Text and publication
First publ. Apr. 1841, the first number of the B & P series (see Appendix C, p. 883). The song ‘A king lived long ago’ (iii 163–224) had appeared in MR n.s. ix (Nov. 1835) 707–8, with the title The King and signed ‘Z.’, B.’s usual signature for contributions to this journal (see I 326). Not repr. separately; repr. 1849, 1863, 1868, 1888. The Ottima—Sebald scene (i 1–276) was repr. in 18632. Four songs from the play were repr. in 18652: ‘You’ll love me yet!’ (iii 297–308) and ‘Give her but a least excuse to love me!’ (ii 195–210), both with the title Song from Pippa Passes; ‘A king lived long ago’ (iii 163–224), with the title Romance from Pippa Passes, and, immediately following, ‘The year’s at the spring’ (i 215–22), with the title Song from the Same. Two songs were repr. in 1872: ‘The year’s at the spring’ and ‘Give her but a least excuse to love me!’ Substantive variants from all these texts are given in the notes; because of its special interest, a complete collation is given of ‘The year’s at the spring’, incl. the available extant MSS which B. wrote as autographs. Our text is 1841; we refer in our notes to the untitled opening section as Intro.
B. did not offer the play to the actor-manager William Macready, who had produced Strafford (1837), and indeed seems deliberately to have avoided doing so. Pippa had been one of three dramas announced as ‘nearly ready’ when Sordello was publ. in 1840 (see below), and Macready had already rejected the other two, King Victor and Return of the Druses (both publ. after Pippa: see Appendix C, p. 883). B. wrote to Macready, enclosing his presentation copy of Pippa: ‘all things considered, I had rather publish, that is print—this play … than take the chance of a stage success that would in the highest degree gratify and benefit me, at the risk of “mettre du gêne” [putting constraint] in a friendship which I trust I know how to appreciate, by compelling you once more to say “No”, where you would willingly say “Yes” ’ (Correspondence v 37). The play has never been professionally produced, though there have been numerous amateur performances and readings. For B.’s request to Eliza Flower for music for the songs, see below, p. 82; there have been many settings of the songs, notably ‘The year’s at the spring’ (53 listed in Bibliography). In 1908, D. W. Griffith made a film based on the play, which is usefully discussed by E. Guiliano and R. C. Keenan in ‘Browning Without Words’ (BIS iv [1976] 125–59) and by F. A. Hilenski in ‘D. W. Griffith’s Film Version of Pippa Passes’ (Literature/Film Quarterly iv [Winter 1976] 76–82).
Composition and revision
‘Mr. Browning was walking alone, in a wood near Dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of someone walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa, or Pippa’ (Orr Life 55). B.’s letter to Mrs Bronson describing his first visit to Asolo confirms this account; see below, pp. 10–11. The exact date cannot be fixed, but it was some time after B. returned from his 1838 trip to Italy; a likely date would be late summer 1839, when B. had recently completed Sordello (note the anticipation of Pippa in Sordello vi 849ff., I 768). The work was described as ‘nearly ready’ in an advertisement at the end of Sordello (publ. Mar. 1840). There is no external evidence of the order of composition of the various sections. Oxford mistakenly suggests that pt. i must have been written before June 1839, citing a reference to the Ottima—Sebald scene in ‘A Familiar Epistle to Robert Browning’ by Barry Cornwall (the pseudonym of B.’s friend B. W. Procter), publ. in English Songs and Other Small Poems (1851). However, this reference does not occur in the portion of the poem headed ‘St. John’s Wood, June, 1839’, which covers only ll. 1–44; the remainder, in which the reference to Pippa does occur (ll. 149–50), comes in a section headed ‘London, 1846–1850’. In a letter of 3 May 1845, B. told EBB.: ‘nobody ever sees what I do till it is printed’ (Correspondence x 201). DeVane conjectures that pt. iii was drafted first, during or shortly after B.’s return from his travels in 1838. In a letter to Julia Wedgwood dated 17 Oct. 1864 (RB & JW 102), B. recalls reading the ‘revise’ (corrected proof ) of the poem on ‘Good Saturday’, i.e. 10 Apr., since Good Friday in 1841 fell on 9 Apr. (see also headnote to Artemis Prologuizes, II 106).
B. made a few revs. in B & P BYU. The poem was extensively revised for 1849. EBB. wrote to Mrs Jameson on 4 Feb. 1847: ‘Robert is very busy with his new edition, & has been throwing so much golden light into “Pippa,” that everybody shall see her “pass” properly . . yes, & surpass’ (Correspondence xiv 114). For B.’s own comments on the 1849 revs., see headnote to Paracelsus, I 102. The revs. are generally concerned with clarifying, by addition and expansion, supposed obscurities in plot and psychology. The pattern is not uniform. Revision of Intro was so heavy (36 new lines and numerous other changes) that B. had to write out a fair copy instead of marking up a printed text: this MS, now at Texas, has no substantive differences from 1849, but a few cancelled readings. The Jules— Phene scene (ii 1–243) was even more heavily revised (1849 adds 97 lines and deletes 13), perhaps also by means of a new fair copy, though this has not survived. In proportion to its length, the Ottima—Sebald scene (i 1–276) was least affected. Punctuation was consistently overhauled through all eds., in keeping with B.’s usual practice. There were few verbal changes after 1849. The Ottima—Sebald scene (i 1–276) shows some points of interest in 18632. It contains many of the 1863 revs., anticipates a number of 1868 readings, but retains some from 1849 (see e.g. ll. 143^144n.), and has spellings characteristic of 1849, suggesting that it was produced after 1863 but using 1849 as copy-text. A few readings are unique to 18632: for the only substantive one, see l. 91n. In 18632 the following note, probably not B.’s but presumably approved by him, appears at the beginning of the extract: ‘Pippa is a girl from a silk-factory, whose “passing” the various persons of the play, at certain critical moments, in the course of her holiday, becomes, unconsciously to herself, a determining influence on the fortune of each’.
Form
The form of Pippa Passes—four entirely separate one-act plays with link-passages and parallel endings—is both its most celebrated and its least documented feature. The consensus is that it is unprecedented, though we have found one particular work which challenges this assumption: see below. A. Symons describes it as containing ‘elements of the play and elements of the masque’ (An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 2nd ed. [1906] 52). These ‘elements of the masque’ are presumably Pippa’s songs. In Elizabethan and Jacobean masques, songs are interspersed with the action, sometimes to mark the appearance of fresh characters; such songs remain, however, subordinate to dance and spectacle. See E. Welsford, The Court Masque (1927). Evidence that B. envisaged a musical dimension for the work is to be found in his letter to Eliza Flower of 9 Mar. 1840: ‘By the way, you speak of “Pippa”—could we not make some arrangement about it,—the lyrics want your music—five or six in all—how say you?’ (Correspondence iv 256). I. Jack (Browning’s Major Poetry [Oxford 1973] 64–5) points out that the ‘dramatic scene’, the form into which each section of Pippa falls, was very popular in the 1820s and 1830s; B. probably knew those by ‘Barry Cornwall’ (B. W. Procter) publ. in 1819–20, some of which have intercalated songs; cp. also Lamb’s Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets (1808). D. Hair (Browning’s Experiments with Genre [Toronto 1972] 51) compares Landor’s short dramatic pieces (e.g. Ippolito di Este), a comparison anticipated by EBB. (see i 4–10n.). The abrupt and discontinuous structure of Goethe’s Faust may also have influenced B.’s approach.
The particular work, almost certainly known to B., which anticipates in detail the form of Pippa, is John Fletcher and Nathan Field’s Four Plays or Moral Representations in One (?1613–15), not previously cited as a source. This consists of four separate one-act plays (or ‘Triumphs’), with a prologue and epilogue, and link-passages. There is a striking thematic parallelism: the four plays are concerned successively with adultery, marriage between social unequals, the killing of a tyrant, and wealth, which are the topics, and in that order, of the sections of Pippa. A further parallel is that in Four Plays each act concludes with music: a celebratory fanfare (‘The Triumph of Honour’) or celebratory song (‘The Triumph of Time’); or, in ‘The Triumph of Love’ and ‘The Triumph of Death’, a dramatically integrated song. The latter are of especial interest because in both the song becomes a means of dramatic reversal or conversion, as in Pippa; though derived from the masque (E. M. Waith, in The Pattern of Tragi-Comedy in Beaumont and Fletcher [ Yale 1952], comments that the playlets of Four Plays stand ‘somewhere between masques and plays’), this feature goes well beyond the masque’s non-dramatic use of song. B. may have been familiar with the 1811 ed. of the Beaumont—Fletcher canon, which included Four Plays; the probability that he had read Four Plays is enhanced by the fact that it was publ. in 1840 by Moxon, B.’s publisher, in a collection of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays (ed. G. Darley): in fact, it was the format of this and other of Moxon’s reissues of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays that supplied the model for B & P (see Appendix C, p. 884).
These reissues, assuming that B. had not already encountered the works in their original form in his father’s library or in the British Museum, would also have given B. access to other experimental blends of masque and drama, such as Ford and Dekker’s The Sun’s Darling; in 1840, another publisher issued the complete works of Middleton, and B. might have read Middleton and Rowley’s The World Tost at Tennis, where again a sequence of disparate scenes is modulated by means of songs. Equally, however, a reading of Four Plays might have reminded B. of the more ambitious conflations of masque and play in the works of Shakespeare and Jonson, which Pippa frequently echoes. However, some features of Pippa, such as its dramatic naturalism and integrated structure, remain unprecedented; Welsford remarks of Four Plays: ‘there is no just cause why these four plays should be joined together’ (p. 287).
Time and Place
The date of the action is contemporary, but cannot be precisely determined. The clearest indicator would be the identity of the Austrian Emperor who is the target of the assassination plot in pt. iii. But up to 1865, the corr. reissue of 1863 (see iii 14n.), B. gave no clue to his identity, and even in 1865 it is not certain whether the mention of ‘old Franz’ refers to a specific individual. Francis II (1768–1835), who became Emperor in 1804, had a pathological fear of liberal or reformist opposition, personally supervised a huge police network, and was responsible, with his chief minister Metternich, for the partition of Italy after the Napoleonic Wars into separate states under Austria’s rule, or subject to its influence. This partition, effected by the Treaty of Vienna in 1816, created the Austrian kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia (which included Asolo). However, Francis II died ( peacefully) three years before B. went to Italy and five years before the publication of the poem. His successor Ferdinand I (1793–1875), Emperor from 1835 until his abdication in 1848, was a kindly, weak-minded, and ineffectual ruler, with far less interest than Francis in the repression of dissent. In 1830, when he bore the title of King of Hungary, an army officer with a private grudge against him attempted to shoot him. This is the only assassination attempt recorded in the period against a member of the ruling house of Hapsburg.
The action takes place at Asolo, a small village in the ‘Trevisan’, the district surrounding the town of Treviso in northern Italy. B. called Asolo his ‘very own of all Italian cities’ (Bronson1 921) and it is of crucial importance in his career. He first saw it on his 1838 journey, as he wrote to Fanny Haworth on 24 July, after his return: ‘I went to Trieste, then Venice—then thro’ Treviso & Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo’ (Correspondence iv 68). Asolo was certainly B.’s ‘discovery’; it was not a noted tourist spot (Murray does not mention it, though it mentions nearby Possagno). A friend later recalled: ‘One day Mr. Browning related an incident of a visit to Asolo when Austria was in possession of Venetian territory. He was asked by the chief dignitary of the town, “What have you come here for?” “To see the place.” “Do you intend to stay?” “Yes; I hope to remain a few days.” “But you have seen the place already; how can you possibly wish to stay longer?” “Because I find it so very beautiful.” The Austrian looked at him in puzzled amazement, and then, after a moment’s pause, signed the “permit of sojourn” required’ (Bronson1 921). In a letter dated 10 June 1889, B. remembers his first impressions of Asolo: ‘When I first found out Asolo I lodged at the main Hotel in the square, an old, large Inn of the most primitive kind. The ceiling of my bedroom was traversed by a huge crack, or rather cleft; “caused by the earthquake last year; the sky was as blue as could be, and we were all praying in the fields, expecting the town to tumble in.” On the morning of my arrival I walked up to the Rocca; and, on returning to breakfast, I mentioned it to the landlady, whereon a respectable, middle-aged man, sitting by, said, “You have done what I, born here, never thought of doing.” … I took long walks every day,—and carried away a lively recollection of the general beauty,—but I did not write a word of “Pippa Passes”. The idea struck me when walking in an English wood, and I made use of the Italian memories. I used to dream of seeing Asolo in the distance and making vain attempts to reach it, repeatedly dreamed this for many a year, and when I found myself once more in Italy with my sister [1878], I went there straight from Verona. We found the old inn lying in ruins, a new one about to take its place … People told me the number of inhabitants had greatly increased, and things seemed generally more ordinary-life-like … When I got my impression Italy was new to me’ (Bronson1 920). With this disillusion, cp. Prologue (Asolando, 1889).
Besides personal observation, B. could have consulted, in the British Museum, an anonymous pamphlet, Notizie Istoriche e Geografiche appartenenti alla città di Asolo ed al suo territorio (Belluno 1780). Prefacing a detailed description of the four ‘quarters’ of the district is a general eulogy of its beauty and fertility (pp. 5–6), and there are also notes on Asolo’s only claim to historical importance, the residence there of Queen Caterina Cornaro of Cyprus (see ii 200n.).
There has been some debate as to whether the day on which the action of the poem takes place, ‘New Year’s Day’, refers to the old date, 25 Mar., rather than the modern 1 Jan. In support of the former are Pippa’s song ‘The year’s at the spring’ (i 215–22), and Luigi’s mention of the cuckoo (iii 137–9); as against this, Monsignor refers to the ‘winter-weather’ and implies that it is ‘fourteen years and a month, all but three days’ since his elder brother’s death on 3 Dec. (iv 6, 30–1). Furthermore, in a letter of 8 Jan. 1885 offering belated New Year greetings B. wrote: ‘New Year’s Day was Pippa’s Day, also’ (to J. Dunnachie, ABL MS ). Pippa’s itinerary has been traced in J. Korg, Browning and Italy (Athens, Ohio, 1983) 41–2.
Sources, and parallels in B.
(1) The character of Pippa. B.’s characterization of Pippa draws upon a long and varied tradition of the representation of children as figures of innocence and intuition. The Romantic idealization of childhood in e.g. Rousseau and Wordsworth (esp. The Solitary Reaper, which celebrates the unconscious influence of a girl’s singing), emerges strongly in Pippa. Marguerite in Goethe’s Faust, who stands on the borderline between childhood innocence and adult experience, complicates this figure of the child by opening it to sexual and economic exploitation, a theme which Dickens had highlighted in Oliver Twist (1837–8) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840). It was at this period, too, that agitation about child labour began to make itself seriously felt.
Pippa’s orphan state, and the discovery that she is nobly born, are stock motifs of folktale and romance. The parallel with Shakespeare’s romances, esp. Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, is striking, and confirmed by other echoes. The second part (‘The Triumph of Love’) of Fletcher and Field’s Four Plays (see Form) also involves this motif; so does T. N. Talfourd’s Ion, where Ion proves to be the son of the tyrant Adrastus. A. E. Dubois (‘Robert Browning, Dramatist’, SP xxxiii [1936] 626–55) extends the parallel, concluding that Pippa is ‘a female Ion in a play dedicated to Talfourd’.
Talfourd’s Ion (1836) concerns the cleansing of Argos from plague by Ion, a foundling, who first persuades the tyrant Adrastus to meet the priests and people, and, when that fails, joins a conspiracy to kill him, knowing that only when Adrastus’ line is extinct will Argos be saved. However, during the assassination of Adrastus (not by Ion), Ion learns that he himself is Adrastus’ son. He accepts the succession, and publicly kills himself in order to end the curse. Like Ion, Pippa is an orphan; she is likewise involved, though unconsciously, in the redemption of her people; and she similarly proves to be the child of a potentate. Euripides’ Ion, on which Talfourd drew, also contributed to B.’s conception of Pippa. In Euripides’ play, Ion is the secret offspring of Apollo and Creusa, brought up, without his mother’s knowledge, as a slave in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. She meanwhile has married Xuthus; because they are childless they have come to Delphi to find out if they will ever have children. The oracle tells Xuthus that the first person he meets will be his son; meeting Ion, he claims him as the child of himself and a former mistress. Learning of this, Creusa conspires to kill Ion to prevent his becoming Xuthus’ heir, but the plot fails and the truth is revealed. The conspiracy in Pippa iv, in which Pippa is to be lured to prostitution and death in order to prevent her from coming into her rightful inheritance, has strong affinities with this story.
Pippa’s role, and in particular the unconscious nature of her influence through song, may owe something to the central episode of conversion in St Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine describes how, seated in a garden, he was ‘weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” Instantly my countenance altered, I began to think most intently, whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words: nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God, to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find’ (transl. 1848, pp. 169–70). B.’s letter to Fanny Haworth of [?25] Apr. 1839 has some MS music, with the comment, ‘What the children were singing last year in Venice, arm over neck’ (Correspondence iv 138–9). The figure of Pippa strikingly anticipates that of Pompilia in Ring.
(2) Episode 1: Ottima and Sebald (i 1–276). No specific source has been identified. There are echoes of various Jacobean tragedies, particularly Macbeth and Middleton’s The Changeling. Ottima has some affinity with Vittoria Corrombona, and Sebald with Bracchiano, in Webster’s The White Devil. Their situation parallels that of Alice and her lover Mosby in Arden of Faversham and, more strikingly, that in Donne’s Elegy iv.
(3) Episode 2: Jules and Phene (i 277 to ii 243; see also iv 39–57).
(a) The plot of the deceptive marriage. F. E. Faverty, ‘The Source of the Jules— Phene Episode in Pippa Passes’ (SP xxxviii [1941] 97–105), compares Bulwer-Lytton’s successful play The Lady of Lyons, produced by Macready in 1838. Claude Melnotte, low-born but cultured, is married by deception to the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Pauline, whom two rejected suitors wish to humiliate. Faverty argues that B. may also have consulted Bulwer-Lytton’s acknowledged source, a translation by Helen Maria Williams of a French tale (The History of Perourou, 1803), because there the rejected suitors are artist-engravers, and six of them (as in B.) gather to witness the dénouement. B. certainly saw Bulwer-Lytton’s play, and knew both him and Macready well. Note B.’s reversal of the sex of impostor and victim. Cp. also Victor Hugo’s melodrama Ruy Blas (1838), where a servant poses as a nobleman at the Spanish court and gains the queen’s affection as part of a revenge plot by the servant’s master. The theme of ‘queen-worship’ was a favourite of B.’s: see ii 195–210n. To Faverty’s list of the literary sources may be added the Malvolio plot in Twelfth Night and the Beatrice—Benedick plot in Much Ado About Nothing, conspiracies using forged letters to deceive a man into believing that a woman is in love with him. Faverty also mentions the painter Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), who was tricked into marrying an impoverished adventurer. B.’s studies for Sordello may have informed him that the troubadour Pierre Vidal (see Sordello ii 714–17n., I 508) married a Greek girl (Phene, Jules’s bride, is Greek) in the mistaken belief that she was of imperial family. B. may also have known of the practical joke played by Keats’s friend Charles Wells on Keats’s younger brother Tom, who received love-letters purportedly from a mysterious French lady. B. could have heard the story from a number of Keats’s friends, e.g. Leigh Hunt. There is an important parallel with Ring, where Guido forges letters between his wife and her ‘lover’, Caponsacchi.
(b) The character of Jules the sculptor. B.’s principal model was Antonio Canova (1757–1822). The action takes place at Possagno, Canova’s birthplace and the site of a ‘Gipsoteca’ (gallery of models and casts) devoted to his work (see i 353–4). Besides direct observation during his trip to Italy in 1838 (he wrote to Fanny Haworth on 24 July 1838, after his return: ‘I was disappointed in one thing, Canova’ [Correspondence iv 67] ), and personal contact with Italian intellectuals such as his tutor Angelo Cerutti, B. could have learned about Canova’s work and reputation from many sources. Canova’s fame was at its height in B.’s boyhood (see e.g. Byron, Beppo 368); his studio was an obligatory stop for connoisseurs and collectors on the Grand Tour. Of several accounts which B. might have seen in the British Museum, there are interesting parallels with the anonymous, privately printed Journal of a Tour in Italy (now attrib. to the Countess of Clanwilliam, and dated 1836); see e.g. ii 116–17n. The main printed source is The Works of Antonio Canova, in Sculpture and Modelling, Engraved in Outline by Henry Moses; with Descriptions from the Italian of the Countess Albrizzi, and a Biographical Memoir by Count Cicognara (3 vols., 1824), whose plates and commentaries cover all the works alluded to in the poem. The following features of Canova’s career and personality were major influences on B.’s conception of Jules.
i. Canova’s admiration for classical Greek sculpture. This supposedly began in Venice, where he ‘found an immense source of knowledge and improvement in the gallery of plaster casts of the Commendatore Farsetti, comprising all the celebrated remains of antiquity, and which, with a noble liberality, was devoted to the use of young students, and the public curiosity’ (Works of Canova i, p. ii). Contemporaries frequently stressed the likeness of Canova’s work to antique sculpture. But B. may also have noted Canova’s opinion that ‘The perfect and determinate models of the Greeks … and the just prescriptive influence of their conventional modes of art, while they assist and ennoble modern sculpture, preclude it from originality in any of its essential points’ (Works of Canova iii 7): see below, ‘Canova and painting’.
ii. Canova’s technical skill. His marbles were noted for their ‘softness and delicacy of contour’ and ‘minute accuracy of expression’, while his ‘susceptibility and active fancy gave great quickness and energy to his invention, prompting his imagination spontaneously, and without effort, to reach the great and excellent in his designs’ (Works of Canova i, pp. xiii–xvii). Cp. ii 67–98 and notes.
iii. Canova’s relation to his rivals. ‘The influence of established practice and professional jealousy created no trifling obstacles to the progress of Canova; these, however, his modest and unpresuming conduct aided greatly to remove, while an air of triumph and superiority would, by wounding the feelings of his rivals, have created additonal opposition’ (Works of Canova i, p. vii). The Countess of Clanwilliam commented: ‘Canova was perfectly conscious of the merit of his performances, but totally unaffected and void of pretension … his conversation was always playful, and left a pleasing impression’ ( Journal of a Tour in Italy ii 296–7). Jules displays the exact inverse of this attitude: see i 315–17, 352–70.
iv. Canova’s private life. ‘More than once during his life, he experienced the passion of love, in a degree corresponding to the susceptibility of his nature … On two occasions he was very near to entering into the marriage state, but was, perhaps, deterred by the apprehension of its diverting him from his devotion to his art, which was always his master and engrossing passion: his heart was, however, never entangled by low attachments, but was the seat of the noblest and most elevated sentiments’ (Works of Canova i, p. xx). Cp. i 371–8 and ii 13–24.
v. Canova and painting. This aspect of Canova’s career bears principally on Jules’s decision to abandon sculpture for painting, which he explains in a letter to Monsignor (see iv 45–55) as a rejection of the imitation of classical models. B. asserted in many contexts the importance of originality, though in early treatments of this topic (Pauline 390–2 [p. 33], Chatterton 209–17 [II 484]) he regards a phase of imitation as a natural part of the young artist’s development. Jules’s letter suggests that such imitation necessarily precedes a supplantation of the models copied: see Sordello ii 80–4 (I 468) for an example of this process. In Jules’s case the rejection of imitation is accompanied by a change of medium, a change which takes place after he breaks his own statues (ii 295–7), since at that point he still intends to continue a sculptor; some time between ‘Noon’ and ‘Night’ he decides that his only hope of originality lies in becoming a painter, and writes his letter to Monsignor. The motif of the change of medium appears in Rudel, and most prominently in One Word More (p. 598), of which it is the subject. See also B.’s letter to Ripert-Monclar of 9 Aug. 1837: ‘I cannot remember the time when I did not make verses [ … but when] subsequently real and strong feeling called for utterance, either Drawing or Music seemed a much fitter vehicle than “verses” ’ (Correspondence iii 264) and B. to EBB., 11 Mar. 1845: ‘I think you like the operation of writing as I should like that of painting, or making music, do you not?’ (Correspondence x 121). B. was an accomplished musician, and studied sculpture during the 1850s. Monsignor’s suggestion that Jules will however ‘fail egregiously’ in his ambition perhaps reflects the fact that his original, Canova, was a mediocre painter. His partisans claimed that he merely ‘found an agreeable relief in the occasional use of the pencil’ and denied that he ‘thought very highly of his pictures, and that they had withdrawn his attention from more important subjects’ (Works of Canova i, p. xiv); but Thomas Moore recorded in his journal for 13 Nov. 1819: ‘Called at Canova’s, and again looked over his treasures. It is strange enough (if the world did not abound with such anomalies) that Canova prides himself more on some wretched daubs he has perpetrated in painting, than on his best sculpture’ (Memoirs, ed. John Russell [5 vols., 1856] iii 71). B. himself, in a letter of 28 Sept. 1878, noted: ‘a wonder of detestability indeed is the paint-performance of the great man!’ (Learned Lady 93). In the same letter, B. expressed the belief he had come to hold that an artist should aim directly at originality: in reply to a recommendation that his son would improve as a painter by ‘imbuing himself with the works of the Great Masters’, he wrote: ‘Does not all mediocrity come of a beginner’s determining to look at nature through the eyes of his predecessors … ? I should expect a genuine painter … to begin by ascertaining what he likes best to see in nature generally,—then master the means of expressing what he likes and sees,—and, then only, ask himself how others have gone through the same process and with what results’ (a position which directly repudiates that of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose Discourses [1769–90] constantly insist on the importance of imitation in a painter’s development: see e.g. Discourse I, Discourse VI).
Besides Canova, B.’s presentation of Jules may owe something to Michelangelo: Jules’s Neo-Platonic philosophy and his arrogant aloofness from social interchange recall similar features in Michelangelo’s thought and personality. See ii 67–98n. B. drew on the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea for the actual scene between Jules and Phene (ii 1–243), In Ovid’s account (Metamorphoses x), Pygmalion’s aversion to the debauchery of real women is linked to his love for the beautiful statue he has made: cp. i 371–8, B. may also have known Rousseau’s ‘scène lyrique’ Pygmalion (1775), which consists of Pygmalion’s monologue in front of his statue of Galatea, before it comes to life. In Rousseau’s version, the transformation of the statue into a woman reciprocates Pygmalion’s recovery of his sense of his own genius and artistic purpose; a similar reciprocation takes place when Jules discovers a new artistic ‘life’ as a result of ‘vivifying’ Phene. Pygmalion’s earlier declaration that he has lost all interest in other people may have contributed to the aloofness which his enemies resent in Jules. Both scenes end in an embrace. Another poem on the subject which may have been known to B. is T. L. Beddoes’ Pygmalion, whose hero has suggestive similarities to Jules: see i 311–14n., 373–8n., ii 67–98n. B. may also have found a ref. to the Pygmalion legend in Works of Canova: ‘ “Pity that this nymph cannot speak,” said an English visitor in the studio of Canova, “and that this Hebe does not rise into the skies; if, like Pigmalion’s statue, life were added to them, nothing would remain to be desired.” “You are mistaken,” observed the sculptor, “and would in that case have nothing to be pleased or surprised at. I do not aim in my works at deceiving the beholder; we know they are marble—mute and immobile” ’ (iii 26). Cp. also the final scene of The Winter’s Tale where the ‘statue’ of Hermione—supposedly the work of the ‘rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape’ ( V ii 97–100)—comes to life. A possible source for the discussion of the relation of art to life is the first of Alciphron’s Letters of Courtesans (Loeb ed. [1949] 251–2), in which the courtesan Phryne writes to the sculptor Praxiteles: ‘Have no fear; for you have wrought a very beautiful work of art, such as nobody, in fact, has ever seen before among all things fashioned by men’s hands; you have set up a statue of your own mistress in the sacred precinct. Yes, I stand in the middle of the precinct near your Aphrodite and your Eros too. And do not begrudge me this honour. For it is Praxiteles that people praise when they have gazed at me; and it is because I am a product of your skill that the Thespians do not count me unfit to be placed between gods. One thing only is still lacking to your gift: that you come to me, so that we may lie together in the precinct. Surely we shall bring no defilement to the gods that we ourselves have created. Farewell’. Alciphron is mentioned at i 381. The most important parallels in B., among his numerous works dealing with art and artists, are Old Pictures (p. 404) and James Lee viii (‘Beside the Drawing-Board’, p. 680).
(4) Episode 3: Luigi and his mother (ii 244 to iii 225).
(a) Historical background for the assassination plot. See p. 83 above. B.’s detailed allusions to political conditions in Lombardy-Venetia (e.g. the presence of Austrian police, employment of spies, censorship, restriction on travel) are glossed in the notes. There was widespread sympathy for Italian nationalism in Britain, stimulated by successive waves of refugees from political repression. (B.’s Italian tutor, Angelo Cerutti, was himself such a refugee.) B.’s interest in the subject is already present in Sordello, where the Guelf—Ghibellin struggle parallels the modern struggle against Austria. It is the subject of Italy in England (p. 245), and features in Old Pictures (p. 404) and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871); see also Up at a Villa 44–6 (III 147) and De Gustibus 33–8 (III 27–8). The attempted assassination of a reactionary Italian ruler is the subject of A Soul’s Tragedy (II 180). For B.’s sympathy with English Radicalism, see iii 163–224n.
(b) Literary sources. B.’s conception of the Austrian Emperor’s court, and the kind of assassination plot that Luigi outlines, seem to have been influenced by Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, notably Webster, whose work B. knew well. There are also reminiscences of Julius Caesar (the justice of political killing) and of Coriolanus (a mother persuading her son against his sense of duty). See also ii 47–9n. The major literary influence comes from Talfourd’s Ion (see above, p. 85). Luigi’s argument with his mother about the morality and expediency of assassination parallels that in Ion I ii between Ion and Clemanthe, his betrothed.
(5) Episode 4: Monsignor and the Intendant (iv 1–341). The plot to deprive Pippa of her inheritance by seducing her and forcing her into prostitution has clear affinities with Pericles. The confrontation between Monsignor and the Intendant is paralleled in B. by that between Ogniben and Chiappino at the end of A Soul’s Tragedy, and in another way by that between the Pope and an imaginary ‘educated man’ in bk. x of Ring.
Criticism
B. wrote to Monclar on 29 Apr. 1841: ‘c’est un effort pour contenter presque tout le monde, et vous savez comme cela réussit ordinairement’ [it is an attempt to please practically everybody, and you know what kind of success that normally has] (Correspondence v 39). His prediction was accurate: Pippa Passes had a mixed reception. As with Sordello, most critics objected to the play as obscure, esp. Intro and pt. ii, but its central conception was praised: ‘The idea of this little drama is, in itself, we think, remarkably beautiful’ (Athenaeum, 11 Dec. 1841, 952; repr. Correspondence v 399). After 1849, the play became, as one reviewer put it, ‘held as set apart and sacred in the mind of any reader’ (Moncure Conway in Victoria Magazine ii [Feb. 1864] 309); writing in 1890, Edmund Gosse claimed that ‘the public was first won to Mr. Browning by Pippa Passes’ (Personalia 55). This process is mirrored in the reaction of EBB. Her first response, in a letter to Mary Russell Mitford (15 July 1841), was that ‘ “Pippa passes” . . comprehension, I was going to say!’ and, while admitting ‘the presence of genius’ she asked ‘Was there any need for so much coarseness?’ (Correspondence v 75); but in a letter of 20 Jan. 1842 she objected to an adverse review (ibid. v 221), and on 19 Oct. she praised the poem’s ‘unity & nobleness of conception’ (ibid. vi 111). An early letter to B. (17 Feb. 1845) confirmed the change of heart: ‘You have taken a great range—from those high faint notes of the mystics which are beyond personality . . to dramatic impersonations, gruff with nature, “gr-r-you swine”: & when these are thrown into harmony, as in a manner they are in “Pippa Passes” (which I could find it in my heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of your works,—) the combinations of effects must always be striking & noble’ (Correspondence x 79). B. told her ‘I like “Pippa” better than anything else I have done yet’ (26 Feb. 1845, ibid. 99). However, it seems likely that, as with Sordello (see headnote, I 354), she encouraged B. to remove obscurities by revision, and perhaps to mitigate the ‘coarseness’ of which she had complained to Miss Mitford. One of B.’s close friends, Eliza Flower, gave a strongly adverse reaction in a letter to her friend Miss Bromley: ‘I send you Bells and Pomegranates [i.e. Pippa], not because you will like it any more than I do, but because you won’t like it any less than I do. It is just like his way. This time he has got an exquisite subject, most exquisite, and it seemed so easy for a poet to handle. Yet here comes one of those fatal ifs, the egoism of the man, and the pity of it. He cannot metempsychose with his creatures, they are so many Robert Brownings. Still there are superb parts, and the very last is quite lovely. But puppets, what a false word to use, as if God worked by puppets as well as Robert Browning!’ (quoted in Garnett, Life of W. J. Fox [1909] 194; for the ‘puppets’, see Intro 152).
Synopsis
In the introductory section, Pippa, an orphan girl who works in a silk factory in Asolo, decides to spend her one day’s holiday of the year ‘passing’ by the four people whom she regards as the most fortunate in Asolo. Ottima is the wife of Pippa’s employer, the old and wealthy Luca Gaddi, and has a young lover, Sebald. Jules, a young sculptor, is about to marry the beautiful Phene. Luigi is blessed by the tranquil love between himself and his mother. The holy Monsignor, visiting Asolo from Rome after the death of his brother, is happy in the love of God. In four scenes, interspersed with interludes of ‘talk by the way’, Pippa passes by each in turn, unconscious of the fact that their situations are the reverse of happy, and that each is facing a climactic moment of moral choice. As she passes, she sings a song which they hear, and which, unknown to her, radically affects the choices they make. The last of these episodes concerns her own fate. Still unaware of the effect of her passing, Pippa returns to her room in the final scene of the drama.
New Year’s Day at Asolo in the Trevisan. A large, mean, airy Chamber. A girl, Pippa, from the silk-mills, springing out of bed.
Day!
Faster and more fast
O’er night’s brim day boils at last;
Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim
5 Where spurting and supprest it lay—
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of eastern cloud an hour away—
But forth one wavelet then another curled,
10 Till the whole sunrise, not to be supprest,
Rose-reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
Day, if I waste a wavelet of thee,
Aught of my twelve-hours’ treasure—
15 One of thy gazes, one of thy glances,
(Grants thou art bound to, gifts above measure,)
One of thy choices, one of thy chances,
(Tasks God imposed thee, freaks at thy pleasure,)
Day, if I waste such labour or leisure
20 Shame betide Asolo, mischief to me!
But in turn, Day, treat me not
As happy tribes—so happy tribes! who live
At hand—the common, other creatures’ lot—
Ready to take when thou wilt give,
25 Prepared to pass what thou refusest;
Day, ’tis but Pippa thou ill-usest
If thou prove sullen, me, whose old year’s sorrow
Who except thee can chase before to-morrow,
Seest thou, my day? Pippa’s—who mean to borrow
30 Only of thee strength against new year’s sorrow:
For let thy morning scowl on that superb
Great haughty Ottima—can scowl disturb
Her Sebald’s homage? And if noon shed gloom
O’er Jules and Phene—what care bride and groom
35 Save for their dear selves? Then, obscure thy eve
With mist—will Luigi and Madonna grieve
—The mother and the child—unmatched, forsooth,
She in her age as Luigi in his youth,
For true content? And once again, outbreak
40 In storm at night on Monsignor they make
Such stir to-day about, who foregoes Rome
To visit Asolo, his brother’s home,
And say there masses proper to release
The soul from pain—what storm dares hurt that peace?
45 But Pippa—just one such mischance would spoil,
Bethink thee, utterly next twelvemonth’s toil
At wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil!
And here am I letting time slip for nought!
You fool-hardy sunbeam—caught
50 With a single splash from my ewer!
You that mocked the best pursuer,
Was my basin over-deep?
One splash of water ruins you asleep
And up, up, fleet your brilliant bits
55 Wheeling and counterwheeling,
Reeling, crippled beyond healing—
Grow together on the ceiling,
That will task your wits!
Whoever it was first quenched fire hoped to see
60 Morsel after morsel flee
As merrily,
As giddily … what lights he on—
Where settles himself the cripple?
Oh never surely blown, my martagon?
65 New-blown, though!—ruddy as a nipple,
Plump as the flesh bunch on some Turk bird’s poll!
Be sure if corals, branching ’neath the ripple
Of ocean, bud there,—fairies watch unroll
Such turban flowers . . I say, such lamps disperse
70 Thick red flame thro’ that dusk green universe!
Queen of thee, floweret,
Each fleshy blossom
Keep I not, safer
Than leaves that embower it
75 Or shells that embosom,
From weevil and chafer?
Laugh thro’ my pane then, solicit the bee,
Gibe him, be sure, and in midst of thy glee
Worship me!
80 Worship whom else? for am I not this Day
Whate’er I please? Who shall I seem to-day?
Morn, Noon, Eve, Night—how must I spend my Day?
Up the hill-side, thro’ the morning,
Love me as I love!
And the gardens, and stone house above,
And other house for shrubs, all glass in front,
Are mine, and Sebald steals as he is wont
To court me, and old Luca yet reposes,
90 And therefore till the shrub-house door uncloses
I … what now? give abundant cause for prate
Of me (that’s Ottima)—too bold of late,
By far too confident she’ll still face down
The spitefullest of talkers in our town—
95 How we talk in the little town below!
But love, love, love, there’s better love I know!
This love’s only day’s first offer—
Next love shall defy the scoffer:
For do not bride and bridegroom sally
100 Out of Possagno church at noon?
Their house looks over Orcana valley—
Why not be the bride as soon
As Ottima? I saw, myself, beside,
Arrive last night that bride—
105 Saw, if you call it seeing her, one flash
Of the pale snow-pure cheek and blacker tresses
Than … not the black eyelash;
A wonder she contrives those lids no dresses
—So strict was she the veil
110 Should cover close her pale
Pure cheeks—a bride to look at and scarce touch,
Remember Jules!—for are not such
Used to be tended, flower-like, every feature,
As if one’s breath would fray the lily of a creature?
115 Oh, save that brow its virgin dimness,
Keep that foot its lady primness,
Let those ancles never swerve
From their exquisite reserve,
Yet have to trip along the streets like me
120 All but naked to the knee!
How will she ever grant her Jules a bliss
So startling as her real first infant kiss?
Oh—no—not envy this!
Not envy sure, for, if you gave me
125 Leave to take or to refuse
In earnest, do you think I’d choose
That sort of new love to enslave me?
Mine should have lapped me round from the beginning;
As little fear of losing it as winning—
130 Why look you! when at eve the pair
Commune inside our turret, what prevents
My being Luigi?—While that mossy lair
Of lizards thro’ the winter-time, is stirred
With each to each imparting sweet intents
135 For this new year, as brooding bird to bird—
I will be cared about, kept out of harm
And schemed for, safe in love as with a charm,
I will be Luigi … if I only knew
What was my father like … my mother too!
140 Nay, if you come to that, the greatest love of all
Is God’s: well then, to have God’s love befall
Oneself as in the palace by the dome
Where Monsignor to-night will bless the home
Of his dead brother! I, to-night at least,
145 Will be that holy and beloved priest.
Now wait—even I myself already ought to share
In that—why else should new year’s hymn declare
All service ranks the same with God:
150 Paradise, God’s presence fills
Our earth, and each but as God wills
Can work—God’s puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last nor first.
Say not, a small event! Why small?
155 Costs it more pain this thing ye call
A great event should come to pass
Than that? Untwine me, from the mass
Of deeds that make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!
160 And more of it, and more of it—oh, yes!
So that my passing, and each happiness
I pass, will be alike important—prove
That true! oh yes—the brother,
The bride, the lover, and the mother,—
165 Only to pass whom will remove—
Whom a mere look at half will cure
The Past, and help me to endure
The Coming … I am just as great, no doubt,
As they!
170 A pretty thing to care about
So mightily—this single holiday!
Why repine?
With thee to lead me, Day of mine,
Down the grass path gray with dew,
175 ’Neath the pine-wood, blind with boughs,
Where the swallow never flew
As yet, nor cicale dared carouse:
No, dared carouse!
[She enters the Street.
I.—Morning. Up the Hill-side. The Shrub House. Luca’s Wife Ottima, and her Paramour the German Sebald.
Sebald. [Sings] Let the watching lids wink!
Day’s a-blaze with eyes, think,—
Deep into the night drink!
Ottima. Night? What, a Rhineland night, then?
How these tall
5 Naked geraniums straggle! Push the lattice—
Behind that frame.—Nay, do I bid you?—Sebald,
It shakes the dust down on me! Why, of course
The slide-bolt catches—Well, are you content,
Or must I find you something else to spoil?
10 Kiss and be friends, my Sebald. Is it full morning?
Oh, don’t speak then!
Sebald. Ay, thus it used to be!
Ever your house was, I remember, shut
Till mid-day—I observed that, as I strolled
On mornings thro’ the vale here: country girls
15 Were noisy, washing garments in the brook—
Herds drove the slow white oxen up the hills—
But no, your house was mute, would ope no eye—
And wisely—you were plotting one thing there,
Nature another outside: I looked up—
20 Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars,
Silent as death, blind in a flood of light,
Oh, I remember!—and the peasants laughed
And said, “The old man sleeps with the young wife!”
This house was his, this chair, this window—his.
25 Ottima. Ah, the clear morning! I can see St.
Mark’s:
That black streak is the belfry—stop: Vicenza
Should lie—there’s Padua, plain enough, that blue.
Look o’er my shoulder—follow my finger—
Sebald. Morning?
It seems to me a night with a sun added:
30 Where’s dew? where’s freshness? That bruised plant
I bruised
In getting thro’ the lattice yestereve,
Droops as it did. See, here’s my elbow’s mark
In the dust on the sill.
Ottima. Oh shut the lattice, pray!
Sebald. Let me lean out. I cannot scent blood here
Foul as the morn may be—
35 There, shut the world out!
How do you feel now, Ottima? There—curse
The world, and all outside! Let us throw off
This mask: how do you bear yourself ? Let’s out
With all of it!
Ottima. Best never speak of it.
40 Sebald. Best speak again and yet again of it,
Till words cease to be more than words. “His blood,”
For instance—let those two words mean “His blood”
And nothing more. Notice—I’ll say them now,
“His blood.”
Ottima. Assuredly if I repented
The deed—
45 Sebald. Repent? who should repent, or why?
What puts that in your head? Did I once say
That I repented?
Ottima. No—I said the deed—
Sebald. “The deed” and “the event”—and just now it was
“Our passion’s fruit”—the devil take such cant!
50 Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol,
I am his cut-throat, you are—
Ottima. Here is the wine—
I brought it when we left the house above—
And glasses too—wine of both sorts. Black? white, then?
Sebald. But am not I his cut-throat? What are you?
55 Ottima. There trudges on his business from the Duomo,
Benet the Capuchin, with his brown hood
And bare feet—always in one place at church,
Close under the stone wall by the south entry;
I used to take him for a brown cold piece
60 Of the wall’s self, as out of it he rose
To let me pass—at first, I say, I used—
Now—so has that dumb figure fastened on me—
I rather should account the plastered wall
A piece of him, so chilly does it strike.
This, Sebald?
65 Sebald. No—the white wine—the white wine!
Well, Ottima, I promised no new year
Should rise on us the ancient shameful way,
Nor does it rise—pour on—To your black eyes!
Do you remember last damned New Year’s day?
70 Ottima. You brought those foreign prints.
We looked at them
Over the wine and fruit. I had to scheme
To get him from the fire. Nothing but saying
His own set wants the proof-mark roused him up
To hunt them out.
Sebald. Faith, he is not alive
To fondle you before my face.
75 Ottima. Do you
Fondle me then: who means to take your life
For that, my Sebald?
Sebald. Hark you, Ottima,
One thing’s to guard against. We’ll not make much
One of the other—that is, not make more
80 Parade of warmth, childish officious coil,
Than yesterday—as if, sweet, I supposed
Proof upon proof was needed now, now first,
To show I love you—still love you—love you
In spite of Luca and what’s come to him.
85 —Sure sign we had him ever in our thoughts,
White sneering old reproachful face and all—
We’ll even quarrel, love, at times, as if
We still could lose each other—were not tied
By this—conceive you?
Ottima. Love—
Sebald. Not tied so sure—
90 Because tho’ I was wrought upon—have struck
His insolence back into him—am I
So surely yours?—therefore, forever yours?
Ottima. Love, to be wise, (one counsel pays another)
Should we have—months ago—when first we loved,
95 For instance that May morning we two stole
Under the green ascent of sycamores—
If we had come upon a thing like that
Suddenly—
Sebald. “A thing” . . there again—“a thing!”
Ottima. Then, Venus’ body, had we come upon
100 My husband Luca Gaddi’s murdered corpse
Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close—
Would you have pored upon it? Why persist
In poring now upon it? For ’tis here—
As much as there in the deserted house—
105 You cannot rid your eyes of it: for me,
Now he is dead I hate him worse—I hate—
Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold
His two dead hands, and say, I hate you worse
Luca, than—
Sebald. Off, off; take your hands off mine!
110 ’Tis the hot evening—off! oh, morning, is it?
Ottima. There’s one thing must be done—you know what thing.
Come in and help to carry. We may sleep
Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night.
Sebald. What would come, think you, if we let him lie
115 Just as he is? Let him lie there until
The angels take him: he is turned by this
Off from his face, beside, as you will see.
Ottima. This dusty pane might serve for looking-glass.
Three, four—four grey hairs! is it so you said
120 A plait of hair should wave across my neck?
No—this way!
Sebald. Ottima, I would give your neck,
Each splendid shoulder, both those breasts of yours,
This were undone! Killing?—Let the world die
So Luca lives again!—Ay, lives to sputter
125 His fulsome dotage on you—yes, and feign
Surprise that I returned at eve to sup,
When all the morning I was loitering here—
Bid me dispatch my business and begone.
I would—
Ottima.See!
Sebald. No, I’ll finish. Do you think
130 I fear to speak the bare truth once for all?
All we have talked of is at bottom fine
To suffer—there’s a recompense in that:
One must be venturous and fortunate—
What is one young for else? In age we’ll sigh
135 O’er the wild, reckless, wicked days flown over:
But to have eaten Luca’s bread—have worn
His clothes, have felt his money swell my purse—
Why, I was starving when I used to call
And teach you music—starving while you pluck’d
Me flowers to smell!
Ottima. My poor lost friend!
140 Sebald. He gave me
Life—nothing less: what if he did reproach
My perfidy, and threaten, and do more—
Had he no right? What was to wonder at?
Why must you lean across till our cheeks touch’d?
145 Could he do less than make pretence to strike me?
’Tis not the crime’s sake—I’d commit ten crimes
Greater, to have this crime wiped out—undone!
And you—O, how feel you? feel you for me?
Ottima. Well, then—I love you better now than ever—
150 And best (look at me while I speak to you)—
Best for the crime—nor do I grieve in truth
This mask, this simulated ignorance,
This affectation of simplicity
Falls off our crime; this naked crime of ours
155 May not be looked over—look it down, then!
Great? let it be great—but the joys it brought
Pay they or no its price? Come—they or it!
Speak not! The past, would you give up the past
Such as it is, pleasure and crime together?
160 Give up that noon I owned my love for you—
The garden’s silence—even the single bee
Persisting in his toil, suddenly stopt
And where he hid you only could surmise
By some campanula’s chalice set a-swing
As he clung there—“Yes, I love you.”
165 Sebald. And I drew
Back: put far back your face with both my hands
Lest you should grow too full of me—your face
So seemed athirst for my whole soul and body!
Ottima. And when I ventured to receive you here,
Made you steal hither in the mornings—
170 Sebald. When
I used to look up ’neath the shrub-house here
Till the red fire on its glazed windows spread
Into a yellow haze?
Ottima. Ah—my sign was, the sun
Inflamed the sere side of yon chestnut-tree
Nipt by the first frost—
175 Sebald. You would always laugh
At my wet boots—I had to stride thro’ grass
Over my ancles.
Ottima. Then our crowning night—
Sebald. The July night?
Ottima. The day of it too, Sebald!
When heaven’s pillars seemed o’erbowed with heat,
180 Its black-blue canopy seemed let descend
Close on us both, to weigh down each to each,
And smother up all life except our life.
So lay we till the storm came.
Sebald. How it came!
Ottima. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
185 Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt thro’ the pine-tree roof—here burnt and there,
As if God’s messenger thro’ the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
190 Feeling for guilty thee and me—then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead—
Sebald. Yes.
Ottima. While I stretched myself upon you, hands
To hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook
All my locks loose, and covered you with them.
You, Sebald, the same you—
195 Sebald.
Ottima. And as we lay—
Sebald. Less vehemently—Love me—
Forgive me—take not words—mere words—to heart—
Your breath is worse than wine—breathe slow, speak slow—
Do not lean on me—
Ottima. Sebald, as we lay,
200 Rising and falling only with our pants,
Who said, “Let death come now—’tis right to die!
Right to be punished—nought completes such bliss
But woe!” Who said that?
Sebald. How did we ever rise?
Was’t that we slept? Why did it end?
Ottima. I felt
205 You tapering to a point the ruffled ends
Of my loose locks ’twixt both your humid lips—
(My hair is fallen now—knot it again).
Sebald. I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now;
This way? will you forgive me—be once more
My great queen?
210 Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow;
Crown me your queen, your spirit’s arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!
Sebald I crown you
My great white queen, my spirit’s arbitress,
Magnificent—
215 [Without] The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn:
The hill-side’s dew-pearled:
The lark’s on the wing,
220 The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven—
All’s right with the world!
[Pippa passes.
Sebald. God’s in his heaven! Do you hear that? Who spoke?
You, you spoke!
Ottima. Oh—that little ragged girl:
225 She must have rested on the step—we give
Them but one holiday the whole year round—
Did you e’er see our silk-mills—their inside?
There are ten silk-mills now belong to you.
She stops to pick my double heartsease … Sh!
She does not hear—you call out louder!
230 Sebald. Leave me!
Go, get your clothes on—dress those shoulders.
Ottima. Sebald?
Sebald. Wipe off that paint. I hate you!
Ottima. Miserable!
Sebald. My God! and she is emptied of it now!
Outright now!—how miraculously gone
235 All of the grace—had she not strange grace once?
Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes,
No purpose holds the features up together,
Only the cloven brow and puckered chin
Stay in their places—and the very hair,
240 That seemed to have a sort of life in it,
Drops a dead web!
Ottima. Speak to me—not of me!
Sebald. That round great full orbed face, where not an angle
Broke the delicious indolence—all broken!
Ottima. Ungrateful—to me—not of me—perjured cheat—
245 A coward too—but ingrate’s worse than all:
Beggar—my slave—a fawning, cringing lie!
Leave me!—betray me!—I can see your drift—
A lie that walks, and eats, and drinks!
Sebald. My God!
Those morbid, olive, faultless shoulder-blades—
250 I should have known there was no blood beneath!
Ottima. You hate me, then? you hate me then?
Sebald. To think
She would succeed in her absurd attempt
And fascinate with sin! and show herself
Superior—Guilt from its excess, superior
255 To Innocence. That little peasant’s voice
Has righted all again. Though I be lost,
I know which is the better, never fear,
Of vice or virtue, purity or lust,
Nature, or trick—I see what I have done
260 Entirely now. Oh, I am proud to feel
Such torments—let the world take credit that
I, having done my deed, pay too its price!
I hate, hate—curse you! God’s in his heaven!
Ottima. Me!
Me! no, no Sebald—not yourself—kill me!
265 Mine is the whole crime—do but kill me—then
Yourself—then—presently—first hear me speak—
I always meant to kill myself—wait you!
Lean on my breast . . not as a breast; don’t love me
The more because you lean on me, my own
270 Heart’s Sebald. There—there—both deaths presently!
Sebald. My brain is drowned now—quite drowned: all I feel
Is … is at swift-recurring intervals,
A hurrying-down within me, as of waters
Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit—
275 There they go—whirls from a black, fiery sea.
Ottima. Not me—to him oh God be merciful!
Talk by the way in the mean time. Foreign Students of Painting and Sculpture, from Venice, assembled opposite the house of Jules, a young French Statuary.
1 Student. Attention: my own post is beneath this window,
but the pomegranate-clump yonder will hide three or
four of you with a little squeezing, and Schramm and his
280 pipe must lie flat in the balcony. Four, five—who’s a
defaulter? Jules must not be suffered to hurt his bride.
2 Student. The poet’s away—never having much meant
to be here, moonstrike him! He was in love with himself,
and had a fair prospect of thriving in his suit, when suddenly
285 a woman fell in love with him too, and out of pure
jealousy, he takes himself off to Trieste, immortal poem and
all—whereto is this prophetical epitaph appended already,
as Bluphocks assured me:—“The author on the author. Here
so and so, the mammoth, lies, Fouled to death by butterflies.”
290 His own fault, the simpleton! Instead of cramp couplets,
each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says
Bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly.—Aesculapius, an
epic. Catalogue of the drugs:—Hebe’s plaister—One strip Cools
your lip; Phoebus’ emulsion—One bottle Clears your throttle;
295 Mercury’s bolus—One box Cures …
3 Student. Subside, my fine fellow; if the marriage was
over by ten o’clock, Jules will certainly be here in a minute
with his bride.
2 Student. So should the poet’s muse have been acceptable,
300 says Bluphocks, and Delia not better known to our dogs than
the boy.
1 Student. To the point, now. Where’s Gottlieb? Oh,
listen, Gottlieb—What called down this piece of friendly
vengeance on Jules, of which we now assemble to witness
305 the winding-up. We are all in a tale, observe, when Jules
bursts out on us by and bye: I shall be spokesman, but each
professes himself alike insulted by this strutting stone-
squarer, who came singly from Paris to Munich, thence with
a crowd of us to Venice and Possagno here, but proceeds in
310 a day or two alone,—oh! alone, indubitably—to Rome
and Florence. He take up his portion with these dissolute,
brutalized, heartless bunglers! (Is Schramm brutalized? Am
I heartless?)
Gottlieb. Why, somewhat heartless; for, coxcomb as much
315 as you choose, you will have brushed off—what do folks
style it?—the bloom of his life. Is it too late to alter? These
letters, now, you call his. I can’t laugh at them.
4 Student. Because you never read the sham letters of our
inditing which drew forth these.
320 Gottlieb. His discovery of the truth will be frightful.
4 Student. That’s the joke. But you should have joined us
at the beginning; there’s no doubt he loves the girl.
Gottlieb. See here: “He has been accustomed,” he writes, “to have Canova’s women about him, in stone, and the world’s
325 women beside him, in flesh, these being as much below,
as those above, his soul’s aspiration; but now he is to have”
… There you laugh again! You wipe off the very dew of
his youth.
1 Student. Schramm (take the pipe out of his mouth,
330 somebody), will Jules lose the bloom of his youth?
Schramm. Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this
world: look at a blossom—it drops presently and fruits
succeed; as well affirm that your eye is no longer in your
body because its earliest favourite is dead and done with,
335 as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first object
is superseded in due course. Has a man done wondering
at women? There follow men, dead and alive, to wonder
at. Has he done wondering at men? There’s God to
wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be at the same
340 time grey enough with respect to its last object, and yet
green sufficiently so far as concerns its novel one:
thus …
1 Student. Put Schramm’s pipe into his mouth again—There
you see! well, this Jules . . a wretched fribble—oh, I
345 watched his disportings at Possagno the other day! The Model-
Gallery—you know: he marches first resolvedly past great
works by the dozen without vouchsafing an eye: all at once
he stops full at the Psiche-fanciulla—cannot pass that old
acquaintance without a nod of encouragement—“In your
350 new place, beauty? Then behave yourself as well here as at
Munich—I see you!”—Next posts himself deliberately
before the unfinished Pietà for half an hour without moving,
till up he starts of a sudden and thrusts his very nose
into . . I say into—the group—by which you are informed
355 that precisely the sole point he had not fully mastered in
Canova was a certain method of using the drill in the articulation
of the knee-joint—and that, even, has he mastered
at length! Good bye, therefore, to Canova—whose gallery
no longer contains Jules, the predestinated thinker in
360 marble!
5 Student. Tell him about the women—go on to the
women.
1 Student. Why, on that matter he could never be supercilious
enough. How should we be other than the poor
365 devils you see, with those debasing habits we cherish?
He was not to wallow in that mire, at least: he would love
at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with the Psichefanciulla.
Now I happened to hear of a young Greek—real
Greek girl at Malamocco, a true Islander, do you see, with
370 Alciphron hair like sea-moss—you know! White and quiet
as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest;
daughter, so she swears, of that hag Natalia, who helps us
to models at three lire an hour. So first Jules received a scented
letter—somebody had seen his Tydeus at the Academy, and
375 my picture was nothing to it—bade him persevere—would
make herself known to him ere long—(Paolina, my little
friend, transcribes divinely.) Now think of Jules finding
himself distinguished from the herd of us by such a creature!
In his very first answer he proposed marrying his
380 monitress; and fancy us over these letters two, three times a
day to receive and dispatch! I concocted the main of it:
relations were in the way—secrecy must be observed—
would he wed her on trust and only speak to her when they
were indissolubly united? St—St!
385 6 Student. Both of them! Heaven’s love, speak softly!
speak within yourselves!
5 Student. Look at the Bridegroom—half his hair in
storm and half in calm—patted down over the left temple,
like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old
390 blouse he murders the marble in!
2 Student. Not a rich vest like yours, Hannibal Scratchy,
rich that your face may the better set it off.
6 Student. And the bride—and the bride—how magnificently
pale!
395 Gottlieb. She does not also take it for earnest, I hope?
1 Student. Oh, Natalia’s concern, that is; we settle with
Natalia.
6 Student. She does not speak—has evidently let out
no word.
400 Gottlieb. How he gazes on her!
1 Student. They go in—now, silence!
II.—Noon. Over Orcana. The House of Jules, who crosses its threshold with Phene—she is silent, on which Jules begins—
Do not die, Phene—I am yours now—you
Are mine now—let fate reach me how she likes
If you’ll not die—so never die! Sit here—
My work-room’s single seat—I do lean over
5 This length of hair and lustrous front—they turn
Like an entire flower upward—eyes—lips—last
Your chin—no, last your throat turns—’tis their scent
Pulls down my face upon you. Nay, look ever
That one way till I change, grow you—I could
Change into you, beloved!
10 Thou by me
And I by thee—this is thy hand in mine—
And side by side we sit—all’s true. Thank God!
I have spoken—speak thou!
—O, my life to come!
My Tydeus must be carved that’s there in clay,
15 And how be carved with you about the chamber?
Where must I place you? When I think that once
This room-full of rough block-work seemed my heaven
Without you! Shall I ever work again—
Get fairly into my old ways again—
20 Bid each conception stand while trait by trait
My hand transfers its lineaments to stone?
Will they, my fancies, live near you, my truth—
The live truth—passing and repassing me—
Sitting beside me?
Now speak!
Only, first,
25 Your letters to me—was’t not well contrived?
A hiding-place in Psyche’s robe—there lie
Next to her skin your letters: which comes foremost?
Good—this that swam down like a first moonbeam
Into my world.
Those? Books I told you of.
30 Let your first word to me rejoice them, too,—
This minion of Coluthus, writ in red
Bistre and azure by Bessarion’s scribe—
Read this line . . no, shame—Homer’s be the Greek!
My Odyssey in coarse black vivid type
35 With faded yellow blossoms ’twixt page and page;
“He said, and on Antinous directed
A bitter shaft”—then blots a flower the rest!
—Ah, do not mind that—better that will look
When cast in bronze . . an Almaign Kaiser that,
40 Swart-green and gold with truncheon based on hip—
This rather, turn to . . but a check already—
Or you had recognized that here you sit
As I imagined you, Hippolyta
Naked upon her bright Numidian horse!
45 —Forget you this then? “carve in bold relief” …
So you command me—“carve against I come
A Greek, bay-filleted and thunder-free,
Rising beneath the lifted myrtle-branch,
Whose turn arrives to praise Harmodius.”—Praise him!
50 Quite round, a cluster of mere hands and arms
Thrust in all senses, all ways, from all sides,
Only consenting at the branch’s end
They strain towards, serves for frame to a sole face—
(Place your own face)—the Praiser’s, who with eyes
55 Sightless, so bend they back to light inside
His brain where visionary forms throng up,
(Gaze—I am your Harmodius dead and gone,)
Sings, minding nor the palpitating arch
Of hands and arms, nor the quick drip of wine
60 From the drenched leaves o’erhead, nor who cast off
Their violet crowns for him to trample on—
Sings, pausing as the patron-ghosts approve,
Devoutly their unconquerable hymn—
But you must say a “well” to that—say “well”
65 Because you gaze—am I fantastic, sweet?
Gaze like my very life’s-stuff, marble—marbly
Even to the silence—and before I found
The real flesh Phene, I inured myself
To see throughout all nature varied stuff
70 For better nature’s birth by means of art:
With me, each substance tended to one form
Of beauty—to the human Archetype—
And every side occurred suggestive germs
Of that—the tree, the flower—why, take the fruit,
75 Some rosy shape, continuing the peach,
Curved beewise o’er its bough, as rosy limbs
Depending nestled in the leaves—and just
From a cleft rose-peach the whole Dryad sprung!
But of the stuffs one can be master of,
80 How I divined their capabilities
From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk
That yields your outline to the air’s embrace,
Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure
To cut its one confided thought clean out
85 Of all the world: but marble!—’neath my tools
More pliable than jelly—as it were
Some clear primordial creature dug from deep
In the Earth’s heart where itself breeds itself
And whence all baser substance may be worked;
90 Refine it off to air you may—condense it
Down to the diamond;—is not metal there
When o’er the sudden specks my chisel trips?
—Not flesh—as flake off flake I scale, approach,
Lay bare those blueish veins of blood asleep?
95 Lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised
By the swift implement sent home at once,
Flushes and glowings radiate and hover
About its track?—
Phene? what—why is this?
Ah, you will die—I knew that you would die!
Phene begins, on his having long remained silent.
100 Now the end’s coming—to be sure it must
Have ended sometime!—Tush—I will not speak
Their foolish speech—I cannot bring to mind
Half—so the whole were best unsaid—what care
I for Natalia now, or all of them?
105 Oh, you . . what are you?—I do not attempt
To say the words Natalia bade me learn
To please your friends, that I may keep myself
Where your voice lifted me—by letting you
Proceed . . but can you?—even you perhaps
110 Cannot take up, now you have once let fall,
The music’s life, and me along with it?
No—or you would . . we’ll stay then as we are
Above the world—
Now you sink—for your eyes
Are altered . . altering—stay—“I love you, love you,”—
115 I could prevent it if I understood
More of your words to me . . was’t in the tone
Of the voice, your power?
Stay, stay, I will repeat
Their speech, if that affects you! only change
No more and I shall find it presently—
120 Far back here in the brain yourself filled up:
Natalia said (like Lutwyche) harm would follow
Unless I spoke their lesson to the end,
But harm to me, I thought, not you: and so
I’ll speak it,—“Do not die, Phene, I am yours” . .
125 Stop—is not that, or like that, part of what
You spoke? ’Tis not my fault—that I should lose
What cost such pains acquiring! is this right?
The Bard said, do one thing I can—
Love a man and hate a man
130 Supremely: thus my lore began.
Thro’ the Valley of Love I went,
In its lovingest spot to abide;
And just on the verge where I pitched my tent
Dwelt Hate beside—
135 (And the bridegroom asked what the bard’s smile meant
Of his bride.)
Next Hate I traversed, the Grove,
In its hatefullest nook to dwell—
And lo, where I flung myself prone, couched Love
140 Next cell.
(For not I, said the bard, but those black bride’s eyes above
Should tell!)
(Then Lutwyche said you probably would ask,
“You have black eyes, love,—you are sure enough
145 My beautiful bride—do you, as he sings, tell
What needs some exposition—what is this?”
… And I am to go on, without a word,)
Once when I loved I would enlace
Breast, eyelids, hands, feet, form and face
150 Of her I loved in one embrace—
And, when I hated, I would plunge
My sword, and wipe with the first lunge
My foe’s whole life out like a spunge:
—But if I would love and hate more
155 Than ever man hated or loved before—
Would seek in the valley of Love
The spot, or in Hatred’s grove
The spot where my soul may reach
The essence, nought less, of each …
160 (Here he said, if you interrupted me
With, “There must be some error,—who induced you
To speak this jargon?”—I was to reply
Simply—“Await till … until . .” I must say
Last rhyme again—)
165 . . The essence, nought less, of each—
The Hate of all Hates, or the Love
Of all Loves in its glen or its grove,
—I find them the very warders
Each of the other’s borders.
170 So most I love when Love’s disguised
In Hate’s garb—’tis when Hate’s surprised
In Love’s weed that I hate most; ask
How Love can smile thro’ Hate’s barred iron casque,
Hate grin thro’ Love’s rose-braided mask,
175 Of thy bride, Giulio!
(Then you, “Oh, not mine—
Preserve the real name of the foolish song!”
But I must answer, “Giulio—Jules—’tis Jules!”)
Thus I, Jules, hating thee Sought long and painfully …
Jules interposes.
180 Lutwyche—who else? But all of them, no doubt,
Hated me—them at Venice—presently
For them, however! You I shall not meet—
If I dreamed, saying that would wake me. Keep
What’s here—this too—we cannot meet again
185 Consider—and the money was but meant
For two years’ travel, which is over now,
All chance, or hope, or care, or need of it!
This—and what comes from selling these—my casts
And books, and medals except … let them go
190 Together—so the produce keeps you safe
Out of Natalia’s clutches! If by chance
(For all’s chance here) I should survive the gang
At Venice, root out all fifteen of them,
We might meet somewhere since the world is wide.
1.
195 [Without] Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When—where—
How—can this arm establish her above me
If fortune fixed my lady there—
—There already, to eternally reprove me?
200 (Hist, said Kate the queen:
—Only a page who carols unseen
Crumbling your hounds their messes!)
2.
She’s wronged?—To the rescue of her honor,
My heart!
205 She’s poor?—What costs it to be styled a donor?
An earth’s to cleave, a sea’s to part!
—But that fortune should have thrust all this upon her!
(Nay, list, bade Kate the queen:
Only a page that carols unseen,
210 Fitting your hawks their jesses!)—
[Pippa passes.
Kate? Queen Cornaro doubtless, who renounced
Cyprus to live and die the lady here
At Asolo—and whosoever loves
Must be in some sort god or worshipper,
215 The blessing, or the blest one, queen or page—
I find myself queen here it seems!
How strange!
Shall to produce form out of shapelessness
Be art—and, further, to evoke a soul
From form be nothing? This new soul is mine—
220 Now to kill Lutwyche what would that do?—Save
A wretched dauber men will hoot to death
Without me.
To Ancona—Greece—some isle!
I wanted silence only—there is clay
Every where. One may do whate’er one likes
225 In Art—the only thing is, to be sure
That one does like it—which takes pains to know.
Scatter all this, my Phene—this mad dream!
Who—what is Lutwyche—what Natalia—
What the whole world except our love—my own
230 Own Phene? But I told you, did I not,
Ere night we travel for your land—some isle
With the sea’s silence on it? Stand aside—
I do but break these paltry models up
To begin art afresh. Shall I meet Lutwyche,
235 And save him from my statue’s meeting him?
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!
Like a god going thro’ his world I trace
One mountain for a moment in the dusk,
Whole brotherhoods of cedars on its brow—
240 And you are ever by me while I trace
—Are in my arms as now—as now—as now!
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!
Some unsuspected isle in far off seas!
Talk by the way in the mean time. Two or three of the Austrian Police loitering with Bluphocks, an English vagabond, just in view of the Turret.
Bluphocks.⋆ Oh! were but every worm a maggot, Every fly a grig,
245 Every bough a christmas faggot, Every tune a jig! In fact, I
have abjured all religions,—but the last I inclined to was
the Armenian—for I have travelled, do you see, and at
Koenigsberg, Prussia Improper (so styled because there’s a
sort of bleak hungry sun there,) you might remark over a
250 venerable house-porch, a certain Chaldee inscription; and
brief as it is, a mere glance at it used absolutely to change
the mood of every bearded passenger. In they turned, one
and all, the young and lightsome, with no irreverent pause,
the aged and decrepit, with a sensible alacrity,—’twas the
255 Grand Rabbi’s abode, in short. I lost no time in learning
Syriac—(vowels, you dogs, follow my stick’s end in the mud—
Celarent, Darii, Ferio! ) and one morning presented myself
spelling-book in hand, a, b, c,—what was the purport of
this miraculous posy? Some cherished legend of the past,
260 you’ll say—“How Moses hocus-pocust Egypt’s land with fly and
locust,”—or, “How to Jonah sounded harshish. Get thee up and
go to Tarshish,”—or, “How the angel meeting Balaam, Straight
his ass returned a salaam,”—in no wise! “Shackabrach—
Boach—somebody or other—Isaach, Re-cei-ver, Pur-cha-ser and
265 Ex-chan-ger of—Stolen goods.” So talk to me of obliging
a bishop! I have renounced all bishops save Bishop
Beveridge—mean to live so—and die—As some Greek dog-sage
dead and merry, Hellward bound in Charon’s ferry—With
food for both worlds, under and upper, Lupine-seed and Hecate’s
270 supper, And never an obolus . . (it might be got in somehow)
Tho’ Cerberus should gobble us—To pay the Stygian ferry—or
you might say, Never an obol To pay for the coble. … Though
thanks to you, or this Intendant thro’ you, or this Bishop
thro’ his Intendant—I possess a burning pocket-full of
275 zwanzigers.
1 Policeman. I have been noticing a house yonder this long
while—not a shutter unclosed since morning.
Policeman. Old Luca Gaddi’s, that owns the silk-mills
here: he dozes by the hour—wakes up, sighs deeply, says he
280 should like to be Prince Metternich, and then dozes again
after having bidden young Sebald, the foreigner, set his wife
to playing draughts: never molest such a household, they mean
well.
Bluphocks. Only tell me who this little Pippa is I must have
285 to do with—one could make something of that name.
Pippa—that is, short for Felippa—Panurge consults Hertrippa
—Believ’st thou, King Agrippa? Something might be done with
that name.
2 Policeman. Your head and a ripe musk-melon would not
290 be dear at half a zwanziger! Leave this fool, and look out—
the afternoon’s over or nearly so.
3 Policeman. Where in this passport of Signior Luigi does
the principal instruct you to watch him so narrowly?
There? what’s there beside a simple signature? That English
295 fool’s busy watching.
2 Policeman. Flourish all round—“put all possible
obstacles in his way;” oblong dot at the end—“Detain
him till further advices reach you;” scratch at bottom—
“send him back on pretence of some informality in the
300 above.” Ink-spirt on right-hand side, (which is the case here)—
“Arrest him at once,” why and wherefore, I don’t concern
myself, but my instructions amount to this: if Signior
Luigi leaves home to-night for Vienna, well and good—
the passport deposed with us for our visa is really for his
305 own use, they have misinformed the Office, and he means
well; but, let him stay over to-night—there has been the
pretence we suspect—the accounts of his corresponding
and holding intelligence with the Carbonari are correct
—we arrest him at once—to-morrow comes Venice—and
310 presently, Spielberg. Bluphocks makes the signal sure enough!
III.—Evening. Inside the Turret. Luigi and his Mother entering.
Mother. If there blew wind you’d hear a long sigh, easing
The utmost heaviness of music’s heart.
Luigi. Here in the archway?
Mother. Oh no, no—in further.
Where the echo is made—on the ridge.
Luigi. Here surely then!
5 How plain the tap of my heel as I leaped up:
Aristogeiton! “ristogeiton”—plain
Was’t not? Lucius Junius! The very ghost of a voice—
Whose flesh is caught and kept by those withered wall-flowers,
Or by the elvish group with thin bleached hair
10 Who lean out of their topmost fortress—look
And listen, mountain men and women, to what
We say—chins under each grave earthy face:
Up and show faces all of you!—“All of you!”
That’s the king with the scarlet comb: come down!—
“Come down.”
15 Mother. Do not kill that Man, my Luigi—do not
Go to the City! putting crime aside,
Half of these ills of Italy are feigned—
Your Pellicos and writers for effect
Write for effect.
20 Luigi. Hush! say A writes, and B.
Mother. These A’s and B’s write for effect I say.
Then evil is in its nature loud, while good
Is silent—you hear each petty injury—
None of his daily virtues; he is old,
Quiet, and kind, and densely stupid—why
Do A and B not kill him themselves?
Others to kill him—me—and if I fail
Others to succeed; now if A tried and failed
I could not do that: mine’s the lesser task.
Mother, they visit night by night …
Mother. You Luigi?
30 Ah will you let me tell you what you are?
Luigi. Why not? Oh the one thing you fear to hint
You may assure yourself I say and say
Often to myself; at times—nay, now—as now
We sit, I think my mind is touched—suspect
35 All is not sound—but is not knowing that
What constitutes one sane or otherwise?
I know I am thus—so all is right again!
I laugh at myself as thro’ the town I walk
And see the world merry as if no Italy
40 Were suffering—then I ponder—I am rich,
Young, healthy, happy, why should this fact trouble me …
More than it troubles these? But it does trouble me!
No—trouble’s a bad word—for as I walk
There’s springing and melody and giddiness,
45 And old quaint turns and passages of my youth—
Dreams long forgotten, little in themselves—
Return to me—whatever may recreate me,
And earth seems in a truce with me, and heaven
Accords with me, all things suspend their strife,
50 The very cicales laugh “There goes he and there—
“Feast him, the time is short—he is on his way
“For the world’s sake—feast him this once, our friend!”
And in return for all this, I can trip
Cheerfully up the scaffold-steps: I go
This evening, mother.
55 Mother. But mistrust yourself—
Mistrust the judgment you pronounce on him.
Luigi. Oh, there I feel—am sure that I am right.
Mother. Mistrust your judgment then of the mere means
Of this wild enterprise: say you are right,—
60 How should one in your state e’er bring to pass
What would require a cool head, a cold heart,
And a calm hand? you never will escape.
Luigi. Escape—to wish that even would spoil all!
The dying is best part of it—I have
65 Enjoyed these fifteen years of mine too much
To leave myself excuse for longer life—
Was not life pressed down, running o’er with joy,
That I might finish with it ere my fellows
Who sparelier feasted make a longer stay?
70 I was put at the board head, helped to all
At first: I rise up happy and content.
God must be glad one loves his world so much—
I can give news of earth to all the dead
Who ask me:—last year’s sunsets and great stars
75 That had a right to come first and see ebb
The crimson wave that drifts the sun away—
Those crescent moons with notched and burning rims
That strengthened into sharp fire and there stood
Impatient of the azure—and that day
80 In March a double rainbow stopped the storm—
May’s warm, slow, yellow moonlit summer nights—
Gone are they—but I have them in my soul!
Luigi. You smile at me—I know
Voluptuousness, grotesqueness, ghastliness
85 Environ my devotedness as quaintly
As round about some antique altar wreathe
The rose festoons, goats’ horns, and oxen’s skulls.
Mother. See now—you reach the city—you must cross
His threshold—how?
Luigi. Oh, that’s if we conspire!
90 Then come the pains in plenty you foresee
—Who guess not how the qualities required
For such an office—qualities I have—
Would little stead us otherwise employed,
Yet prove of rarest merit here—here only.
95 Every one knows for what his excellences
Will serve, but no one ever will consider
For what his worst defects might serve; and yet
Have you not seen me range our coppice yonder
In search of a distorted ash?—it happens
100 The wry spoilt branch’s a natural perfect bow:
Fancy the thrice sage, thrice precautioned man
Arriving at the city on my errand!
No, no—I have a handsome dress packed up—
White satin here to set off my black hair—
105 In I shall march—for you may watch your life out
Behind thick walls—binding friends to betray you;
More than one man spoils every thing—March straight—
Only no clumsy knife to fumble for—
Take the great gate, and walk (not saunter) on
110 Thro’ guards and guards—I have rehearsed it all
Inside the Turret here a hundred times—
Don’t ask the way of whom you meet, observe,
But where they cluster thickliest is the door
Of doors: they’ll let you pass . . they’ll never blab
115 Each to the other, he knows not the favourite,
Whence he is bound and what’s his business now—
Walk in—straight up to him—you have no knife—
Be prompt, how should he scream? Then, out with you!
Italy, Italy, my Italy!
120 You’re free, you’re free—Oh mother, I believed
They got about me—Andrea from his exile,
Pier from his dungeon, Gaultier from his grave!
Mother. Well you shall go. If patriotism were not
The easiest virtue for a selfish man
125 To acquire! he loves himself—and then, the world—
If he must love beyond, but nought between:
As a short-sighted man sees nought midway
His body and the sun above. But you
Are my adored Luigi—ever obedient
130 To my least wish, and running o’er with love—
I could not call you cruel or unkind!
Once more, your ground for killing him!—then go!
Luigi. Now do you ask me, or make sport of me?
How first the Austrians got these provinces—
135 (If that is all, I’ll satisfy you soon)
… Never by warfare but by treaty, for
That treaty whereby …
Mother. Well?
Luigi. (Sure he’s arrived—
The tell-tale cuckoo—spring’s his confidant,
And he lets out her April purposes!)
140 Or . . better go at once to modern times—
He has . . they have . . in fact I understand
But can’t re-state the matter; that’s my boast;
Others could reason it out to you, and prove
Things they have made me feel.
Mother. Why go to-night?
145 Morn’s for adventure. Jupiter is now
A morning-star. … I cannot hear you, Luigi!
Luigi. “I am the bright and morning-star,” God saith—
And, “such an one I give the morning-star!”
The gift of the morning-star—have I God’s gift
Of the morning-star?
150 Mother. Chiara will love to see
That Jupiter an evening-star next June.
Luigi. True, mother. Well for those who live June over.
Great noontides—thunder storms—all glaring pomps
Which triumph at the heels of June the God
155 Leading his revel thro’ our leafy world.
Yes, Chiara will be here—
Mother. In June—remember
Yourself appointed that month for her coming—
Luigi. Was that low noise the echo?
Mother. The night-wind.
She must be grown—with her blue eyes upturned
160 As if life were one long and sweet surprise—
In June she comes.
The Titian at Treviso—there again!
[Without] A king lived long ago,
In the morning of the world,
165 When earth was nigher heaven than now:
And the king’s locks curled
Disparting o’er a forehead full
As the milk-white space ’twixt horn and horn
Of some sacrificial bull—
170 Only calm as a babe new-born:
For he was got to a sleepy mood,
So safe from all decrepitude,
Age with its bane so sure gone by,
(The Gods so loved him while he dreamed,)
175 That, having lived thus long, there seemed
No need the king should ever die.
Luigi. No need that sort of king should ever die.
[Without] Among the rocks his city was:
Before his palace, in the sun,
180 He sate to see his people pass,
And judge them every one
From its threshold of smooth stone.
They haled him many a valley-thief
Caught in the sheep-pens—robber-chief,
185 Swarthy and shameless—beggar-cheat—
Spy-prowler—or some pirate found
On the sea-sand left aground;
Sometimes there clung about his feet
With bleeding lip and burning cheek
190 A woman, bitterest wrong to speak
Of one with sullen, thickset brows:
Sometimes from out the prison-house
The angry priests a pale wretch brought,
Who through some chink had pushed and pressed,
195 Knees and elbows, belly and breast,
Worm-like into the temple,—caught
He was by the very God,
Who ever in the darkness strode
Backward and forward, keeping watch
200 O’er his brazen bowls, such rogues to catch:
These, all and every one,
The king judged, sitting in the sun.
Luigi. That king should still judge sitting in the sun.
[Without] His councillors, on left and right,
205 Looked anxious up,—but no surprise
Disturbed the king’s old smiling eyes,
Where the very blue had turned to white.
A python passed one day
The silent streets—until he came,
210 With forky tongue and eyes on flame,
Where the old king judged alway;
But when he saw the sweepy hair,
Girt with a crown of berries rare
The God will hardly give to wear
215 To the maiden who singeth, dancing bare
In the altar-smoke by the pine-torch lights,
At his wondrous forest rites,—
But which the God’s self granted him
For setting free each felon limb
220 Because of earthly murder done
Faded till other hope was none;—
Seeing this, he did not dare
Approach that threshold in the sun,
Assault the old king smiling there.
[Pippa passes.
225 Luigi. Farewell, farewell—how could I stay?
Farewell!
Talk by the way in the mean time. Poor Girls sitting on the steps of
Monsignor’s brother’s house, close to the Duomo S. Maria.
1 Girl. There goes a swallow to Venice—the stout sea-farer!
Let us all wish; you wish first.
2 Girl. I? This sunset To finish.
3 Girl. That old … somebody I know,
To give me the same treat he gave last week—
230 Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers,
Lampreys, and red Breganze-wine, and mumbling
The while some folly about how well I fare—
Since had he not himself been late this morning
Detained at—never mind where—had he not . .
235 Eh, baggage, had I not!—
2 Girl. How she can lie!
3 Girl. Look there—by the nails—
2 Girl. What makes your fingers red?
3 Girl. Dipping them into wine to write bad words with
On the bright table—how he laughed!
1 Girl. My turn:
Spring’s come and summer’s coming: I would wear
240 A long loose gown—down to the feet and hands—
With plaits here, close about the throat, all day:
And all night lie, the cool long nights, in bed—
And have new milk to drink—apples to eat,
Deuzans and junetings, leather-coats . . ah, I should say
This is away in the fields—miles!
245 3 Girl. Say at once
You’d be at home—she’d always be at home!
Now comes the story of the farm among
The cherry orchards, and how April snowed
White blossoms on her as she ran: why fool,
250 They’ve rubbed the chalk-mark out how tall you were,
Twisted your starling’s neck, broken his cage,
Made a dunghill of your garden—
1 Girl. They destroy
My garden since I left them? well—perhaps!
I would have done so—so I hope they have!
255 A fig-tree curled out of our cottage wall—
They called it mine, I have forgotten why,
It must have been there long ere I was born,
Criq—criq—I think I hear the wasps o’erhead
Pricking the papers strung to flutter there
260 And keep off birds in fruit-time—coarse long papers
And the wasps eat them, prick them through and through.
3 Girl. How her mouth twitches! where was I before
She broke in with her wishes and long gowns
And wasps—would I be such a fool!—Oh, here!
265 This is my way—I answer every one
Who asks me why I make so much of him—
(Say, you love him—he’ll not be gulled, he’ll say)
“He that seduced me when I was a girl
Thus high—had eyes like yours, or hair like yours,
270 Brown, red, white,”—as the case may be—that pleases!
(See how that beetle burnishes in the path—
There sparkles he along the dust—and there—
Your journey to that maize-tuft’s spoilt at least!
1 Girl. When I was young they said if you killed one
275 Of those sunshiny beetles, that his friend
Up there would shine no more that day or next.
3 Girl. When you were young? Nor are you young, that’s true!
How your plump arms, that were, have dropped away!
Why I can span them! Cecco beats you still?
280 No matter so you keep your curious hair.
I wish they’d find a way to dye our hair
Your colour—any lighter tint, indeed,
Than black—the men say they are sick of black,
Black eyes, black hair!
2 Girl. Sick of yours, like enough,
285 Do you pretend you ever tasted lampreys
And ortolans? Giovita, of the palace,
Engaged (but there’s no trusting him) to slice me
Polenta with a knife that had cut up
An ortolan.
3 Girl. Why—there! is not that Pippa
290 We are to talk to, under the window, quick
Where the lights are?
1 Girl. No—or she would sing
—For the Intendant said …
3 Girl. Oh, you sing first—
Then, if she listens and comes close . . I’ll tell you,
Sing that song the young English noble made,
295 Who took you for the purest of the pure
And meant to leave the world for you—what fun!
2 Girl. [Sings]
You’ll love me yet!—and I can tarry
Your love’s protracted growing:
June reared that bunch of flowers you carry
300 From seeds of April’s sowing.
I plant a heartfull now—some seed
At least is sure to strike
And yield—what you’ll not care, indeed,
To pluck, but, may be like
305 To look upon . . my whole remains,
A grave’s one violet:
Your look?—that pays a thousand pains.
What’s death?—You’ll love me yet!
3 Girl. [To Pippa who approaches] Oh, you may come
310 closer—we shall not eat you!
IV.—Night. The Palace by the Duomo. Monsignor, dismissing his Attendants.
Monsignor. Thanks, friends, many thanks. I desire life now
chiefly that I may recompense every one of you. Most I know
something of already. Benedicto benedicatur . . ugh . . ugh! Where
was I? Oh, as you were remarking, Ugo, the weather is mild,
5 very unlike winter-weather,—but I am a Sicilian, you
know, and shiver in your Julys here: To be sure, when ’twas
full summer at Messina, as we priests used to cross in procession
the great square on Assumption Day, you might see
our thickest yellow tapers twist suddenly in two, each like
10 a falling star, or sink down on themselves in a gore of wax.
But go, my friends, but go! [To the Intendant] Not you, Ugo!
[The others leave the apartment, where a table with refreshments
is prepared.] I have long wanted to converse with you, Ugo!
Intendant. Uguccio—
15 Monsignor … ’guccio Stefani, man! of Ascoli, Fermo,
and Fossombruno:—what I do need instructing about are
these accounts of your administration of my poor brother’s
affairs. Ugh! I shall never get through a third part of your
accounts: take some of these dainties before we attempt it,
20 however: are you bashful to that degree? For me, a crust
and water suffice.
Intendant. Do you choose this especial night to question me?
Monsignor. This night, Ugo. You have managed my
late brother’s affairs since the death of our elder brother—
25 fourteen years and a month, all but three days. The 3rd of
December, I find him …
Intendant. If you have so intimate an acquaintance with
your brother’s affairs, you will be tender of turning so far
back—they will hardly bear looking into so far back.
30 Monsignor. Ay, ay, ugh, ugh,—nothing but disappointments
here below! I remark a considerable payment made to yourself
on this 3rd of December. Talk of disappointments!
There was a young fellow here, Jules, a foreign sculptor, I
did my utmost to advance, that the church might be a gainer
35 by us both: he was going on hopefully enough, and of a
sudden he notifies to me some marvellous change that has
happened in his notions of art; here’s his letter,—“He never
had a clearly conceived Ideal within his brain till to-day.
Yet since his hand could manage a chisel he has practised
40 expressing other men’s Ideals—and in the very perfection
he has attained to he foresees an ultimate failure—his
unconscious hand will pursue its prescribed course of old
years, and will reproduce with a fatal expertness the ancient
types, let the novel one appear never so palpably to his spirit:
45 there is but one method of escape—confiding the virgin type
to as chaste a hand, he will paint, not carve, its characteristics,”—strike
out, I dare say, a school like Correggio: how
think you, Ugo?
Intendant. Is Correggio a painter?
50 Monsignor. Foolish Jules! and yet, after all, why foolish?
He may—probably will, fall egregiously: but if there should
arise a new painter, will it not be in some such way—a poet,
now, or a musician, spirits who have conceived and perfected
an Ideal through some other channel, transferring it to this,
55 and escaping our conventional roads by pure ignorance of
them, eh, Ugo? If you have no appetite, talk at least, Ugo!
Intendant. Sir, I can submit no longer to this course of
yours: first, you select the group of which I formed one,—
next you thin it gradually,—always retaining me with your
60 smile,—and so do you proceed till you have fairly got me
alone with you between four stone walls: and now then?
Let this farce, this chatter end now—what is it you want
with me?
Monsignor. Ugo …
65 Intendant. From the instant you arrived I felt your smile
on me as you questioned me about this and the other
article in those papers—why, your brother should have
given me this manor, that liberty,—and your nod at the
end meant,—what?
70 Monsignor. Possibly that I wished for no loud talk here—
if once you set me coughing, Ugo!
Intendant. I have your brother’s hand and seal to all I possess:
now ask me what for! what service I did him—ask me!
Monsignor. I had better not—I should rip up old disgraces—
75 let out my poor brother’s weaknesses. By the way, Maffeo
of Forli, (which, I forgot to observe, is your true name)
was the interdict taken off you for robbing that church at
Cesena?
Intendant. No, nor needs be—for when I murdered your
80 brother’s friend, Pasquale for him …
Monsignor. Ah, he employed you in that matter, did he?
Well, I must let you keep, as you say, this manor and that
liberty, for fear the world should find out my relations were
of so indifferent a stamp: Maffeo, my family is the oldest in
85 Messina, and century after century have my progenitors gone
on polluting themselves with every wickedness under
Heaven: my own father … rest his soul!—I have, I know,
a chapel to support that it may: my dear two dead brothers
were,—what you know tolerably well: I, the youngest,
90 might have rivalled them in vice, if not in wealth, but from
my boyhood I came out from among them, and so am not
partaker of their plagues. My glory springs from another
source, or if from this, by contrast only,—for I, the bishop,
am the brother of your employers, Ugo. I hope to repair
95 some of their wrong, however; so far as my brother’s ill-gotten
treasure reverts to me, I can stop the consequences
of his crime, and not one soldo shall escape me. Maffeo, the
sword we quiet men spurn away, you shrewd knaves
pick up and commit murders with; what opportunities the
100 virtuous forego, the villanous seize. Because, to pleasure myself,
apart from other considerations, my food would be millet-cake,
my dress sackcloth, and my couch straw, am I therefore
to let the off-scouring of the earth seduce the ignorant
by appropriating a pomp these will be sure to think lessens
105 the abominations so unaccountably and exclusively associated
with it? Must I let manors and liberties go to you,
a murderer and thief, that you may beget by means of them
other murderers and thieves? No … if my cough would but
allow me to speak!
110 Intendant. What am I to expect? you are going to punish
me?
Monsignor. Must punish you, Maffeo. I cannot afford to
cast away a chance. I have whole centuries of sin to redeem,
and only a month or two of life to do it in! How should
115 I dare to say …
Intendant. “Forgive us our trespasses.”
Monsignor. My friend, it is because I avow myself a very
worm, sinful beyond measure, that I reject a line of conduct
you would applaud, perhaps: shall I proceed, as it were,
120 a-pardoning?—I?—who have no symptom of reason to
assume that aught less than my strenuousest efforts will keep
myself out of mortal sin, much less, keep others out. No—
I do trespass, but will not double that by allowing you to
trespass.
125 Intendant. And suppose the manors are not your brother’s
to give, or yours to take? Oh, you are hasty enough just
now!
Monsignor. 1, 2—No. 3!—ay, can you read the substance
of a letter, No. 3, I have received from Rome? It is on the
130 ground I there mention of the suspicion I have that a
certain child of my late elder brother, who would have
succeeded to his estates, was murdered in infancy by you,
Maffeo, at the instigation of my late brother—that the
pontiff enjoins on me not merely the bringing that Maffeo
135 to condign punishment, but the taking all pains, as
guardian of that infant’s heritage for the church, to recover
it parcel by parcel, howsoever, whensoever, and where-soever.
While you are now gnawing those fingers, the
police are engaged in sealing up your papers, Maffeo, and
140 the mere raising my voice brings my people from the next
room to dispose of yourself. But I want you to confess
quietly, and save me raising my voice. Why, man, do I not
know the old story? The heir between the succeeding
heir, and that heir’s ruffianly instrument, and their complot’s
145 effect, and the life of fear and bribes, and ominous
smiling silence? Did you throttle or stab my brother’s infant?
Come, now!
Intendant. So old a story, and tell it no better? When did
such an instrument ever produce such an effect? Either the
150 child smiles in his face, or, most likely, he is not fool
enough to put himself in the employer’s power so thoroughly—the
child is always ready to produce—as you say—
howsoever, wheresoever, and whensoever.
Monsignor. Liar!
155 Intendant. Strike me? Ah, so might a father chastise! I shall
sleep soundly to-night at least, though the gallows await me
to-morrow; for what a life did I lead? Carlo of Cesena reminds
me of his connivance every time I pay his annuity (which
happens commonly thrice a year). If I remonstrate, he will
160 confess all to the good bishop—you!
Monsignor. I see thro’ the trick, caitiff! I would you spoke
truth for once; all shall be sifted, however—seven times sifted.
Intendant. And how my absurd riches encumbered me!
I dared not lay claim to above half my possessions. Let me
165 but once unbosom myself, glorify Heaven, and die!
Sir, you are no brutal, dastardly idiot like your brother
I frightened to death … let us understand one another. Sir,
I will make away with her for you—the girl—here close at
hand; not the stupid obvious kind of killing; do not
170 speak—know nothing of her or me. I see her every day—
saw her this morning—of course there is no killing; but at
Rome the courtesans perish off every three years, and I can
entice her thither—have, indeed, begun operations already
—there’s a certain lusty, blue-eyed, florid-complexioned,
175 English knave I employ occasionally.—You assent, I perceive—no,
that’s not it—assent I do not say—but you will
let me convert my present havings and holdings into
cash, and give time to cross the Alps? ’Tis but a little
black-eyed, pretty singing Felippa, gay silk-winding girl.
180 I have kept her out of harm’s way up to this present; for
I always intended to make your life a plague to you with
her! ’Tis as well settled once and forever: some women
I have procured will pass Bluphocks, my handsome
scoundrel, off for somebody, and once Pippa entangled!—
185 you conceive?
Monsignor. Why, if she sings, one might …
[Without] Over-head the tree-tops meet—
Flowers and grass spring ’neath one’s feet—
What are the voices of birds
190 —Ay, and beasts, too—but words—our words,
Only so much more sweet?
That knowledge with my life begun!
But I had so near made out the sun—
Could count your stars, the Seven and One!
195 Like the fingers of my hand—
Nay, could all but understand
How and wherefore the moon ranges—
And just when out of her soft fifty changes
No unfamiliar face might overlook me—
200 Suddenly God took me.
[Pippa passes.
Monsignor [Springing up] My people—one and all—all—
within there! Gag this villain—tie him hand and foot: he
dares—I know not half he dares—but remove him—quick!
Miserere mei, Domine! quick, I say!
Pippa’s Chamber again. She enters it.
205 The bee with his comb,
The mouse at her dray,
The grub in its tomb
Wile winter away;
But the fire-fly and hedge-shrew and lobworm, I pray,
210 Where be they?
Ha, ha, thanks my Zanze—
“Feed on lampreys, quaff Breganze”—
The summer of life’s so easy to spend!
But winter hastens at summer’s end,
215 And fire-fly, hedge-shrew, lob-worm, pray,
Where be they?
No bidding you then to . . what did Zanze say?
“Pare your nails pearlwise, get your small feet shoes
“More like . . (what said she?)—and less like canoes—”
220 Pert as a sparrow … would I be those pert
Impudent staring wretches! it had done me,
However, surely no such mighty hurt
To learn his name who passed that jest upon me.—
No foreigner, that I can recollect,
225 Came, as she says, a month since to inspect
Our silk-mills—none with blue eyes and thick rings
Of English-coloured hair, at all events.
Well—if old Luca keeps his good intents
We shall do better—see what next year brings—
230 I may buy shoes, my Zanze, not appear
So destitute, perhaps, next year!
Bluf—something—I had caught the uncouth name
But for Monsignor’s people’s sudden clatter
Above us—bound to spoil such idle chatter,
235 The pious man, the man devoid of blame,
The … ah, but—ah, but, all the same
No mere mortal has a right
To carry that exalted air;
Best people are not angels quite—
240 While—not worst people’s doings scare
The devils; so there’s that regard to spare!
Mere counsel to myself, mind! for
I have just been Monsignor!
245 And you too, Luigi!—how that Luigi started
Out of the Turret—doubtlessly departed
On some love-errand or another—
And I was Jules the sculptor’s bride,
And I was Ottima beside,
250 And now what am I?—tired of fooling!
Day for folly, night for schooling—
New year’s day is over—over!
Even my lily’s asleep, I vow:
Wake up—here’s a friend I pluckt you.
255 See—call this a heart’s-ease now!
Something rare, let me instruct you,
Is this—with petals triply swollen,
Three times spotted, thrice the pollen,
While the leaves and parts that witness
260 The old proportions and their fitness
Here remain, unchanged unmoved now—
Call this pampered thing improved now!
Suppose there’s a king of the flowers
And a girl-show held in his bowers—
265 “Look ye, buds, this growth of ours,”
Says he, “Zanze from the Brenta,
I have made her gorge polenta
Till both cheeks are near as bouncing
As her … name there’s no pronouncing!
270 See this heightened colour too—
For she swilled Breganze wine
Till her nose turned deep carmine—
’Twas but white when wild she grew!
And only by this Zanze’s eyes
275 Of which we could not change the size,
The magnitude of what’s achieved
Elsewhere may be perceived!”
Oh what a drear, dark close to my poor day!
How could that red sun drop in that black cloud!
280 Ah, Pippa, morning’s rule is moved away,
Dispensed with, never more to be allowed.
Day’s turn’s over—now’s the night’s—
Oh Lark be day’s apostle
To mavis, merle and throstle,
285 Bid them their betters jostle
From day and its delights!
But at night, brother Howlet, over the woods
Toll the world to thy chantry—
Sing to the bats’ sleek sisterhoods
290 Full complines with gallantry—
Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
[After she has begun to undress herself.
Now one thing I should like to really know:
295 How near I ever might approach all these
I only fancied being this long day—
… Approach, I mean, so as to touch them—so
As to . . in some way . . move them—if you please,
Do good or evil to them some slight way.
300 For instance, if I wind
Silk to-morrow, silk may bind
[Sitting on the bedside.
And broider Ottima’s cloak’s hem—
Ah, me and my important passing them
This morning’s hymn half promised when I rose!
305 True in some sense or other, I suppose.
[As she lies down.
God bless me tho’ I cannot pray tonight.
No doubt, some way or other, hymns say right.
All service is the same with God—
Whose puppets, best and worst,
310 Are we … …
[She sleeps.