel” that contains Cimabue’s painting of the Virgin (I: 320–33). The Cimabue painting has a historical and cultural context, of painters before and after, and EBB presents that context, its stories, and the thinking and attitudes of its principal figures, in some detail to make the point that “thus we mount into the sum / Of great things known or acted” (I: 368–9) – organic filaments in another kind of weaving. EBB’s rhymes are the embodiment of those organic filaments. Rhyme has the obvious function of allying words that sound alike but differ in meaning, and so it is like the pun, one form of which is the use of the same word with different connotations. EBB does that with her key word “beat,” on which she both puns and rhymes in the long unit on the celebratory procession of 12 September 1847 (I: 446–660). She begins by using the word “beat” in a way that does not draw attention to itself, as a verb embedded within a line – “the heart of man beat higher / That day in Florence” (I: 451–2) – but when she uses it a few lines later as one of her rhyme words, it is now a noun with an additional meaning: people “left their ancient beats” (I: 456). The word is neatly double. It is, first of all, the pulsations or rhythms from the past, their usefulness for a sense of nationhood now outgrown; and, since the early part of the nineteenth century, the word had also meant “the round or course habitually traversed by a watchman, sentinel, or constable on duty” (oed) – the streets, the areas used by people going about their daily business. EBB reinforces the pun by rhyming “beats” with “heats” and “streets” (I: 454, 452), in effect identifying in a highly condensed and highly effective way the chief elements of the political movement: feelings, motives, responses, and scenes of action. So music and a sense of place coalesce in a new rhythm that is potentially chaotic but in fact “orderly” (a word EBB uses at I: 472). EBB characterizes the Grand Duke’s decision as “The first pulse of an even flow of blood,

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/ To prove the level of Italian veins / Toward rights perceived and granted” (I: 468–70). When EBB picks up one meaning of the pun – “beats” as “streets” – she asks a question of the reader: “Where guess ye that the living people met”? (I: 579). The answer is a surprising one, and one very much dependent upon local knowledge: “On the stone / Called Dante’s, – a plain flat stone, scarce discerned / From others in the pavement” (I: 601–3) of the Piazza del Duomo. It is where Dante used to sit “and pour alone / The lava of his spirit when it burned” (I: 605–6). So EBB invokes the poet as prophet, and uses the same metaphor she will use in Aurora Leigh (5: 3–6 and 5: 214– 15), lava being both the energy and the music of creation: it continues to flow from the “tryst-place for thy Tuscans to foresee / Their earliest chartas from” (I: 618–19). (A “charta” is, in the words of Stone and Taylor, a “charter of rights or constitution” webb 2: 551n78). For EBB urges the need for thinkers rather than fighters, thinkers able “To strike electric influence through a race” (I: 729). The poet fulfils that role,“seeing he shall treat / The deeds of souls heroic” (I: 734–5). In using Dante as she does, EBB seems to be picking up sentences from the last paragraph of Carlyle’s 1840 lecture on the hero as poet. Carlyle’s examples are Dante and Shakespeare, but in the final paragraph he returns to Dante and links his words with the present state of Italy: “Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak-forth melodiously what the heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all; yet the noble Italy is actually one: Italy produced its Dante; Italy can speak!” (Works 5: 114). Carlyle’s diction – “voice,” “melodiously,” “heart” – is also EBB’s, and he hears in the terza rima of the Divine Comedy a true musical beat: “it proceeds as by a chant … One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt” (Works 5: 91). The beat in part II is a parodic version of the beat in part I. When EBB witnesses, from Casa Guidi windows, the return of the Austrians, she hears “The regular tramp of horse and tread of men” (II: 288), and her simile for that sound indicates how this beat is different from the earlier one. It “Did smite the silence like an anvil black / And sparkless” (II: 289–90). The blacksmith is an image of creation, like God as blacksmith in Blake’s “The Tyger,” but here the anvil has no life and no capacity to give life. Later,

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she tropes the “measured tramp” (II: 367) as “like a gong / At midnight” (II. 368–9), when the silence makes the regularity “awfuller” (II: 369). That dead beat, however, does not destroy what is essential: “Ye stamp no nation out, though day and night / Ye tread them with that absolute heel which grates / And grinds them flat” (II: 337–9). And almost at the end of part II there is a line that refers again to the bell, and restores hope: “And take for music every bell that tolls” (II: 771). As in Carlyle’s lectures ten years earlier, EBB deals with heroes and heroworship. She wants a hero, “some high soul” in whom “God’s light” is “organised,” some soul “crowned capable to lead / The conscious people, conscious and advised” (I: 762–3). The hero will inspire “Instead of passion, thought” (I: 770), and will meet the need to “expand / The inner souls of men” (I: 793–4). Her model for such a hero is David, a “sovran teacher” (I: 766), whom she tropes as a master musician: he will “build the golden pipes and synthesize / This people-organ for a holy strain” (I: 813–14). He will inspire in the literal sense of the word, fill These empty bladders with fine air, insphere These wills into a unity of will, And make of Italy a nation … (I: 837–40) EBB’s bladder metaphor is one she may have borrowed from RB. He would use it for the fool, a word derived from the Latin follis, which means bellows, so that the fool came to be thought of as a windbag in need of deflation. EBB avoids the word “fool” altogether and makes inflation a good thing: the bladders are to be filled with “fine air” rather than (as we would say) hot air. “But the teacher, where?” (I: 795), EBB asks. The answer she suggests is double. There is the teacher who is a political figure, a figure of action and involvement, like Pio Nono or Mazzini; and there is the teacher who stands and watches, like EBB herself, and moves by singing. She, “a singer also” (I: 155), identifies herself with the singing child at the beginning of the poem, but she is a flawed and failed singer, she confesses in part II, where she keeps referring to her woman’s point of view and the extent to which it has led her astray. Her mistaken belief in the Grand Duke she

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ascribes to her “woman’s fault” (II: 64); her faith in him she sets down to her seeing him among his sons and being moved by him as a family man, “because I am a woman” and because “I … felt my own child’s coming life” (II: 95–6). But she is unwilling to give up the promise of new life in a child, and the music of the child at the beginning of part I is only in abeyance, not permanently silenced. She returns to the child near the end of part II: And I, who first took hope up in this song, Because a child was singing one … behold, The hope and omen were not, haply, wrong! (II: 736–8) For “creatures young / And tender, mighty meanings, may unfold” (II: 740– 1) – like the child in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. For there is EBB’s own two-year-old son,“my blue-eyed prophet” (II: 757), she calls him, and he is an emblem of the future and the future life. Of him EBB might well use Wordsworth’s line, “The Child is father of the Man,” and the conclusion of part II might be read as a political version of the Wordsworth ode. EBB’s prosody is the embodiment of her singing, and since she makes so much of the word “beat” as the key element in the appeal of the poem, it is logical to ask how the actual beat of the lines meets her criterion for political poetry. Most of the commentary on the form of the poem has focused on its relation to terza rima, a logical choice for EBB, given the poem’s setting in Florence and its references to Dante. But terza rima is difficult to sustain in a long poem in English, since the language has a limited number of rhyme words (in contrast to Italian). In their headnote to the poem in webb 2: 485, Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor label the verse form “hybrid” and note that “the triple pattern of its rhymes modifies the terza rima of seminal Italian works.” Nevertheless, the reviewer in the Guardian (11 June 1851) thought terza rima was the metre of the poem – and one over which, he said, EBB had a “want of command” (bc 17: 310). The reviewer in the Morning Chronicle (13 September 1851) was both more informed and more thoughtful: We thought at first that these lines and the whole poem were in the terza rima of Dante; but a puzzled state of the ear soon led us to investigate the metre. They are, indeed, in a kind of terza rima, but

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not Dante’s, whose measure opens and closes each canto with a couplet; thus properly distinguishing stanza from canto, and providing for the fine movement of the ternal verse in each stanza. There is nothing of the stanza form in Mrs Browning’s verses, which are, with an accidental exception or two, a series of triplets flowing on and on, and in and out, in harmony with the thought and feeling sought to be expressed. (bc 17: 336) As this reviewer says, “there is nothing of the stanza form in Mrs Browning’s verses.” EBB divides her poem into sections with varying numbers of lines, but her rhyme scheme, which is a b a b a b, c d c d c d, and so on, gives us, within those larger sections, units of six lines, with alternating sounds sustained long enough to suggest terza rima, though without the complexity and intricacy of Dante’s interwoven form. Reviewers usually commented on the rhyme – rhyme “that has no music in it” (bc 17: 328), said one, assuming, mistakenly, that the music depended upon the rhyme – and some faulted specific rhyme words: as I noted in the previous chapter, Charles Kingsley, writing in Fraser’s Magazine (December 1851) objected to her rhyming “elemental,”“prevent all,” and “ungentle” (bc 17: 356). Other reviewers, however, had a better understanding of the music of EBB’s poetry. The critic in the Atlas (14 June 1851) heard the beat when he referred to “the stately march of this continuous decasyllable rhyme” (bc 17: 311), and the reviewer in the Ladies Companion (1 July 1851) came even closer to a true understanding of the rhythm when he noted that “carelessness has been objected to Mrs Browning’s versification: it has been by some called unmusical.” But this reviewer has a genuine understanding of the music of “Mrs Browning’s versification”: “we think that its breaks and pauses may be ascribed rather to a superabundance than to a deficiency of the musical sense – to instincts analogous with those which make certain singers and players lean too strongly towards a tempo rubato, by way of avoiding that mechanical monotony which becomes intolerable to every refined ear” (bc 17: 324). To hear how EBB handles the beat, let’s return to the passage in part I where the subject is “beats,” “heats,” and “streets.” Here are the lines once again:

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It is easy enough to mark five accented syllables in each of these lines, but such notation does not account for the union of rhythm and sense nor for the effects gained by the practice one reviewer pointed out, of “not ending the sense with the line” (bc 17: 338). For when one listens to the isochronous units or bars, one discovers that some lines have five, but some have fewer, and the bars straddle the line endings. Consider, for example, the lines “That day in Florence, flooding all her streets / And piazzas with a tumult and desire.” If one were to use conventional metrical scansion on the first of those lines, one could count five iambs, but such scansion yields only the kind of unvarying beat that EBB always wanted to avoid, and ignores the caesura and the enjambement. If one hears the beat as bars of music, the effect is much more varied and interesting. The first bar is “day in,” the second “Florence” plus the rest signalled by the comma, the third “flooding,” the fourth “all her,” and the fifth “streets / And pi.” The next line has eleven syllables but only three bars. The first is “azzas with a,” and the three unaccented syllables after the ictus increase the tempo (thus coinciding with the meaning of the participle “flooding”) and anticipate the meaning of the word “tumult.” There are three unaccented syllables in the second bar as well: “tumult and de.” The third bar has only one syllable in that line – the accented syllable “sire” – followed by a longer rest (the period contrasts in length with the comma in the preceding line) – plus the unaccented “The” that begins line 454. My analysis here indicates how EBB’s verse can both excite and sound excitable, as the meaning of the lines requires, but her beat can be calm and confident as well. Consider these lines from the end of part II, when she is imaging her son as the hope for the future:

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Now, look straight before, And fix thy brave blue English eyes on mine, And from my soul, which fronts the future so, With unabashed and unabated gaze, Teach me to hope for, what the angels know … (II: 746–50) There is a regular alternation of accented and unaccented syllables in these lines (except for “brave blue Eng”), and we hear that regularity echoed in the bars as well. There are five to the line, and the fifth bar, which begins on the rhyme word, includes the pause at the line ending and the unaccented syllables “And” and “With” at the beginnings of the next lines. The beat is the agent of EBB’s politics. It depends upon the fact that the kinesthetic rhythms of our bodily being are common to all, and can be affected by those skilled in appealing to them. In his lecture on the hero as poet, Carlyle stated a version of that same idea. “A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men,” he said; at the same time, “no man is made altogether of Poetry.” But “we are all poets when we read a poem well” (Works 5: 82). In EBB’s terms, there is music in all of us – think of her “peopleorgan” metaphor – and the poet-musician knows how to play it. There is another dimension to the language of Casa Guidi Windows, and it is bound up with the question: what kind of poem are we dealing with? EBB herself refers to the text as a “meditation,” and while that term had a precise meaning in seventeenth-century religious poetry, as Louis Martz’s 1954 study, The Poetry of Meditation, showed, the devotional practices and three-fold structure that Martz explored so well can hardly apply to a nineteenth-century political poem. EBB herself defines the genre of the poem at the beginning of part II, and she links it with the beat that we have been examining. After repeating her first label for the poem – “I wrote a meditation” (II: 1) – and after affirming, about the child’s singing, that “I leant upon his music as a theme” (II: 3), she says that “my heart’s full beat / … tried at an exultant prophecy” (II: 4–5). “Prophecy” is the genre, and Matthew Reynolds has recently taken critics to task for not considering it sufficiently (91). “Prophecy” may seem, initially, no more precise a term than EBB’s “meditation,” but the Old Testament precedents that are EBB’s models help us define its characteristics. One expects a prophet to

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foretell the future, and indeed, when EBB herself defined the term, many years earlier, she had written that “Prophecy is like a Messenger from Heav’n to teach Chosen Men what is to come to pass in this World, & sometimes in the next” (webb 5: 199). But the prophet was also the critic of society, and claimed to speak with divine inspiration. Moreover, from the earliest times the prophet spoke as a poet, and of course Carlyle had identified poet and prophet in his lectures on heroes and hero-worship. One model for EBB, as I have already pointed out, was Miriam, the sister of Aaron, whom the Bible labels a “prophetess” (Ex. 15:20). The song of Miriam, performed with timbrel and dancing after the chief event of the exodus, takes up only one verse: “Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea” (Ex. 15:21). There is not much here from which to derive an understanding of prophecy as a poetic genre, but Matthew Reynolds points to a crucial characteristic. Among the functions of the prophet is the ability to identify “a sign whose referent did not yet exist,” a “promise,” “an indication of greater changes in the future”: “The genre of prophecy requires first the noticing, and then the interpretation of such signifiers; and finally the urging of their significations into being” (91). The word “sign” and its cognates appear often enough in Casa Guidi Windows to be marks of the genre. Gladys Hudson’s concordance gives the facts: “sign” occurs five times, and “signs” three. “Significance,”“signifies,” and “signify” each appear once. The “signs” are sometimes concrete details observed by EBB, like the café-signs (II: 125), the “black sign of the ‘Martyrs’” (I: 494) in the 1847 procession, and – more importantly in that event – the “flag and sign” of the people (I: 497), where the sign is the “Il Popolo” motto. More usually, “sign” and “signs” are part of a statement of interpretation. EBB has Michelangelo say, of the snow sculpture episode, that “the tradition” of the role of the Medici and of himself “Shall gather up, for unborn men, a sign / Of what is the true princedom” (I: 142–3). The banners carried in procession are “freighted with the signs / And exultations of the awakened earth” (II: 31–2). The epaulettes worn by the citizens, “alas, if not the sign / Of something very noble, … are nought” (I: 752–3), and the café-signs, that everyday detail, were set up “to show / Where patriots might sip ices in pure air” (II: 125–6). The “marshalled thousands” of Austrian troops swept through the streets “in mute significance of storm”

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(II: 311), while the motions of the earth, “gentle or ungentle,” “signify but growth” (II: 765–6). The prophet as critic of society may question a sign, as EBB does the church: “what signifies a church / Of perfect inspiration and pure laws, / Who burns the first man with a brimstone-torch [?]” (I: 926–8). For the prophet, every sign is ultimately “God’s sign” (II: 575). That label appears in a parenthesis after the third of part II’s invocations to Mazzini, and it is a subjective genitive: God supplies the sign that is to be read by the prophet. Both the Bible and Carlyle had identified prophecy and poetry, and we need to define precisely their common ground. To notice and interpret signs, the prophet must be good at a defining characteristic of poetry, and that is troping. A trope is in Greek a turn, and to trope is to take a word and turn it away from its primary and usual signification, toward something else entirely. Locke taught that words are signs of ideas in the mind (not signs of things, as popularly thought), and he distrusted troping, which in his view was a fiction and misleading: it undermined the correspondence of our words and our experiences, that correspondence being the guarantee of the truth of our assertions. The poet would, of course, question that limited view of truth and affirm, in various ways, troping’s claim to truths beyond the senses, as EBB certainly does. To turn a word is not, however, to divorce it from experience, but rather to reveal meanings hidden from our five senses: the starting point is always the primary idea. For example, EBB looks at Grand Duke Leopold’s face and says explicitly what she as poet/prophet did with it: “We turned” – troped – “the mild dejection of thy face / To princely meanings” (II: 48– 9). This assertion is part of a confession of error in judgment on her part: the Grand Duke was in fact a “perjurer” (II: 38), swearing “the patriot’s oath” (II: 37) when he had no intention of abiding by it. Turning a datum of the senses in the wrong direction is an occupational hazard of the prophet; nonetheless, her tropes are the chief agents of her prophecy. Among all the figures that she uses, metaphor is primary. In Greek a “carrying across,” it is in practice the identification of one thing with another unlike thing: the poet says, in effect, “this is that.” The grammatical form of the metaphor is the statement of identity: noun, copula verb, subjective completion. That sentence structure is usually understood rather than used explicitly.

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For readers with Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode in mind, the opening passage of Casa Guidi Windows is also an announcement of the poem’s genre. The child singing is, like Wordsworth’s child, a “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” and EBB’s characterization of him as such is a mark of her own role as prophetess. The passage is an exercise in interpretation, as the words “you concluded” indicate. There are in fact two conclusions: the metaphor, which identifies the child’s high notes with the “upspringing” of a “nimble bird,” and the statement of the song’s effect: “the heart of Italy must beat.” Who is “you”? The editors of webb gloss the pronoun as “a representative observer; or perhaps RB, whom EBB addresses directly in I. 1129 ff.” (webb 2: 546n6). Again, Matthew Reynolds is helpful: “Like all her writing, Casa Guidi Windows is directed primarily at an English audience” (99). Its language limited its Italian readers to those who knew English, and her main appeal was to people back home: “she sought to promote greater political support for the Risorgimento and perhaps some kind of international intervention.” There was absolutely no prospect of any such active support, as Reynolds points out, and EBB’s appeal was not that of the practical politician but that of the poet, “knowingly, and wilfully, ‘idealistic’” (100). In the prophet’s view, ideals precede implementation, and the “bella libertà” which the child sings is to come to pass in Italy, whatever the delays, backslidings, obstacles, failures of will, and failures of “life’s brave energy” (I: 174). She later characterizes the child as “hopeful” (I: 153), singing “open-eyed for liberty’s sweet sake!” (I: 154), and herself as “a singer also” (I: 155): poet and prophet are fused in that noun. But Casa Guidi Windows did have an effect in Italy, and played a part in the Risorgimento, for Massimo d’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont, in an 1852 address to the Piedmont Chamber of Deputies, quoted from the poem. In a July 1853 letter to her brother George, EBB told him how she came to learn about the use of her poem. It was from a Mr Kinney, the “American minister from the court at Turin”: “Mr Kinney told me he had pointed out to the King that passage in ‘Casa Guidi windows’ about his father Charles Albert, & that he was ‘much gratified.’‘If you were to go to Turin’ added Mr Kinney, ‘he would give you a cordial reception.’ What pleased me more was another thing mentioned … that Azeglio when prime minister, quoted the poem in the Piedmontese chamber – That, I liked to hear” (bc 19: 164–5). So EBB actually contributed to (what she

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characterized as) “the music called Italy,” and she went on to say – this was two or three years later – that “for my part, absent or present, the tune of it sings on in my head” (bc 19: 251). Moreover, D’Azeglio had a lifelong interest in the role of poets in evoking nationalist feelings, and came to see the Brownings in Rome in March of 1859. He valued them for their contribution to the cause of Italian unity, and they in turn liked and admired him: EBB told her sister Arabella that “Robert said afterwards to me – ‘Yes, – it wd. be well if we could all think & feel largely & nobly like that man!’ Robert was as impressed as I” (Letters … Arabella 2: 400). The prophet typically criticizes the society in which he or she is operating, and EBB does just that when she deals with the “innumerous / Sweet songs” (I: 14–15) from Italy’s past. They describe the country’s “woe.” The conjunction of woe and weal is part of the prophet’s stock-in-trade: past woe is to be cast aside for the promise of a better future. So EBB rejects Cybele and Niobe as “personating Image[s]” (I: 30) for Italy, and substitutes her own: the child singing in the street. She herself is the interpreter, observing – “me who stand in Italy to-day” (I: 49) – and rejecting past woes: “I can but muse in hope upon this shore / Of golden Arno” (I: 52– 3). She tropes the river as an arrow that “shoots away / Through Florence’ heart” (I: 53–4), and the bridges as bows. Matthew Reynolds points out an unfortunate implication of the metaphor: “if the arrow has pierced Florence’s heart, the city may be dead” (92). But that is to ignore the fact that the image is primarily visual. In the Old Testament, however, God’s wrath is troped as arrows that pierce the body, as in the Lamentations of Jeremiah (3:13), and in the Book of Job the arrows are “the terrors of God” (6:4). Those associations fit the context, which is past woes, but EBB muddies that reading by exclaiming, of the river, “How beautiful!” (I: 66). Local knowledge and personal experience trump biblical associations. Her chief concern with the river-arrow metaphor, however, seems to be that of the prophet expecting a word from a divine source, for she says that the mountains “In silence listen for the word said next” (I: 67) – next after “beautiful,” that is. It is the task of the prophet to supply that word, and she does so not explicitly but by implication. The word is “libertà,” metaphorically identified with two structures in Florence: Giotto’s campanile or cathedral bell tower, and Michelangelo’s statues on the Medici tombs. The former is her answer to the question, “What word will men

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say” (I: 68), and the unspoken word is suggested by her simile for the bell tower, “like an unperplexed / Fine question Heaven-ward” (I: 69–70), its upward reach (like the child’s search for high notes at the beginning of the poem) indicating “aspiration … undaunted” (I: 72). The latter is her answer to the question, “What word will God say?” (I: 73), and the answer is suggested by the sculptor’s “marble scorn” (I: 74) of the city’s rulers in the service of “freeing of the unborn / In Florence and the great world outside Florence” (I: 78–9). There follows a long passage in which EBB interprets those statues in detail, and adds to them the snow sculpture demanded of Michelangelo, a jest of Lorenzo de Medici. She uses the prophet’s working phrase “not without a meaning” for the Medici statues, and she turns Lorenzo’s mocking laughter upside down when she addresses the sculptor himself: “thou couldst proudly thank / God and the prince for promise and presage” (I: 120–1). “Promise and presage” are, of course, the business of the prophet; EBB speaks of Michelangelo reading a prophecy (I: 124); and she makes the artist himself a prophet by attributing a speech to him in which he affirms the lasting efficacy of the word and its role in making things come to pass: The same is kept of God, who taketh heed That not a letter of the meaning fall Or ere it touch and teach His world’s deep heart … (I: 131–3) With her apostrophe to the artist at line 145, she voices the prophet’s conventional timetable: “the day’s at hand” (I: 145). The poem alternates, as prophecy does, between woe – criticism of Italy’s present use of its past – and hope for the future, hope that is based upon an identification of the signs of the ideal which is to be made real. “Rhymers,”“archaists,” and “sketchers” (I: 148–50), all of them dealing with the past, will not do; the “hopeful bird” and the “hopeful child” who look to the future will (I: 152, 153). There are in the present “these oil-eaters, with large, live, mobile mouths / Agape for maccaroni” (I: 200–1) – the realism of that description makes them unlikely guarantors of future freedom – and there are “heroic ashes” (I: 189) and “consecrated heroes” from a glorious past (I: 200–3), who pose a danger: they “shall abstract / … our strength” (I: 225–6) and “drag us backward” (I: 232). Everything depends

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upon reading the signs correctly, and for that the prophet is the teacher. For those who read mistakenly, the prophet calls down curses, as EBB does for a scornful critic of Cimabue’s Virgin: “his blood / The poet’s curse strikes full on and appoints / To ague and cold spasms for evermore” (I: 355–7). The prophet may promote rituals that look both backwards and forwards, and EBB urges the continued observance of a custom in Florence, that of strewing with violets the pavement where Savonarola was burned for, in words from EBB’s own note, “his testimony against papal corruptions” (webb 2: 499). And she issues instructions on the proper performing of that ritual: it is not to be an end in itself, but part of an ongoing process connecting past, present, and future. For that organic process she uses, appropriately, agricultural metaphors: So rise up henceforth with a cheerful smile, And having strewn the violets, reap the corn, And having reaped and garnered, bring the plough And draw new furrows ’neath the healthy morn, And plant the great Hereafter in this Now. (I: 295–9) The chief sign that EBB reads as prophecy is the great celebratory procession of 12 September 1847. The model for EBB’s description of the event, as previously noted, is Miriam’s song in Exodus, and the actions the texts celebrate – the safe crossing of the Red Sea, the joyous passage through the streets of Florence – are parallel. Both celebrate release from oppression and into greater freedom; and both mark not the end of the process but a stage in the realization of the ideal. The theme of Miriam’s song is God as liberator; the substance of her song is the interim evidence of that role. Similarly, EBB celebrates the Grand Duke’s decision as “good so far, presageful of more good” (I: 464) and, like Miriam, she reads the signs: they “Are good and full of promise” (I: 547). Reading the signs involves troping them, and her tropes in this lengthy passage are all ones she has already used to mean hope for the future: the dove (I: 449), fire (I: 455), and the torch (I: 465), “the first pulse of an even flow of blood” (I: 468). A major sign is the motto “Il popolo”: “The word means dukedom, empire, majesty, / And kings in such an hour might read it so” (I: 500–1). Here the prophet’s

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statement of meaning – her carrying across of the word “people” to the abstractions “dukedom, empire, majesty” – is an unexpected one: those abstractions would in the past be linked with “kings.” Here she transfers them to the people. The whole of the aim of the Risorgimento is summed up in that transfer, and its force depends upon EBB’s unconventional handling of the convention of metaphor. She follows up with the animating of inanimate things, the expression of the joy that is the appropriate response to liberation. The trope is prosopopoeia. In the streets of Florence “the stones seemed breaking into thanks … the very housewalls seemed to bend” (I: 516, 518), while the windows are “murmuring” (I: 491) as if they were mouths and “flash[ing] out a rapture” (I: 520) as if they were eyes. The precedent for that troping is the song of another poetprophet whom EBB names, David, and the text is the great Exodus psalm where, in response to the time “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language,” “The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs” (Psalm 114:1, 4). There is a parallel passage in Isaiah 55:12, where, in response to the accomplishing word of God, “the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” EBB’s lines are an urban version of the Bible’s pastoral images; the poet’s ability to use prosopopoeia is her human participation in the divine fiat. The prophet’s concern with signs is both exemplary and cautionary. About the “lappets on your shoulders” – the epaulettes on uniforms – EBB warns, “if not the sign / Of something very noble, they are nought” (I: 752–3). But there are also signs for which EBB the prophet does not have to teach the meaning. One such sign is the people’s choice of some material thing to be the visible image of their aspirations. It turns out to be something humble rather than grand: not one of the great sculptures set up in the city’s public places, but “a plain flat stone,”“the stone / Called Dante’s” (I: 601–2). I have already commented on this stone in a previous context, but here I want to make the point that, in their response to the stone the Florentines “use the name of greatness unforgot, / To meditate what greatness may be done” (I: 647–8). That is the proper reading of a sign. One of the functions of the prophet is to herald the hero-to-come (as in the messianic expectations of the Hebrew prophets). For EBB that hero

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is a “sovran teacher” (I: 766) who is also a prophet, speaking “the word God giveth thee to say” (I: 768) and inspiring thought rather than passion. “Rise up” (I: 772), EBB says to that figure. The specific function of that teacher is to “make a nation” (I: 773) – to make actual the meaning of that word as it was understood in the mid-nineteenth century, and to answer the question posed in the poem: “‘Now tell us what is Italy?’ men ask” (I: 175). I have already quoted the oed’s entry for “nation,” and it became the basis of political legitimacy. The word depended upon citizens’ awareness of themselves as part of an “imagined community.” Hence the word “nationalism” had acquired, by 1844 and among other implications, “devotion to one’s nation; national aspiration; a policy of national independence” (oed; the dictionary supplies the 1844 date) – meanings to be made actual. Hence EBB ends part I of the poem as John ends his Book of Revelation, with the imperative “Come”: “Deliverer whom we seek, whoe’er thou art, / Pope, prince or peasant!” (I: 1046–7), “Come, appear, be found, / If pope or peasant, come!” (I: 1052–3). Part II of the poem is altogether darker. In it EBB criticizes the Florentines as the Old Testament prophets criticized the children of Israel for falling away from God: “Conviction was not, courage failed, and truth / Was something to be doubted of ” (II: 239–40). In her second apostrophe to Mazzini she elaborates: Set down thy people’s faults; – set down the want Of soul-conviction; set down aims dispersed, And incoherent means, and valour scant Because of scanty faith, and schisms accursed, That wrench these brother-hearts from covenant With freedom and with each other. Set down this, And this … (II: 527–32) But EBB ends her prophecy with hope: Poets are soothsayers still, like those of old Who studied flights of doves, – and creatures young And tender, mighty meanings, may unfold. (II: 739–41)

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So she ends where she began in part I, with the child who is the “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” She sees his type in her own child, “my blue-eyed prophet” (II: 757) in whose face she reads hope and from whose smile she gathers cheer. The language of prophecy overcomes a difficulty EBB had, early on, identified in language, and that was, as she made clear in An Essay on Mind, the view (following Locke) that words are grounded in sense experience, and are therefore inadequate to express spiritual matters. Even words “which are made use of to stand for Actions and Notions quite removed from sense,” Locke asserts,“have their rise from thence” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding 3: 1.5). So, in her Essay, EBB says that words have a “grossness” (632) that distorts our thoughts and “cramp[s]” their “spiritual essence” (639). The language of prophecy exploits that very difficulty. The prophet begins with sense – actual sensory experience – regards it as the sign of something beyond sense, and proceeds (with divine inspiration) to reveal its meaning.

8 “the rhythmic turbulence / of blood and brain”: aurora leigh

Whatever else the story of Aurora Leigh is, it is a turbulent one, the turbulence originating in the blood and brains of the characters: Aurora’s early loss of both parents; her upbringing by a cold English aunt; her rejection of Romney’s initial proposal of marriage; Romney’s aborted wedding; a scheming and wicked antagonist; the rape of Marian and the birth of her child; Aurora’s return to Italy; Romney’s blinding; the confessions and declarations of love in the Ninth Book. In her earlier poetry EBB had used the pulse as her prime example of the music – the beat – which, in her view, is the essence of all creation, but in this epic she shifts to the word “turbulence” with its suggestions of greater energy and greater range of affect, even of confusion and chaos. But the turbulence remains “rhythmic,” so that the phrase is an oxymoron. The figure characterizes not only the events in the story but the style as well. That is where I want to begin. When Aurora uses the oxymoron, she not only shifts explicitly from “pulses” to “rhythmic turbulence,” but also links such turbulence with her own ambitions in poetry, so that words are the expression of that energy of “blood and brain.” Here is the passage in the First Book: But the sun was high When first I felt my pulses set themselves For concord; when the rhythmic turbulence Of blood and brain swept outward upon words, As wind upon the alders, blanching them By turning up their under-natures till They trembled in dilation. (1: 895–901)

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The style matches the content. The most immediately obvious feature of this passage is the enjambement, where both syntax and rhythm “sweep” the reader onwards with increasing urgency, culminating in the line division that separates “till” from the rest of its clause: there can be hardly a pause at all after “till.” Metrical variations coincide with meaning. There is a forward-moving iambic metre in lines 895–7, with only one trochaic word (“pulses”) and one spondee (“concord”) cutting across the iambic feet. Then in line 897 that steady pulsing becomes turbulent, for after the long pause signalled by the semi-colon there are the two unaccented syllables of “when the,” and two words that counterpoint the dominant iambic metre: “rhythmic,” in itself a trochee, and “turbulence,” in itself a dactyl. The line division separates that noun from its adjectival phrase, which returns to iambs (“Of blood and brain”), only to have that metre pushed outward by the following spondee (“swept out”). And note the double conjunction of metre and meaning in line 901, where three unaccented syllables (“bled,”“in,” and “di”) cause the metre both to tremble and to dilate.“Rhythmic turbulence” is an accurate description of the music of this passage. There is nothing regular about Aurora’s prosody, and yet it is based on pulsations that in themselves are harmonic. That reading fits with Kirstie Blair’s comment on the passage, when she says that “‘rhythmic turbulence’ sums up the contrasting needs to maintain a steady pulse and to let the heart flow freely.” But, as the prosodic analysis above indicates, I do not agree with her comment that “there is little turbulence in the rhythm of this passage … as Aurora preserves the evenness of metre even while describing its disruption” (134). There is another passage in the First Book in which Aurora uses the word “pulses” but contrasts them with rigidity, the prosody embodying the contrast. It is one of the passages in which Aurora describes her aunt: She stood straight and calm, Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight As if for taming accidental thoughts From possible pulses … (1: 272–5) The spondee in 272 – “stood straight” – suggests rigidity. The four trochaic words cutting across the iambic feet in 273, weaving together the iambs

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and trochees, imitate in sound the braiding and tight binding of the aunt’s forehead. The trochaic “taming” and “accidental” tying together the iambic feet in line 274 suggest the same firm control. But in line 275 the animal life reacts against such control, when the trisyllabic “possible” – the extra syllable hinting at rebellion – and the trochaic “pulses” – part of the plosive “p” alliteration – hint at the rhythmic turbulence that leads Aurora to react against everything her aunt stands for. Though the “rhythmic turbulence” is primarily a matter of prosody, “turbulence” also suggests the mixed style of the poem, which has an astonishing range of registers. EBB’s model for the mixed style that she so artfully uses is Byron’s Don Juan. When she was planning Aurora Leigh, she told Mary Russell Mitford that “I want to write a poem of a new class, in a measure – a Don Juan, without the mockery & impurity” (bc 9: 304). That “measure” – and I take the word to refer to the diction as well as the prosody – is well described by Jerome McGann in his 1986 edition of the poem. “Byron studied the conversational and anecdotal manner of various earlier poets,” McGann writes, and made himself thoroughly familiar with “the colloquial tradition” in both English and Italian. That resulted in a style that was “anecdotal, digressive, and full of personal discursiveness,” a“mixed style”that suited Byron’s comic and satiric purposes (Complete Poetical Works 5: 667–9). Digressions were an essential part of that style. In Canto I Byron condemns “all wandering” as “the worst of sinning” (52) – and gleefully digresses whenever he wants to. EBB claimed the same freedom. She told Mary Russell Mitford in 1844 that she wanted to write a work that would allow for two non-narrative elements: “philosophical dreaming” and “digression,” the latter, she said, being “a characteristic of the age” (bc 9: 304), and so a necessary part of a poem “completely modern” (bc 10: 102). Here is an example of the mixed style EBB wanted. This passage, which is from the First Book, has as its context Aurora’s characterization of nature in England, not grand and wild like nature in Italy but, as Aurora says here, “tamed / And grown domestic”: A nature tamed And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl, Which does not awe you with its claws and beak

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Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up, But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause Of finer meditation. (1: 634–40) Here EBB is indeed “running into the midst of our conventions” (bc 10: 102), this time a literary one, the epic simile. Conventionally the epic simile not only describes and enriches but also elevates; this one lowers and diminishes, and by the time it includes eggs at breakfast one has a sense of a digression produced by everyday associations not quite under control. All of which was part of EBB’s plan. EBB’s rhythms match the descent into the ordinary. Early on in the simile, the variations in the iambic metre are unremarkable: the two unaccented and three accented syllables of line 635 (“like a barn-door fowl”), and the spondaic substitutions in lines 636 and 637 (“not awe,”“high up”). But the moment the reader reaches the word “cackling” – surely a deliberate lapse in decorum – the metre breaks up. Three accented syllables (“sets you think”) and two unaccented syllables (“ing of ”) push the reader through the enjambement – the line end cuts the phrase in half – and into “Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast,” which sounds like an order to a kitchen rather than an understanding of “English ground” (1: 627) and “nature tamed” (1: 634). But EBB’s art is still apparent. Line 639 ends with the word “pause,” which not only looks back to the comma in the middle of the line, but also marks the line end, usually a “pause” but here one that is barely perceptible, since the line end separates the noun (“pause”) from its modifying adjectival phrase (“Of finer meditation”). Still, there is an important difference between the end of that line and the end of the preceding one. The line division in the preceding one separates the preposition (“of ”) from its object (“Your eggs”) and so makes the push through the enjambement not only grammatically necessary but also apparently rushed by appetite. The line division after “pause” at least coincides with a grammatical division and so suggests something “finer.”“Philosophical dreaming,” perhaps, the result of “meditation,” and a return to higher things after the bottoming-out of “eggs … at breakfast.” So EBB proves herself completely in control of her mixed medium.

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But when it came to dialogue in poetry, EBB’s mixed style was sorely questioned by her early critics. The dialogue between Aurora and Romney in the Second Book is crucial – it is the heroic battle that Aurora fights, the verbal combat replacing the conventional physical combat in earlier epics – and EBB’s handling of it is also new. The novel was such a powerful form when EBB was writing, and realism was so fast becoming the dominant kind of fiction, that dialogue with the diction and rhythms of ordinary speech was considered “prose.” But EBB wanted to use modern dialogue in poetry, and approached the task with a crusading spirit. In December 1844 she had asked Mary Russell Mitford,“And now tell me, – where is the obstacle to making as interesting a story of a poem as of a prose work – Echo answers where. Conversations & events, why may they not be given as rapidly & passionately & ludicly [sic] in verse as in prose – echo answers why” (bc 9: 304). (When quoting these sentences, critics often silently emend “ludicly” to “lucidly,” perhaps thinking, with some justification, of EBB’s sometimes shaky command of spelling, but since EBB is talking about a mixed style, why should it not be characterized as not only rapid and passionate but also playful? Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis, the editors of that volume of The Brownings’ Correspondence, retain “ludicly” without question, but Meredith and Sullivan, editors of EBB’s letters to Mitford, read the word as “lucidly” without indicating any problem in the manuscript (3: 49).) Here is how EBB presents a crucial part of the dialogue between Aurora and Romney – one of the most quoted and discussed parts of the poem: ‘What you love, Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir, A wife to help your ends, – in her no end! Your cause is noble, your ends excellent, But I, being most unworthy of these and that, Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.’ ‘Farewell, Aurora? you reject me thus?’ He said.

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fres h st r a n ge mus i c ‘Sir, you were married long ago. You have a wife already whom you love, Your social theory. Bless you both, I say. For my part, I am scarcely meek enough To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse. Do I look a Hagar, think you?’ ‘So you jest.’ ‘Nay, so I speak in earnest,’ I replied. (2: 400–14)

This sounds like speech in a realistic novel – and even more so with “He said” and “I replied.” So it was easy for the first reviewers of the poem to level the charge that such dialogue was not poetry at all, but prose, and to make their point they printed some of the exchanges without the line divisions. W.E. Aytoun did just that in his Blackwood’s review, and he explained why: “All poetical characters, all poetical situations, must be idealised. The language is not that of common life, which belongs essentially to the domain of prose. Therein lies the distinction between a novel and a poem” (Reynolds ed. 416). Aytoun chooses a passage of “sorry prose” made to “read like blank verse” – lines 813–32 in the Fifth Book – prints it without the line divisions, and then asks,“Is that poetry? Assuredly not.” John Nichol in the Westminster Review went even further, saying that “Mrs Browning has broken loose altogether from the meshes of versification, and run riot in prose cut up into lines of ten syllables” (Reynolds ed. 426). But let’s turn that argument around. What if EBB’s purpose is to take ordinary conversation and reveal its rhythmic, and ultimately musical, nature? The line divisions do have a function, and they are the means by which the music underlying everyday speech can be made apparent. They divide the dialogue into units of (mostly) ten syllables, so that the eye sees a unit even if the ear may not hear one. But that visual device does encourage the sensing of a steady beat, five to the line, behind all the rhythms of ordinary speech, – isochronous units, which are the music of dialogue, ordinarily unheard behind the multiple voices. Aytoun concludes his review with a sentence that he clearly intends as a put-down, but in fact it

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says much more than its author intended, and states a truth that apparently he did not recognize: Mrs Browning, Aytoun writes, “makes no distinction between her first and her third class passengers, but rattles them along at the same speed upon her rhythmical railway” (Reynolds ed. 419). Yes, that is precisely EBB’s point: the music of lower class speech is ultimately the same as the music of the upper classes. Though EBB herself had been apprehensive in waiting for Aytoun’s review, she was not put off by it, saying in a letter of January 1857 to her sister Arabella: “Did you read the Blackwood Review? … I have read it myself, & no, there is really nothing to complain of … I think him wrong, but not malignant; and the admissions are so great, that more good than evil will arise from it to the sale of the book” (Letters … to Arabella 2: 279). EBB does not comment on Aytoun’s turning her poetry into prose. He proceeded on the assumption that there is a fundamental difference between poetry and prose, the distinction depending upon idealizing. That was not EBB’s view: the music that underlies language is apparent in everything spoken or written. What then is the difference between poetry and prose? An unlikely person – Jeremy Bentham – pointed out the obvious: in prose, the lines run all the way from the left-hand to the right-hand margins, while in poetry they don’t. In Bentham’s own words, “Prose is where all the lines but the last go on to the margin – poetry is where some of them fall short of it” (qtd. by Adams 152n). The observation sounds so simple-minded as to be useless to the critic, but those divisions were for EBB the markers of isochronous units, and by using them in a text that sounded like ordinary prose or familiar speech she hoped to break through conventions and conventional responses and bring about a revolution in the way people heard themselves. But hers was a revolution with limited success. I am not aware of any reviewer or critic who has advanced the argument I have just made, and when even a reader as astute as Virginia Woolf asked, “what will the poet do with dialogue?” her answer was one that represents the prevailing critical view: “In modern life, as Mrs Browning indicated when she said that our stage is now the soul, the tongue has superseded the sword. It is in talk that the high moments of life, the shock of character upon character, are defined. But poetry when it tries to follow the words on people’s

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lips is terribly impeded … Blank verse has proved itself the most remorseless enemy of living speech.” Woolf does acknowledge the music of EBB’s blank verse when she complains of “the monotony of the rhythm” and criticizes EBB for “following the lilt of her rhythm rather than the emotions of her characters” (Woolf 5: 526). The word “lilt” is a musical term, and it is (as Grove’s Dictionary makes clear) not a song but a melody without words, sung to some such syllable as “la, la, la,” and designed for the beating of time. But the fault Woolf condemns was the virtue – the power – EBB sought. Let’s go back to the dialogue I quoted above, the crucial dialogue between Aurora and Romney in the Second Book. The beat is easily heard: / / What you love / / / / / Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: / / / / / You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir, / / / / / A wife to help your ends, – in her no end! How, as Woolf suggests, does the lilt – the beat – impede the expression of emotions in this passage? Does the beat not heighten the emotions, since the ictus falls on key words: “love,” “not,” “but,” “cause,” “want,” “ends”? The “rhythmic turbulence” of Aurora’s blood finds its perfect outlet in these ten-syllable lines, the rhythm in the regular beat, the turbulence in the pressure of the pauses and the occasional extra accented syllable (such as “no” in “no end!”). EBB’s handling of dialogue is especially daring in the scene of the aborted marriage in the Fourth Book, where the narrative brings together the rich and the poor, St James and St Giles, the story’s equivalent of Carlyle’s dandies and drudges. Aurora records the speech of the rich preceding the wedding, and the speech of the poor after the cancelled ceremony, and her point in using ten-syllable lines and line divisions for both is a political one: diction and content may differ, but the beat is the same, and the essence of both is music. Music is EBB’s aural equivalent of Carlyle’s organic fila-

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ments, the “wondrous … bonds that unite us one and all” (Works 1: 195), the mysterious forces which, in the midst of upheaval (Carlyle’s “Firewhirlwind,”EBB’s“tumult”), create the new even as the old is being destroyed. So prosody becomes politics. So the very sound of EBB’s lines is the embodiment of her social agenda. While Aurora is waiting for the wedding, she hears “a ripple of women’s talk” and “louder phrases thrown out by the men” (4: 611, 614), and she confirms a characteristic of English conversation that Tennyson would bemoan and try to avoid: the predominance of sibilants. His son records a comment of his father about the need for “the kicking of the geese out of the boat” – the avoidance of juxtaposed s’s and sh’s: “I never, if possible, put two ‘ss’ together in any verse of mine” (428). That hissing sound is what Aurora hears in the church, “a spray / Of English ss, soft as a silent hush” (4: 611–12). The onomatopoeia is obvious, and it draws attention to the sibilants in the snippets of conversation that follow: the repeated “she” of the gossips, the clustered s’s of “Miss Norris modest” (4: 620) and “one’s shoes” (4: 622). But underneath all that hissing is a regular beat, revealed by the line divisions: / / / / / – ‘Yes, really, if we need to wait in church / / / / / We need to talk there.’ – ‘She? ’t is Lady Ayr, / / / / / In blue – not purple! that’s the dowager.’ / / / / / – ‘She looks as young’ – ‘She flirts as young, you mean.’ (4: 615–18) The lines all have ten syllables; the isochronous units vary in number of syllables and in the placing and duration of the pauses. The same beat and the same variables characterize the lower-class speech after Romney’s announcement of the cancelled wedding: / / / / / ‘Now, look to it, coves, that all the beef and drink

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fres h st r a n ge mus i c / / / / / Be not filched from us like the other fun, / / / / / For beer’s spilt easier than a woman’s lost! / / / / / This gentry is not honest with the poor; / / / / / They bring us up, to trick us.’ – ‘Go it, Jim …’ (4: 816–20)

The crowd in the church may be “like the sea in storm” and “like the earth in earthquake” (4: 859–60) and the masses may be “turbulent” (4: 849), but that turbulence here, as elsewhere in the poem, is rhythmic, and the blank verse reveals the music. Aurora’s simile,“like the sea in storm,” establishes a crucial link between turbulence of blood and brain, and turbulence of water, especially a body of water that is large enough to have waves, which she in turn associates with sound waves. That cluster of images, both visual and auditory, is one that EBB exploits as the story proceeds. And here I digress. For those readers who might think that Aurora’s – and EBB’s – claims for the poet’s special insight are a pretty fiction, having no connection to the actual nature of things, there is a parallel in physics to Aurora’s “rhythmic turbulence,” and it is a phenomenon in fluid dynamics that EBB could not have known, but one that is familiar to radiologists of our own day. They know it as the “transition to turbulence.” The term “turbulence” suggests something without any pattern, but in fact when radiologists image the flow of blood in arteries and veins, they see“arteriographic standing waves.” Radiologist Dr Gavin Hamilton explains. Such “standing waves” occur “during the rapid injection of a radio-opaque ‘dye’ (radiographic contrast agent), adding to the flow rate in an artery that already contains fast flowing blood, resulting in a combined turbulent flow rate, with implied chaotic flow. In spite of suggested chaos, a beautiful simple harmonic stationary wave pattern is revealed in radiographs … the standing waves are a manifestation of standing wave sound energy created by the flow” (Order in Chaos 59). EBB intuits this phenomenon with her “rhythmic turbulence.” She also intuits the connection between such turbulence and sound waves which, as Dr Hamilton indicates, can have a

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visible effect on the physical, not only blood, the subject of his primary observation, but sand, clouds, and water. But EBB’s intuition anticipates some scientific work closer to her own day, the lectures on sound by Sir John Tyndall in the 1860s. Tyndall dismisses the Pythagoreans and their linking of the musical scale, the planets, and the “choral dance of the worlds, the ‘music of the spheres’” as a “glorious superstition” (Sound 393), but many of his experiments with sound suggest that a regular musical beat is pervasive in nature. For the vibrations that produce sound travel not only through the air but through liquids and solids as well; sound waves have a visible effect on sand or powder; a flame will respond to the human voice; and the gas jets flaring in railway carriages or concert halls “exhibited pulsations which were exactly synchronous with the audible beats,” says Tyndall, quoting the American scientist Leconte (“Action” 375). Leconte had described a musical evening when notes from the different instruments were reflected in the action of the flame, so that the audible became visual: “‘A deaf man might have seen the harmony’” (375). EBB’s “rhythmic turbulence” seems, in retrospect, to be a remarkable anticipation of scientific fact. Tyndall’s lectures, and his accompanying demonstrations, were immensely popular, so much so that he, and they, were the subject of a parody written by a fellow scientist, James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish mathematician and physicist, and published in Nature in 1871: Maxwell titled his parody “To the Chief Musician upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode,” and used the verse form of Tennyson’s “The Brook.” (Nabla is a harp; mathematicians took over the term in the mid-nineteenth century for their own purposes.) Here is the fourth and final stanza of the parody, as reprinted by Daniel Brown in his The Poetry of Victorian Scientists (99): I light this sympathetic flame, My slightest wish to answer, I sing, it sweetly sings the same, It dances with the dancer; I whistle, shout, and clap my hands, I hammer on the platform, The flame bows down to my commands, In this form and in that form.

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The material effects of sound waves – that demonstration of Tyndall’s is what EBB anticipates, and she does so at a crucial moment in her story. It is at the beginning of the Eighth Book where EBB most fully exploits the conjunction of sound and matter and creates an effect that is rich, sensuous, and subtly, powerfully, erotic. The reader will remember that the book begins with an evening scene, with Aurora and Marian at home, which is “at Florence on the hill / Of Bellosguardo” (7: 515–16). Aurora is sitting on the terrace, reading; Marian is in the garden down below, playing and laughing with her son. The scene is surprisingly erotic, permeated as it is with pulsations and rhythms, imaging Aurora’s desire and establishing the context for the unexpected appearance of Romney. Aurora tropes the coming of evening as a flood that engulfs Florence and renders it a “drowned city in some enchanted sea” (8: 38). The coming of evening is rhythmic: Aurora describes the owls and their cries as counting “every pulse / Of the skyey palpitation” (8: 33–4). The “passionate desire” (8: 40) of the onlooker leads to the imagined sight of a male figure,“a sea-king with a voice of waves” (8: 41) – waves of course are rhythmic – who is an erotic figure. Then Aurora hears the cathedral bell strike ten, and she hears “twenty churches answer it” (8: 46). The sound waves have a physical effect – “Some gaslights tremble along squares and streets” (8: 48) – an effect that, as I have said, anticipates the work of Leconte and Tyndall on the flaring of gas in response to sound. The erotic context continues with Aurora’s use of Michelangelo’s purported epithet for the church of Santa Maria Novella – his Bride – and her ascribing of desire to the two astronomical instruments placed in the façade of the church, dials “black / With rhythms of many suns and moons” (8: 56–7). (The lines point to weathering of the instruments, but also suggest a more scientific version of the music of the spheres.) Those instruments are “large blind dial-eyes” (8: 55) and clearly foreshadow the appearance of the blind Romney. When he does appear and surprises Aurora, her response is to link him with the male figure she had imagined: “O my heart, … the sea-king!” (8: 59). But the sound waves are the crucial means of Aurora’s recognition: she says “sea-king” and almost immediately says “my king!” (8: 61), an acknowledgment of her love for him, an acknowledgment that comes through the rhythm: “In my ears / The sound of waters” (8: 60–1). For the biblical

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source of “the sound of waters” Reynolds and Stone both point the reader to three passages, the first of which is Ezekiel 43:2, where the temple is filled with God’s glory: “and his voice was like a noise of many waters.” John picks up that simile in the Book of Revelation, where the voice from heaven is “as the voice of many waters” (14:2), and where the voice of a “great multitude” in heaven is also “as the voice of many waters” (19:6). But the crucial link is with Christ. When John gives an account of his vision of Christ in the first chapter of Revelation, where Christ charges John to write what he has seen, his voice is “as the sound of many waters” (1:15). Christ, as we shall see when we consider the question of Aurora’s muse, is the source of universal harmony and the energy behind “rhythmic turbulence.” The whole focus of this opening scene in the Eighth Book is on voices, not on sight. Romney, of course, is blind, though Aurora does not yet know that; and Aurora says that she herself does not see: “I felt him, rather than beheld him” (8: 62). “Rhythmic turbulence” brings them together. At the end of the Ninth Book, after Aurora and Romney have acknowledged their love and embrace, Aurora says, And, in that hurtle of united souls, The mystic motions which in common moods Are shut beyond our sense, broke in on us, And, as we sate, we felt the old earth spin, And all the starry turbulence of worlds Swing round us in their audient circles … (9: 835–40) The passage is EBB’s updating of the Pythagorean notion of universal harmony and the music of the spheres. The universal harmony remains in “mystic motions,” but the stately and organized movement of the spheres is now “the starry turbulence of worlds,” immense and apparently chaotic energy that nonetheless produces “audient circles,” sound waves that, unlike the old music of the spheres, which could not actually be heard, pervade all things, including the physical being of the lovers. It is time now to go through Aurora Leigh in more detail, to see how music, as both sound and content, underpins the actions, the characterization,

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the theorizing (EBB’s “philosophical dreaming”), and her social agenda. I begin with music as the right ordering of personal relations, and as the affect of books and nature. Music is the foundation of Aurora’s parents’ marriage. When her father first sees her mother in a religious procession in Florence, “A face flashed like a cymbal on his face / And shook with silent clangour brain and heart, / Transfiguring him to music” (1: 87–9). The transformation is parallel to that in Sonnets from the Portuguese, where EBB herself sings more fully, and lives life in a “new rhythm,” in response to RB as “chief musician” – and as Aurora herself will ultimately live and love in response to Romney’s voice which is like “some chief musician’s song” (9: 844). In the First Book the figures for the transformation are synaesthesia – the cymbal registers on the senses of hearing and seeing both – and oxymoron – “silent clangour.” Those seeming opposites come together in “music,“ and suggest EBB’s favourite diapason trope – all things sounding fully together in harmony. As always, EBB links that harmony with higher modes of being. The music is Aurora’s father’s “sacramental gift / With eucharistic meanings” (1: 90–1), and EBB uses the verb “transfigure” for the change in him. In contrast, the music Aurora learns in England as one of her girlish “accomplishments” is a parody of genuine music: I learnt much music, – such as would have been As quite impossible in Johnson’s day As still it might be wished – fine sleights of hand And unimagined fingering, shuffling off The hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notes To a noisy Tophet … (1: 415–20) This parodic music is technically difficult but soulless: the allusion, as Margaret Reynolds explains in her Norton edition of the poem (18n6), is to Johnson’s saying, on hearing a hard composition performed by an accomplished musician, “I would it had been impossible.” The genuine music to which Aurora is instinctively attracted is in nature (no matter how different nature in England is from the Italian landscape), and in Aurora’s physical response to the English landscape. That is the re-

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sponse of her “heart and lungs” (1: 479) – the rhythms of her pulse and her breath – to nature’s “elemental nutriment and heat” (1: 474), and that response EBB elsewhere calls the “animal life.” It is a genuine life, in contrast to the parodic life of Aurora’s girlhood, “the life thrust on me” (1: 477) by her aunt. And though Aurora contrasts the English and Italian landscapes, saying (using Paul’s tropes from the Bible) that nature in England is the letter (1: 628) while nature in Italy is the spirit that “giveth life,” in fact the English landscape does foster her “animal life.” The colour green is the agent. Aurora’s own “little chamber” (1: 567) is green, and it is a reflection of the “out-door world with all its greenery” (1: 574). Still, the English landscape cannot match the wildness of Italy. The particular landscape Aurora remembers is one EBB was herself familiar with: Vallombrosa. Aurora’s diction suggests immense energy: “headlong leaps / Of waters” (1: 617), “palpitating pines” (1: 619), woods “cleaving” to precipices (1: 616). The mountains exercise an “electric” touch (1: 624), and they are “panting from their full deep hearts / Beneath the influent heavens” (1: 624–5). Books are Aurora’s other source of music. Aurora provides a lengthy account of her love of books, and at the same time she is creating one, as the opening lines of the poem indicate. Though the books Aurora reads are all the product of art, her reading has the indiscriminate energy of nature. She rejects a narrow purpose in reading – the consideration whether or not the books are “fit / To do me good” (1: 701–2) – and instead approaches them with an omnivorous appetite: It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth – ’Tis then we get the right good from a book. (1: 705–9) “The right good” is not some narrow moral or proverb, but something with a much broader appeal and significance – an emotional and spiritual appeal. When she re-reads the books from which her father had taught her – Theophrastus and Aelianus are the two she mentions – she does so with memories of his love and a revival of the emotion they once stirred in her. When she goes beyond those volumes, she reads for hope (1: 730),

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which she tropes as a romance quest. She is the “young wayfaring soul” (1: 740) on a “perilous road … through / The world of books!” (1: 741, 743–4). That world is, in the child’s eyes, a romance world, with heroes and villains, saints and fools, “seers” and “conjurors,” and the child’s first response is to absorb all the imaginative energy of that world without judging it: “who judges? – who distinguishes / ’Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight” (1: 766–7; the webb editors explain the biblical allusion, 3: 272n64). Aurora reads books “bad and good” (1: 779) and is “dashed / From error on to error,” but “every turn / Still brought me nearer to the central truth” (1: 798–800). The question of truth leads Aurora to a digression – and, of course, EBB wanted the freedom to digress, considering it a characteristic of the modern age and one she wanted to integrate into her story. The digression comes under EBB’s heading of “philosophical dreaming” – the other element she wanted to include in her epic – and its subject is “All this anguish in the thick / Of men’s opinions” (1: 801–2) – the same subject Locke tackles in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s analysis of knowledge and opinion led him to a language theory, and it leads Aurora to one too. The digression (lines 801–32) is thick with philosophical allusions: to “school logic” (1: 809) in the Lockean tradition, with its chain of reason and inference that works better than the syllogism in a world where probability and opinion characterize human thinking; to Locke’s metaphor for the mind as a “clean white paper” (1: 825); and to Locke’s epistemology, where sensations (1: 819) are the source of our ideas. But Aurora reverses the meaning of all those references. In “school logic” “bare inference” is not sufficient, and “Pure reason” (1: 807) is “stronger,” “Pure reason” being a term from the Germano-Coleridgean tradition and linked by Aurora with “a noble trust / And use of your own instinct” (1: 805–6). She replaces Locke’s white paper metaphor with one of her own: the palimpsest, which (again in the Germano-Coleridgean tradition) indicates that there is something in the mind prior to sensation. That something, which is not the mind’s contents (ideas) but a shaping and organizing power, she labels “spirit-insight” (1: 818), which sensations dull but which nonetheless “quicken[s] in the dark” (1: 820). (These lines ought to be read in the context of EBB’s awareness of Leibnitz’s response to Locke, which she

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quotes in her contribution to the essay on Carlyle in R.H. Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age (1844): “nothing being in the mind without the mediation of the senses, as Locke held, – ‘except,’ as Leibnitz acutely added in modification, ‘the mind itself ’” (bc 8: 353).) “Such dumb motions of imperfect life” (1: 822) are like Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality, “oracles of vital Deity / Attesting the Hereafter” (1: 823–4). Hence reading is always double. There is the text that we see with our eyes, and there is the underlying text that we read with “spirit-insight.” EBB’s adjective for such a text is “obscene” (1: 829). She is using the adjective in its original Latin sense of “inauspicious,” and as such it parallels her view of language itself, which is also “inauspicious” as an heuristic because it is the product of sensation (as Locke taught) and not of spirit. But here EBB’s view that, with the expulsion from Eden, the human mind was not completely darkened underlies the affirmation that follows. If we read by intently “poring on … [the] obscene text,” we may discern perhaps Some fair, fine trace of what was written once, Some upstroke of an alpha and omega Expressing the old scripture. (1: 828–32) Of all the “obscene” texts Aurora reads, those of the poets are the most important. Her comments are based not only on her early reading, but also on her adult career – “I who have written much in prose and verse” (1: 2) – but here it is her early reading that she recalls. Her first contact with poetry she images in the same way Michelangelo images God’s quickening of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: “poetry’s divine first fingertouch” (1: 851) brings her to life. In the digression that follows, she gives the popular view of poets: virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, Exaggerators of the sun and moon, And soothsayers in a tea-cup … (1: 856–8) Her own view is just the opposite. Poets are

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the only truth-tellers now left to God, The only speakers of essential truth, Opposed to relative, comparative, And temporal truths … (1: 859–62) “Relative, comparative, / And temporal truths” are knowledge and opinion as defined by Locke.“Essential truth,” which Locke and the empiricists say we cannot know, belongs to the opposite philosophical tradition. It, however, is no more likely to bring certainty than empiricism, and Aurora’s apostrophe to “My own best poets” (1: 881), an apostrophe that involves music and breathing, ends with an expression of doubt: When my joy and pain, My thought and aspiration, like the stops Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb Unless melodious, do you play on me My pipers, – and if, sooth, you did not blow, Would no sound come? or is the music mine, As a man’s voice or breath is called his own, Inbreathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubt For cloudy seasons! (1: 887–95) Nonetheless, this whole digression ought to be read in the light of EBB’s early enthusiasm for Locke, her apostrophe to him in An Essay on Mind, and her subsequent regret about that enthusiasm as expressed in her letters. By the time she is writing Aurora Leigh, EBB has moved away from the Lockean tradition and has embraced ideas that might be labelled “Germano-Coleridgean.” That shift is especially apparent in her comments on poetic composition. Aurora’s account of poetic composition is a text that ought to enter into critical discussions of EBB just as much as earlier texts enter into discussions of earlier poets: Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, the thirteenth chapter of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry. For Aurora’s account of poetic composition includes all of EBB’s central concerns: music, “concord” and “harmony,” the pulse and “animal spirits,” nature and its music, and angels both immanent and transcendent.

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For her, composition begins with the pulses, which are the source of “the harmony of verse” (and I quote again that crucial passage from the First Book): “my pulses set themselves / For concord; when the rhythmic turbulence / Of blood and brain swept outward upon words” (1: 896–8). Aurora links such pulsations with nature, both through the timing of composition (when “the sun was high” 1: 895) and through a simile, her version of Wordsworth’s “correspondent breeze,” which, the reader will remember, moves “gently” at first and then becomes a “tempest.” Here is her simile, where the progress is toward physical ecstasy: “As wind upon the alders, blanching them / By turning up their under-natures till / They trembled in dilation” (1: 899–901). Wordsworth’s tempest “vex[es] its own creation”; Aurora’s turns outward in an affect that is the “delight / And triumph of the poet” (1: 901–2). For she “says the word so that it burns you through / With a special revelation, shakes the heart / Of all the men and women in the world” (1: 905–7). Such an affect is crucial to EBB’s purposes in this poem, and she makes it crucial to Aurora’s role as poet. The poet’s response is joy (1: 911), and the cause of that emotion is “the palpitating angel in his flesh” (1: 912). Aurora, like her creator, affirms the role of angels as the messengers of God, and she affirms the way in which they convey their message: through kinesthetic rhythms,“palpitating” in “flesh.” So the pulses become the means of revelation, and poetry is “cognisant of life / Beyond this bloodbeat, passionate for truth / Beyond these senses!” (1: 916–18). Like her creator, Aurora is concerned with the role of rhyme in poetry: “Many fervent souls / Strike rhyme on rhyme” (1: 942–3); “Many tender souls / Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread” (1: 945–6). Rhyming, as Aurora treats it in this passage, belongs to the apprenticeship of poets, when they imitate rather than striking out on their own. She herself first produced “Mere lifeless imitations of live verse” (1: 974). Still, those imitations had their music, as Aurora’s metaphor for composition indicates: she “beat the phorminx” – a stringed instrument – “till we hurt our thumbs” (1: 978). What was missing? Aurora continues with the musical metaphor, saying that the missing element was “counterpoint” – musical lines that move independently but that sound together in harmony. By the end of the First Book, Aurora affirms the relation of soul and sense, soul – her “quickening inner life” (1: 1026) – growing in spite of her aunt’s strictures: “My soul was singing at a work apart / Behind the wall

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of sense” (1: 1053–4).“And so, through forced work and spontaneous work, / The inner life informed the outer life” (1: 1057–8) – an understanding that Aurora draws upon in her debate with Romney, when she asserts (as part of her argument about the way to bring about social reform) that “life develops from within” and “It takes a soul, / To move a body” (2: 485, 479–80). Thus Aurora establishes the pattern and theme that are EBB’s central concerns in the epic: “the practical & the ideal lifes,” the practical as “the external evolution of the ideal & spiritual,” and hence the movement behind both poetic composition and social change, “from inner to outer” (Reynolds ed. 331). Aurora will champion the inner, Romney the outer. Upon that clash of opposites the story depends. And so does the dialogue in that crucial scene in the garden in the Second Book. The heroic action in this epic is fought with words, and the topics in that conversation – they are the battleground – are gender issues and issues of social reform. On the former, Aurora realizes that Romney would, among other things, deny women music. When he asks for her help in dealing with the “general suffering” (2: 199) of the world,“the great sum / Of universal anguish” (2: 208–9), she turns the argument against him: ‘What help?’ I asked. ‘You’d scorn my help, – as Nature’s self, you say, Has scorned to put her music in my mouth Because a woman’s. Do you now turn round And ask for what a woman cannot give?’ (2: 345–9) If this speech is to be voiced properly, “you” and “say” both need to be accented, “you” even more than “say.” When Romney characterizes women with being “weak for art” but “strong / For life and duty” (2: 372, 374–5), Aurora is quick to seize upon the contradictions in his view: “am I proved,” she asks, as “poor to think, / Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?” (2: 361–2). Earlier she had linked thought with the primal rhythm that brings about genuine change. Romney had said that “dreaming” brings “headaches.”Aurora had replied: “if heads / That hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce, / For my part I choose headaches” (2: 106–8). Still earlier in the dialogue, she had linked thought with music. When she is choosing

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ivy for her wreath over laurel and myrtle, verbena and rose, she recounts her thinking at that moment and then steps back to continue her narrative: “Thus speaking to myself, half singing it, / Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bell / To ring with once being touched” (2: 54–6).“Singing” links the thoughts to music, which in turn leads Aurora to the bell simile, here used for summoning attention, but the figure is a strategic error on Aurora’s part and gives Romney an opening for a conventional association and a put-down: the biblical tinkling cymbal that figures the emptiness of the sound – a figure continued with irony by Aurora, who adds the biblical “sounding brass.” At the end of the Second Book, when Romney and Aurora each, under questioning from the other, discloses a plan of life, Romney’s statement is significantly devoid of references to music, while such references are central to Aurora’s: ‘All my life Is open to you, cousin. I go hence To London, to the gathering-place of souls, To live mine straight out, vocally, in books; Harmoniously for others, if indeed A woman’s soul, like man’s, be wide enough To carry the whole octave …’ (2: 1180–6) “Harmoniously” and “octave” are, as we have seen, two of EBB’s key words when she is invoking music. The beginning of the Third Book is Aurora’s account of her poetic apprenticeship in London. She judges her early efforts harshly, as “Mere tones, inorganised to any tune” (3: 250) and strives to express fully the music that is within her: “Day and night / I worked my rhythmic thought” (3: 271– 2). “I felt / My heart’s life throbbing in my verse to show / It lived, it also – certes incomplete” (3: 338–40). When Aurora comes to know Marian Erle, she senses the music in Marian’s soul, music made evident in Marian’s response to her fragmentary reading. Marian has “no book-learning” and is “ignorant / Of authors” (3: 999–1000) but she was nonetheless

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within The cadenced hum of such, and capable Of catching from the fringes of the wind Some fragmentary phrases, here and there, Of that fine music, – which, being carried in To her soul, had reproduced itself afresh In finer motions of the lips and lids. (3: 1002–8) Marian relieves the monotony of her work as a seamstress by remembering poems, the mnemonic device being rhyme: While rhymes from lovely poems span around Their ringing circles of ecstatic tune, Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour. (3: 1018–20) Here rhyme is hardly a “sounding brass” or “tinkling cymbal”; its “ringing circles” are an aid to memory, and the entrée into the “ecstatic tune” of poetry, music to which Marian seems to be by nature attuned. Contrast Marian’s fragmentary reading and her response to it with Romney’s extensive reading and his use of it. Romney’s response has no music in it. “Your Fouriers failed,” Aurora says to him, “Because not poets enough to understand / That life develops from within” (2: 483–5). Instead of music, Romney speaks of his work, and his “work” is to “make … vocal” (2: 1206) the needs of “hungry orphans,” “beaten and bullied wives,” and of all who toil and sweat. In the Third Book, EBB puts the catalogue of Romney’s reading in the mouth of Lady Waldemar – Fourier, Proudhon, Considerant, Louis Blanc, and “various other … socialists” (3: 586) – and she, not surprisingly, makes no reference to music, nor does she use music as a trope. Lady Waldemar has memorized Romney’s speeches in the House, and she has heaps of reports on social issues, all listed factually but all of them lacking that power that Aurora considers essential. And yet Romney certainly has music in his soul. When Marian first encounters him in the hospital, she hears his speech as music: “‘when he spoke / He sang perhaps’” (3: 1171–2). As a result, Marian can repeat

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Romney’s words to Aurora “‘exactly as he uttered them’” (3: 1209) – but she cannot reproduce their music: “‘I repeat his words, / But not his tones: can any one repeat / The music of an organ, out of church?’” (3: 1217–19). Aurora – and EBB – are always suggesting the working of universal harmony behind all the ups and downs of the human relations in the story. Consider, for instance, the two clocks figure in the Fourth Book. It is Aurora’s metaphor for the talk between herself and Romney after they have left Marian; the talk is wide-ranging, from the weather to social and political issues, from “modern books / And daily papers” (4: 398–9) to Dickens. Aurora figures her relation with Romney as that of two clocks: leave two clocks, they say, Wound up to different hours, upon one shelf, And slowly, through the interior wheels of each, The blind mechanic motion sets itself A-throb to feel out for the mutual time. (4: 421–5) In her Norton edition of the poem, Margaret Reynolds identifies the source of the reference in Leibnitz, who used the example “to explain his theories of the universal governing influence of preestablished harmony” (Reynolds 119n3). On this occasion the proximity of Aurora and Romney does not work like the clocks – “It was not so with us, indeed” (4: 426) – but the trope is yet further evidence of EBB’s continuing interest in – faith in, really – universal harmony. Aurora and Romney seem far apart – “while he / Struck midnight, I kept striking six at dawn, / While he marked judgment, I, redemption-day” (4: 426–8) – but of course they are parts of one continuous process that will gradually be revealed as a spiral upward. In this same passage Aurora refers to “a general law / Imperious upon inert matter even” (4: 429–30), a law to which she and Romney seem to be an “exception” (4: 429), but that “general law” is, I think, universal harmony, its sound waves moving even through “inert matter.” Universal harmony gives us a new perspective on timing as marked by clocks. In a recent essay on the “two clocks” passage, Mary Mullen argues that the epic “questions the dominance of linear, progressive time” (64) and shows ways of transcending it. The allusions to Carlyle and Mill present “conflicting conceptions

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of historical time” (65), while the poem “celebrates the simultaneity that literary form produces: the merging of the transcendent with embodied, historical time” (76–7). Aurora’s attempt to comfort Romney after the aborted wedding is full of musical terms. Aurora sees herself as a woman with a woman’s instinct to “hum the tune of comfort” (4: 1090). She instinctively searches for “a simple word” (4: 1104) that is more likely to move than the “full-voiced rhetoric” (4: 1108) of “the pregnant thinkers of our time” (4: 1098), in spite of their skill as musicians. She describes their work as “some chromatic sequence of fine thought” in which “learned modulation phrased itself / To an unconjectured harmony of truth” (4: 1101–2), and her diction – “chromatic,”“modulation”– indicates, as Margaret Reynolds comments (138nn4,5), both comprehensiveness (chromatic “includes every tone and semitone in the scale”) and skill (modulation is “resolution, or movement from one mode or key to another”). Yet Aurora and Romney are hardly in harmony in this conversation. He values Aurora’s “rhymes” as “innocent distraction” (4: 1117). She defends her art as the instrument of progress, which she figures as a circle that spirals upwards. Art, she says, is life upon the larger scale, the higher, When, graduating up in a spiral line Of still expanding and ascending gyres, It pushes toward the intense significance Of all things, hungry for the Infinite … (4: 1153–6) In the first four hundred lines of Book Five, Aurora elaborates upon her theory of poetry and examines the effectiveness of the various genres. She introduces her theory with a remarkable sentence. The first forty-two lines of the Fifth Book are one unit, a periodic sentence. The imperative, “Aurora Leigh, be humble” (5: 1), repeated at 5: 42, frames a single grammatical unit of great complexity. It is a unit in which Aurora sets out her theory of composition (and hence it ought to be set side by side with the parallel passage in the First Book, from line 881 on). At the centre of Aurora’s theory of composition is a concept dear to her creator: the “harmony” of verse. Aurora’s diction includes the words “tune”

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and “rhythm,”“strain” and “harmonious” as she catalogues all the aspects of “man and nature” (5: 3) that her poetry brings into one great dynamic musical structure. The periodic structure is the grammatical equivalent of the harmony she is seeking, since it keeps gathering up successive grammatical units while suspending their resolution which, when it comes at last, reveals the interconnectedness of all the apparently unrelated parts. The sentence embodies the characteristics of the “full-voiced rhetoric” (4: 1108) she had avoided at the end of the Fourth Book: it is a “chromatic sequence” that is inclusive and comprehensive, and it modulates to a resolution that could be characterized as “an unconjectured harmony of truth” (4: 1102). The periodic structure serves Aurora’s purposes well. Aurora establishes the periodicity with the unfinished question in the Fifth Book’s first three lines: “Shall I hope / To speak my poems in mysterious tune / With man and nature?” That last phrase invites a catalogue for both nouns, and the next twenty-one lines are indeed such a listing, each part of it a phrase governed by the preposition “with.” The theory that the phrases set out is not one of mimesis but rather of expression: Aurora wants to appropriate the energy that pervades man and nature and use it for her artistic and social ends. The nouns that complete the “with” phrases all name aspects of (what is revealed to be) one living power. The first is a compound, “lava-lymph”: with the lava-lymph That trickles from successive galaxies Still drop by drop adown the finger of God In still new worlds? (5: 3–6) Though the clause modifying the compound gives the widest possible view of creation – the lines, with the words “galaxies” and “new worlds,” refer to the whole universe – the compound itself links the astronomical and the human: molten rock is part of the same music of creation as the lymph secreted in the human body. That linking of nature and man is characteristic of the whole passage. The “with” phrases that follow the first narrow to a more human perspective, the human response to the seasons (summer first, then spring, winter, and autumn), each of them a manifestation of energy (such as the breathing of the summer days, or “the quickened

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blood of roots” in spring). Then Aurora turns the seasons into a trope for feelings and emotions, “the human heart’s large seasons” (5: 13) – “fears, joys, grieves, and loves” – and “all that strain / Of sexual passion,” where the body is not at odds with the soul but rather the means to “a sacrament of souls” (5: 16). The next of the nouns in the “with” phrases has attracted much critical attention: “with mother’s breasts / Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there, / Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?” (5: 16–18). Joyce Zanona defines the extent to which these lines are a radical revision of convention and tradition: “The poet seeks to ‘tune’ her verse, not to the harmony of the inaccessible heavenly spheres, but to the music of these very earthly, tangible, and visible spheres of the female body. In just three lines of concentrated imagery, Barrett Browning offers a compelling alternative to the centuries-long tradition of cosmic harmony associated with disembodied and ethereal muses” (526). When Aurora links “the rhythm of blood with the rhythms of her verse,” she is setting out “what contemporary feminists have defined as a poetics of the body” (527). The last two nouns in this series of phrases take us in a summary way to earth (“With multitudinous life” 5: 19) and then in an apocalyptic way to heaven: and finally With the great escapings of ecstatic souls Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame, Their radiant faces upward, burn away This dark of the body, issuing on a world Beyond our mortal? (5: 19–24) Then come the lines that resolve the suspended grammatical resolution: can I speak my verse So plainly in tune to these things and the rest, That men shall feel it catch them on the quick, As having the same warrant over them To hold and move them if they will or no,

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Alike imperious as the primal rhythm Of that theurgic nature? (5: 24–30) These lines not only complete the grammatical structure of the passage, but also complete the theory of poetics Aurora is setting out. Tuning her verse to the harmony of all things is not an end in itself: the end is to move readers, to “catch them on the quick,” quick being the living flesh, with all its feelings and emotions. For Aurora’s purpose is to bring about a revolution in the way people think and feel, and such an inward revolution must be prior to the outer social changes Romney seeks. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis remarks,“conversion experiences … are the real boot of any social change… true awakening will be brought about only by poetry and God, not by politics” (465). “The primal rhythm / Of that theurgic nature” (5: 29–30) needs some explanation. The words are, first of all, Aurora’s (and EBB’s) renewal of the myth of “the music of the spheres.” In John Tyndall’s words,“The numerical relations of the seven notes of the musical scale were … thought by [the Pythagoreans] to express the distances of the planets from their central fire; hence the choral dance of the worlds, the ‘music of the spheres’” (Sound 393). But for Aurora that music is not the intervals of the musical scale but a beat, and the beat is the manifestation of divine energy in nature: in nature, not above nature. For Aurora’s view of nature is not double (matter and spirit) but monistic, like Carlyle’s “natural supernaturalism” as he defines it in Sartor Resartus. “Theurgy” means a god (theos) working inside, and hence is the divine operating within nature. It gives Aurora’s poetry authority, which she tropes as a warrant. The word “warrant” is a legal term, and refers to a document authorizing an agent to carry out a court-ordered action. It has the power to over-ride private judgment and the will of the individual. That unfamiliar noun, “theurgy,” raises the question: who, in EBB’s view, is the god working within nature? The short answer is the incarnate Christ – incarnate, that is, not just at a particular point in human history, but for all time. That answer becomes apparent when Aurora is dealing with the theory of troping. She introduces it with the line, “A tree’s mere firewood, unless humanised” (5: 95), and that verb refers to prosopopoeia,

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the master trope of poetry (and defined as such in 1835 by RB’s Paracelsus who, in a long passage, catalogues ways in which man “imprints for ever / His presence on all lifeless things” 5: 719–20). Aurora refers to the Greeks and their animating of nature with nymphs and gods, “Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads and the rest” (5: 113), and she condemns their possession of a “senseless world” as “unnatural vampire-uses” (5: 115–16): they suck the life out of things. The true agent of prosopopoeia for her (as for her creator) is the incarnate Christ, who infused everything with life when he “came down” (5: 106) and resurrected an Earth left “stiff and dry, / A mere dumb corpse” (5: 105–6) by Adam’s sin. The Earth is alive with Christ’s spirit, by which “she lives, remembers, palpitates / In every limb, aspires in every breath, / Embraces infinite relations” (5: 110–12). Such is EBB’s version of the myth of a sky god and an earth goddess, a version both Christian and classical. The link between Christ and prosopopoeia follows from Aurora’s claim that the earth is alive and palpitating with Christ’s spirit (again, “theurgic nature”), and that claim underlies her theory of troping. “See the earth,” she says, The body of our body, the green earth, Indubitably human like this flesh And these articulated veins through which Our heart drives blood. (5: 116–20) That “indubitably human” earth, with its rhythms like those of the human body, makes troping revelatory: There’s not a flower of spring That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied By issue and symbol, by significance, And correspondence, to that spirit-world Outside the limits of our space and time, Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice With human meanings … (5: 120–6) “Issue,” “symbol,” “significance,” and “correspondence” – those are key

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nouns in Aurora’s (and EBB’s) poetics. They indicate that tropes are not a human fiction opposed to truth (as in Locke) but a revelation of an essential ontological truth: they are a manifestation of the energy human beings share with nature and with all of creation. Poets give that energy “voice” and “human meanings” (5: 125–6). The four nouns define the ways in which troping works, “issue” and “symbol” being a related pair, best understood ontologically, and “significance” and“correspondence”another pair, best understood epistemologically. “Issue” is derived from the Latin verb exire, to go out, and suggests something made manifest. The something is “that spirit-world / Outside the limits of our space and time” (5: 123–4) and that and its manifestation share the same being. The best gloss on the word “issue” is a passage one hundred lines or so later on, where Aurora asks the question, “What form is best for poems?” (5: 223). Here is her answer: Trust the spirit, As sovran nature does, to make the form; For otherwise we only imprison spirit And not embody. Inward evermore To outward, – so in life, and so in art Which still is life. (5: 224–9) “Inward evermore / To outward” is in effect the definition of “issue,” as is the sentence about moving “from inner to outer” in EBB’s March 1855 letter to John Kenyon, already quoted. “Symbol,” derived from the Greek sem, one, indicates that tropes are synecdochic, and participate ontologically in the being they name. “Significance” is literally “sign-bearing” and “correspondence” is the Swedenborgian term: both are ways of knowing “that spirit-world” (5: 123), either through a sign pointing to it or through an image mirroring it. Aurora’s poetics include an assessment of the various genres and their comparative efficacy in embodying the move “Inward evermore / To outward.” Her assessment is her version of Aristotle’s Poetics, with its distinction among lyric, narrative, and dramatic, the difference being based on their mode of presentation. Among the shorter forms, the ballad is too “rapid” for “thought and golden image” (5: 85–6). The sonnet is a static form; in

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it the poet “must stand still” (5: 89). “My pastoral … was a book / Of surface-pictures – pretty, cold, and false / With literal transcript” (5: 130–2). The “prospects” of her “descriptive poem” were “too far and indistinct” (5: 91); they could have no effect unless “humanised” (5: 95). When Aurora assesses the drama, she reflects the attitudes of her own day in criticizing the theatre and in defending dramatic texts. The drama, she says, requires “obsequiousness” to convention (5: 237); its appeal is “lower,” to popular taste (5: 269); “the modern stage” (5: 300) is in decline; “the painted scene, / Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume” (5: 338–9) are unworthy vehicles for the dramatic text that, Aurora says, is best played out on “a worthier stage[,] the soul itself ” (5: 340). Is she advocating a silent reading of the text in the privacy of one’s own study? Possibly, because she goes on to suggest that staging the drama in one’s own soul enables one to hear the silences, and to hear them for what they really are, an essential part of the music of the text,“the pauses of its rhythmic sounds” (5: 343). And like the pauses in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, these are “grand orchestral silences” (5: 342), the adjective “orchestral” indicating their richness, their breadth and, in Josie Billington’s words, “drama’s more subtle possibilities” (100). Just why such silences cannot be heard when skilled actors speak the lines aloud is not an issue Aurora deals with, though her avoidance of it may have something to do with the conventions Aurora attacks at the beginning of her review of the drama: “the points for clapping, fixed” (5: 239), the conventional appeal to the heart in the fourth act (5: 243–4), and “stage-tricks” (5: 276) of various sorts. The stage, she suggests, is a noisy place where sounds muffle true silences. Aurora’s assessment of the epic – her chosen genre – is well known, as are her statements about it, many of them influenced by the thinking of Carlyle, whom she names explicitly at line 156. The age of epic is not dead; no age ever appears heroic to itself; nonetheless, all men are “possible heroes” and every age “heroic in proportions” (5: 152–3); the poet’s task is “to represent the age” (5: 202) in all its multifaceted particulars, both close up and in perspective; hence “poets should / Exert a double vision” (5: 183–4), seeing things near and looking at them from afar. That “double vision” (5: 184) is embodied in the scheme of antimetabole (where key words in the first half of the scheme appear in reverse order in the second

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half) when Aurora states her version of the heroic: “All actual heroes are essential men, / And all men possible heroes” (5: 151–2). “Double vision” means seeing the heroic as ordinary, and the ordinary as heroic – Aurora’s version of Carlyle’s “natural supernaturalism.” What makes her own age heroic, in Aurora’s view? There is a clue in the adjectives Aurora uses: “live” and “throbbing” (5: 203).“Throbbing” is EBB’s usual metaphor for the beat of the music that is the basis of all living things, and lava flowing from a volcano is, in this book, her repeated metaphor for its generative power (it had first appeared in line 3,“lava-lymph”). Now she explicitly links lava and music with her injunction to the epic poet, “catch / Upon the burning lava of a song” (5: 214–15). In these lines, Aurora replaces the lymph, linked with lava in the earlier passage, with mother’s milk and tropes the age as a woman,“full-veined, heaving, double-breasted” (5: 216). That metaphor is both a break with the past, where male actions characterized the age, and a link with the future where, even after the bosom has become history, the beat goes on in the poetry, and “sets ours beating” (5: 221) – our bosoms, that is, the bosoms of the next age: “this is living art” (5: 221). Daniel Karlin, reviewing Reynolds’ edition of the poem, draws attention to the turbulence suggested by these lines, and to the violent energy which propels Aurora’s (and EBB’s) blank verse: “These lines are not simply a challenge to patriarchal images of creativity, they are an assault on conventional notions of what blank verse is for, and what it can do. The poem’s violent mixture of registers is, itself, ‘unscrupulously epic,’ and it is this quality which must, surely, strike every new reader of the poem” (24). That “living art” and its power to change society are topics Aurora muses on as she walks in Paris at the beginning of the Sixth Book. Her musings reflect EBB’s usual criticism of socialist schemes: that they deal with outward and material things and leave out the animating word and its accompanying music. The outward and material things she lists as public baths, “Phalansteries, material institutes, / The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries” (6: 210–11). All these she labels “physics” (6: 207), which needs “A larger metaphysics,” “a completer poetry” (6: 206–7), and that rests in “the essential prophet’s word / That comes in power” (6: 216–17) and is spoken by the poet:

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On which, we thunder down We prophets, poets, – Virtue’s in the word! The maker burnt the darkness up with His, To inaugurate the use of vocal life … (6: 217–20) “Virtue’s in the word!” – that sentence neatly ties the poet’s language to the man within, if we consider the etymology of “virtue” (I will deal with the crucial idea of “the man within” in another context). Its root is the Latin vir, man, and hence the word means manly strength and power, both physical and moral. The power is a creative one, as the next lines indicate: Aurora links the poet’s word with the word by which God created the world in Genesis. That word, in her view, was spoken not only to create but “To inaugurate the use of vocal life,” so creation is not a one-time event but the ongoing life of things, a continuous music of which language is the chief expression. The role of the poet is to access that music and sound it so that it is heard and acted upon. For that hearing Aurora uses an organic metaphor: planting. And, plant a poet’s word even, deep enough In any man’s breast, looking presently For offshoots, you have done more for the man Than if you dressed him in a broad-cloth coat And warmed his Sunday potage at your fire. (6: 221–5) Like the Fifth Book, the Seventh is full of theorizing, and it is the replaying of the theory of Five in a different key. Helen Cooper has shown how EBB organizes the books of her epic as a palindrome: “the events recorded in Books 1–4 are repeated in reverse order in Books 6–9, dividing the poem into two parts” (153–4). Five, a “pivotal book” because of “Aurora’s meditation on Art,” has its counterpart in Seven, with its exploration of epistemology and typology. That exploration clearly struck a chord with Robert Browning, who wrote on the manuscript the words “Read this Book, this divine Book, Wednesday night, July 9, 1856” (Irvine and Honan 346). As usual with EBB, she speaks in terms of a “twofold world” (7: 762) that is in fact one. The two are “Natural things / And spiritual” (7: 763–4),

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and there follow ten lines in which Aurora warns against separating them and lists the dire consequences, among them painting “futile pictures” and writing “unreal verse” (7: 767). Aurora’s concerns are not primarily ontological but epistemological, and her epistemology parallels Carlyle’s Descendentalism: one can know the spiritual only through intense observation of the material. Aurora’s version of this idea: “without sensuous, spiritual / Is inappreciable” (7: 775–6). So, although man is “twofold” and the sphere in which he lives is also “twofold” (7: 777), he “Holds firmly by the natural, to reach / The spiritual beyond it” (7: 779–80). The terms she uses are borrowed from typology: [man] fixes still The type with mortal vision, to pierce through, With eyes immortal, to the antetype Some call the ideal, – better called the real, And certain to be called so presently When things shall have their names. (7: 780–5) Margaret Reynolds glosses that last line with a reference to the Book of Revelation, but the line may also be a reference to a theory of naming, when names are no longer arbitrary and derived from sensation, but necessary and part of the being to which they point; when they are, in Coleridge’s terminology, no longer allegorical but symbolic. But Aurora’s chief focus is on what might be called the soul expressing itself, in observation and in art. When the soul expresses itself in observation, the result is typology, which sees everything as double: what is seen is both itself and the type of something of which it is the appearance and (in history) the anticipation. Man, a “two-fold creature” (7: 802), sees everything in a “two-fold manner” (7: 803). Here is how she defines that manner: in and outwardly, And nothing in the world comes single to him, A mere itself, – cup, column, or candlestick, All patterns of what shall be in the Mount; The whole temporal show related royally,

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Line 806 is a definition of typology; Reynolds identifies the mount as Mount Sinai and the context as God’s instructions to Moses for the making of the tabernacle. Aurora completes this allusion with another to the burning bush, also from the Moses story: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, / And every common bush afire with God” (7: 821–2). Though Aurora’s examples of observing descendentally and typologically are visual, she also appeals to the ear through her prosody, where sound is just as revelatory as sight. Consider, for instance, these lines: “No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee, / But finds some coupling with the spinning stars” (7: 814–15). The onomatopoeia in line 814 (the repeated “m”) is obvious, but the placing of one “m” between two “l”’s, two “f ”’s and another “l” perfectly embodies in sound the meaning of the words: the “l”’s and “f ”’s muffle the “m.” Line 815 begins with two iambs (“but finds some coup”), but “coupling” itself is a trochee, and so too is “spinning.” Trochees dominate the second half of the line, and “coupling” neatly ties together the initial iambs and the later trochees. But if we consider that line in conjunction with the preceding line, another effect is heard: the preceding line has three trochaic words and an extra syllable, so that the irregularity (still rhythmic, of course) resolves itself into the more comprehensive regularity of line 815 – comprehensive in that it “couples” iambs and trochees in one complex rhythm. Aurora’s final example of descendental and typological observation – her pulse – is the crucial one: No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere; No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim; (7: 814–15) (EBB is using “implies” precisely, in its root sense of being folded in.) And, (glancing on my own thin, veinéd wrist,) In such a little tremour of the blood The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul Doth utter itself distinct. (7: 816–19)

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Aurora labels that utterance “witnessing,” and “witness” is a key noun in her poetics: “Art’s the witness of what Is / Behind this show” (7: 834–5). Hence she rejects the theory of art as imitation of “this world’s show” (7: 835). The expected opposite is “expression,” but in fact it is “witness,” and “witness,” from the Old English “wit,” knowledge, has as its Indo-European root the verb “to see.” What does she see? – That every natural flower which grows on earth Implies a flower upon the spiritual side, Substantial, archetypal, all a-glow With blossoming causes, – (7: 840–3) The agent of such witnessing Aurora calls her “spirit-sense” (7: 844), a double noun that is itself neatly double in meaning: first, spirit and sense (sensation) are the two ways of knowing or perceiving, and the hyphen equates them; and – the second meaning – the means by which spirit operates, its sensing capabilities, are by something prior to the evidence of our five senses, something that gives perception its authority. That authority is the revelation of the “spiritual significance … of material shows” (7: 860–1). That revelation is always partial, because “material shows” are an “hieroglyphic” (7: 861) and because the “spirit-sense” is limited in its apprehension: it May catch at something of the bloom and breath, – Too vaguely apprehended, though indeed Still apprehended, consciously nor not … (7: 845–7) (Romney had said in the Fourth Book that “‘The whole creation, from the hour we are born, / Perplexes us with questions’” (4: 1175–6).) So the witnessing is always fragmentary, and results only in hints and suggestions, to be read properly by an audience like Milton’s, fit though few: And still transferred to picture, music, verse, For thrilling audient and beholding souls By signs and touches which are known to souls. (7: 848–50)

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If such effects were magnified, the truth, “fully recognised, would change the world / And shift its morals” (7: 856–7). Romney’s retention of Aurora’s words from the Second Book is the model for the reform she hopes to bring about by her poetry. They, he says, “Were ever on me, stinging through my dreams, / And saying themselves for ever o’er my acts / Like some unhappy verdict” (8: 443–5). The words are like the law in the Judaeo-Christian tradition: its function is to accuse and bring about a conviction of sin. What are those words? “‘It takes a soul, To move a body’” (8: 429–30); “‘It takes the ideal, to blow an inch inside / The dust of the actual’” (8: 433–4); there is a need “‘to understand / That life develops from within’” (8: 435–6). Those words lead to Romney’s confession, which is accompanied by contrition. The next stage is conversion, and that takes the form of Romney’s statement of the lesson he has learned from Aurora’s last book: he now comprehends the universal not in an empiricist but in a transcendental way. He had understood Our natural world too insularly, as if No spiritual counterpart completed it Consummating its meaning, rounding all To justice and perfection, line by line, Form by form, nothing single nor alone, The great below clenched by the great above, Shade here authenticating substance there, The body proving spirit, as the effect The cause … (8: 617–25) The reader can arrange Romney’s nouns in parallel lists: on the one side, “shade,”“body,” and “effect”; on the other,“substance,”“spirit,” and “cause.” What is the relation between the two lists? They are in fact one, the first being the appearance of the second, which stands under (the literal meaning of “substance”) the first and gives it life and meaning. For the relation Romney himself uses locksmith’s terms: the natural world is both the key and “the lock / Of the spiritual” (8: 659–60). Hence the difficulty of using the key. Romney tropes the difficulty in terms of language: “Is there any common phrase / Significant, with the adverb heard alone, / The verb being

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absent, and the pronoun out?” (8: 667–9). The trope is Romney’s way of suggesting the difficulty of understanding the meaning when, of the whole pattern – the syntax of a complete grammatical unit, with subject (pronoun) and verb – there is only the adverb by which to guess the “significance” of the whole “phrase.” The adjective “common” suggests a degree of familiarity and hence a guess that is not entirely without guidance, but the “roar of life” (8: 670) distracts the interpreter, and even though the adverb is God’s (8: 671), the reader’s judgment is that the thought is “void” and the meaning “hopeless” (8: 672–3). The answer to this dilemma is work – work understood as it is by Carlyle. His Teufelsdröckh, in the final stage of his conversion, advocates work as the solution to doubt. Speculation, Teufelsdröckh says, “is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices,” and “only by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience does it find any centre to revolve round.” Hence he arrives at two aphorisms: “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action”; and, if there is doubt about what work to do,“Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.” Such work opens the doors of perception, and “Thy second Duty will already have become clearer” (Works 1: 156). Aurora and Romney both carry those ideas farther, Aurora by insisting that work is gender-neutral (8: 712–13) and Romney by linking it with “the man within”: ‘True. After Adam, work was curse; The natural creature labours, sweats, and frets. But, after Christ, work turns to privilege, And henceforth, one with our humanity, The Six-Day Worker working still in us Has called us freely to work on with Him In high companionship.’ (8: 717–23) Contrast Romney’s words here with his comments in 2: 129 ff. There his concept of work is set in the context of the difference between the sexes: man is the head, woman the heart. Romney says he wants to set aside such a division, since life means both, but he is not yet ready at that point to accept a true equality of the sexes, and talks only of cooperation:

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Men and women make The world, as head and heart make human life. Work man, work woman, since there’s work to do In this beleaguered earth, for head and heart, And thought can never do the work of love: But work for ends, I mean for uses, … (2: 132–7) As for the question of what to work at, Romney adopts Carlyle’s view that there does not exist a human situation in which there is not work to be done: “Oh cousin,” he says,“let us be content, in work, / To do the thing we can, and not presume / To fret because it’s little” (8: 732–4). Romney repeats the same idea at 9: 597 (“Content henceforth to do the thing I can”) and confirms his move from the ambitious mind to the contented mind, the contrast between the two states of mind being a commonplace in the sixteenth century (the ambitious mind characterizes tragedy and epic, the contented mind pastoral poetry). In the Second Book, the conversation between Aurora and Romney ultimately drove them apart; in the Eighth and Ninth books, the parallel conversation brings them together. Both conversations are the ongoing “use of vocal life” inaugurated by the creating Word in Genesis (6: 219– 20), but in the Ninth Book there is a third voice, that of Marian. She speaks “As one who had authority to speak, / And not as Marian” (9: 250–1). Who is the “one who had authority to speak, / And not as Marian”? To answer that question, I need to back up and examine two related questions: who is Aurora’s muse? And where is the invocation in this epic? The invocation comes late. In Paradise Lost, which establishes our expectations for the placing of it, the invocation is at the very beginning, and Milton renews his petition to the Holy Spirit twice, at the beginning of books Three and Seven. Aurora’s invocation to her muse comes so late in the epic and so near the end of one of its books that most seem to miss it, and one has some sympathy with those readers when even an astute critic like Joyce Zanona says that “there are no explicit invocations to the muse in the poem” (521). But there is one, in the Seventh Book. Marjorie Stone, arguing that Aurora’s muse is male, quotes Aurora’s statement in that book that “It seems as if I had a man in me” (7: 213) (“Genre Subver-

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sion” 122), and at that point the “man in me” is like the Old Testament law, an accuser and judge despising women because they are “weak in flesh” (7: 200) and here bringing about a recognition (anagnorisis) in Aurora herself. Stone links Aurora’s “man within” with two other phrases Aurora uses,“my angel of the Ideal” (2: 797) and “My Phoebus Apollo, soul within my soul” (5: 414), and she might have gone on to the passage in the Seventh Book I am about to quote, where Aurora addresses Christ as “thou in me” (7: 1035). Critics have proposed several candidates for the muse in the poem – Aurora’s father (Angela Leighton), “sister” Marian (Angela Leighton and Marjorie Stone), Aurora’s mother and Aurora herself (Joyce Zanona) – but, whatever the claims of others, Christ is the ultimate muse, and Aurora, moving in effect from the Old Testament law to the New Testament gospel, invokes him thus: Alas, long-suffering and most patient God, Thou needst be surelier God to bear with us Than even to have made us! thou aspire, aspire From henceforth for me! thou who hast thyself Endured this fleshhood, knowing how as a soaked And sucking vesture it can drag us down And choke us in the melancholy Deep, Sustain me, that with thee I walk these waves, Resisting! – breathe me upward, thou in me Aspiring who art the way, the truth, the life, – That no truth henceforth seem indifferent, No way to truth laborious, and no life, Not even this life I live, intolerable! (7: 1027–39) The principal imperative in this invocation is conventional: “breathe me upward.” The principal request is not: “that with thee I walk these waves, / Resisting!” Walking the waves is an image – a powerful one – of rhythmic turbulence. The biblical reference involves a great storm, contrary winds, the fear of the disciples, and Jesus’ rescue of the doubting Peter (Matt. 14:24–31). The waves are both an image of turbulence and of rhythm, and walking itself is of course rhythmic. It enables the petitioner to resist

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the danger of the turbulence, since it is life itself (understood as “theurgic nature”) resisting the pull of death and the threat of drowning “in the melancholy Deep.” But that is not the epic’s first or only use of that image of walking on waves. Earlier, in the Sixth Book, Aurora had associated Marian with a parallel image. When Aurora finds Marian at last in Paris, and holds her fast by her hands, saying that she has found her and will never let her go,“Come,” Aurora says to Marian. Here is Marian’s response: Not a word She said, but in a gentle humbled way (As one who had forgot herself in grief) Turned round and followed closely where I went, As if I led her by a narrow plank Across devouring waters, step by step; And so in silence we walked on a mile. (6: 478–84) A parallel passage a few lines later marks a role reversal that anticipates Marian’s authoritative voice in the story’s climactic scene in the Ninth Book: Then she led The way, and I, as by a narrow plank Across devouring waters, followed her, Stepping by her footsteps, breathing by her breath, And holding her with eyes that would not slip; And so, without a word, we walked a mile … (6: 500–5) Walking on the “narrow plank / Across devouring waters” is yet another version of rhythmic turbulence, but the second passage includes the diction of invocation, particularly the phrase “breathing by her breath,” which suggests that Marian is, at this moment, Aurora’s muse. Is it going too far to suggest that that “narrow plank / Across devouring waters” is the emblem of Lady Waldemar, since, as in her name, forest and sea are linked in “plank” and “waters,” and since the rhythmic and harmonized walk of the two women – Aurora “stepping by [Marian’s] footsteps” – indicates

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both close and threatening contact with turbulence and, paradoxically, delivery from danger and death, as in the biblical story. If the reader were seeking an image summing up the whole plot of the epic and its essential character as “rhythmic turbulence,” this is it. In the climactic scene in the Ninth Book, Marian’s authority lies, not in the steps by which she leads Aurora, as above, but in her voice, and Aurora describes it three times. The first time, it is “the thrilling, solemn, proud, pathetic voice” (9: 196). The second time, it is “The thrilling, tender, proud, pathetic voice” (9: 206). Two of the repeated adjectives are crucial. Marian’s voice is “pathetic” because it is the expression of pathos, suffering, and her suffering gives it authority. “Thrilling,” the only adjective repeated in all three iterations, is an affirmation of the music in Marian’s voice, for “thrilling” is that which causes the listener to tremble, quiver, or vibrate. The etymology of the word gives us an image of something piercing something else or penetrating something (from the Middle English pyrel, hole). I have already quoted part of the third description: The thrilling solemn voice, so passionless, Sustained, yet low, without a rise or fall, As one who has authority to speak, And not as Marian. (9: 248–51) The changes in this third iteration suggest another voice speaking through Marian’s, for her pathos is replaced by its opposite,“passionless.” “Solemn,” the adjective dropped in the first repetition and picked up again in this one, indicates something formal and ceremonial. And “thrilling,” the only adjective repeated twice, indicates the ongoing music of her speech, but it is music without a cadence, “without a rise or fall” (cadence being literally the fall of the voice from the point of highest emphasis). That steady voice seems to be the voice that stands under all others – it is “Sustained, yet low” – and as such it has ultimate authority. The “one who has authority to speak” is, I think, Christ voicing himself through Marian. For the scene is in effect a marriage service. Marian acts as the priest or minister, but her authority does not come from any church. Aurora describes her as “still and pallid as a saint, / Dilated, like a saint in ecstasy” (9: 187–8). “Ecstasy” is etymologically a putting out of place, and what is

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usually put out of place is the body, to allow the soul to live, at least for the moment, its full life. In the words of the oed, ecstasy is “the state of rapture in which the body was supposed to become incapable of sensation, while the soul was engaged in the contemplation of divine things.” From that perspective Marian presides over the right ordering of the bodies and souls of Aurora and Romney. It is she who asks the conventional questions in the marriage ceremony. To Romney, for instance, she says (and note that she uses both the firstperson pronoun and the third),“‘Confirm me now. / You take this Marian, such as wicked men / Have made her, for your honourable wife?’” (9: 193–5). And Romney’s response echoes the words of the question as he affirms his intention: “‘I take her as God made her, and as men / Must fail to unmake her, for my honoured wife’” (9: 199–200). Marian’s second question is unconventional: – ‘You take this Marian’s child, which is her shame In sight of men and women, for your child, Of whom you will not ever feel ashamed?’ (9: 203–5) And again Romney echoes the words of the question: “Here I take the child / To share my cup, to slumber on my knee” (9: 211–12). Then Marian turns to Aurora and casts her in the role of witness to the marriage: “‘And you, – what say you?’” (9: 219). Aurora’s response is to say,“‘Accept the gift’” (9: 255), and she offers her hand, affirming Marian as “pure,” and saying that “‘I’ll witness to the world / That Romney Leigh is honoured in his choice / Who chooses Marian for his honoured wife’” (9: 271–3). After the vows of bride and groom and the assent of the witness comes the charge, which is usually an imperative about not putting asunder those whom God has joined together. Marian reverses that charge: with the confirmation that Romney loves her, she says that she has never loved him. And at this point the needs of a realistic narrative take over. “Did I indeed / Love once; or did I only worship?” (9: 362–3), Marian asks; she affirms that her only love now is for her child; and she insists that she now sees clearly (9: 427). The charge in the marriage ceremony is conventionally followed by the blessing, and Marian voices it with an imperative:

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‘For you, meantime, Most noble Romney, wed a noble wife, And open on each other your great souls, – I need not farther bless you.’ (9: 439–42) And with that speech Marian disappears from the story. But Aurora and Romney go on to declare their love, and Aurora’s language in her account of that moment gives the reader a final – and daring – version of the rhythmic turbulence that has characterized the story from the beginning. Theirs are “two large explosive hearts” (9: 718), she says, their words are broken and “melted” (9: 720) – surely a never-before-heardof transformation of language – their kiss “long and silent” (9: 722), and their embrace “convulsion” (9: 721) accompanied by “deep, deep, shuddering breaths” (9: 723). Anyone who thinks the Victorians were invariably reticent about sex should have a look at this passage, where sexual excitement is part of the “rhythmic turbulence” that makes up the “animal life” of this epic. Cora Kaplan has already pointed out that Aurora Leigh is, among many other things, EBB’s“celebration of ‘sexual passion’ and woman’s right to feel it” (89). So EBB’s lines are daringly erotic, with those “deep, deep, shuddering breaths, which meant beyond / Whatever could be told by word or kiss” (9: 723–4). The rhythm of line 723 is turbulent: with its three pauses, its juxtaposed accented syllables (“deep, deep, shud”), its rhythmic imitation of meaning (“shuddering breaths”), and its eleven rather than ten syllables. The line division separates the preposition (“beyond”) from its object, the noun clause in line 724; the syntax and the enjambement express an urgency parallel to the meaning, but that potentially chaotic push of the turbulence resolves itself into harmony, a regular iambic metre appropriate for a meaning folded into the physical but “beyond … word or kiss.” Aurora Leigh ends with a marriage of true minds and hearts, and so the shape of the whole story is that of comedy. Comedy conventionally begins with tragedy – here the deaths of Aurora’s parents, her exile in England, and her refusal of Romney – proceeds through a period of confusion and illusion, and ends with union in marriage. The Ninth Book is a miniature reflection of that structure: it begins with an expression of hatred (Lady

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Waldemar’s letter) and ends with vows of love between Aurora and Romney. And the wedding that was aborted in the Fourth Book will take place as a result of the events of the Eighth and Ninth, and in effect is celebrated in the dialogue in the Ninth Book. In the final scene, Aurora and Romney clasp hands, turn toward the East, and raise their hands to the dawn. That gesture, with its accompanying allusions to the Book of Revelation, indicates that this comedy is also a divine comedy, the end of which is not only marriage but the New Jerusalem. Building it is their work, the Carlylean concept fused with that pervasive nineteenth-century idea: progress. The workers’ tools are words and the work is a “mental fight” (as in Blake), but Aurora will take the lead and will metaphorically sound the clarion, the music of the trumpet levelling “all class-walls” (9: 932) and raising human beings to “some purer eminence” (9: 935). The guarantor of such work is Christ himself, as Aurora’s quotation of Revelation 21:5 indicates: “‘HE shall make all new’” (9: 949). For all EBB’s reformist agenda, the text she is creating is not a program for reform (as critics of the poem have often observed), and its analysis of social conditions and attitudes, and its aim of effecting change through the story told, rest upon an understanding of language that makes the poem different in character from the novels EBB admired because they engaged the social issues of the day, novels like Gaskell’s Ruth and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Aurora Leigh, in EBB’s view – never explicit but always obliquely suggested – is a sacred text, insofar as its words participate in the creating Word and its ongoing legacy in human language. “Sacred text” is not a label EBB uses, but she was not averse to another: “Mrs Browning’s gospel.” EBB was both amused and gratified by the responses to the poem, as she told her sister Arabella: “the success of ‘Aurora’ is a great thing … The extravagant things said about that poem, would make you smile (as they make me) – and there’s one sort of compliment which would please you particularly … people are fond of calling it ‘a gospel’ – That’s happy – isn’t it?” (Letters … to Arabella 2: 275). “It’s the favorite phrase,” EBB goes on, “in letters from England – in gossip at Florence – And even from America the other day, the publisher writes … ‘we have received Mrs Browning’s gospel.’” EBB is not inclined to make such a high claim for the poem so

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explicit, asking Arabella if the label is not “entirely prophane, or simply ridiculous?” but she goes on to affirm that the label is not inaccurate: “Still, that there is an amount of spiritual truth in the book to which the public is unaccustomed, I know very well.” Then she states her source for that “spiritual truth”: “I was helped to it – did not originate it – & was tempted much (by a natural feeling of honesty) to say so in the poem, & was withheld by nothing except a conviction that the naming of the name of Swedenborg, that great Seer into the two worlds, would have utterly destroyed any hope of general acceptance & consequent utility” (Letters … to Arabella 2: 275). Swedenborg’s “sublime truths,” “most humbly … used as I could,” may have been her immediate source, and Charles LaPorte quotes one of many passages in the poem that reflect Swedenborg’s “two worlds” and the correspondence between them (see 1: 901–16), but the poem without the explicit references to Swedenborg, and along with all its contemporary materials, is still, to use LaPorte’s label, “a new sacred text” (65), revelatory and inspiriting, saying “the word so that it burns you through / With a special revelation, shakes the heart / Of all the men and women in the world” (1: 905–7). In the poem, EBB explains the basis of such a sacred text in a passage I have already quoted (6: 217–25) but need again in this context. Genesis and John’s gospel both start with the phrase “In the beginning,” and in the beginning was creation, undertaken not with an extended finger (as in Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling) but with the Word. In the beginning, God spoke, and light, heaven, and earth, all appeared; the instrument of creation was the Word, as John affirms at the beginning of his gospel. EBB too affirms that creative power lies in the Word, and she restates Genesis 1:3 with her line, “The maker burnt the darkness up with His” (6: 219). But the Word is not the prerogative of God alone: his speaking establishes language as the ongoing instrument of creation, or, in EBB’s words, “inaugurate[s] the use of vocal life” (6: 220), so that through language human beings share in creation as an ongoing process. The word has power, as EBB affirms: “Virtue’s in the word!” (6: 218). I have already commented on the meaning of “virtue,” but here I need to add that in that same line EBB links poets and prophets, joining them with the pronoun “we.” They are the agents of growth, adept in “the use of vocal life.” EBB had no

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doubts about such growth. She told Fanny Haworth, five years after the publication of Aurora Leigh, that “I should fear for a revealed religion incapable of expansion according to the needs of man. What comes from God has life in it, and certainly from all the growth of living things, spiritual growth cannot be excepted” (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 421). Aurora Leigh, like Genesis and John’s gospel, begins with the creative word, though the parallel with the biblical texts is disguised by the allusion to the world-weary words of the preacher in Ecclesiastes: “Of writing many books there is no end” (1:1). Nonetheless, in the beginning of this poem there is a book, Aurora is writing it, and as Margaret Reynolds states with the first sentence in the preface to her Norton edition of the poem, it is central: “At the heart of Aurora Leigh there is a book” (Reynolds ed. vii). Aurora begins with reference to her words, and their end, like the words of the Bible, is the New Jerusalem, so that the total shape of the book parallels that of the Bible. The New Jerusalem, as John claims at the beginning of the Book of Revelation, is “the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John.” Similarly, Aurora Leigh can claim to be the revelation of Jesus Christ, since he is the “man within” the poet who makes her a prophet. That inspiration is the guarantee of the “spiritual truth in the book to which the public is unaccustomed.” But EBB is modest about making this claim, and the question of setting the right tone is a crucial one. She thought that avoiding Swedenborg’s name in the text assured its “general acceptance” and hence its labelling as a “gospel.” Had she included the name, she told Arabella, “it wd. have been Mrs Browning’s rhodomontade!” (Letters … to Arabella 2: 275). That second label is an allusion to the conventional figure in comedy (as defined by Aristotle), the braggart or miles gloriosus, and EBB characteristically does not brag about her source of inspiration. The opposite of the braggart is the figure who, Aristotle says, is more attractive as the hero of comedy, the eiron or the modest man, the man who says less than he knows. EBB is characteristically unwilling to press her claims too far when she is talking about inspiration, as in this passage in a June 1845 letter to RB, while at the same time she is perfectly clear about her beliefs:

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Yes, I quite believe as you do that what is called the “creative process” in works of Art, is just inspiration & no less – which made somebody say to me not long since, – “And so, you think that Shakespeare’s Othello was the effluence of the Holy Ghost?” – rather a startling deduction, … only not quite as final as might appear to somebodies perhaps. At least it does not prevent my going on to agree with the saying of Spiridion … do you remember? …“Tout ce que l’homme appelle inspiration, je l’appelle aussi revelation,” … if there is not something too selfevident in it after all – my sole objection! And is it not true that your inability to analyze the mental process in question, is one of the proofs of the fact of inspiration? – as the gods were known of old by not being seen to move their feet. (bc 10: 266) How then are we to read Aurora Leigh, when so much is hidden or implied? The reader needs a double perspective, and it is the double perspective of the palimpsest. The primary text, the one immediately visible, is the book Aurora has written and is in the process of writing, and it is, in EBB’s words to John Kenyon in March 1855, “An autobiography of a poetess – (not me)” (Reynolds ed. 330). At the same time, EBB says in the dedication, also addressed to Kenyon, that “this book” is “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” My convictions. Those convictions may be sensed in the primary text, most strongly when Aurora is expressing her opinions on life and art, and when those opinions coincide with ones EBB states in her letters and elsewhere. Those are the passages EBB might label “philosophical dreaming,” the result of her stated desire to be free to digress. But there is a text underlying both Aurora’s autobiography and EBB’s opinions and convictions, a text kept back or held in reserve, rather like the mysteries that are never fully stated, or stated only by indirection, to the uninitiated. That text is a contemporary Book of Revelation, inspired by Christ, its purpose being “to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass” and its end being the building of the New Jerusalem. That underlying text may not be read directly, but the primary text is its sublimation. That is the alchemical trope EBB had used eleven years earlier when she objected to Sara Coleridge’s speaking of poetry as “a diversion.”

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In that letter EBB plays on the word: religious truth is “sublime,” she writes, and poetry, which is “truth in its highest & eternal relations,” is not a diversion: “I take it to be rather a sublimation” (bc 10: 129). As I have already said in my introduction,“rhythmic turbulence” characterizes EBB’s texts from 1857 on. She was passionately involved in the politics of France and Italy, especially in the decade between 1851 and 1861: “You know I can’t take things quietly,” she told Fanny Haworth (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 323). How that “rhythmic turbulence” expressed itself is the subject of the next chapter.

9 blessings, curses, and sweet music

Poems Before Congress begins with a blessing – “Napoleon III. in Italy” – and ends with “A Curse for a Nation.” Both poems are speech acts, which means that, whatever the truth of the assertions in the texts, these affirmations are secondary to EBB’s purpose of spurring her readers to assent and action through such vocal means as the chant in the volume’s opening poem, and the reiterated command “Write” in the closing one. In the final poem there is a twist on the usual speech act: the imperative “Write” is directed initially to the poet herself, so that her acquiescence in the justice of the curse and her acting upon the command become the model for the response of her readers, who must write the same message on their own minds and hearts. EBB’s central political argument in “Napoleon III. in Italy” rests upon a historical fact: that Louis Napoleon was confirmed as emperor through democratic means, the December 1851 vote of the French people: “Translated to the sphere of domination / By democratic passion!” (54–5). Those are EBB’s lines, and they are not a speech act but an assertion, the truth of which can be affirmed or denied in Lockean fashion, by reference to experience, to actual historical events. But those lines, and their appeal to the faculty of reason, are subordinate to the speech act that dominates the poem, the refrain or chant, “Emperor / Evermore.” Its appeal is to our kinesthetic rhythms, to the music in us, always the source and end of ultimate truth for EBB. But she knew that the substance of the appeal would offend her English readers. “You wont like it,” she told her sister Arabella two months before publication of the volume, “& everybody else in England wont like me because of it” (Letters … to Arabella 2: 443–4).

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The “or” rhyme may have a connection with Poe’s rhymes in “The Raven” (see webb 4: 568n4), but EBB herself was concerned with its affect. In her preface to the volume, EBB mentions her “jarring of the national sentiment,” which, though “ever so little,” is “imputable” to the rhymes of “poets who write of the events” of the time (webb 4: 554). “The spirit of the whole [poem],” EBB told her sister-in-law, “is, of course, opposed to the national feeling, or I should not in my preface suppose it to be offended” (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 369). EBB is using “rhymes” as synecdoche for poetry because, for the most part, her actual rhymes in this ode are unremarkable, but one at least would, perhaps, jar her readers, not because of its poetics, but because of its political partisanship. It is the “or” rhyme with which she begins. The “or” rhyme might give offence because it is part of a chant for Napoleon III – the kind of thing supporters might voice at a political rally or demonstration. The rhythm is more important than the sound repetition. The words might be scanned as two dactyls, but the “or” rhyme makes that scansion unstable, and the words resolve themselves into amphimacers, which are more suited to a chant: with accents on the first and third syllables of each word, and a pause between the two words, one could easily clap one’s hands and beat time to the refrain. The first line of the poem – “Emperor, Emperor!” – establishes that rhythm. It is the expression of EBB’s extreme partisanship: she told her sister-in-law that, although RB had destroyed his poem on “the Italian question” because it “no longer suited the moment,” she forged ahead: “the poetical devil in me burnt on for an utterance” (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 368–9). So the poem is, like Aurora Leigh, the product of “rhythmic turbulence / Of blood and brain,” of EBB’s passionate response to Napoleon III and Italian politics, everywhere in evidence in her letters of the period: “I feel stirred up to the dregs of me … I can’t rest, I am so excited” (Letters … to Arabella 2: 417). Anxiety, rage, indignation, protestation, all figure in her agitation: “You know I can’t take things quietly,” she told Fanny Haworth (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 323). Such was her “poet-passion” (“Italy and the World” 96 – the second-last poem in the volume). The establishing rhythm of the first line and the confirming beat of the refrain repeats itself in the body of the poem. The lines, for the most part, fall into two isochronous units, units that reflect the nature of the am-

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phimacers by having two accented syllables each, with any number of unaccented syllables in between. There are, of course, variations, sometimes an unaccented syllable or two before the first accented syllable, sometimes extra syllables after the second, but still the rhythm of the chant can be heard in each of those seemingly irregular lines. Consider, for instance, the lines from part I, “Stood eight millions up and swore / By their manhood’s right divine” (4–5). In line 4, the crucial accents are on “stood” and “mill,” with an extra syllable after that, then on “up” and “swore.” One can hear the echo of the amphimacers in that scansion, just as one can hear them in the next line, which might be scanned, conventionally, as a catalectic trochaic line, but which we now hear as two isochronous units, the first beginning with the accented “By,” the second beginning with the accented “right,” so that the apparently catalectic line ends with three syllables that reflect exactly the amphimacers that are the ground rhythm. EBB makes that rhythm serve her semantic purposes in line 7, “This man should renew the line.” The accent in the first isochronous unit is not on “man,” as might be expected, but on “This,” where the accent coincides with the emphatic gesture of the deictic and with EBB’s meaning: this particular man of all other men. That rhythmic unit is completed with “should,” accented and with the force of an imperative. In the second unit, “new the line” again reflects the basic amphimacers. The poem is an ode, and has the conventional tripartite division of the Pindaric ode. The first division (the strophe or turn) is made up of the first five of the numbered parts, and deals with the legitimacy of Louis Napoleon’s claim to be emperor. That claim rested, as I have already said, on the referendum of December 1851, when “eight millions” voted to “renew the line” of the “first Napoleon,” thus giving assent to the coup d’état of that same month. The second division (the antistrophe or counterturn) includes parts VI through IX, and focuses on Italy and its need for a deliverer. The remainder of the ode – the epode or stand – brings together the emperor and the country, so that the two parts of the title – “Napoleon III” and “Italy” – are fused: hero and “newly delivered impassioned land” (270). In the key units of the first division (parts IV and V), EBB states the basis of her own assent to the emperor. Louis Napoleon had been the subject of a major disagreement in the Brownings’ married life, and EBB’s word for

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their arguments – émeute – suggests that she was the one who was rebelling against prevailing opinion, and causing a tumult in doing so – turbulence, in other words. In December 1851 she described for her sister Arabella the nature of their disputes: “Robert & I have had some domestic émeutes on this question … ‘Quite vexing,’ he said I was! And ‘quite absurd’ I said they were [they being ‘all the stories Robert brought home to me’]. And so we fought” (bc 17: 191–2). In all their émeutes, EBB kept returning to the fact that the emperor had been put in place by democratic means. In a letter written from Paris on Christmas Day, 1851, EBB told her sister Arabella that “The fact remains, that the people, such as it is, & from whatever motive, are with the president, to a degree which is extraordinary. For my part, I am a democrat, & I respect the decisions of any people” (209). Earlier, on 2 December 1851, she had witnessed Louis Napoleon ride under their window on the Champs Elysées, a great spectacle that she subsequently described for several correspondents and in which she rejoiced: “I thought it one of the grandest of sights, – for he rode there in the name of the people after all” (204). She had appealed to “Il popolo” in Italy, as is evident in Casa Guidi Windows; she placed the same faith in the people of France. That thinking came out of her lifelong concern with “the harmony of verse.” As we have seen in chapter 2, “the harmony of verse” had its origin in the old tradition of universal harmony, not only the music of the spheres, but the music that characterized the right ordering of body, mind, soul, and society. EBB’s understanding of music is also comprehensive, and extends beyond poetics and into politics. The circulation of blood in the body provides her with her usual image for music, the pulse or heartbeat; the equivalent in the state to the circulation of blood in the body is the people, whose will manifests itself as kinesthetic rhythms. Consider, for example, the metaphor she uses in a letter to Mrs Ogilvy from Paris at the end of December 1851: “Do you know that scarcely for the sight of the Alps, as I keep repeating to myself & others, would I have missed being at Paris during this revolutiontime. It has been & is still intensely interesting: you have the great heart-beat of the world under your hand” (216). Eight years later EBB uses that same metaphor: she tropes the will of the body politic as both “the people’s heart” and “the people’s blood,” and she argues that the latter flows in the veins of Louis Napoleon, gives him his authority, and is the basis of the trust EBB places in him. That will may be turbulent, and the people themselves a mix-

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ture of virtues and vices – like the Italians, “with all their defects & undeniable weaknesses” (but still “I love Italy & the Italians” and, as a result, “I have faith for the future” 72). Similarly she has faith in the French people as the ultimate authority in the state. EBB told her brother George before the election of 1851 that “There’s a higher right than legal right, we all feel instinctively – the living people are above the paper constitution. Therefore if Napoleon is loyal & true in his appeal to the will of the people & in his intention of abiding by the issue of the approaching election,‘je fais acte d’adhésion,’ I, for one, & hold him justified to the full extent of his revolutionary act” (180) – that act being the coup d’état. More than eight years later she is still making the same affirmations: that she “reverenc[es] the people,”“their deed and oracle,” and supports “the great conclusion of their will” (43–7). She places herself among “poets of the people” (77), and defines such poets as those “who take part / With elemental justice, natural right” (77–8). Taking part with “right” is, as we shall see, a crucial part of the speech act in “A Curse for a Nation.” Since EBB links her own sense of “elemental justice, natural right” with the people, one might expect her to use the old aphorism, Vox Populi, vox Dei. In fact she does use it in 1860, in a letter to the editor of the New York periodical, the Independent: she summarizes for him the political situation in Italy, and then says, “the popular vote silences the unwise majority, and justifies the inspiration of the people. ‘Vox Populi, vox Dei’” (qtd. in webb 5: 51). And in a letter to the same periodical, published on 21 March 1861 alongside the poem,“Parting Lovers,” EBB sets out her political “creed’ (her word):“I honor Republicanism everywhere as an expression of the people.” “Let us be for the Democracy, and leave the rest. Who cares for the figure at the helm, as long as the people’s wind is in the sails? I care little. Only I do care that the Democracy should have power – that each man should have the inheritance of a man, and the right of voting where he is taxed. So this is my creed” (webb 5: 98). But EBB did care for “the figure at the helm,” and she hoped that her hymn in his praise would have the same effect as that she attributes to the hymn sung by Garibaldi’s daughter in the late poem, “The King’s Gift”: that it would “[set] the souls of us ringing” (95). EBB goes even further than that political argument, however, and claims for her ode divine inspiration – not only for its subject, form, and rhythm, but for her own “conviction” and for the feelings that propel it: “O voice

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and verse, / Which God set in me to acclaim and sing / Conviction, exaltation, aspiration” (48–50). What God “set in me” was music, but EBB claims that “we” withheld music and its “holy rhythm” from the result of the referendum: We gave no music to the patent thing, Nor spared a holy rhythm to throb and swim About the name of him Translated to the sphere of domination By democratic passion! (51–5) Who is “we”? She and RB? Her English readers? Or the poet raised to heights by inspiration, and so the equivalent of the royal “we”? Perhaps the first and last, for EBB confesses herself to be no lover of “any kind of throne” (59), and so excuses her initial reaction. But there is a great deal going on in these few lines. EBB treats the election results in literary terms, and Louis Napoleon’s elevation as a trope. For “translation” is the Latin equivalent of “metaphor” (both mean a carrying across) and the vote carried “the name of him” across from president to emperor. Moreover, the crucial phrases – “sphere of domination,” “democratic passion” – are the same metrically – three trochees – so that an identical beat lies under and sustains words of opposite political meaning. EBB thus makes her prosody serve her political views: though “domination” and “democratic” may seem to be at opposite ends of the political spectrum, her point is that, in these particular historical circumstances, they are fundamentally the same, and the music of her lines is the proof. In the next part (V) EBB elevates Louis Napoleon higher than “vulgar monarchs” (66) and higher than any throne, “lifted as thou art / To the level of pure song” (71–2). “Pure song” is, as Carlyle had affirmed, the essence and ground of all being, and he or she who is acting on that level is the hero. So EBB looks to the emperor “To help in the hour of wrong / The broken hearts of nations to be strong” (69–70) – the first (oblique) reference in the ode to the phrase that completes the title: “in Italy.” Implicit in the elevation of Louis Napoleon is EBB’s linking of the people and song: hence her identification of the people as the source of Louis Napoleon’s authority.

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EBB tropes the Risorgimento in Italy as a beat called into being in response to the music of Louis Napoleon heard over the Alps: We stand to meet thee on these Alpine snows! And while the palpitating peaks break out Ecstatic from somnambular repose With answers to the presence and the shout … (73–6) She apostrophizes Louis Napoleon as “Sublime Deliverer!” (94) and offers him advice: An English poet warns thee to maintain God’s word, not England’s: – let His truth be true And all men liars! with His truth respond To all men’s lie. (84–7) EBB is quoting Paul’s epistle to the Romans (3:4), “let God be true, but every man a liar,” the same quotation RB will, much later, use as the text for Fra Celestino’s sermon in Book XII of The Ring and the Book, when he is (apparently) saying that all human speech is inadequate. The quotation is not an assertion but a proposition, a provisional statement to act upon, not a conclusion. It too is one of the speech acts in the poem. In the next part (VI) of the ode – it begins the antistrophe or counterturn – EBB turns to Italy and its need for a hero to intervene. She signals the turn by repeating the defining rhythm that she had established in the first section: “But Italy, my Italy” (98). The two amphimacers can be heard in the repeated “Italy,” with the addition of two unaccented syllables and the caesura. In the next line, she makes the truncation of that rhythm coincide with her meaning: “Can it last, this gleam?” The first part of the line is the expected amphimacer, but the last is only an iamb, so the amphimacers do not “last” and their cutting short suggests the answer to her question. EBB uses the same technique in line 110 – “Die and count no friend?” – where the expected second amphimacer is replaced by a spondee. Part VI ends with a lament for Italy after the failures of 1848: “‘She is not alive, but dead’” (144). The beginning of part VII reverses that statement, or, more properly, asks if a reversal is possible: “Now, shall we say / Our

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Italy lives indeed?” (145–6). The historical reason for the reversal was the alliance of France and Piedmont, but EBB’s poetical reason is the beat of renewed life. That beat has its source in the dust of heroes, which EBB tropes as “a seed / Sure to emerge one day” (150–1), its emerging preceded by “underground heave and strain” (149), and heard “thrill[ing] through ruined aisle and arch” and “throb[bing] along the frescoed wall” (155–6). That crucial rhythm of renewal is threatened by the march of foreign armies, whose opposition can be heard in EBB’s switch from her usual amphimacers to regular iambs: “the beat and bray / Of drum and trump of martial men” (147–8). But there is a supporting beat in the armies of France and Piedmont, and theirs is a “rhythmic march” (152). In the two lines in which EBB mentions those armies, the “double hosts” (153), she also doubles the unaccented syllables of the iambs she had just used for armies, so that one hears anapests and their quickening of the tempo: “And if it were not for the rhythmic march / Of France and Piedmont’s double hosts” (152–3). “It were not” and “for the rhyth” are anapests, as is “and Pied,” so that EBB distinguishes allied armies from enemy ones, though both march to a “beat.” There is another beat that is just as important as the martial one, and it is in the passion of the Italians themselves, with whom EBB identifies herself: Ay, if it were not for the tears in our eyes, These tears of a sudden passionate joy, Should we see her arise From the place where the wicked are overthrown, Italy, Italy? (160–4) “Passionate joy” expresses itself rhythmically, and is the agent of renewal. EBB’s simile at the end of part IX suggests that that renewal has divine support. In that part EBB catalogues, in a series of parallel lines, all the various patriots who have been persecuted and exiled, only to return “like a restrainèd word of God, / Fulfilling itself by what seems to hinder” (225–6). The epode or stand of this ode begins with part X, where EBB transforms the chant with which she began the whole poem into an imperative: “Shout for France and Savoy!” (229). The amphimacer-anapest combination of the command is a livelier version of the double amphimacers of

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the chant, “Emperor / Evermore” with which she had been ending most sections, but does not repeat here. This third division (parts X to XIX) of the ode focuses on the figure of the deliverer, first Macmahon, associated with a child and flowers – EBB’s usual images of renewal and celebration – and then Louis Napoleon himself, whom she praises at length, and defends with her usual argument: he is not an autocrat but “ruler incarnate of / The people” (296–7). He has “special virtues” (301): The people’s blood runs through him, Dilates from head to foot, Creates him absolute, And from this great beginning Evokes a greater end To justify and renew him – (302–7) “The people’s blood” is the guarantee of the man as hero and deliverer: You think he could barter and cheat As vulgar diplomates use, With the people’s heart in his breast? (319–21) Compared with all around him, he is “Larger so much by the heart, / Larger so much by the head” (338–9). In Italy, the “newly delivered impassioned land” (270), Louis Napoleon is “He who has done it all” (272). The deliverance and the “new passion” are reflected in a new beat in this third division of the ode. Not the rather hard-thumping repetition of the amphimacers that dominated the strophe and antistrophe, but a rhythm with a quicker tempo and an easier, more energetic feel to it. The shift is the result of EBB’s much more frequent use of anapests. Her lines still have four strong beats, like her earlier lines, but, like the “people’s blood” in Louis Napoleon’a veins, they seem to “dilate” with the deliverer’s purpose, though his passion is hidden behind “a cold stern face” (273). EBB introduces this new rhythm with the line, “Ay, it is He” (266), where the anapest points to the emperor, and repeats itself in subsequent lines:

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Leave room to his horse and draw to the side, Nor press too near in the ecstasy Of a newly delivered impassioned land … (268–70) Line 268 has two anapests (the two phrases); line 269 has one (“in the ec”); line 270 has three (the first three feet). That new rhythm takes on a more settled tone in part XVIII, where EBB switches to lines of three beats and uses a rhyme scheme, a b a b, and so on, so that the part has units of four lines. The rhymes are mostly unremarkable, and reflect EBB’s usual practice of going beyond exact repetition of sound: she rhymes “laurels,”“morals” and “quarrels,”“honor” and “upon her.” And she rhymes an accented syllable with a partially accented one: “lance” and “finance.” In the final part of the ode (XIX) EBB returns to the amphimacer and uses it in conjunction with the anapests: “Great is he, / Who uses his greatness for all” (381–2); “Just is he, / Who is just for the popular due” (388–9). So the ode becomes a hymn in praise of the hero, and ends with the chant with which it began, but a chant now fully informed with political purpose. The tripartite nature of the amphimacers is reflected in the larger tripartite division of the ode. Katherine Montwieler, in considering all eight pieces in Poems Before Congress, says that “each of the works addresses the power of language, particularly the language of women. Throughout the collection, women speak, and with their words, they bless, seduce, comfort, mock, criticize, predict, and curse. Barrett Browning sets these particular speech acts in the context of the Risorgimento to show that women can intervene in politics at this juncture in history, if only vocally” (295). Of the first poem in the volume – the one I have just been considering at length – Montwieler says, “On one level the baptism of a new leader, the poem on another level is an assertion of the extraordinary powers and role of the woman poet” (300). For the effect of performative language – both blessings and curses – derives, EBB claims, from divine inspiration. A speech act, as EBB treats it, is the human counterpart of the divine fiat, the creating word, which needs only to be spoken to bring into being that which did not exist before. (“God said, Let there be light: and there was light” Gen. 1:3.) In the human reflection of that power, the word alone is not enough: it needs

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the music that EBB thought was the ground of all being and that manifests itself in our hearts and the circulation of our blood. Hence the beat and rhythms of the ode and their appeal to our kinesthetic rhythms are crucial. EBB does not call the power of language into question in the poem with which the volume ends, “A Curse for a Nation,” but she does portray herself as hesitating about using it. Moreover, the propelling power of this particular act – the writing of the curse – is not hers but that of the angel who voices the command, and she seems to be only the amanuensis of the divine messenger. But the angel’s speech act – the imperative “Write” – has a hidden appeal that becomes apparent when we listen to the word instead of reading it. Then we hear a homonym, and we understand the word, as Marjorie Stone points out, as a pun. As evidence, Stone points to “the juxtaposition of the final word ‘wrong’ in the second-last line of the first stanza in ‘The Curse’ with the final word ‘Write’ in the last line”: the juxtaposition activates the pun (“Political Poems” 168). The pun echoes the lines on the poet’s obligation in “Napoleon III. in Italy,” where “right” is a crucial word: We, poets of the people, who take part With elemental justice, natural right, Join in our echoes also, nor refrain. (77–9) There the poet “echoes” the shouts of the people; here, the poet echoes the angel’s imperative with “right” in her mind, her devotion to “natural right” being the inner sense of the sound of the angel’s word, a sound (and meaning) hidden from sight but apparent to the ear (always a crucial appeal for EBB). So the poet is not the passive instrument of the angel’s command: she contributes her own response to that imperative and, in doing so, models the response needed from her readers. The pun is crucial. If we do not hear it, then the imperative “Write” in “The Curse” itself is only an empty echo of the angel’s command, as involuntary and unmeaning a repetition of sound as in the original myth of Echo. But if we ask about the refrain, as Marjorie Stone does, “who speaks the command and who acts in response?” (167), then we hear echoes with a powerful affect and a divine origin, a sequence of sound going back from poet to angel to God,

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and forward from poet to her readers and listeners. Here is Stone on those relations: “The final stanza of the ‘Prologue’ indicates that the poet herself has written the curse (‘So thus I wrote’): it is therefore she who most obviously issues the command ‘Write’ to the wrongdoers in the nation she addresses. But the refrain also reminds us that she is responding to the angel’s command to write just as presumably the angel is responding to God’s command” (167). The word “curse” itself is just as multivalent as “write,” and part of that complexity rests on the doubleness of the preposition “for” in the title. Is the curse the poet’s gift to the nation, to use against social and political wrongdoing? – so that the nation, in writing the curse, would repeat in its relation to the poet the poet’s relation to the angel? Or is the curse directed against the nation by the poet, acting like a prophet on divine inspiration? EBB herself indicates that my first question is the right one, and Marjorie Stone, after having analyzed the alterations and complications of the meanings of the word “curse” and of the refrain, thinks that EBB “was strictly accurate when she maintained in one of her letters that she did not curse any nation in the poem” (169). The recipient of that letter was Isa Blagden, and in it EBB comments on Chorley’s review of the poem in the Athenaeum, which led “you & the majority” to understand that the poem was “directed against England,” but “in fact, I cursed neither England nor America … the poem only pointed out how the curse was involved in the action of slave-holding” (Florentine Friends 318).

But if EBB does not curse, she does prophesy, in the second part of “The Curse,” “in six stanzas that describe first what the nation will ‘watch,’ and then what it will hear (three for each mode of perception)” (Stone, “Political Poems” 168). But this prophecy is not like that of Casa Guidi Windows, that is, the reading of signs and the interpreting of them for the future. This prophecy is about the failure to speak out, the failure to utter curses and act on them – and knowing that one has failed in that way, such consciousness turning back upon the self, so that failing to curse becomes the curse itself (as Stone points out 168). The first stanza in the second part sets the pattern, with not daring, when “kings conspire,” “To utter the thought into flame / Which burns at your heart” (75–6). Then there is the

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business of “only under your breath” favouring the cause of right (82–3), and of speaking words that carry less than full conviction (89–90). As a result, Christian prayer becomes an accuser, sounding “like the tramp of a foe” (96), and the gap between ideal and practice becomes the norm, “for the thing which ye do / Derides what ye are” (103–4). “What ye are” is the ideal, a nation’s “conscience, tradition, and name” (109), and the ideal becomes accuser and judge of “the thing which ye do.” The poem is a puzzle of relations and meanings. A reader encountering a text with the title “A Curse for a Nation” would expect a straightforward speech act: the poet’s identification of a nation’s wrongdoing and her condemnation of it. But EBB does not identify the nation; she does not utter the curse herself but presents it as dictated to her; the chief imperative is not a command to reform but the instruction to “write”; and the deictic in the repeated “This is the curse” seems to point not to a verbal construct but to a state in which people fail to act when they know better, when the failure to condemn and curse becomes itself the curse. But if such is the reference of “this” – a state of mind and of political and social life rather than explicit and defining words – why the command to “write”? If the imperative is directed at the poet, it does make sense, since the angel is enjoining her to undertake an analysis of the nation’s shortcomings and wrongdoings, an analysis “for” the nation to use. But if the curse is being conveyed by the poet to her readers, what is the point of her telling them to “write”? Then the imperative makes sense only if it is heard as a pun, “right” as in “make right.” In the first part of “The Curse,” EBB rhymes “write” with “height,” “acolyte,” and “sight.” In the second part the word is unrhymed, and the repetition of exactly the same sound focuses the reader and listener’s attention on a single syllable that seems to draw into itself all the complicated relations of speaker and audience. And though “write” is unrhymed, the long “i” sound in “crime” and “lie,” – words that immediately precede the repeated “Write” in the first part – links the issues with the speech act. Write what? And for whom? The short answer to “what?” is the poem itself: just as the poet writes at the dictation of the angel, she enjoins her readers to write at her dictation, the exercise of writing focusing their attention on the need to recognize and act. Write for whom? The obvious answer is in the “for” in the title, “for” the nation. The less obvious answer

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is for the self, fulfilling an obligation to a divine source. So this speech act generates the need for thinking and interpretation, for self-examination as much as political action. Its aim is engendering the attitude that ought to underlie any right action: just as the Old Testament insists that God values the right spirit of sacrifice more highly than burnt offerings (1 Sam. 15:22; Psalm 51:17), and the New Testament makes the act of refraining from adultery even more demanding by requiring that there be no such desire in one’s heart (Matt. 5:28), so EBB undertakes that most difficult of all political and social acts: changing people’s attitudes, and bringing them into a right relation with “God’s witnessing Universe” (117). She commands them to “Write,” but with “right” in their minds and hearts. The pun is the realization in language of her central purpose. The reading of “write” as a pun (with its enfolded sense of duty, obligation, and the proper ordering of the self) is even more convincing when we consider it in the context of EBB’s study of Emanuel Swedenborg and all he has to say about angels. EBB had represented the speech of angels in The Seraphim, in ways that I have defined in chapter 3, but by the time she was writing “A Curse for a Nation” (which she dates 1854) she was deeply immersed in reading Swedenborg, and refers (in a letter of October 1853) to the previous year, which included “a winter’s meditation on Swedenborg’s philosophy” (bc 19: 305). She had not read the Arcana, she told Isa Blagden in August 1853, but “of what I have read, the Heaven & Hell struck me most” (243). In that treatise, Swedenborg has a chapter “Of the Speech of the Angels,” and he asserts, among other things, that “they can express, in a minute, things which a man could not do in less than half an hour, and also the contents of several pages in a few words” because “every word comprehends so much” (par 240, p 164).“Write” is one of those concentrated words. The word becomes even more concentrated when we ask why “write” is the angel’s imperative, rather than the expected “utter” or “speak” or “say.” Again, Swedenborg is instructive. In his chapter “Of Writings in Heaven,” Swedenborg tells how he received “a little paper” from Heaven, “on which were written some words in Hebrew characters, and it was told me that every letter contained some secrets of wisdom, nay the very flexures and curvatures of the letters, and the sounding of them from thence; which gave me to understand the meaning of those words of the

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Lord” (par 260, p 178). “Hence it is,” Swedenborg asserts, “that the Word contains divine and heavenly secrets, even in it’s [sic] jots, tittles, and points” (par 260, p 179). And while EBB is probably not suggesting that we look at the typeface used by the compositor of the Liberty Bell (where the poem was first published) in the same way as Hebrew characters, she is nonetheless implying writing as revelation. She was certainly aware of Swedenborg’s thinking on the topic: “He respects the letter of Scripture in fact, to a degree beyond what I have been accustomed to think rational. There’s a great deal of the Jewish reverence of the words, of the form – and, to the letter, he insists, the church is to look for doctrine” (bc 19: 71–2). Swedenborg’s key word is “correspondence,” and as he defines it, it is not a static pattern of relationships but a dynamic one in which man’s “natural world (or body, senses and actions) derives it’s [sic] existence from his spiritual world, (or mind, intellect and will)” (par 89, p 62). “Correspondence between things spiritual and natural, signifies the essence of a thing brought into form, or the principle manifested in act” (62n). In my previous chapter, I have already quoted EBB’s parallel assertion of that idea in an 1855 letter to John Kenyon: that “the practical & real (so called) is but the external evolution of the ideal & spiritual – that it is from inner to outer” (qtd. by Reynolds in her Norton edition of Aurora Leigh 331). When we consider “A Curse for a Nation” in such a context, it begins to appear as a complex set of correspondences that are in the process of coming into being. The angel speaks a word that corresponds to its divine inspiration (Swedenborg asserts that “the knowledge of angels” is “the knowledge of correspondence” – par 87, p 61), and the poet repeats that word and (after arguing with the angel) brings it into being and into correspondence with her readers. The section of the poem labelled “The Curse” is her expanding outward into its full meaning of all that is woven into “write,” and her corresponding imperative is, in Swedenborg’s words, “the principle manifested in act.” Of the organization of “The Curse” we could say what EBB says of the “involuntary writing” of Mary Brotherton,“who writes Greek, without any knowledge of the language” (bc 20: 100): it is “a significant sort of grouping … as if the meaning were struggling out into coherence” (95). For the movement of “The Curse” clearly shows the evolution that is the essence of Swedenborg’s understanding of “correspondence.” EBB divides “The

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Curse” into two parts, the first being the cause (signified by the subordinating conjunction “Because” which begins each stanza) while the second is the effect and curse proper. The dominant verb in the second part is “shall,” with its sense of necessity or determination in the future, and that future is a time when word no longer corresponds to thought (we might remember EBB’s early “A Thought on Thoughts”), when act no longer corresponds to character, and when the spoken word is an inadequate expression of the emotion that propels it. (The lines,“Your soul shall be sadder within / Than the word ye shall speak” are very Swedenborgian, since Swedenborg characterizes the language of the angels as having a “natural and spontaneous” correspondence with their “affections and thoughts”: their speech is “a sounding affection, and a speaking thought” (par 236, p 161). The curse is the loss of such harmony and spontaneity. The imperatives in the final stanza of the curse – “Go,”“recoil” – sound like a final consignment to a world of “ill deeds” and “ill-doers,” but the last command – “recoil from clenching the curse / Of God’s witnessing Universe / With a curse of yours” – ironically suggests a turn from a damning to a healing action. The verb “clench” is crucial. To “clench the curse / Of God’s witnessing Universe” is to hold it tight, especially when feeling anger (“a curse of yours”), and holding it tight suggests taking it to heart and making it a guide to action, as curse corresponds with curse and makes a connection that had been threatened with failure. There is one further point to be made about this Swedenborgian reading of “A Curse for a Nation,” and that is its relation to the world harmony that was so much a part of EBB’s early thinking. She knew the Pythagorean myth of the music of the spheres without affirming it as her own; but in her developing thinking about such harmony, Swedenborg played an increasingly important part. Although she first read him in the early 1840s, she was making a serious study of him in the 1850s, and for all her reservations about parts of his thinking, she found in him a view of world harmony that was “modern” and very much applicable to her own time – and to her own preoccupation with spiritualism.“Swedenborg,” she told Mary Brotherton in 1854,“has thrown more light on the nature of the whole of the present movement, though standing back from us a hundred years, than any of our thinkers & observers” (bc 20: 84). His correspondences – a complex system of relationships and influences – are the updating

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of the ancient idea, and evoked in EBB “sympathy and attraction” (bc 18: 341) – the result, she said, of “his great doctrine of corres[pon]dence … such as he delivers it concerning the natural & spiritual worlds, & the natural & spiritual bodies of man. Oh – he is a wonderful thinker, & has hit upon deep truths touching our relations to the universe, I feel sure. He impresses me immensely, & makes me humble in regard to him even when I am inclined to think him mistaken” (bc 19: 72).

Every poet seems to come, at some point in his or her career, to create a text that is not only at the centre of his or her imagination but captures the imagination of readers, like Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, the Ancient Mariner, the Lady of Shalott, or RB’s Childe Roland – a text that not only draws upon the richness and complexity of its creator’s thinking, but appeals to readers independently of everything else the poet wrote. For EBB, that text is “A Musical Instrument.” EBB had sent it to Cornhill Magazine in April 1860, where it was first published; it then appeared posthumously, in Last Poems (1862); and it has been a standard selection in anthologies ever since. With its hauntingly vigorous rhythm and its vividly imagined scene and action, it can stand on its own, but it gains in complexity and suggestiveness in the context of all EBB’s thinking about the “harmony of verse” and the relation of music and poetry. I begin with the significance of the reed. In some of her earliest unpublished lyrics, EBB distinguishes between two kinds of musical instruments: the lyre, which she associates with the heroic, and hence with the aspiring and ambitious mind and its desire for fame; and the reed, which she links with pastoral poetry, and hence with the contented mind and its wish for joy. There is, for instance, an unfinished lyric from 1818, which begins with the line “Here stay my wandering steps” (webb 5: 263). The place where she pauses is a pastoral landscape, and she stops to address her harp: Recieve [sic] thy load kind harp for I would paint The lovely landscape – which thus smiles around – And thou – eternal Muse who dost uphold My panting spirit when it {soars} to tell The wondrous deeds of Greece & heroes dead

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Then she makes the distinction with which I am concerned: Now aid me – not with that celestial lyre Which fires the soul to fame – but breathing soft Upon the past’ral reed this lovely theme – Behold yon ploughed field rising from the womb Of bonteous [sic] nature – (webb 5: 264) But EBB is not consistent in making that distinction. In a birthday poem from that same year – 1818 – she metaphorically uses the lyre for a domestic (as opposed to heroic) topic. The poem is the unpublished “To My Dearest Bro, Alias Edward, on his Birth Day” (webb 5: 265), and it begins: “To sing no mighty deeds, I call the Muse / To sweep those chords once more.” The instrument is a lyre, but she wants from it “fainter notes to tell a Sisters love.” There is a parallel distinction – parallel to that between the lyre and the reed – in the 1846 poem “A Reed” (webb 2: 369). That poem is an exercise in prosopopoeia, and the repeated line by which the reed defines itself – “I am no trumpet, but a reed” – is a distinction between two kinds of wind instruments. The trumpet is associated with the heroic life, the reed with the pastoral. The editors of the 2010 Works quote Shelley’s Defence of Poetry where trumpets are “the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire” (qtd. on 2: 368), and hence the reed distances itself – herself? – from “priest or king,” from “flattering breath,” and from social and political policies “that in re-echoing / Would leave a bondsman faster bound.” Similarly, EBB herself, commenting not on this poem but on “A Musical Instrument,” distances herself from the heroic life, from fame and military action, even though she was, at the time (April 1860) passionately involved in European politics and very much a partisan of the Risorgimento. Just after she had sent “A Musical Instrument” to Thackeray for publication in the Cornhill, she described it to Isa Blagden: “The poem is ‘meek as maid’ though the last thing I wrote – no touch of ‘Deborah’” (Florentine Friends 329). Both references suggest the heroic and military life set aside in favour of another kind of life: “meek as maid” is Chaucer’s phrase for the Knight with his long military career in the prologue to The

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Canterbury Tales, and “no touch of ‘Deborah’” is an allusion to Judges, chapters 4 and 5, where Deborah is a warrior woman who led a successful campaign against the king of Canaan, and whose song celebrates that military action. But in spite of the implied distinction between pastoral and heroic in “A Musical Instrument” – a widely used and richly developed binary in the English Renaissance – EBB’s reed in “The Reed” is hardly the retiring and contented figure of earlier pastoral poetry. Syrinx lies behind the “I” of the monologue (Corinne Davies explores EBB’s use of the myth, 561, 564–6), and she describes herself as “A broken reed,” an oblique reference to the metamorphosis meant to save her, and the painful fashioning of her into a musical instrument by Pan. She pleads that she is no threat to anyone – specifically to the fishermen who spread their nets along the river’s edge – and guarantees a response to any expression of longing or sadness: Yet if a little maid, or child, Should sigh within it [the shore], earnest-mild, This reed will answer evermore. EBB thus provides new associations for the pastoral poet – pain, sorrow, longing, sympathy for the young and the downtrodden – and in doing so she extends a statement of hers in the preface to the two volumes of Poems (1844): “the necessary relations of genius to suffering and self-sacrifice” (webb 2: 569) – her aim in A Drama of Exile. In the early 1850s she found a parallel to that association of the reed and pastoral poetry, and to the linking of the music of the reed with sorrow, pain, and longing. That parallel is in EBB’s favourite French writer, George Sand. Sand published Les Maîtres Sonneurs (The Master Pipers) in 1853, and in November of 1854, EBB recommended the novel to her sister Arabella: If you want a book, try to get George Sand’s “Maîtres Sonneurs.” You know I dont often ask you to read her books, but I should like you to read this for the excessive beauty & purity of it. Robert thinks it rather heavy – it has no brilliant situations: it is a pastoral romance, – all about the country & country people … and for my part

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Arabella did read it, and liked it. A month earlier, EBB had recommended the novel to Mrs Jameson: “Tell me if you have read George Sand’s ‘Maîtres Sonneurs’ & if it isn’t exquisite” (bc 20: 327). Though the most important instrument in Sand’s novel is the bagpipes, Joseph, who becomes a master piper, begins with the flute, and his playing of that reed instrument brings his listener to tears. His listener is the beautiful flirt, Brulette, who often protects the odd and moody Joseph, and when he asks her why she is crying, she says that the music makes her remember“mille ressouvenances du temps passé”(72; a thousand old memories from past times). The ones she mentions are all linked with a pastoral landscape; many of them involve her childhood with Joseph; and some of them are set in winter rather than spring or summer. Because, as another master piper explains later in the novel, music has two modes, the major and minor,“mode de ciel bleu et mode de ciel gris” (the blue sky mode and the grey sky mode). The major mode is the “mode de la force ou de la joie” (the mode of strength or joy), the minor the “mode de la tristesse ou de la songerie” (the mode of sadness or dreaming): “car tout, sur la terre, est ombre ou lumière, repos ou action” (262; for everything, on earth, is shadow or light, rest or striving). EBB’s “A Reed” can be read as a combination of those two modes. In Sand’s novel, the master piper, the complete musician, is he who masters both and combines them. (A note on my translation of “songerie” as “dreaming”: the English “dream” does not convey the nuance of the French “songe.” As Anne Hébert explains in response to Frank Scott’s translation of her “songe” as “dream”: “Le français a deux mots, l’un de la vie courante: rêve et l’autre, plus rare et littéraire: songe. L’anglais n’a pas cette nuance” (65). “Songe” fits the action in Hébert’s “Le Tombeau des Rois,” in which the “I” is “étonnée” and “fascinée.” In the French Bible, Jacob’s dream is “le songe de Jacob,” not “le rêve de Jacob.” “Rêve” is for the ordinary and the everyday; “songe” includes that but goes far beyond in suggestiveness, toward something revelatory.)

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“A Reed” consists of three sexains, in the particular variation of that stanza called tail-rhyme: a a b c c b, but all the lines are tetrameters when the third and sixth lines of that stanzaic form are more often trimeters. “A Musical Instrument” also consists of sexains, but with lines 2 and 6 (rather than 3 and 6) the shorter lines, and with a different rhyme scheme: a b a c c b. The effect of this version of the sexain depends upon word recurrence: the b rhyme is always the word “river.” Flowing water is a conventional metaphor for expression, sometimes used to indicate the aim and goal of the poet, as it is in the first of James Reaney’s Twelve Letters to a Small Town, “To the Avon River above Stratford, Canada”: that emblem poem ends with the wish, “To flow like you.” But the river in EBB’s poem flows “turbidly” – hardly a model for the poet – even though the water is “limpid.” For EBB’s is a poem about expression stopped or (in the diction of the poem) “cut … short,” painfully, to produce music. The prosodic embodiment of that cutting short is catalexis. The dominant metre of the poem is dactylic and trochaic, but only two of the lines end in trochees: they are lines 2 and 6, and they end with the word that is repeated in those same lines throughout the poem: “river.” All the other lines are catalectic, and the rhymes – a and c – are on accented syllables, so that EBB makes her rhyme scheme serve the purposes of her story: music (and poetry, for which music is a metaphor) depends upon a cutting short. The water is “limpid” – clear and transparent, that is – but its flow is “turbid” – muddy or opaque. The contrasting adjectives indicate the need for art to bring the flow in line with the character of the material, but that making involves energy that seems anything but disciplined: hacking, hewing, cutting, emptying, and notching, all done with heedlessness of the side effects: Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river. But those brutal and violent actions are all metaphors for art as opposed to nature. Art transforms the “patient reed” – EBB is using the adjective

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in its etymological sense, as enduring suffering – and its chief characteristic as wind instrument is its design which cuts short the flow of air through it. For Pan removes that which impedes the flow of air – the pith – and then notches “the poor dry empty thing,” making holes, into one or more of which the musician blows to produce musical notes while stopping other holes. Sound waves, with their varying frequencies, now characterize the flow of air through the reed, and Pan can manipulate that flow “‘To make sweet music.’” I have been scanning the lines of “A Musical Instrument” in terms of trochees and catalexis because I want to highlight the connection between the metre and the content, but such scansion does not make apparent the essential aspect of music in poetry, which for EBB was its beat. Derek Attridge’s recent analysis is particularly good in showing how the beat governs the movement of the lines. He borrows from Russian poetry the term “dolnik,” which for the purposes of practical criticism he defines as “verse that has a strong four-beat rhythm and does not fall into the regular syllabic patterns scannable in terms of repeated feet” (53n7). I think there are repeated feet here, but that issue does not cloud one’s appreciation of Attridge’s reading, in which he uses an upper-case B under the relevant syllable to mark the beat, and an intervening figure showing the number of syllables between the beats. Here is his reading of the first stanza: What was he doing, the great god Pan, B 2 B 2 B1 B Down in the reeds by the river? B 2 B 2 B 1 B Spreading ruin and scattering ban, B 1 B 2 B 2 B Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat B 2 B 2 B 2 B And breaking the golden lilies afloat 1 B 2 B 1 B 2 B With the dragon-fly on the river. 2 B 1 B 2 B 1 B Attridge’s reading takes into account the pauses at the ends of lines as

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well as voiced syllables, and so is particularly good at showing the music of the four-beat line. The problem for the critic is to link that beat with the nature of Pan’s music as EBB presents it in the poem. The penultimate sexain in “A Musical Instrument” is an apostrophe to Pan in which EBB repeats the word “sweet,” and repeats it insistently: the beat falls on the word, and there are no intervening syllables, only pauses: Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! Piercing sweet by the river! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! The adjective is in fact EBB’s rendering in the spoken language of Pan’s music on the reed: the essence of it is the flow of breath cut short. The long “e” sound can be extended indefinitely, so long as one’s breath holds out, but the plosive “t” cuts it short. There is a parallel effect when one pays attention to metrics and grammar. The double adjectives “piercing sweet” and “blinding sweet” both begin with a trochaic word and then cut that metre short, in one line by the slight but natural grammatical pause after the adjective and before the phrase “by the river,” and in the other line by the comma and the apostrophe that follows. EBB goes on to suggest that such music is charming in the root sense of the word; that is, as a song (from the Latin carmen) that has magical qualities and effects, like the music of Orpheus: The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river. So the ruinously violent actions of Pan are reversed by his music: EBB is, as usual, constructing a story of ruin and recovery. She characterizes the recovery not only as “sweet” – her key word – but as accompanied by laughter and by the expression of a primal energy, another version of her “animal life” of poetry: “Yet half a beast is the great god Pan.” In the final sexain EBB instructs the reader on how to interpret her story: Pan is “Making a poet out of a man.” The “man” is the uncut reed growing in the river; the “poet” is the musical instrument Pan has

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fashioned out of the reed. Characteristically, she links the poet with suffering and self-sacrifice, “the cost and pain” of the transformation from man to poet: “The true gods sigh for the cost and pain.” Who are “the true gods”? She doesn’t say “true God,” but is she making any reference to Christianity? I think the “true gods” are like the deities of Mount Olympus, “true” primarily because they are of the sky and transcendent, while Pan is of the earth, and earth-bound. Corinne Davies, perhaps mindful of EBB’s view of the desirability of a “revealed religion [capable] of expansion according to the needs of man” (Letters, ed. Kenyon 2: 421), says of the “true gods,” that “they represent in all their multiplicity the imaginative, empathetic, and feminist ones, the new poets of the new poetry, the new Christs” (566). But the verb “sigh” suggests just how ineffectual the witness of the “true gods” is in the face of Pan’s primal energy. EBB herself expresses regret in the elegiac note sounded in the poem’s last two lines, where she sighs “For the reed which grows nevermore again / As a reed with the reeds in the river.” But the dominant note of the poem is joy: EBB celebrates Pan’s laughter, his raucous energy, his being “half a beast.” She thus anticipates RB’s Fifine at the Fair, where he too links music, metre, and meaning, and where sexual energy, represented materially by the Breton menhir, allows folk to reach the “arch-word” – the name of God – better than the insipid talk of the curé (see Hair, “A Note”). The success of “A Musical Instrument” – and its enduring appeal – depend upon its haunting, energetic rhythm – four beats per line, heard under the trochees and dactyls and their truncation. Both are vigorous kinds of feet because both begin with an accented syllable. EBB makes the most of their character by beginning the poem without an anacrusis; that is, there is no “striking up of the tune” with one or more unaccented syllables preceding the first accented one. Instead, the poem plunges at once into its rhythm, in a way that musicians would call “attack,” and the “attack” supports the urgency of the initial question posed: “What was he doing, the great god Pan …?” That is followed by more dactyls – “Down in the,”“reeds by the” – and more trochees – “Spreading,”“Splashing.” The indentation in the stanzas indicates the number of accented syllables (beats) in the lines: four in lines 1, 3, 4, and 5, the catalectic lines; and three in lines 2 and 6, the acatalectic lines (with the pause at the end of the line

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making up the fourth beat). So the metrical feet coincide with the isochronous units, and metre and music are one. For instance, the fourth line is a brachycatalectic dactylic tetrameter: / x x / x x / xx / Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat There are four bars in this line, if one assigns to it a time signature of 2/4:

 

           



 







 













That kind of line is the norm in the poem, and EBB is thus creating the “harmony of verse” in her own way, by making the metrical feet and the bars of music one. But EBB goes even farther with her use of music here. The music is primary, just as Pan’s music is the crucial matter in the content of the poem, and its primacy governs the climactic sixth stanza, where exclamations are the expression of joy, and there the poem becomes a celebration of art that approaches oneness with creation itself. In the first line of that stanza, the unaccented syllables (all but one) disappear, and left are four accented ones: “Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!” Musical notation, which must include rests as well as notes, reveals what scansion cannot (though Attridge’s notation comes close, since he acknowledges that the beat can be filled out by a rest): the line is a combination of sound and silence. As such, it is EBB’s closest approximation to revelation:  

        
     
   
   









 

















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“Piercing” and “blinding” suggest a revelation of the divine, parallel to the effect of the “celestial fire” which EBB had, much earlier, associated with Euterpe, and parallel to the fire in the last poem EBB ever wrote, “The North and the South” (webb 5: 113–15). There she uses geography to define two kinds of language, and to suggest the rapprochement of the two. The poem is a dialogue, and it is an elaborate compliment to Hans Christian Andersen, who visited the Brownings in 1861. North and South speak in alternate verses, both of them expressing wishes and both using the imperative “give us.” The North asks for the sensuous landscape of the South – olives, vineyards, sun, like Keats’s “warm South” – while the South wants heroes fostered by the challenges of the harsher climate of the North. The landscape the North asks for it considers as “symbols and bright degrees” in art, art that “climbs to the dear Lord’s knees.” The South would ascend strenuously in “belief and prayer.” Then the dialogue turns to revelation. The North, who has already used the term “symbol,” asks for “the flowers that blaze, and the trees that aspire, / And the insects made of a song or a fire!” like the burning bush that Moses observes (note the implied identity of “song” and “fire”). The South asks for “a seer to discern the same,” and it is then that EBB attributes to the South the idealist theory of language: the South “sighs”“For a poet’s tongue of baptismal flame, / To call the tree or the flower by its name!” (28–9). The name would be symbolic – not arbitrary and conventional but necessary because it participates in the being of the thing that it names. Such an idealist theory of language remains a wish in the poem, and EBB does not hold it as her own – except in her prosody. For music becomes symbolic when articulate language (after Adam’s naming of the beasts) can no longer be so, and thus she combines two theories: the Lockean, where words are derived from sensation and are arbitrary and conventional, and another for which I do not have a label, where the beat of the spoken word is symbolic, and participates in the being of all creation. The result is a language no longer completely arbitrary: it is, at least in part, revelatory. In achieving that fusion, EBB is a master musician. For there is in Sand’s Les Maîtres Sonneurs a parallel to EBB’s use of geography in “The North and the South.” In Sand’s novel, too, there are contrasting landscapes, the ones Sand knew best in central France: Berry, with its fertile plains, and Bourbonnais, with its forests and mountains. Each has its characteristic

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music, as the woodcutter and master piper from the Bourbonnais explains: “La plaine chante en majeur et la montagne en mineur” (262; the plain sings in the major and the mountain in the minor mode). If Joseph is to be a “musicien complet,” he must master both modes. Joseph in fact learns how to combine them in new compositions, as the woodcutter realizes when he asserts, toward the end of the story, that Joseph has become a master piper, a creator of new music and not merely a skilled player of the pieces of others. il y a même en lui deux natures bien remarquables: la nature de la plaine, où il est né, et qui lui donne des idées tranquilles, fortes et douces, et la nature de nos bois et de nos collines, qui s’est ouverte à son entendement et qui lui a donné des idées tendres, vives et sensible. Il sera donc, pour ceux qui auront des oreilles pour entendre, autre chose qu’un sonneur ménétrier de campagne. Il sera un vrai maître sonneur des anciens temps, un de ceux que les plus forts écoutent avec attention et qui commandent des changements à la coutume. (363–4) [there are in him two remarkable natures, the nature of the plain, where he was born, and which gave him tranquil thoughts, strong and gentle thoughts, and the nature of our woods and hills, which opened his understanding and which gave him tender, lively and sensitive thoughts. He will be, therefore, for those who will have ears to hear, something other than a country minstrel. He will be a real master piper of olden times, one of those to whom the strongest listen with attention and who command changes of costume.] So the master piper becomes the agent of social change – a tying together of art and society by no means foreign to EBB’s aims and ambitions.

overview and conclusion

The EBB I present in this book is not the usual EBB: the woman poet struggling in a tradition dominated by men; the daughter coping with a loving but domineering and unforgiving father; the lover celebrating her return to life through Robert Browning; the social and political activist promoting major changes in the roles and status of women, and agitating on behalf of the enslaved, the exploited, and the downtrodden. Those portraits of EBB have already been painted by critics, and painted with great skill and insight. Instead, I have focused on a key element of EBB’s art, and on its implications for the individual and for society, an element that enables us to see EBB’s poetry not as a series of loosely related (or wholly unrelated) texts but rather as of a piece, in spite of their obvious differences. It also enables us to see EBB herself as poet-prophet, a role she claimed, though with becoming reticence and suitable modesty. The basis of her claim is the beat that, in her view, occurs naturally in the language she was using, and that she exploited in her own work. As she grew as a poet, that beat became increasingly important to her. EBB’s early understanding of language, explored, among many other topics in An Essay on Mind (1826), was derived from Locke and Bacon, and from them she came to think of language, however useful for communication and the ordinary purposes of life, as imperfect and problematic. There is a “grossness” about words, she charged, and that “grossness” obscures or distorts their “spiritual essence.” For EBB thought of an invisible spiritual world lying within and above the material and sensible world, but words have no necessary connection with spirit. In Locke’s language theory, names are derived primarily from sensation – that is, from the experience of the five senses in apprehending material things – and

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they are arbitrary and conventional. Though EBB was well aware of the idealist view of naming – that names, like those Adam gives to the beasts, are symbolic, participating in the being they name and hence necessary – she did not hold that theory as her own. Instead, she thought of that kind of naming as something long lost. Stories of loss and ruin are central to EBB’s imagination, from the biblical accounts of the Passion through Paradise Lost to any number of texts from the Romantic period. But in her re-telling of those stories, the loss, however devastating, is followed by a partial recovery. That pattern is a repeated one in many of the narratives she constructs (including Aurora Leigh), and it is also the pattern in her thinking about language. The kind of naming that Adam did is lost forever. But human beings can partly recover the symbolic function of language through music: words understood not as arbitrary signs for sensible referents, but as sounds that are themselves and nothing else, participating in (EBB believed) the music that is the ground of all creation. She realized that music in her prosody. Prosody, as Paul Fussell long ago pointed out, posits a world view. EBB’s cosmos-as-music rests upon the myth I have just defined, the story of a loss and a partial recovery. We see that myth in its fullest form in her Drama of Exile, where Adam and Eve lose paradise but continue to hear echoes from the garden, its music now “Shaded off to resonances” and played in a minor key. Another version of that myth is the music of the spheres, once heard, now beyond human apprehension. But that music lingers, and it does so, in EBB’s view, in a form different from that imagined by the ancients, which was the harmonics of pitch produced by various heavenly bodies moving in proportion to each other. For EBB the lingering music is a beat – for her the essence of music is the bar or isochronous unit – and she heard that music in the natural rhythms of the body, particularly the heart beat and the pulse. Where one might have expected breathing to be her chief focus – especially given the conventional link between breath and inspiration – one finds instead the systolic-diastolic rhythm that she labelled the “animal life” of poetry. She theorized it through all her complex thinking about accent and quantity, and she realized it in her actual prosodic practice. Through the 1820s and 1830s the relation of accent and quantity in English poetry occupied EBB’s thinking about her craft. The immediate context

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for her interest was the question of whether or not it was possible to write quantitative verse in English, on the model of Greek and Latin poetry, when metre in English depended (in the popular view) only upon accent. EBB carried on a learned discussion on the question in her exchange of letters with Sir Uvedale Price, and from them it is clear that, while she certainly did not think that there were only two quantities in English, long and short (as in classical poetry), she did think that one could not ignore quantity in English, because quantity was the basis of timing, and timing depended upon isochronous units, each beginning with a strong beat and each made up of varying numbers of syllables – and hence of varying quantities. Accent, and the kind of metrical scansion that is the tool for its analysis, are also essential, and she agreed with the view that metrics are the instrument of expression, enhancing the meaning of words and embodying the emotion and feeling of a line. The music of poetry is thus, in her view, a complex matter: one hears the metre, understands its relation to meaning, and feels its affect, and at the same time one hears the steady beat of the isochronous units, which include rests and pauses, line endings that are silent but fill out the bar, and the pacing or speed of a line – the beat that begins each unit being the essential element of its music and the chief echo of original creation. Strangely enough, silence is just as important for EBB as speech. For her, silence was not just the absence of sound; it was, as it was for Carlyle, a generating element, a complex attention-driven and energy-filled mix out of which words and actions emerge – just as, in our contemporary physics, nothing is not emptiness or absence, but the source of the universe and all that therein is. EBB’s view reverses Lear’s “Nothing will come of nothing”; hers are “grand orchestral silences” (Aurora Leigh 5: 342), and in her prosody they are the pauses, the caesurae, in her lines, where both speaker and reader generate responses, interpretations, and new creations. “The listening pause” (bc 11: 4), she calls the caesura, and “listening” indicates focus, attention, and the readiness to decide and to create. In EBB’s poetry, what is not heard is just as important as what is heard. If her words are the body of her prosody, her silences are its spirit. Music in poetry has great implications for EBB: it is the basis of her social and political agenda. The links between music and the right ordering of the individual, society, and the state were not new, but EBB forged them

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anew when writing about herself, her family and friends, about exploited women and children, and (later in her career) about politics in Italy and France. According to her,“human sympathies and dreams of power” (webb 5: 485, line 15) are the crucial elements retained from the original music of creation. The former is foremost in her early poetry, where she is always suggesting that music ought to characterize one’s temper of mind, bringing with it “kindly, social love” for one’s family and friends. “So would my tune of life be musical” (webb 4: 150) is a wish expressed in one of the short poems in the volume of 1826 (“The Prayer”; I am wrenching the line out of its context). “Human sympathies” develop into her activism on behalf of “fallen” or exploited or enslaved women and children. Such sympathies, combined with “dreams of power,” lead her in her later poetry to champion the Risorgimento in Italy. Her support for the Risorgimento rested upon her identification of the people – il popolo – and music, and her support for Napoleon III rested upon the same view, that the voice of the people, which had made him emperor, was music, and as such sounded with the beat of creation itself. Earlier myths had told of cities built to music, like Troy and Thebes; EBB updates those myths by focusing on a nation built to music. Moreover, the music is partly hers, and it is accompanied by “dreams of power.” Not of military action or of political struggles, but of affect: the “power” EBB dreamed of was the ability of poetry to change minds and inspire action, primarily through its appeal to the kinesthetic rhythms of its readers. With all that EBB has to say about the music of poetry, one would expect – as many readers of her own day did – that rhyme would play a major part in making that music. But EBB regularly makes rhyme a minor part of poetry, troping it as the biblical “tinkling cymbal” accompanying “choral harmonies,” or condemning it by pairing “rhyme” with “chime,” the word drawn from campanology and meaning the mechanical sounding of the same note again and again. Moreover, in her constructing of a narrative about English poetry, she makes the “Idol-worship of rhyme” her antihero. But she herself certainly used rhyme, and she thought long and deeply and carefully about it, as she did about every other aspect of her art. “My rhymatology” was her label for her practice, and that “ology” was a good deal more liberal, and deliberately more unconventional, than the rhymes sanctioned by the practices of the day. As always, her views rested upon

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her understanding of the nature of the English language itself. She was well aware of the relative scarcity of perfect rhyme words in English, and as early as the 1820s she was defending (what she calls) “imperfect rhymes” against the criticism of Hugh Stuart Boyd. These involved rhymes where the vowel was the same but the pronunciation different; or rhymes where the consonants were the same but the vowel different; or the rhyming of an accented with an unaccented syllable; or “double rhymes” (her term), the pairing of two-syllable words where the second syllable is unaccented. Unlike many of her reviewers and critics, she never considered such rhymes in isolation: her defence of them usually involved their role in the rhythm of a line, and she knew that rhymes could enhance rhythm. She had condemned “the despotism of the final emphasis,” established in the Restoration period, but rather than avoiding it, she transformed it into a “time-beater,” the final accented rhymed syllable marking the beginning of an isochronous unit that included the pause at the end of the line (if there was one) and a varying number of syllables at the beginning of the next line. She thus anticipated the argument of Coventry Patmore in his 1857 essay,“English Metrical Critics,” an essay considered in our own time as marking a new era in Victorian prosody but in fact, as Joseph Phelan has recently shown, the consolidation of a continuing line of thinking and practice throughout the century. EBB plays a major role in the transformations of that practice. The poet’s ability to hear resonances and echoes of the original music of creation, and to sound those echoes in her own creations, made her a prophet, and EBB did not shy away from that role and its claims, though she was always modest and hesitant in talking about them. In the 1838 “Sounds” EBB affirms that all sounds are the instrument of divine revelation, that God speaks through nature, “the regular breath of the calm creation” (110) and (surprisingly) through human sorrow and pain, “the moan of the creature’s desolation” (111). So “God speaketh to thy soul” (102). With that affirmation comes a crucial simile: As the seer-saint of Patmos, loving John (For whom did backward roll The cloud-gate of the future) turned to see The Voice which spake. It speaketh now … (106–9)

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That last adverb is the important one, as Charles LaPorte has shown: revelation is not a unique event in the distant past but something ongoing in the here and now. The prophet, however, is not limited to foretelling the future. He or she also has a critical view of the present, both of its falling short of its potential, and of its move toward making up for that deficiency. The linguistic mark of the prophet is the reading of signs. That act depends upon the ability to interpret, a God-given ability, and it manifests itself in language as troping. The prophet says, in effect, “this means that,” and in doing so she uses metaphor, which means etymologically the carrying across of “this” to “that.” The text in which EBB most clearly exercises her role as prophet is Casa Guidi Windows, where EBB, in reading two events she actually witnessed in Florence, identifies the signs of the coming unification of Italy. EBB’s diction – matter and spirit, and “two-fold world” – sounds like a dualistic understanding of ontology, but in fact her view is monistic, matter being the manifestation of spirit.“Trust the spirit … to make the form,” she has her Aurora Leigh say (5: 224–5), and the movement that characterizes all her work is “Inward evermore / To outward” (Aurora Leigh 5: 227–8).“The practical & real (so called) is but the external evolution of the ideal & spiritual,” she told John Kenyon (Reynolds ed. 331). Hence she troped her poetic texts as palimpsests. There is the text that we read with our physical eyes and respond to with the faculty of understanding, and there is an underlying text to which we must bring (what EBB calls) “spiritinsight” (Aurora Leigh 1: 818). The understanding receives “relative, comparative, / And temporal truths”; “spirit-insight” apprehends “essential truth” (860–2). “Essential truth” is the business of the poet, and its guarantor is her muse, whom she refers to as “the man within.” He is, as he is for the angel at the beginning of the Book of Revelation, Christ. “Virtue’s in the word!” (Aurora Leigh 6: 218) – that affirmation neatly ties the poet’s language to the man within, if we consider the etymology of “virtue.” Its root is the Latin vir, man, and hence the word means manly strength and power, physical, moral – and spiritual. The power is a creative one: Aurora links the poet’s word with the word by which God created the world in Genesis. That word, in her view, was spoken not only to create, but also “To inaugurate the use of vocal life” (6: 220), so creation is not a one-time event but the ongoing life of things, a continuous music of

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which language is the chief expression. The role of the poet is to access that music: Aurora calls it “the primal rhythm / Of … theurgic nature” (5: 29– 30) – nature that has a god within it; EBB herself calls that rhythm the “animal life” of poetry. Her role is to sound it so that it is heard and acted upon. “Sweet” is a key word in EBB’s poetics. When she first uses it in An Essay on Mind to define the “harmony of verse,” it is one of two elements: “The just in structure, with the sweet in sound.” There the adjective is denotative, and (as in Johnson’s dictionary) broad in its meaning: whatever is “sweet” appeals not just to the sense of taste but to all the senses, and to the mind as well. By the time EBB uses the word in the late poem “A Musical Instrument,” it is not only denotative but substantive and material: the cutting short of the flow of the long vowel sound by the plosive “t” is a precise embodiment of the music produced by Pan with the reed he has cut short. The word is no longer simply a sign but the thing itself, and the repeated exclamation – “Sweet, sweet, sweet” – is both the echo of heavenly music and the beat of original creation. In no other line did EBB come so close to language – actual, material language – as revelation. Is there a difficulty in the fact that EBB does not sound such a revelation in an explicitly Christian context? Perhaps – but then one remembers her affirmation that all sounds in creation are ultimately revelatory. To focus on the conjunction of poetry, music, and prophecy, as I have done, is to arrive at a unified view of EBB’s work. There is a continuity in it, from An Essay on Mind and other early texts to Last Poems. The later ones – Casa Guidi Windows, Poems Before Congress – are overtly political texts, and critics, torn between admiration for her support of the Risorgimento in Italy and embarrassment at her championing of Napoleon III, have not quite known what to do with them. And what on earth do those texts have in common with Sonnets from the Portuguese or Lady Geraldine’s Courtship? This book, I hope, answers that question.

references

All quotations from EBB’s poetry, unless otherwise noted, are from The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 5 vols. General editor: Sandra Donaldson. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010. Vols 1 and 2 ed. Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor; vols 3 and 4 ed. Sandra Donaldson; vol. 5 ed. Sandra Donaldson, Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, and Beverly Taylor. For references to this edition, I adopt Marjorie Stone’s abbreviation: webb. All quotations from EBB’s letters up to November 1854 are from The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20 vols to date. Winfield, ks: Wedgestone, 1984–. Vols 1 to 8 ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson; vols 9 to 14 ed. Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis; vols 15 to 19 ed. Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, and Edward Hagan; vol. 20 ed. Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, Joseph Phelan, and Rhian Williams. For references to these volumes, I use the abbreviation bc.

Aarsleff, Hans. The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Adams, Stephen. Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms, and Figures of Speech. Peterborough, on: Broadview Press, 1997. Armstrong, Isobel. “Meter and Meaning.” Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason David Hall. Athens, oh: Ohio University Press, 2011. 26–52. Attridge, Derek. “Beat.” The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 36–55. Avery, Simon.“Re-reading EBB: Trends in Elizabeth Barrett Browning Criticism.” Journal of Browning Studies 1 (2010): 5–13. Avery, Simon, and Rebecca Stott. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London: Longman, 2003. Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. Ed. William Aldis Wright. Oxford: Clarendon, 1868.

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– “Over Worked, Worked Over: A Poetics of Fatigue.” The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature. Ed. Rachel Ablow. Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Press, 2010. 114–30. Tyndall, John. “On the Action of Sonorous Vibrations on Gaseous and Liquid Jets.” Philosophical Magazine 33 (1867): 375–91. – Sound. 3rd ed., rev. Akron, oh: Werner, [1875]. Williams, Rhian.“‘Our Deep, Dear Silence’: Marriage and Lyricism in the Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): 85–102. Woodhouse, A.S.P. The Heavenly Muse: A Preface to Milton. Ed. Hugh MacCallum. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Woolf, Virginia. “‘Aurora Leigh.’” The Common Reader, 2nd series. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Stuart N. Clarke. London: Hogarth, 2009. 5: 519–29. Zanona, Joyce.“‘The Embodied Muse’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics.” 1989. Reprinted in Margaret Reynolds, ed. Aurora Leigh. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1996. 520–33.

index

Aarsleff, Hans, 12–13 accent and quantity: EBB on, 18–19, 45–7, 51–3, 112; Foster on, 47–8; Johnson on, 48; Mitford on, 49. See also quantity Adamic language, 88, 101, 103–4; names as symbolic, 73, 237, 278, 281; partial recovery of, in music, 281 Adams, Stephen, 130 anacrusis, 95, 149, 276 angels’ speech: cadence in, 86, 143–4; in “A Curse for a Nation,” 24, 266–9; in Paradise Lost, 20, 27, 84–5; in The Seraphim, 85–92; Swedenborg on, 266–8 “animal life” of poetry: defined 46–7; and dancing, 50, 56; “physiological poetics,” 10–11, 24; as “primal rhythm” of “theurgic nature,” 231, 286; as sexual passion, 247; and walking, 10, 96, 139, 172, 174. See also beat; pulse; turbulence, rhythmic Aristotle, 32, 233, 250 Armstrong, Isobel, 11, 52 Attridge, Derek, 274–5, 277 Avery, Simon, 7, 8 Bacon, Francis: the essay, 38; language theory, 28; meaning of “Baconian,” 17, 20, 31–2, 35–7 Barrett, Edward Barrett Moulton- (EBB’s father): criticism of EBB, 42, 43, 75; as music master, 19, 76–8 beat: as “animal life” of poetry, 19, 47, 281; “beat,” “street,” “heat” rhyme, 185, 189– 90, 193–4; as defining element of

rhythm, 16, 19; heartbeat, 16, 41, 47, 59– 60, 256; and “the people’s heart,” 256, 261; and political poetry, 185, 195; systole and diastole, 47, 111. See also pulse Bentham, Jeremy, 32, 211 Billington, Josie, 135, 234 Blair, Hugh, 131 Blair, Kirstie, 111, 206 Blake, William, 187, 190, 248 blank verse: 115–18; its “arched cadence,” 115–16; as “the enemy of living speech,” 211–12 Boyd, Hugh Stuart, 40, 82, 93, 98, 109, 119, 129, 132; his criticism of EBB’s poetics, 117, 148, 155–7; EBB’s defence, 164–5 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett: émeutes of EBB and RB, 255–6; “The Greek Christian Poets,” 154; her history of English poetry, 20, 21, 106–18; her reading of Swedenborg, 266–9; her “short analysis” of Locke, 30–1; “A Thought on Thoughts,” 29, 268; her translation of Chaucer, 113–14; unfinished poem on “the development of genius,” 71–5; “a writer of rhymes,” 4, 40, 152 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, works: “Address to Poetry,” 62; Aurora Leigh, 23–4, 205–52; birthday ode for father, 62; Casa Guidi Windows, 23, 181, 183–204, 285; “Cheerfulness Taught by Reason,” 145; “Cowper’s Grave,” 81; “The Cry of the Children,” 12, 14, 22, 148–51; “A Curse for a Nation,” 24, 263–9; “The Dead Pan,” 9,

296 22, 157–62; A Drama of Exile, 20, 92–105, 271, 281; “The Dream: A Fragment,” 79– 80; “Earth,” 74–5; An Essay on Mind, 18, 26–40, 41, 55–8; “Futurity,” 145; “Heaven and Earth,” 145; “Here stay my wandering steps,” 269–70; “Insufficiency,” 145; “An Island,” 92, 105; “Italy and the World,” 254; “The King’s Gift,” 257; Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 22, 128–40; “The Lay of the Brown Rosary,” 140–1; “A Lay of the Early Rose,” 147; “Leila: A Tale,” 70–1; “Life,” 144–6; “The Lost Bower,” 146–7; “Love,” 144–6; “Memory,” 67–8; “The Muse,” 68; “A Musical Instrument,” 25, 269–78, 286; “Napoleon III. in Italy,” 24, 253–63; “Nature’s Remorses,” 60; “The North and the South,” 73, 278; “Parting Lovers,” 257; “The Past,” 78–80; “Perplexed Music,” 143–4; “The Poet and the Bird: A Fable,” 146; “The Poets’ Enchiridion,” 71–4; “The Poet’s Vow,” 62, 168; “The Prayer,” 60, 283; “A Reed,” 270– 3; “A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress,” 60, 147; “Riga’s Last Song,” 80; “A Sea-Side Walk,” 81; The Seraphim, 20, 84–92; Sonnets from the Portuguese, 22, 23, 173–9; “The Soul’s Expression,” 141–3; “Sounds,” 20, 21, 41, 81–2, 284–5; “Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron,” 77; “To –” (1826), 19, 43, 61–6; “To My Dearest Bro, Alias Edward, on His Birth Day,” 270; “To My Dearest Papa on His Birthday,” 68; “To My Father on His Birthday,” 67, 76–8; unpublished birthday poems, 68–70; “Verses to My Brother,” 67; “The Vision of Fame,” 80–1; “A Vision of Poets,” 5, 21, 122–6; “Wine of Cypress,” 164–5 Browning, Robert: bladder metaphor, 191; on Book Seven of Aurora Leigh, 236; as “chief musician,” 22, 78, 173, 176–7; EBB on his music, 21, 121–2, 165–6, 172; EBB on his rhythms, 21–2, 165–72; on EBB’s “fresh strange music,” 3, 165; EBB’s public notices of, 109, 128–9, 136; on EBB’s

i n dex rhymes in “The Dead Pan,” 162–3; Fifine at the Fair, 276; “The Flight of the Duchess,” 21, 167–71; inscribes lines from EBB’s “The Past,” 79; as the “new rhythm” of EBB’s life, 174–5; on prosopopoeia, 232; The Ring and the Book, 259; “Saul,” 170–1 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, Baron Lytton, 6 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 31, 39, 43, 77, 119; The Corsair, 70; Don Juan as model for mixed style, 207 cadence: defined by Mitford, 49; as understood by EBB, 49–50, 116; “cadenced hum,” 226; “cadenced tears,” 186; common element of human and angelic speech, 86–7, 143–4; EBB’s metaphors for, 115–16; musical analysis of cadence, 65–6, 277; in “To –” (1826), 19, 62–6 caesura: “grand orchestral silences,” 234, 282; Hugh Blair on, 131; in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 22, 129–30, 138; the “listening pause,” 22, 89, 92, 134–5, 171–2, 208, 282; “playing at ball with the pause,” 131–2. See also Billington, Josie; silence Campion, Thomas, 59 Carlyle, Thomas, 122, 212, 237; “the great teacher of the age,” 60; “a great prose poet,” 118, 120–1; on the heroic, 234–5; Lady Geraldine’s Courtship as favourite, 139–40; music as “the heart of Nature,” 60, 258; “natural supernaturalism,” 231, 235; “organic filaments,” 23, 184, 186, 187, 212–13; poet as hero (Dante), 190, 196; poetry “exists in … all men,” 195; on romance, 129–30; on silence, 72, 134, 136, 178, 282; speech as silver, silence as golden, 132, 178; on symbol, 135–6; on work, 241–2, 248; on works of art, 136 catalexis and acatalexis: in “A Musical Instrument,” 273; in trochaic metre, 129– 30, 149, 169 chant, 80, 190, 254–5; “full chant divine,” 104; as time-beater, 117

index Chapman, Alison, 7–8 Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 153–4 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 14, 15, 146, 270–1; in EBB’s history of English poetry, 106, 107, 109–10; EBB on his prosody, 111–12; EBB’s translation of, 113–14; Horne on his prosody, 15–16, 47, 110–11 “chief musician.” See music master Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10, 109, 140, 187; Aids to Reflection, 13, 14, 101; Biographia Literaria, 222; “Christabel,” 10, 171; copy and imitation, 20, 86; “Germano-Coleridgean” epistemology, 220, 222; one of “two great seminal minds,” 32; quotes Leibnitz, 101; on symbol, 135, 237; in “A Vision of Poets,” 124 contractions: apocope, 43, 56, 165; atonics, 54–5; EBB’s avoidance of, 10, 164–5; synaeresis, 43 Cooper, Helen, 6, 7, 236 “correspondence” (Swedenborg): defined, 267–8; in Aurora Leigh, 232–3; as “modern” version of world harmony, 268–9 Dante Alighieri, 192–3; Dante’s stone, 190, 202 Davies, Corinne, 165, 271, 276 D’Azeglio, Massimo (prime minister of Piedmont), 198–9 dialogue in poetry: critics on the dialogue in Aurora Leigh, 210–12; defence of EBB’s dialogue, 211–14; EBB’s crusade for “conversations … in verse as in prose,” 209, 211 diapason, 41, 60, 218; defined, 73–4, 125; “the diapason closeth full … in God,” 82–3 Dickinson, Emily, 5, 8 Dryden, John, 21; in EBB’s history of English poetry, 108, 109, 117, 148; “and the French school,” 106, 148; “Song for St Cecilia’s Day,” 82–3; in Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary, 160

297 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 231 Erkkila, Betsy, 5 Foster, John: on accent and quantity, 47–8; on enclitics and atonics, 54–5 “French school”: defined by EBB, 117–18; “the corruption of French rhythms,” 109–10, 148 Fussell, Paul, 43, 46–7, 58, 281 Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, 6 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 12, 13 Hallam, Arthur, 11, 117 Hallam, Henry, 153 Hamilton, Dr Gavin: on “transition to turbulence,” 214–15 Hare, Augustus and Julius, 13, 120 “harmony of verse, the,” 41–2; as redefined by EBB, 18, 46–7; in An Essay on Mind, 55–8; as chief mark of the Christian poet, 82; in the eighteenth century, 18, 42–3; “harmony” a true dactyl, 45; Mitford on, 49–51, 57–8 Hawes, Stephen: praised by EBB, 114–15 Hayter, Alethea, 4–5 heartbeat. See beat Hébert, Anne, 272 hero, hero-worship: “all men possible heroes,” 235; birth of hero in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 138–9; “I am a hero-worshipper,” 118–19; need for hero, 191, 202–3, 259–60; poet as hero, 127, 203 Hodder, Karen, 110 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 13, 182; “rove over,” 150 Horne, Richard Hengist, 4, 39, 101, 122, 142, 152, 165; attack on current “system of scanning,” 111; on Chaucer’s prosody, 14–16, 47, 110; his Chaucer, Modernized, 110–13; criticism of EBB’s rhymes, 22, 157–61, 179; A New Spirit of the Age, 119, 221

298 ideal and real: in The Book of the Poets, 107; “the ideal is in fact the real,” 38; real as “external evolution” of ideal, 39, 224, 267, 285 idealist theory of language. See Adamic language inspiration, 68; Aurora Leigh as “a new sacred text,” 249–50; “Mrs Browning’s gospel,” 24, 248–9; divine inspiration in “Sounds,” 81–2; incarnate Christ as muse, 24, 242–4, 250–1, 285; Othello as “the effluence of the Holy Ghost,” 251; what God “set in me,” 257–8. See also muse Johnson, Dr Samuel: on accent and quantity, 48; on cadence, 50; definition of “just,” 57; definition of “sweet,” 57; on harmony in poetry, 42–3 Kaplan, Cora, 247 Karlin, Daniel, 235 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (“LEL”), 119, 156 Langland, William, 14, 146 language, EBB’s ideas on: summary of her views, 280–1; EBB’s metaphors for words, 29–30; the “grossness of words,” 23, 28, 74, 221; need for “spirit-insight” in reading, 221; the ontology of words, 35; spoken language naturally musical, 110; “the use of vocal life,” 236, 242, 249–50, 285–6; “Virtue’s in the word,” 236, 249; words and thoughts, 17, 28–9; words “arbitrary” but beat “symbolic,” 278 LaPorte, Charles, 20, 82, 84, 154, 249, 285 lava metaphor, 190, 229, 235 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm: quoted by EBB, 101, 220–1; the two clocks, 227 Leighton, Angela, 6, 78, 243 Levine, Caroline, 11–12 Lewis, Linda, 89 lilt, 3, 190; defined, 184–5, 212 lineation, 210–13 Locke, John: EBB’s reading of, 17, 18, 30–1,

i n dex 34, 142, 144–6; EBB’s repudiation of, 40, 222; the “grossness of words,” 23, 28, 221; his distrust of troping, 197, 233; his language theory, 27–8, 100, 280; on inference and opinion, 37, 220; Leibnitz’s response to, 101, 220; on speed of communication, 30 Macpherson, Jay, 72, 78, 173 Martz, Louis, 19 Masson, David, 32 Mathews, Cornelius, 40; quoted by EBB, 60 matter and spirit: EBB’s monism, 231; EBB on ontology, 32–4, 233, 236–7, 240, 285; “issue,” 233; “spirit-sense,” 237, 239; in Swedenborg, 267–9; threat of “blind matter,” 88; “twofold world,” 236, 240. See also symbol Maxwell, James Clerk, 215–16 McDonald, Peter, 9, 182 melody: defined by EBB, 79–80; by Foster and Mitford, 49; “the sprite of Melody,” 80–1 Mermin, Dorothy, 6–7 metre: difference between metrical feet and rhythmical units, 19, 50; EBB’s “doxy,” 54; as “the expressive element of cadence,” 50–2, 282; “the guardian of Rhythm,” 54, 164; Horne on metrical and musical scansion, 16. See also rhythm Mill, John Stuart, 32, 227 Milton, John: in An Essay on Mind, 58; Comus, 98–9; A Drama of Exile, 20–1, 93, 99; EBB’s analyses of his prosody, 51–2, 53–4; in EBB’s history of English poetry, 108; his Arminian theology, 98; invocation in Paradise Lost, 242; Paradise Lost, 20, 33, 88, 91, 92, 103–4; The Seraphim, 91; on solitude, 72, 99, 100 Mitford, William, 49–51, 57–8; on accent and quantity, 49 Montwieler, Katherine, 262 Morlier, Margaret, 8–9

index Mullen, Mary, 227–8 muse: EBB’s father, 19, 76–8; Euterpe, 19, 55, 68–70; incarnate Christ, 24, 242–4, 251, 285; “the man within,” 236, 242–3; Mnemosyne, the nine Muses, Apollo, 68, 76–7; Past, Time, Fame, 78–81; “theurgic nature,” 231–2, 286 music and poetry: common characteristics, 10, 46; the foot and the bar, 46, 50 music master: David, 191; EBB’s father, 19, 76–8; Robert Browning, 19, 78, 173, 176– 7, 218; Romney, 19, 78, 218; Sand’s Les Maîtres Sonneurs, 19, 271–2, 278–9; Tyndall, 215–16 music of the spheres: “audient circles” in Aurora Leigh, 217; “a glorious superstition” (Tyndall), 215; parody of, 102–3; its Pythagorean origin, 59, 119, 231, 281; redefined by Carlyle, 60, 186; redefined by EBB, 19, 59, 217, 230; spheres redefined as “mother’s breasts,” 230, 235; Swedenborg’s “correspondences” as “modern” version of, 24, 268–9 musical instruments in EBB’s poetry: clarion (trumpet), 248; cymbal, 187, 188; flute, pipe, 222, 272, 274; harp, 72, 93; lute, 59, 61, 70–1, 80, 123; lyre, 68–9, 77, 82, 269–70; organ, 73, 112, 124–6, 184, 191, 195, 227; phorminx, 223; reed, 269–7, 273–8; trumpet, 270; viol, 177 musical prosody, EBB’s myth of: as abiding sounds of unfallen Eden, 92–8; in “The Lost Bower,” 146–7; “medicated music,” 177; as a minor key, 94, 105, 143; “the music which is in all things,” 75; as “resonances,” 21, 93, 96, 281, 284 musical prosody, nation-building, and politics: as agent of Italian unification, 23, 60–1, 184–6, 188, 283; anticipated in “Riga’s Last Song,” 80; basis of EBB’s support for Napoleon III, 256–7; cities built to music, 60–1; link with “elemental justice, natural right,” 257, 263; “the music called Italy,” 199; music history of Israel, 187–9

299 musical prosody, social implications of: “human sympathies and dreams of power,” 73; “kindly, social love,” 62–5, 283; right ordering of personal relations 59, 218; as social activism, 148–51, 279, 213–14; “tune of life” as musical, 60, 283 musical scansion (with stave, clef, notes, rests): of lines in “To –” (1826), 66; of lines in “A Musical Instrument,” 277 names, loved, 65, 67, 76–7, 79 octave (EBB’s metaphor), 41, 73, 83, 125, 225; defined, 142 palimpsest, 139, 220, 251, 285 Patmore, Coventry, 9–10, 46, 66, 117, 284 pause, “listening pause.” See caesura “pedestrian metre.” See “animal life” of poetry performative language (speech act), 24, 253–62, 263–9; as human counterpart of the divine fiat, 262–3 Phelan, Joseph, 10, 46–7, 53, 284 Poe, Edgar Allan, 22, 96, 139, 254; criticism of “The Cry of the Children,” 148–9; stanzaic form of “The Raven,” 129 poet: “poet’s power over the pulses,” 111, 119; as prophet, 20, 21, 81–2, 124–6, 236, 284–5; as “truth-teller,” 203, 221–2 poetic composition, theory of, 222–4, 228– 33; “Inward evermore / To outward,” 224, 233; “Trust the spirit … to make the form,” 233 poetry: its affect, 223–4, 230–1, 257, 263; defined in An Essay on Mind, 37–8; as “primitive absolute and universal truth,” 83; as “sublimation,” 251–2; as universe “tuned up to music,” 83 Pollock, Mary Sanders, 165 Pope, Alexander, 21, 33, 38, 40, 157; appeal to the authority of his rhymes, 155, 157, 160, 161; in EBB’s history of English poetry, 108, 109, 148; not one of “the great Fathers of English poetry,” 164

300 Price, Uvedale, 18–19, 42, 44–5, 47–9, 51–4, 75, 282 Prins, Yopie, 11 prophecy: defined by EBB, 196; child as prophet, 192, 194–5, 198, 204; in “A Curse for a Nation,” 264–5; as genre of Casa Guidi Windows, 195–6; and “grossness” of language, 18, 23, 204; Miriam, 186–7, 196, 201; prophecy in “A Curse for a Nation,” 264–5; reading and troping of signs, 196–7, 199–202 prosopopoeia, 80, 202, 270–1; Christ as agent of, 231–2 pulses (and related nouns), 41, 60, 62, 67, 81, 111, 119, 127, 205, 216, 222–3, 281; of Christ’s spirit, 232; EBB’s own pulse, 61, 145, 238–9; in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 131, 138–9; “palpitating angel,” 223; palpitations, 216, 219, 259; pulsations, 102, 144, 189, 215–16, 223; “reflex act of life,” 144–5; in The Seraphim, 87–9; and sound waves, 215; thrills, 87, 239, 245, 260; throbbing, 61, 67, 87, 94, 125, 145, 225, 230, 235, 260; vibrations, 94–5, 102, 123–4. See also “animal life” of poetry; beat; turbulence, rhythmic quantitative verse in English, 18, 44; “no true disyllabic spondees,” 51; Price on defective dactyls, 45 quantity: “the essence of English poetry,” 18, 47, 48–9, 282; “rhythm presupposes quantity,” 112 Reaney, James, 273 Reynolds, Margaret, vii, 39, 218, 227, 228, 237–8, 250 Reynolds, Matthew, 195–6, 198, 199 “rhymatology, my,” 8, 14, 152–82; summarized, 283–4; EBB’s neologism (1844), 163; “double rhymes,” 155–7, 160; “imperfect rhymes,” 9, 22, 152, 155; rejection of charge of carelessness, 158, 163, 164; rhymes must “assist the rhythm,” 167; rima asonante, 159

i n dex rhyme, EBB’s criticism of: as bell-ringing, 58, 127; “the despotism of the final emphasis,” 22–3, 117, 152, 154; “the idol-worship of rhyme,” 107–8, 116–17; primacy of blank verse over rhymed verse, 58; the “rhyme”-“chime” rhyme, 58, 74, 123, 283; rhyme as “time-beater,” 66, 117, 284; rhyme as “tinkling cymbal,” 23, 58, 116, 152, 154, 225, 226, 283 rhymes, nineteenth-century critics on EBB’s: William Allingham, 181–2; Henry Chorley, 180; Richard Hengist Horne, 159, 179; Charles Kingsley, 179, 181, 193; periodical reviews, 179–81, 192–3 rhythm: defined, 16; natural in the English language, 19; “the primal rhythm / Of that theurgic nature,” 231–2, 286; the “primitive elementary principle” of English verse, 16, 110–11; and quantity, 112; thought as rhythmic, 224–5, 228 rhythmic turbulence. See turbulence romance: as defined by Carlyle, 130; as plot of The Book of the Poets, 21, 106; “A Romance of the Age” (Lady Geraldine’s Courtship), 129–30; as story of courtly love, 130–1; as the “world of books,” 220 Rowlinson, Matthew, 7 Rudy, Jason, 10–11, 12 Sadenwasser, Tim, 8–9, 161, 162 Sand, George: Les Maîtres Sonneurs, 19, 271–2, 278–9 sexual passion: “all that strain / Of,” 230; in Aurora Leigh, 247 Shakespeare, William, 21, 59; in EBB’s history of English poetry, 107, 116; function of pauses in, 135 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 72, 222, 270 silence: and speech in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 22, 72, 131–4; “choral silence” of Malvern Hills, 146–7; as revelation in “A Musical Instrument,” 25, 277–8; in The Seraphim, 89, 92; in Sonnets from the Portuguese, 177–9. See also caesura; Carlyle

index

301

Slinn, Warwick, 12 Smith, Fred Manning, 8 sound waves, 214–16; the two clocks, 227 speech act. See performative language Spitzer, Leo, 59, 153 Stark, Robert, 10 Stephenson, Glennis, 6, 7, 129 Stewart, Dugald: EBB’s notes on, 34–5 Stone, Marjorie: annual survey of EBB criticism, 8, 9, 182; and Beverly Taylor, 188, 190, 192, 217; on collaboration of EBB and RB, 165; on EBB’s critical heritage, 4, 7; on EBB and the Romantics, 43; on muse in Aurora Leigh, 242–3; on pun in “A Curse for a Nation,” 263–4 Stott, Rebecca, 7 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 24–5, 249–50; angels’ speech, 266–9; “correspondence,” 233; Charles Augustus Tulk, 187 “sweet”: defined, 57; “completed cadences” as, 143–4; and “the harmony of verse,” 18, 57; key word in “A Musical Instrument,” 25, 275, 286; “sweet compression” in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 135 Swift, Jonathan, 29–30 symbol: defined, 233, 135; in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 134–6; in “The North and the South,” 278

tone(s): defined, 73, 77–9; Romney’s, 227 Tooke, Horne, 30, 100 Trench, Richard Chenevix, 12–13 tropes and troping: Locke’s distrust of, 197, 233; Louis Napoleon’s “translation,” 258; and prophecy, 196–7, 199–202; theory of, 232–3 Tucker, Herbert, 12, 149–50 turbulence: émeutes of RB and EBB, 255– 6; “rhythmic turbulence / Of blood and brain,” 11, 24, 148, 205–7, 212, 217, 254; scientific evidence for, 214–15; sea, storm, waves, 214, 243–5; sexual passion, 247; “the starry turbulence of worlds,” 217; “the whole strong clamour of a vehement soul,” 238–9 Tyndall, John: lectures on sound, 215, 231 typology, 126–7, 158, 237–8

Taylor, Dennis, 9, 46 Tennyson, Alfred, 13, 23, 34, 61, 109, 182; “The Brook,” 215; EBB’s criticism of his rhymes, 160; EBB’s praise of his music, 119–20; his avoidance of sibilants, 213; in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 136; “Locksley Hall,” 149; In Memoriam, 64, 72, 89; as one of EBB’s heroes, 118; “Reticence,” 133

Zanona, Joyce, 230, 242–3

Walker, John, Rhyming Dictionary, 160–1 Williams, Rhian, 171, 173 Woodhouse, A.S.P., 99 Woolf, Virginia, 211–12 Wordsworth, William, 43, 182, 221, 222; “Airey-Force Valley,” 118; child as prophet, 192, 198; “correspondent breeze,” 223; EBB’s 1842 review of, 108–9; in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 136