AN OLD STORY
First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863, 18652, 1868, 1880, 1888. Our text is 1855. In H proof the title is ‘The Old Story’ and there is no subtitle, although the running title changes from ‘The Old Story’ on p. 192 (erroneously numbered 208) to ‘The Patriot’ on p. 193, the first page of signature O. In 1855 the table of contents gives the title as ‘The Patriot.—An Old Story’ but the poem itself has the title and subtitle as here.
The Brownings visited Brescia briefly in June 1851. The city was the site of a heroic but doomed attempt to stem the tide of Austrian military success during the nationalist uprisings of 1848–49; the ‘ten days of Brescia’ (23 Mar.–1 Apr. 1849) became part of nationalist folklore. There is, however, no evidence that the poem was composed at this time, and the link with the city of Brescia was eliminated from 1863 onwards (see l. 26n.). The poem’s reflections on the rapidity with which a hero’s fortunes can be transformed might have been prompted by the entry of Louis Napoleon into Paris on 16 Oct. 1852, an event witnessed by the Brownings and described at length by EBB. in a letter to her sister Arabella: ‘Yesterday was a grand day with us … we saw the great spectacle of Louis Napoleon passing on after his entrance into Paris—Nothing so magnificent was ever seen before. All the military & civil pomp of France had gone out to meet him, & from end to end of the broad beautiful boulevard, as far as our eyes could go, and miles beyond, floated down under that limpid sky & cloudless sun the multitudes of the people—it was wonderful. He rode on horseback quite alone—that is, with a considerable space between those who preceded & those who followed, & with no one at his side. As the people shouted he bowed to right & left, & those who were cursing him stopped suddenly to call him at least a brave man’ (17 Oct. 1852, EBB to Arabella i 504). On the Brownings’ differing attitudes to Louis Napoleon, see Lovers’ Quarrel (p. 376).
The term ‘patriot’ acquired pejorative overtones during the eighteenth century, and came to be applied not only to ‘one whose ruling passion is the love of his country’ but also to ‘a factious disturber of the government’ (J.). These overtones were strengthened during the period of the French Revolution, when ‘patriot’ became more or less synonymous with ‘Jacobin’; see (e.g.) Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) ix 121–4: ‘I gradually withdrew / Into a noisier world, and thus ere long / Became a patriot; and my heart was all / Given to the people, and my love was theirs’.
B. could have found archetypes for his doomed ‘patriot’ in a number of Renaissance plays, most obviously Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus. There are affinities between the fate of the poem’s speaker and that of Spenser’s ‘mightie Prince’ in his translation of Du Bellay’s The Ruines of Time:
It is not long, since these two eyes beheld
A mightie Prince, of most renowmed race,
Whom England high in count of honour held,
And greatest ones did sue to gaine his grace
Of greatest ones he greatest in his place,
Sate in the bosome of his Soueraine,
And Right and loyall did his word maintaine.
I saw him die, I saw him die, as one
Of the meane people, and brought forth on beare.
I saw him die, and no man left to mone
His dolefull fate, that late him loued deare.
… He now is dead, and all is with him dead,
Saue what in heauens storehouse he vplaid.
(ll. 183–93, 211–12)
For other echoes of this work, see headnote to Love Among the Ruins (p. 528) and Lovers’ Quarrel 86n. (p. 381). The suggestion that the poem’s narrative is based on the story of Arnold of Brescia (d. 1155), a cleric who opposed the temporal power of the clergy and was condemned to death at the instigation of Pope Adrian IV, was denied by B. himself according to DeVane (Handbook 239), but he gives no source. Arnold of Brescia became, however, an important icon for the Italian national movement; effigies of Arnold and of Savonarola were carried in Mazzini’s funeral procession. A play on the subject of Arnold by Giovanni Battista Niccolini (1782–1861), drawing explicit parallels between Arnold’s period and the Italy of the early nineteenth century, appeared in 1843, and was translated into English in 1847 by Theodosia Garrow, later Theodosia Trollope, a friend of EBB.’s and neighbour of the Brownings in Tuscany. The crux of the drama is popular support for Arnold, which ebbs and flows throughout, but the symmetrical reversal of B.’s poem is not anticipated. Arnold is presented as a champion of the people, like Rienzi and Sordello (see Sordello [I 369–70]).
B.’s poem suggests that the patriot’s fault is excessive ambition for his people; the image of his leap at the sun (ll. 11–12) aligns him with other overreaching heroes such as Paracelsus, Sordello, and Djabal in The Return of the Druses (1842); cp. also the downfall of the populist leader Chiappino in A Soul’s Tragedy (II 180), and the emblematic division of that work into the ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’ of its hero’s life. The fickleness and ingratitude of a liberated people is another recurring motif in B.’s work; see e.g. One Word More 73–108n. (p. 606). The Patriot represents another example of B.’s interest in ‘impossible’ renditions of speech, since its speaker is about to die, and the transmission of his monologue is hard to explain naturalistically. Cp. Childe Roland (p. 348) and (a slightly different case) Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), where the thoughts of ‘M. Léonce Miranda’ just prior to his solitary suicide are recorded.
It was roses, roses, all the way,
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
5 A year ago on this very day!
2
The air broke into a mist with bells,
The old walls rocked with the crowds and cries.
Had I said, “Good folks, mere noise repels—
But give me your sun from yonder skies!”
10 They had answered, “And afterward, what else?”
3
Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun,
To give it my loving friends to keep.
Nought man could do, have I left undone,
And you see my harvest, what I reap
15 This very day, now a year is run.
4
There’s nobody on the house-tops now—
Just a palsied few at the windows set—
For the best of the sight is, all allow,
At the Shambles’ Gate—or, better yet,
20 By the very scaffold’s foot, I trow.
5
I go in the rain, and, more than needs,
A rope cuts both my wrists behind,
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
For they fling, whoever has a mind,
25 Stones at me for my year’s misdeeds.
Thus I entered Brescia, and thus I go!
In such triumphs, people have dropped down dead.
“Thou, paid by the World,—what dost thou owe
Me?” God might have questioned: but now instead
30 ’Tis God shall requite! I am safer so.
Subtitle. In the sense of ‘a familiar or well-worn story’; note title in H proof (see headnote).
1–2. The patriot’s entry echoes that of Christ into Jerusalem, and is followed by a similar reversal of public acclaim into ignominy and death. Cp. Two Poets of Croisic (1878) 391–2: ‘a crown of bay / Circled his brows, with rose and myrtle mixed’.
1. roses all the way: The line ‘Strowing with fragrant Roses all the way’ appears in Mary Pix’s The Conquest of Spain (1705; Act II p. 21). The phrase ‘roses all the way’ is used by a number of poets after B., who is presumably their source.
2. myrtle: the flower of Venus, often made into wreaths or sprays during classical antiquity to symbolize ‘love, peace, honour etc.’ (OED sense 3). like mad: previous uses of this phrase occur mainly in comic and/or vernacular or dialect writing.
3–7. Cp. EBB.’s description of the procession to the Grand Duke’s palace in the first part of Casa Guidi Windows (1851): ‘the stones seemed breaking into thanks / And rattling up the sky, such sounds in proof / Arose; the very house-walls seemed to bend; / The very windows, up from door to roof, / Flashed out a rapture of bright heads’ (i 516–20).
8–10. Cp. In a Balcony i 63–6 (III 407): ‘Name your own reward! … Put out an arm and touch and take the sun’.
8. “Good folks] “Good folk (1863–88). mere noise: this phrase appears in John Hookham Frere’s Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work … relating to King Arthur and his Round Table (1817), in a context bearing affinities with Patriot: ‘From realm to realm he ran—and never staid; / Kingdoms and crowns he won—and gave away: / It seem’d as if his labours were repaid / By the mere noise and movement of the fray: / No conquests nor acquirements had he made: / His chief delight was on some festive day / To ride triumphant, prodigal, and proud, / And shower his wealth amidst the shouting crowd’ (i 153–60).
11–12. Cp. the image of the grasshoppers whose ‘passionate life … spends itself in leaps all day / To reach the sun’ (Easter Day 309–11, III 113); there may also be an allusion to the myth of Icarus (Ovid, Metamorphoses viii 183–235).
13–15. Cp. Isaiah xvii 11: ‘In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.’
13. do, have I left] do, surely, I left (H proof ). undone,] emended from 1855 ‘undone’, in agreement with H proof and 1856 (which was printed from advance proofs); 1863–88 have ‘undone:’.
16–25. Cp. the description of Guido’s execution in Ring xii 118–208.
16–17. now— / Just] now / Save (H proof ). See next note.
17. a palsied] the palsied (H proof, but not H proof 2). See prec. note; this is a rare example of H proof 2 recording one substantive variant in a line, but not another. palsied: B. probably uses the word primarily to mean ‘old’, following Shakespeare’s ‘palsied-Eld’ (Measure for Measure III i 36). Cp. (among several uses) King Victor and King Charles (1842) II 309–10: ‘crowns should slip from palsied brows to heads / Young as this head’, and Childe Roland 154 ( p. 363).
18. the best of the sight: the best view of the execution.
19. Shambles’ Gate: A ‘shambles’ was originally a meat market; the ‘Shambles’ Gate’ would therefore have been the place where meat was bought and sold; the term is being applied metaphorically here to the gate that leads to the speaker’s place of execution.
20. I trow: I believe (archaic).
21. more than needs: ‘more than is necessary’ (to restrain me).
24–5. Cp. Jesus’s response to the Pharisees when they brought him the woman taken in adultery: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’ ( John viii 7).
26–30. The speaker means that if he had died a year ago, at the height of his triumph, he would have been ‘paid by the World’ and left owing a debt to God; now the situation is reversed. B. has in mind the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus warns: ‘Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward’ (Matthew vi 1–2). Cp. the similar endings of Porphyria (p. 73), Johannes Agricola (p. 79), Mesmerism (III 486) and In a Year ( p. 273).
26.] So I entered this Brescia and quit it so! (H proof ); Thus I entered, and thus I go! (1863–88). For Brescia, see headnote. Cp. Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem Peschiera, published in Putnam’s Magazine in May 1854: ‘Yet not in vain, although in vain / O men of Brescia, on the day / Of love past hope, I heard you say / Your welcome to the noble pain’ (ll. 13–16).
27. In such triumphs, people] In such triumphs some people (H proof ); In triumphs, people (1863–88). Cp. the late poem Imperante Augusto Natus Est (Asolando, 1889), in which the emperor Augustus is compelled to pose as a beggar one day a year to atone for his good fortune; see esp. ll. 144–51.
28. “Thou, paid] “Paid (1863–88).
29. Me?”] Me!” (H proof, but not H proof 2). might have questioned] might question (1863–88).
30. ’Tis God shall requite!] It is God who requites: (H proof ); ’Tis God shall repay! (1863–65); ’Tis God shall repay: (1868–88). Both ‘requite’ and ‘repay’ have biblical connotations of vengeance as well as reward: ‘the spoiler is come upon her, even upon Babylon, and her mighty men are taken, every one of their bows is broken: for the Lord God of recompences shall surely requite’ ( Jeremiah li 56); ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’ (Romans xii 19).