First publ. Hood’s Magazine ii (July 1844) 45–8; for B.’s contributions to Hood’s, see p. 209. A letter of ?24 June 1844 from B. to F. O. Ward, the acting editor of Hood’s (Correspondence ix 30), shows that Ward, and Hood himself, suggested revs. in proof, but the lines to which they refer must have been further changed, since the fragmentary phrases which B. quotes fit neither Garden Fancies nor any other poem of the period. Repr. B & P vii (DR & L), 6 Nov. 1845, with both sections given stanza numbers; then 1849, 1863, 1868, 1880, 1888. Our text is Hood’s. Garden Fancies is the only one of B.’s collective titles for paired poems (e.g. Italy and France for My Last Duchess and Count Gismond) which survived 1849. With his letter of ?18 July 1845 (Correspondence x 312–13), B. sent EBB. all the poems he had publ. in Hood’s, for criticism before publication in DR & L; her comment on Sibrandus 46 (Wellesley MS; all her comments recorded in the notes are from this text, unless otherwise stated) makes it clear that he showed her his own MS, not the printed texts.
For B.’s love of plants and small wild creatures, see Pauline 716–28 (p. 53), Sordello vi 619–28n. (I 752–4), and Flight of the Duchess 726–30n. (II 327). Miller 155 links the poem with Shelley’s The Sensitive Plant; cp. esp. the description of the ‘ruling Grace’ of the garden, ‘A Lady, the wonder of her kind’, e.g. ii 29–32: ‘I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet / Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet; / I doubt not they felt the spirit that came / From her glowing fingers through all their frame’, and ll. 37–40: ‘She lifted their heads with her tender hands, / And sustained them with rods and osier-bands; / If the flowers had been her own infants, she / Could never have nursed them more tenderly’. (For other parallels, see notes.) If, as Miller suggests, the garden is that of B.’s mother, Sibrandus, by contrast, may be seen as a humorous tribute to B.’s father’s large library, which contained many antiquarian volumes. In one of these, Wanley (also a source for Pied Piper [p. 172] and The Cardinal and the Dog [II 114], B. found the name Sibrandus of Aschaffenburg, a town in Bavaria (hence ‘Schafnaburgensis’). E. Cook (Browning’s Lyrics [Toronto 1974] 79) cites Rabelais, Gargantua I i: a mouldy, vermin-eaten book containing Gargantua’s genealogy is found in a tomb with the inscription ‘Hic bibitur’ [Here be drinking]. For a further source in Rabelais, see ll. 17–72n. DeVane (Handbook 169) suggests that the incident is authentic, though B. told EBB.: ‘I have no little insight to the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration’ (26 Feb. 1845, Correspondence x 99). In a letter to Mrs Fitzgerald of 4 Dec. 1886, B. wrote that he was ‘beginning to somewhat arrange my books—such a chaotic mass, in real want of a good clearing fire! For how can I part with old tomes annotated by my Father, and yet how can nine out of ten of them do other than cumber the shelves like the dead weight they are? Oh that helluo librorum [devourer of books] my father, best of men, most indefatigable of book-digesters!’ (Learned Lady 193). Cp. the attack on pedantry in Paracelsus; also Master Hugues (III 388), A Grammarian (p. 586), and Transcendentalism (III 641). The poem was ‘a great favourite’ with EBB.: ‘it is so new, & full of a creeping crawling grotesque life’.
Here’s the garden she walked across,
Arm in my arm, such a short while since:
Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss
Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!
5 She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,
As back with that murmur the wicket swung;
For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,
To feed and forget it the leaves among.
Down this side of the gravel-walk
10 She went while her robe’s edge brushed the box:
And here she paused in her gracious talk
To point me a moth on the milk-white flox.
Roses, ranged in valiant row,
Think will I never she passed you by!
15 She loves noble roses, I know;
But this—so surely this met her eye!
This flower she stopped at, finger on lip;
Stooped over, in doubt, settling its claim,
Till she gave me, with pride to make no slip,
20 Its soft meandering Spanish name:
What a name! Was it love, or praise?
Speech half-asleep, or song half-awake?
I must learn Spanish one of these days,
Only for that slow sweet name’s sake.
25 Roses, if I live and do well,
I may bring her, one of these days,
To fix you fast with as fine a spell,
Fit you each with his Spanish phrase!
But do not detain me now; for she lingers
30 There, like sunshine over the ground,
And ever I see her soft white fingers
Searching after the bud she found.
Flower, you Spaniard, look you grow not,
Stay as you are and be loved for ever!
35 Bud, if I kiss you, ’tis that you blow not,
Mind the pink shut mouth opens never!
For while it pouts thus, her fingers wrestle,
Twinkling the audacious leaves between,
Till round they turn and down they nestle—
40 Is not the dear mark still to be seen?
Where I find her not, beauties vanish;
Whither I follow her, beauties flee;
Is there no method to tell her in Spanish
June’s twice June since she breathed it with me?
45 Come, bud, show me the least of her traces,
Tread in my lady’s lightest foot-fall
—Ah, you may flout and turn up your faces!
Roses, are you so fair after all?
II. Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis
Plague take all pedants, say I!
He who wrote what I hold in my hand,
Centuries back was so good as to die,
Leaving this rubbish to bother the land;
5 This, that was a book in its time,
Printed on paper and bound in leather,
Last month in the white of a matin-prime
Just when the birds sang all together.
Into the garden I brought it to read;
10 And under these arbutes and laurustine
Read it, so help me grace in my need,
From title-page to closing line.
Chapter on chapter did I count,
As a curious traveller counts Stonehenge;
15 Added up the mortal amount;
And then proceeded to my revenge.
Yonder’s a plum-tree, with a crevice
An owl would build in, were he but sage;
For a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis
20 In a castle of the middle age,
Joins to a lip of gum, pure amber;
When he’d be private, there might he spend
Hours alone in his lady’s chamber:
Into this crevice I dropped our friend.
25 Splash, went he, as under he ducked,
—I knew at the bottom rain-drippings stagnate:
Next a handful of blossoms I plucked
To bury him with, my book-shelf’s magnate:
Then I went in-doors, brought out a loaf,
30 Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis;
Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf
Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.
Now, this morning, betwixt the moss
And gum that locked our friend in limbo,
35 A spider had spun his web across,
And sate in the midst with arms a-kimbo:
So I took pity, for learning’s sake,
And, de profundis, accentibus laetis,
Cantate, quoth I, as I got a rake,
40 And up I fished his delectable treatise.
Here you have it, dry in the sun,
With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
And reddish streaks that wink and glister
45 O’er the page so beautifully yellow—
Oh, the droppings have played their tricks!
Did he guess how toadstools grew, this fellow?
Here’s one stuck in his chapter six!
How did he like it when the live creatures
50 Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in, each one, for his right of trover;
When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
55 And the newt borrowed so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black wife’s closet.
All that life, and fun, and romping,
All that frisking, and twisting, and coupling,
While slowly our poor friend’s leaves were swamping,
60 Clasps cracking, and covers suppling!
As if you had carried sour John Knox
To the play at Paris, Vienna, or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
And danced off the Ballet in trowsers and tunic.
65 Come, old martyr! what, torment enough is it?
Back to my room shall you take your sweet self!
Good bye, mother-beetle; husband-eft, sufficit!
See the snug niche I have made on my shelf.
A’s book shall prop you up, B’s shall cover you,
70 Here’s C to be grave with, or D to be gay,
And with E on each side, and F right over you,
Dry-rot at ease till the judgment-day!
11.i 1–3. Cp. Shelley, The Sensitive Plant i 49–50: ‘sinuous paths of lawn and of moss, / Which led through the garden along and across’. The rhyme recurs in Sibrandus 33–5.
i 10. box: an evergreen shrub, used as a hedge or border.
i 12. Cp. (noting ll. 35–6) Shelley, The Sensitive Plant ii 50–2: ‘soft moths that kiss / The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she / Make her attendant angels be’, cited also for In a Gondola 49–55 (II 121).
i 14. Think will I never] I will never think (1849–88).
i 15. loves] loves you (1849–88).
i 16.] But yonder, see, where the rock-plants lie! (1845–88). EBB. quoted the Hood’s reading and commented: ‘Is it hypercritical to complain of this “eye”. I seldom like the singular “eye”—and then, when it is a Spanish eye!—The line is not a great favorite of mine altogether—and the poem is—& you see the least speck on a Venice glass: and if it is “my fancy”, at least I speak it off my mind & have done with it. The beauty & melody we never shall have done with . . none of us’.
i 18. settling] as settling (1845–88).
i 20. In her letter of 21 July 1845 (Correspondence x 315), EBB. praised ‘that beautiful & musical use of the word “meandering,” which I never remember having seen used in relation to sound before. It does to mate with your “simmering quiet” in Sordello’ (referring to i 910, I 454).
i 22. In her letter of 21–22 Oct. 1845 (Correspondence xi 134), EBB. used this line to describe the rhythm of Flight of the Duchess (see l. 512n., II 318), and see also Sibrandus 52n.
i 23–4. In 1834 B. wrote to Amédée de Ripert-Monclar (see headnote to Paracelsus, I 101) that he had ‘learned Spanish enough [to] be able to read “the majestic Tongue which Calderon along the desert flung!—” ’ (Correspondence iii 111; B quotes Shelley, Letter to Maria Gisborne 180–1). In 1878 he wrote to Mrs Fitzgerald: ‘a few weeks since, I took it into my head to learn Spanish … Of the pronunciation I know nothing but what the grammar attempts to teach … Of course, like everybody, I had amused myself years ago by stumbling along a few passages, by means of Latin and Italian’ (Learned Lady 55–6).
i 33. look] look that (1845–88). EBB. suggested the change.
i 35–6. Cp. Keats, Eve of St Agnes 243: ‘As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again’. Cp. B.’s A Face 4–10 (III 233–4).
i 36. Mind the pink shut] Mind that the pink (1845); Mind, the shut pink (1849 –88). EBB. had commented: ‘A clogged line—is it not? Difficult to read’.
i 37. it pouts thus] thus it pouts (1845–65); it pouts (1868–88).
i 46. Tread in] Treasure (1845–88).
i 47. flout: jeer.
i 48. are you … all?] you are not … all. (1845–88, except ‘all!’, 1849–88). EBB. quoted the line, commenting: ‘And I just ask whether to put it in the affirmative thus // “Roses, ye are not so fair after all.” // does not satisfy the ear & mind better. It is only asking, you know’.
ii 1. In Richard Henry Wilde’s Conjectures and Researches concerning … Tasso (1842), the book which he was ostensibly reviewing when he wrote Chatterton (see Appendix C, II 474), B. could have read: ‘At the time of his departure for Modena, he [Tasso] jokes with Scalabrino, crying, “plague on the pedants!” ’ (i 154). pedants] your pedants (1849–88).
ii 4. bother] cumber (1849–88).
ii 7–8. In the sense intended here, ‘white’ means ‘propitious, favourable’ or ‘highly prized, precious’; for its use as a noun in this construction, OED cites only Keats, Endymion iii 402: ‘I loved her to the very white of truth’. ‘Matin-prime’ means, first, ‘the best part of the morning’ (or ‘the beginning of the morning’: l. 8 could refer to the dawn chorus), but matins and prime are both early-morning religious services, and l. 8 suggests that B. may be recalling OED sense 2a: ‘chiefly of birds … to sing their morning song’ (as in Milton, L’Allegro 114: ‘Ere the first cock his matin rings’), and, by extension, Job xxxviii 4–7, where God speaks of the time ‘when I laid the foundations of the earth’ and ‘the morning stars sang together’. Cp. Fifine at the Fair (1872) 855: ‘fresh morning-prime’.
ii 10. these arbutes] the arbute (1845–49). EBB. quoted the Hood’s reading and commented: ‘Are these pluralities quite correct? You know best .. & I doubt, at worst’. She suggested the revised reading as ‘a more consistent course .. but I do not attempt even to decide’. The ‘arbutes’ belong to the genus Arbutus, evergreen shrubs and trees; the name was commonly applied to the strawberry-tree. For the form ‘arbute’, OED cites Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics (ii 96). laurustine: laurustinus, an evergreen winter-flowering shrub.
ii 11. so help me grace: this oath appears in ‘Ode to the Ladies of England’ by the satirist ‘Peter Pindar’ (John Wolcot, 1738–1819), in the context of reading: ‘So help me, Grace! I ever meant to please—/ Ev’n now would I ask pardon on my knees: / If aught I’ve sinn’d, the stanza must not live—/ Bring me the knife— I’ll cut the wanton page, / Which puts my lovely readers in a rage: / But hark! they cry, “Barbarian, we forgive”’ (ll. 88–92).
ii 14. Cp. B.’s comparison of poetry to a ‘Druid stone-circle’ in his reply to Ruskin’s criticism of Men and Women (Appendix B, p. 881). It is not known when (or whether) B. had visited Stonehenge.
ii 15. mortal: ‘long and tedious’ (OED 8c, citing Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s introduction to his novel Zanoni [1842]: ‘And so on for 940 mortal pages in foolscap!’).
ii 19. pont-levis: drawbridge.
ii 26.] At the bottom, I knew, rain-drippings stagnate; (1870–88).
ii 32. Rabelais: François Rabelais (c. 1483–1553), the great Renaissance physician, humanist scholar, and writer; the ‘jolly chapter’ is doubtless from his comic masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais’s name in the period was synonymous with bawdy; cp. A Likeness (p. 645) where ‘the little edition of Rabelais’ (l. 24) figures in the description of a bachelor’s lodgings. In 1879 B. was invited to join the Rabelais Club, and sent a gracious refusal: ‘I have a huge love for Rabelais, and hope to die even as did his Raminagrobis,—but, what Johnson calls a “clubbable person”—I am not,—and why should I pretend to be one?’ (to W. H. Pollock, 28 June 1879, ABL MS). The death of the free-thinking poet Raminagrobis is described in Gargantua and Pantagruel (bk. III, ch. xxi). Cp. H. Ainsworth, Crichton (1837; see headnote to Laboratory, p. 210) I xli: ‘jolly old Rabelais’.
ii 34. limbo: combining the senses of ‘prison’ and ‘a condition of neglect or oblivion’. K. Allott (Browning: Selected Poems [Oxford 1967] 203), noting ll. 38– 9 and ll. 71–2, suggests an allusion to the Christian limbo.
ii 35–6. In a letter of c. June 1843 to R. H. Horne, B. wrote that he had two skulls in his writing room, ‘each on its bracket by the window … a huge field-spider [has] woven his platform-web from the under-jaw of one of these sculls [sic] to the window-sill … the spider’s self is on the watch, with each great arm wide out in a tooth-socket’ (Correspondence vii 184).
ii 38–9. The Latin means ‘sing from the depths in joyful accents’; cp. the opening of Psalms cxxx, in the Vulgate De profundis clamavi: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord’.
ii 46. the droppings have] well have the droppings (1845–88). EBB. quoted the line and commented: ‘ “Oh, well have the droppings” you had written— & better written, I think’. This indicates that she was working from B.’s MS, though not whether it was the printer’s copy for Hood’s.
ii 50. toused: rumpled, pulled about. Only occurrence in B.
ii 51. eft: newt, species of lizard. B. wrote enthusiastically to EBB. about the ‘English water-eft’ (4 Jan. 1846, Correspondence xi 277), and told an anecdote in the same letter which displayed his knowledge of newts (see l. 55).
ii 52. right of trover: a mock-solemn form of ‘finders keepers’, derived from one of the senses of ‘treasure-trove’; technically, ‘trover’ is an action to recover illegally-held property. EBB. commented that B. had ‘right of trover’ to the ‘novel effects of rhythm’ in Flight of the Duchess (21–22 Oct. 1845); see Flower’s Name 22n.
ii 55. so] just so (1849–88).
ii 60. Clasps] And clasps were (1845–88). EBB. quoted the Hood’s reading and commented: ‘Or query .. “While clasps were crackling & covers suppling.” A good deal is to be said for the abrupt expression of the “text” … but the other is safer .. & less trusting the reader. You will judge’.
ii 61–4. After praising the poem (see headnote), EBB. added: ‘Ah but … do you know besides, … it is almost reproachable in you to hold up John Knox to derision in this way!’ Knox (c. 1514–72) was the foremost leader of the Reformation in Scotland, and a type of stern Calvinist morality. Extreme Protestants had a particular aversion to drama and dance as immoral activities, and to theatres as immoral places; theatres in foreign (and Catholic) cities would of course be even worse.
ii 62. play] play-house (1845–88).
ii 64. in] with (1845–88). trowsers] trousers (1845–88); the Hood’s spelling is the earlier form and was still allowed, though becoming rare.
ii 67. sufficit: enough (Latin).