Text and publication
First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863, 18652, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855.
Composition, date and setting
Mrs Orr (Life 196–7) implies that the poem was written, or at least conceived, during the Brownings’ visit to Bagni di Lucca in July–Oct. 1853, when, as EBB. wrote to Mary Russell Mitford, ‘we mean to buy our holiday by doing some work’ (EBB to MRM iii 388). Orr states that ‘Mr. Browning’s share of the work referred to was In a Balcony; also some of the Men and Women; the scene of the declaration in By the Fireside [sic] was laid in a little adjacent mountain-gorge to which he walked or rode’. William Wetmore Story, who was staying with his family nearby, records a ‘constant & delightful intercourse’ with the Brownings, ‘interchanging long eve[nin]gs together two or three times a week & driving & walking together whenever we can meet … Both are busily engaged in writing. He on a new volume of lyrical poems & she on a tale or novel in verse’ (American Friends 277). See also Appendix C, p. 890. Drawing on William Wetmore Story’s letters, DeVane (Handbook 221–2) suggests that the ruined chapel of the poem stands beside the mountain path to Prato Fiorito; and, more recently, M. B. M. Calcraft has attempted to identify the chapel itself as the ‘Oratorio della Madonna delle Grazie’, alongside the river Refubbri near Bagni di Lucca (‘ “A Place to Stand and Love in”: By the Refubbri Chapel with the Brownings’, BSN xvi.1 (Spring 1986) 12–22; see Thomas figs. 235–6 for illustrations). Calcraft disputes DeVane’s dating of the poem, linking it not to 1853 when the Brownings visited Bagni di Lucca in company, but to the more private visit undertaken during 1849 in the immediate aftermath of the death of B.’s mother and the birth of Pen. Jean Stirling Lindsay, in contrast, suggests that the poem is based not on an actual visit to Bagni di Lucca, but on a visit to Lago di Orta planned but never undertaken by the Brownings in 1847, and compares its descriptions of Alpine scenery with those to be found in Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont (SP xxxix [1942] 571–9); see l. 43n.
The internal evidence of the poem, and in particular the complexity of its rhetorical structure, would appear to favour a later date: like Women and Roses (III 235) and unlike the earlier England in Italy (p. 254) which it otherwise resembles, it utilizes a structure of three tenses: the present situation of the speaker is in ‘middle life’ (ll. 101–50, 256–65), from which he projects himself imaginatively forward into old age (ll. 1–25), the better to evaluate a crucial experience in the past (ll. 26–100, 151–265). This process is complicated by his use of the historic present for all three layers: he addresses his future children as ‘my friends’; and he communes with his ‘perfect wife’ as though they still both stood in the place and at the time he is recalling. This complex rhetorical structure makes it difficult to ascertain who is being addressed at certain moments; at l. 27 (for instance) it is not clear if the speaker is talking to his wife or merely imagining doing so. B. for his part sought to pre-empt inquiry into the circumstances of the poem’s composition with the assertion that ‘all but the personality [of the speaker and addressee] is fictitious—that is, the portraiture only is intended to be like—the circumstances are a mere imaginary framework’ (letter to Revd James Graham, 6 April 1888; cited in G. David, ‘Four New Browning Letters’, SBC ii, no. 1 [Spring 1974] 62).
In spite of B.’s disclaimer the poem has generally been seen as one of his most directly personal utterances, and finds many parallels in the poets’ correspondence. In a series of letters in the autumn of 1845 B. and EBB. exchanged ideas about marriage and what they each expected from it; cp., e.g., B.’s letter of 23 Oct. 1845: ‘do you really think that before I found you, I was going about the world seeking whom I might devour,—that is, be devoured by, in the shape of a wife .. do you suppose I ever dreamed of marrying?—what would it mean for me, with my life I am hardened in,—considering the rational chances,—how the land is used to furnish its contingent of Shakespeare’s-women … what do you meet at every turn, if you are hunting about in the dusk to catch my good, but yourself ?’ (Correspondence xi 135). See also ll. 141–5n. In a letter of 11 Jan. 1846 B. looks forward to his future with EBB.: ‘now I most think of you in the dark hours that must come—I shall grow old with you, and die with you … Hear this said now before the few years, and believe in it now, for then, dearest!’ (Correspondence xi 306–8). After the marriage, EBB. wrote to her sisters: ‘Always he will have it, that our attachment was “predestinated from the beginning,”: & that no two persons could have one soul between them so much as we’ (21–4 Nov. 1846, Correspondence xiv 51); again on 7 Jan. 1847 she confided: ‘What makes him perfectly happy is to draw his chair next mine & to let the time slip away’ (Correspondence xiv 94). A letter from B. to Richard Hengist Horne of 3 Dec. 1848 describes the two poets ‘[sitting] here over the log-fire hearing wild news go in & out’ (Correspondence xv 169). This impression of personal significance is reinforced by a number of possible allusions to EBB.’s poetry. The speaker’s comparison of himself to a tree might ‘answer’ EBB.’s representation of B. as a ‘strong tree’ in Sonnets from the Portuguese xxix, and her representation of herself as a ‘sere leaf ’ in ‘The Weakest Thing’. This metaphor in turn seems to derive from an image in Felicia Hemans’s 1826 poem ‘The Forest Sanctuary’ (I xi), as do some of the other details in this poem. Its hero, a Spaniard fleeing religious persecution, elopes with and marries a woman called Leonor, much to the displeasure of her father, who feels that she has ‘cast darkness … on the clear renown’ of her family’s ‘ancestral heritage of fame’ (II xxix; see below l. 101n.). Both the Brownings were admirers of Felicia Hemans’s work; her son presented EBB. with a copy of Mrs Hemans’s Commonplace Book on 25 May 1854 (Collections A1166).
Married love was a popular topic in mid-Victorian poetry, as evidenced by the success of the first volume of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House in 1854 (on which see A Face, III 230). In Tennyson’s ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ (1842 ed.) there is a similar combination of intimate domestic talk and impassioned reminiscence; the poem’s speaker invites his wife to revisit the millpond which had been the scene of their courtship: ‘So sweet it seems with thee to walk, / And once again to woo thee mine— / It seems in after-dinner talk / Across the walnuts and the wine’ (ll. 29–32); later passages anticipate the vocabulary and emotional tone of B.’s poem, e.g. ll. 215–18: ‘Look through mine eyes with thine. True wife, / Round my true heart thine arms entwine / My other dearer life in life, / Look through my very soul with thine!’ and ll. 235–8: ‘But that God bless thee, dear—who wrought / Two spirits to one equal mind— / With blessings beyond hope or thought, / With blessings which no words can find’. A verbal similarity to Arthur Munby’s ‘Communion’ (1852) is noted at l. 74. Munby’s poem contrasts the love of the natural world, which is ‘[loving] and fair, but— blind!’ with the stronger and more lasting desire for ‘[communion] with a human soul’. Donne’s Platonic approach to heterosexual love, in particular in ‘The Extasie’, is another possible source, as is Shelley’s version of this in Epipsychidion and other works. The Brownings were interested in the writings of Swedenborg in the 1850s, and his Conjugial Love may have influenced the poem’s love philosophy (cp. head-note to Evelyn Hope, p. 274).
With the poem’s setting (a remembered climb in wooded mountain scenery) and theme of intense emotional companionship, cp. Matthew Arnold’s ‘Resignation’ (1849), where the couple are the poet and his sister (addressed as ‘Fausta’); see, e.g., ll. 50–9:
The valley-pastures, one by one,
Are threaded, quiet in the sun;
And now beyond the rude stone bridge
Slopes gracious up the western ridge.
Its woody border, and the last
Of its dark upland farms is past—
Cool farms, with open-lying stores,
Under their burnish’d sycamores;
All past! And through the trees we glide,
Emerging on the green hill-side.
Ten years later they repeat the excursion, arriving at the same vantage-point: ‘Here sit we, and again unroll, / Though slowly, the familiar whole’ (ll. 94–5). Like B.’s poem, Arnold’s contains detailed images of the remembered (and revisited) landscape, linked to thoughts about the persistence of identity and feeling:
The loose dark stones on the green way
Lie strewn, it seems, where then they lay;
On this mild bank above the stream,
(You crush them!) the blue gentians gleam.
Still this wild brook, the rushes cool,
The sailing foam, the shining pool!
These are not changed; and we, you say,
Are scarce more changed, in truth, they say.
(ll. 100–7)
The mood of rapture in By the Fire-Side strongly contrasts with the ‘resignation’ which Arnold enjoins; B.’s poem may belong to the ‘dialogue’ with Arnold conducted in the 1850s (see headnote to Cleon, p. 563).
Parallels in B.
The title ‘By the Fire-Side’ is that of the second section of James Lee (p. 668), where it signifies not an ideal communion of souls but marital breakdown. Both James Lee and another poem from DP, Dîs Aliter Visum (p. 688), invert many elements of By the Fire-Side, including the gender of the speaker, who in the latter poem remembers a moment of (male) emotional cowardice. These poems date from after EBB.’s death, but failed marriages and the inability to achieve a desired complete union are not absent from M & W: see esp. Two in the Campagna (p. 556).
The action of the poem turns on the ‘moment, one and infinite’ (l. 181) which is one of B.’s most constant themes, with a particular importance in his love poems. In poems before M & W, cp. Cristina 33–40 (I 776); in M & W, cp. esp. the concluding stanza of Last Ride (III 285). Among post-M & W poems, cp. Now (Asolando, 1889), which begins ‘Out of your whole life give but a moment!’ and describes that moment as one ‘which gives me at last / You around me for once, you beneath me, above me’ (ll. 7–8) and as ‘The moment eternal—just that and no more / When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core’ (ll. 12–13); cp. also A Pearl, a Girl from the same volume. The metaphysics of this concept are expounded in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871) 589–98: ‘I suppose Heaven is, through Eternity, / The equalizing, ever and anon, / In momentary rapture, great with small, / Omniscience with intelligency, God / With man,—the thunder-glow from pole to pole / Abolishing, a blissful moment-space, / Great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire— / As sure to ebb as sure again to flow / When the new receptivity deserves / The new completion. There’s the Heaven for me.’
1
How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark Autumn evenings come,
And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?
With the music of all thy voices, dumb
5 In life’s November too!
2
I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age,
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows,
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
10 Not verse now, only prose!
Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip,
“There he is at it, deep in Greek—
Now or never, then, out we slip
To cut from the hazels by the creek
15 A mainmast for our ship.”
4
I shall be at it indeed, my friends!
Greek puts already on either side
Such a branch-work forth, as soon extends
To a vista opening far and wide,
20 And I pass out where it ends.
5
The outside-frame like your hazel-trees—
But the inside-archway narrows fast,
And a rarer sort succeeds to these,
And we slope to Italy at last
25 And youth, by green degrees.
I follow wherever I am led,
Knowing so well the leader’s hand—
Oh, woman-country, wooed, not wed,
Loved all the more by earth’s male-lands,
30 Laid to their hearts instead!
7
Look at the ruined chapel again
Half way up in the Alpine gorge.
Is that a tower, I point you plain,
Or is it a mill or an iron forge
35 Breaks solitude in vain?
A turn, and we stand in the heart of things;
The woods are round us, heaped and dim;
From slab to slab how it slips and springs,
The thread of water single and slim,
40 Thro’ the ravage some torrent brings!
9
Does it feed the little lake below?
That speck of white just on its marge
Is Pella; see, in the evening glow
How sharp the silver spear-heads charge
45 When Alp meets Heaven in snow.
10
On our other side is the straight-up rock;
And a path is kept ’twixt the gorge and it
By boulder-stones where lichens mock
The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit
50 Their teeth to the polished block.
11
Oh, the sense of the yellow mountain flowers,
And the thorny balls, each three in one,
The chestnuts throw on our path in showers,
For the drop of the woodland fruit’s begun
55 These early November hours—
12
That crimson the creeper’s leaf across
Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt,
O’er a shield, else gold from rim to boss,
And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped
60 Elf-needled mat of moss,
13
By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged
Last evening—nay, in to-day’s first dew
Yon sudden coral nipple bulged
Where a freaked, fawn-coloured, flaky crew
65 Of toad-stools peep indulged.
And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge
That takes the turn to a range beyond,
Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge
Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond
70 Danced over by the midge.
15
The chapel and bridge are of stone alike,
Blackish grey and mostly wet;
Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke.
See here again, how the lichens fret
75 And the roots of the ivy strike!
16
Poor little place, where its one priest comes
On a festa-day, if he comes at all,
To the dozen folk from their scattered homes,
Gathered within that precinct small
80 By the dozen ways one roams
To drop from the charcoal-burners’ huts,
Or climb from the hemp-dressers’ low shed,
Leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts,
Or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread
85 Their gear on the rock’s bare juts.
18
It has some pretension too, this front,
With its bit of fresco half-moon-wise
Set over the porch, art’s early wont—
’Tis John in the Desert, I surmise,
90 But has borne the weather’s brunt—
19
Not from the fault of the builder, though,
For a pent-house properly projects
Where three carved beams make a certain show,
Dating—good thought of our architect’s—
95 ’Five, six, nine, he lets you know.
20
And all day long a bird sings there,
And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times:
The place is silent and aware;
It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
100 But that is its own affair.
21
My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh, heart my own, oh, eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
105 The path grey heads abhor?
22
For it leads to a crag’s sheer edge with them;
Youth, flowery all the way, there stops—
Not they; age threatens and they contemn,
Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,
110 One inch from our life’s safe hem!
23
With me, youth led—I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it
115 Mutely—my heart knows how—
24
When, if I think but deep enough,
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without a rebuff
The response your soul seeks many a time
120 Piercing its fine flesh-stuff—
My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that by its side
125 Youth seems the waste instead!
26
My own, see where the years conduct!
At first, ’twas something our two souls
Should mix as mists do: each is sucked
Into each now; on, the new stream rolls,
130 Whatever rocks obstruct.
27
Think, when our one soul understands
The great Word which makes all things new—
When earth breaks up and Heaven expands—
How will the change strike me and you
135 In the House not made with hands?
Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
140 New depths of the Divine!
29
But who could have expected this,
When we two drew together first
Just for the obvious human bliss,
To satisfy life’s daily thirst
145 With a thing men seldom miss?
30
Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again—
Let us now forget and then recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
150 And gather what we let fall!
31
What did I say?—that a small bird sings
All day long, save when a brown pair
Of hawks from the wood float with wide wings
Strained to a bell: ’gainst the noon-day glare
155 You count the streaks and rings.
32
But at afternoon or almost eve
’Tis better; then the silence grows
To that degree, you half believe
It must get rid of what it knows,
160 Its bosom does so heave.
33
Hither we walked, then, side by side,
Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,
And still I questioned or replied,
While my heart, convulsed to really speak,
165 Lay choking in its pride.
34
Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,
And pity and praise the chapel sweet,
And care about the fresco’s loss,
And wish for our souls a like retreat,
170 And wonder at the moss.
Stoop and kneel on the settle under—
Look through the window’s grated square:
Nothing to see! for fear of plunder,
The cross is down and the altar bare,
175 As if thieves don’t fear thunder.
36
We stoop and look in through the grate,
See the little porch and rustic door,
Read duly the dead builder’s date,
Then cross the bridge we crossed before,
180 Take the path again—but wait!
37
Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o’er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright.
How grey at once is the evening grown—
185 One star, the chrysolite!
38
We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well.
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
190 Till the trouble grew and stirred.
39
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,
195 And life be a proof of this!
40
Had she willed it, still had stood the screen
So slight, so sure, ’twixt my love and her.
I could fix her face with a guard between,
And find her soul as when friends confer,
200 Friends—lovers that might have been.
41
For my heart had a touch of the woodland time,
Wanting to sleep now over its best.
Shake the whole tree in the summer-prime,
But bring to the last leaf no such test.
205 “Hold the last fast!” says the rhyme.
42
For a chance to make your little much,
To gain a lover and lose a friend,
Venture the tree and a myriad such,
When nothing you mar but the year can mend!
210 But a last leaf—fear to touch.
43
Yet should it unfasten itself and fall
Eddying down till it find your face
At some slight wind—(best chance of all!)
Be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place
215 You trembled to forestal!
Worth how well, those dark grey eyes,
—That hair so dark and dear, how worth
That a man should strive and agonise,
And taste a very hell on earth
220 For the hope of such a prize!
45
Oh, you might have turned and tried a man,
Set him a space to weary and wear,
And prove which suited more your plan,
His best of hope or his worst despair,
225 Yet end as he began.
46
But you spared me this, like the heart you are,
And filled my empty heart at a word.
If you join two lives, there is oft a scar,
They are one and one, with a shadowy third;
230 One near one is too far.
47
A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast.
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life; we were mixed at last
235 In spite of the mortal screen.
48
The forests had done it; there they stood—
We caught for a second the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and for good,
Their work was done—we might go or stay,
240 They relapsed to their ancient mood.
49
How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment’s product thus,
When a soul declares itself—to wit,
245 By its fruit—the thing it does!
50
Be Hate that fruit or Love that fruit,
It forwards the General Deed of Man,
And each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan,
250 Each living his own, to boot.
I am named and known by that hour’s feat,
There took my station and degree.
So grew my own small life complete
As nature obtained her best of me—
255 One born to love you, sweet!
52
And to watch you sink by the fire-side now
Back again, as you mutely sit
Musing by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it
260 Yonder, my heart knows how!
53
So the earth has gained by one man more,
And the gain of earth must be Heaven’s gain too,
And the whole is well worth thinking o’er
When the autumn comes: which I mean to do
265 One day, as I said before.
3. Present for future: ‘where, my soul, will thy pleasant hue be?’ Cp. Disraeli, Tancred (1847), bk ii, ch xii: ‘ “Because you have a soul,” continued Tancred, with animation, “still of a celestial hue. They are rare in the nineteenth century. Nobody now thinks about heaven. They never dream of angels. All their existence is concentred in steam-boats and railways.” ’
4. of all thy voices] of thy voices (H proof).
5. life’s November: with the exact phrase, ‘life’s November’, cp. Bernard Barton, The Twelve Months of Human Life (1824) 139–44: ‘And thus, in human life’s November, / When sixty years and six are by, / ’Tis time that man should oft remember / “The hour approaches he must die!” / True, he may linger to four-score, / But death is waiting at the door!’ With the concept, cp. Macbeth V iii 22–3: ‘my way of life / Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf ’; and cp. also Lovers’ Quarrel 134–40n. (p. 383). The events recorded in the poem are attributed to November too (see l. 55), so some kind of probably informal anniversary celebration might be involved.
7. a great wise book: cp. (noting ‘Greek’ in l. 12) Development (Asolando, 1889) 105–15, where the poet describes himself in old age reading Aristotle’s Ethics.
7–8. as beseemeth age, / While] as beseemeth age; / How (H proof, but not H proof 2).
8. cross-wind: usually a contrary, thwarting wind, as in PL iii 487–8: ‘A violent cross wind from either Coast / Blows them transverse ten thousand Leagues awry’. Here it is not quite clear what the wind is contrary to; the sense is perhaps ‘a vexatious wind’, in that it makes the shutters flap.
10. Cp. Tennyson, ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ (1842 ed.), ll. 191–4: ‘So, if I waste words now, in truth / You must blame love. His early rage / Had force to make me rhyme in youth, / And makes me talk too much in age.’ See ll. 52–3n., and headnote, Sources.
12–15.] no quotation marks in H proof.
13. Now or never, then,] Now then or never, (H proof, but not H proof 2). 1863–65 revert to the word order in H proof, but with changed punctuation: ‘Now, then, or never’; 1868–88 agree with H proof. This is a very rare example of B. returning in two stages to a reading which originates in proof.
17–20. By poring over the ‘great wise book’, the speaker gives the ‘young ones’ the slip (they believe him to be ‘deep in Greek’ while he is in fact daydreaming about his past); at the same time, the act of reading itself is the means by which he re-enters the landscape of memory. The children are off to play at exploration and adventure among the ‘hazels by the creek’; the speaker imagines the physical and mental properties of reading Greek (the turning of pages, the shapes of the letters) forming an imaginative ‘branch-work’, like a pergola along which he makes his way towards the place he wishes to reach.
21. outside-frame: apparently B.’s coinage.
22. inside-archway: another of B.’s coinages. Cp. Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’: ‘I am a part of all that I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move’ (ll. 18–21). narrows] widens (18652, 1868–88).
23. rarer sort: i.e. a rarer sort of trees; cp. the description of the ‘trees / Of rarer leaf ’ in Salinguerra’s garden in Ferrara, Sordello iv 125–6 (I 600–2).
24–5. slope … by green degrees: lit., to descend in stages, as though memory were a path leading downward; note the original meaning of ‘degree’ as one of a flight of steps; perhaps also influenced by the traditional way in which English travellers entered Italy by crossing the Alps; but B. may also be playing on a more recent, colloquial sense of ‘slope’, imported from America, as ‘to amble off ’ or even ‘to sneak off ’, since he is giving his ‘friends’ the slip. With the ‘green degrees’ cp. also Pope’s translation of Odyssey vi 353–4: ‘Around the grove a mead with lively green / Falls by degrees, and forms a beauteous scene’. There is also an affinity with the ‘concrete abstractions’ of Metaphysical poetry, as in Marvell, ‘The Garden’: ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’ (ll. 47–8); B. may also have in mind the sense of ‘green’ as fresh and youthful. 27. the leader’s hand: either his wife’s, or the hand of a personification of Italy (see next note). On the question of addressees in the poem see headnote. The image inverts the motif of Orpheus leading his beloved wife Eurydice out of Hades, a theme B. treated in Eurydice to Orpheus (DP, from 1868); see also ll. 100–5.
28–30. B.’s personification of Italy as a beautiful and much loved woman, reiterated in De Gustibus (III 25), contrasts with the dominant iconography of Italian nationalism, which portrayed the ‘woman-country’ as the victim of foreign violation: see e.g. Byron’s loose translation of Vincenzo Da Filicaia’s sonnet ‘Italia, O Italia’ in canto iv of Childe Harold: ‘Oh God! that thou wert in thy nakedness / Less lovely or more powerful, and could’st claim / Thy right, and awe the robbers back, who press / To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress’ (ll. 375–9). Cp. EBB.’s rejection of such images at the beginning of Casa Guidi Windows: ‘Of such songs enough, / Too many of such complaints!’ (i 40–1). 31–5. For the actual landscapes on which B. may be drawing in the poem, see headnote.
31. ruined chapel: cp. Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland (1846): ‘Behind the town of Orta a hill rises, on which there is a sanctuary, dedicated to St Francis of Assisi: over it are distributed 22 chapels or oratories’ (p. 271).
32. Alpine gorge: Calcraft (see headnote, Composition) points out that the mountains near Carrara are known as the Alpi Apuane; but cp. l. 43n.
33. a tower, I ] a tower which I (H proof); a tower I (H proof 2).
36–40. Cp. Pauline 729–810n. (p. 54). Cp. also Murray, Handbook, p. 271: ‘A steep path leads up the mountain side to Arola, amidst the richest vegetation.’
42. That speck] And the speck (H proof, but not H proof 2).
43. Pella: the small town of Pella is on the shores of Lago di Orta, in the province of Novara (Piemonte); glimpsed from the mountains it might look like a ‘speck of white’. As Jean Lindsay points out, B. might have obtained his information about this location from Murray’s Handbook; see headnote.
46–55. Cp. the climb up mount Calvano in England in Italy 170–96 (pp. 263–4).
48–9. lichens mock / The marks on a moth: i.e. the pattern formed by the lichens on the rocks resembles (parodies) the marks on a moth’s wings.
51. Cp. EBB., Lessons from the Gorse: ‘Mountain gorses, ever golden … / Do ye teach us to be strong, / Howsoever pricked and holden / Like your thorny blooms, and so / Trodden on by rain and snow / Up the hill-side of this life, as bleak as where ye grow?’ (ll. 1, 3–7).
52–3. B. probably refers to the fruit of the sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) whose prickly outer casing often contains three nuts. Cp. Tennyson, ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ (1842 ed.): ‘Or from the bridge I leaned to hear / The milldam rushing down with noise … / Or those three chestnuts near, that hung / In masses thick with milky cones’ (ll. 49–50, 55–6). See l. 10n.
52. And the thorny] And thorny (1868–88).
53. on our path in showers,] in this path of ours (H proof).
56. ‘That’ is a relative pronoun referring to the ‘early November hours’: i.e. autumn is turning the foliage red.
58. boss: ‘the part rising in the midst of any thing’ (J.); here, the rounded knob at the centre of a shield, although the word can also refer to protuberances in plants. Cp. Instans Tyrannus 65 (III 263).
59–64. fairy-cupped … Elf-needled … rose-flesh … fawn-coloured: one of the densest clusters of compound epithets in B.; cp. Pretty Woman 1 (III 201), Caliban 40 (p. 627), and see B. W. A. Massey, Browning’s Vocabulary: Compound Epithets (Poznau 1933).
59. for show] to show (H proof, but not H proof 2). fairy-cupped: the ‘mat of moss’ (l. 60) is dotted with ‘fairy-cups’, either the cowslip (Primula veris) or harebell (Campanula rotundifolia); OED cites this line for the former definition: the word is B.’s coinage.
60. elf-needled: the moss is so finely textured that it might have been stitched by elves. References to elves and fairies are rare in B. (in contrast to, e.g., Tennyson or Christina Rossetti). B.’s coinage.
61. By: by the side of. rose-flesh: cp. De Gustibus 34 (III 27): ‘green-flesh melons’.
63. coral nipple: i.e. the mushroom’s coral-pink cap; the Apennines are famous for their wild mushrooms.
64. freaked: streaked, variegated; cp. Milton, Lycidas 144 (‘the pansy freaked with jet’) and James Thomson, Winter (1726) 814 (‘freak’d with many a mingled hue’). flaky: the toadstools have a rough, irregular surface; B. probably has in mind J.’s second definition of ‘flaky’ as ‘lying in layers or strata’, not the first, ‘loosely hanging together’.
68. the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge: the ruined chapel at Refubbri (see headnote) is reached via a one-arched bridge. Cp. Ring xi 9: ‘The one-arched brown brick bridge’. In a letter to Isa Blagden of 19 July 1867, B. remarked: ‘I would gladly ride with Annette [Bracken] once more up to the little old ruined chapel, by the bridge,—she may remember,—where we took shelter in a thunderstorm’ (Dearest Isa 274).
73. Hemp (Cannabis sativa) is a plant used for making cheap clothing and ropes; the stalks here have been cut by the ‘hemp-dressers’ (l. 82) and left to ‘steep’ (soak) in the channel which leads to the ‘stagnant pond’. See also Up at a Villa 34 (III 146).
74. lichens fret: lit., ‘corrode, eat away’ (J.). Cp. Arthur Munby, ‘Communion’: ‘Old shaggy gnarls the lichen frets— / Steep banks of mountain lanes— / Moss-cushion’d arms of rivulets— / The hush of woodland rains’ (ll. 97–100, and see headnote).
77. festa-day: the day of a religious festival; cp. Ring vii 967. Every Italian village has its patron saint and a day dedicated to festivities in his or her honour.
80–1. one roams / To drop] one roams— / Who drops (H proof); one roams— / To drop (1863–88). In H proof ‘Who drops’ (and ‘Or [who] climbs’ in l. 82) are in apposition to ‘one roams’, hence the dash; B. may then have decided that the 1855 construction ‘one roams [in order] to drop’ was awkward or unclear, and restored the dash so that ‘To drop … or [to] climb’ become examples of ‘the dozen ways one roams’.
81–2. Cp. B’s letter to George Barrett from Bagni di Lucca (16–18 July 1853): ‘Then, we are quiet—for there’s nothing civilized beyond us, on this side, but a few charcoal-burners’ huts, the river & the woods’ (George Barrett 195).
82. Or climb] Or climbs (H proof).
83. Leave the grange] Or the grange (H proof).
84. wattled cote: small shed made of interwoven canes; cp. Milton’s Comus 343 and Arnold’s ‘Scholar-Gipsy’, l. 2, where it means a sheep-fold. fowlers: bird hunters; their ‘gear’ (l. 85) is probably nets and poles, as in England in Italy 35 (p. 258).
86. this front: the facade of the chapel.
88. o’er the porch] over the porch (H proof). art’s early wont: in the manner of early Renaissance church architecture (but see l. 95n.).
89. John in the Desert: John the Baptist, who preaches in the ‘wilderness’ (Matthew iii 1), a common subject in Renaissance painting.
90. Cp. the description of the damage suffered by early Italian art in Old Pictures 41–8, 185–92 (pp. 412, 423–4).
92. pent-house: a sloping roof over the porch.
95. The date ‘1569’ does not quite fit the phrase ‘art’s early wont’ in l. 88, which indicates (as in Old Pictures, 57–64, pp. 413–14) Italian art of the ‘Quattrocento’ or 15th century.
98. aware: ‘Vigilant; in a state of alarm; attentive’ (J.).
99. its joys] and joys (H proof, but not H proof 2).
101–10. A further possible allusion to the myth of Orpheus leading his wife Eurydice out of Hades (see l. 27n. and next note): he was warned not to look back at her as they went, but could not help doing so. Here, the husband looks ‘backward’ in time for his wife, with whom he remembers journeying from youth to age; it is this journey of memory which most old people cannot bear to undertake, because it leads to the end of youth and, by implication, love as well, but which in the speaker’s case has led to his salvation.
101. Leonor: the name of the wife in Felicia Hemans’s ‘The Forest Sanctuary’ (see headnote): ‘And thou, my Leonor! that unrepining, / If sad in soul, didst quit all else for me, / When stars—the stars that earliest rise—are shining, / How their soft glance unseals each thought of thee! / For on our flight they smiled; their dewy rays, / Through the last olives, lit thy tearful gaze / Back to the home we never more might see; / So passed we on, like earth’s first exiles, turning / Fond looks where hung the sword above their Eden burning’ (II xxx). Leonora is also the name of the heroine of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, who, disguised as the title character, rescues her husband from imprisonment; the opera’s subtitle is ‘Die Eheliche Liebe’ (Married Love). B. mentions the opera admiringly in a letter to EBB. of 15 Aug 1845 (Correspondence xi 29).
102. Cp. Donne, ‘The Extasie’, ll. 33–6: ‘But as all several souls contain / Mixture of things, they know not what, / Love, these mix’d souls doth mix again, / And makes both one, each this and that’. See also Lovers’ Quarrel 92–4 (p. 381) and Two in the Campagna 41–5 (p. 561). Oh, heart my own, oh, eyes,] Oh, heart my own, oh eyes, (1865, 18652); Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, (1868–88). Cp. Love Among the Ruins 79n. (p. 539).
103. could I dare look] could I look (H proof).
107. Youth, flowery all the way: the association of youth, love, and a flowery path is traditional; cp. e.g. Samuel Daniel, Delia li 5–6: ‘Ah sport (sweet Maide) in season of these yeares, / And learne to gather flowers before they wither: / And where the sweetest blossomes first appeares, / Let loue and youth conduct thy pleasures thither’.
108. contemn: ‘To despise; to scorn; to slight; to disregard; to neglect; to defy’ (J.).
109. the gulf … life’s safe hem: cp. Murray, Handbook: ‘the path leads down through pastoral scenes … then changes almost suddenly to the deep gloom of a ravine.’ With the image of the ‘gulf ’, cp. Old Pictures 137–40 (p. 420). Cp. also Ring, in which the Pope twice describes Guido’s desperate attempt to save his life, first in bk. i, by ‘pressing up so close / Only to set a blood-smutch on our robe’ (ll. 324–5), and again in bk. x: ‘I sit and see / Another poor weak trembling human wretch / Pushed by his fellows, who pretend the right, / Up to the gulf which, where I gaze, begins / From this world to the next,—gives way and way, / Just on the edge over the awful dark: / With nothing to arrest him but my feet’ (ll. 170–6). In Christmas-Eve (III 34) the speaker is transported around the world by clutching the ‘hem’ of Christ’s garment.
111. With me, youth led—: the aposiopesis is total: we are not directly told what youth led to in the speaker’s case. I will speak now: for the debate about whether the speaker means ‘speak aloud’, see headnote.
113–14. Cp. the description of EBB. in George Stillman Hillard’s Six Months in Italy (2 vols., 1853) i 140: ‘I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit’.
115. Mutely—] Mutely, (1863–88); the rev. reading makes clear that it qualifies ‘speak’ (l. 111), implying a form of unspoken or telepathic communication.
116–20. Mesmerism, telepathy and spiritualism were all popular and related topics in the 1850s. B.’s interest in mesmerism (involving telepathic communication) can be traced in his revisions to Sordello, drafted around this time (see headnote, I 358). The belief that lovers in particular could communicate wordlessly is suggested in many poems of Donne (e.g. The Extasie; see 102n., 127–30n.). Cp. Mesmerism (III 475), where telepathic communication is also posited.
118. without a rebuff ] without rebuff (1865–88).
119. The response] Response (1868–88).
123. how little I dreamed] how blind I was, (H proof).
127–30. At first their souls mingled as thoroughly as two mists, but over time they have condensed into a single substance. With this stanza cp. Donne, ‘The Extasie’, esp. ll. 41–4: ‘When love, with one another so / Interinanimates two soules, / That abler soule, which thence doth flow, / Defects of lonelinesse controls.’ See also Confessional 17–18n. (II 338) and Any Wife to Any Husband 50 (III 650).
129. Into each] In each (1868–88).
131. our one soul: cp. Donne, ‘A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning’, l. 21: ‘Our two souls therefore, which are one’, and Shelley, Epipsychidion: ‘We shall become the same, we shall be one / Spirit within two frames’ (ll. 573–4); ‘Let us become the overhanging day, / The living soul of this Elysian isle— / Conscious, inseparable, one’ (ll. 538–40). Cp. also EBB., ‘Inclusions’ (1850): ‘Oh, must thou have my soul, Dear, commingled with thy soul?— / Red grows the cheek, and warm the hand; the part is in the whole: / Nor hands nor cheeks keep separate, when soul is joined with soul’ (ll. 7–9).
132–3. Conflating two biblical sources: John i 1: ‘In the beginning was the Word’, and Revelation xxi 5: ‘Behold, I make all things new’. Cp. also Any Wife to Any Husband 18 (III 649).
135. See 2 Corinthians v 1: ‘For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’. Cp. Abt Vogler 66 (p. 767).
136–40. The stance here echoes that frequently adopted by B. in his letters to EBB.: ‘I should like to breathe and move and live by your allowance and pleasure’ (23 Apr 1846, Correspondence xii 272); ‘I wish your will to be mine, to originate mine’ (4 June 1846; ibid. xiii 22). Cp. the relation between Eglamor, the eternally secondary artist, and the genius whom he admires, in Sordello vi 793–814 (I 764–6); and contrast Two in the Campagna 36–50 (pp. 561–2).
138. Cp. Love in a Life 13 (III 2): ‘Still the same chance! She goes out as I enter’.
139. See and make me see: cp., in Sordello, the description of the highest kind of artist, the ‘Makers-see’ who ‘impart the gift of seeing to the rest’ (iii 842, I 584).
141–5. Cp. EBB.’s letter of 21–4 Dec. 1845: ‘People used to say to me, “You expect too much—you are too romantic”—And my answer always was that “I could not expect too much when I expected nothing at all” ’ (Correspondence xi 258). Later in the same letter she expressed her horror of conventional marriage: ‘To see the marriages which are made everyday! worse than solitudes & more desolate!’ (ibid. 259). But B. was prepared to defend what the poem calls ‘the obvious human bliss’, i.e. marriage as a social partnership rather than a mode of transcendent passion: ‘if you look on the world altogether, and accept the small natures, in their usual proportion, with the greater .. things do not look quite so bad; because, the conduct which is atrocious in those higher cases, of proposal and acceptance, may be no more than the claims of the occasion justify … in certain other cases where the thing sought for and granted is avowedly less by a million degrees … He who honestly wants his wife to sit at the head of the table and carve .. that is be his help-meat (not “help mete for him”[)]—he shall assuredly find a girl of his degree who wants the table to sit at’ (25 Dec. 1845, ibid. 262–3). For another quotation from this letter, see below, l. 234n., and see also headnote.
141. But who] And who (H proof but not H proof 2).
146–50. Cp. the ‘rosary’ of memory in England in Italy 7–10: ‘Let me keep you amused … with telling my memories over / As you tell your beads’ (p. 257).
148. and then recall] and now recall (1863–88).
150. And gather] And pick up (H proof).
151–5. Cp. l. 96, although the hawks were not mentioned there; cp. Woman’s Last Word 5–8 (III 274), where there are two birds and one hawk. Cp. also Misconceptions (III 680).
154. Strained to a bell: presumably, to the shape of a bell, with the hawks gliding.
155. streaks and rings: markings on the hawks’ plumage.
158–60. The place needs to unburden itself of its secrets; cp. ll. 99–100.
161–5. Cp. the couple in Dîs Aliter Visum 101–10 (p. 696).
168. the fresco’s loss: cp. Old Pictures 185–92 (pp. 423–4).
171. settle: ‘A seat; a bench; something to sit on’ (J.).
175. The thieves might be expected to be superstitiously fearful that God would strike them dead if they stole from a church; but the church authorities are taking no chances.
179. we crossed] that we crossed (1888).
181. For the importance of this concept in B., see headnote, Parallels. Oh moment, one] Oh, moment one (H proof); Oh moment one (1872).
182. stock and stone: see Love Among the Ruins 30n. (p. 535).
183–5. Cp. Andrea 35, 207 (pp. 392, 400). Perhaps derived from Keats, Ode to a Nightingale 35: ‘Tender is the night’.
183. The West] emended in agreement with H proof and all other eds from ‘The west’ in 1855; such agreement between proof and subsequent printed eds is rare, as is the restoration of upper case in eds after 1855.
185. one star: cp. PL viii 519–20: ‘bid haste the evening star / On his hill top, to light the bridal lamp’, and Two in the Campagna 52–5 (p. 562). the chrysolite!] its chrysolite! (1870–88); a green semi-precious stone, the ‘garnish’ of the seventh foundation of the New Jerusalem (Revelation xxi 20); cp. Othello V ii 146–9. 186. with never a third: as Turner points out (p. 323), the courtship correspondence contains references to a fictional ‘third person’ who views the lovers’ relationship from the outside; see letters of 31 Aug. 1845 (Correspondence xi 54); and the three letters dated 26 Feb 1846 (Correspondence xii 105–10). Cp. ll. 228–30.
191–5. Cp. Lovers’ Quarrel 106–12 (p. 382). Oxford notes a possible source in Tristram Shandy, vol. ii, ch. 6: ‘Just heaven! how does the Poco più and the Poco meno of the Italian artists;—the insensible more or less, determine the precise line of beauty in the sentence, as well as in the statue!’
196–7. Cp. B.’s very first letter to EBB., lamenting the fact that he had missed seeing her on a previous occasion: ‘I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels—as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight .. so it now seems .. slight and just-sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be!’ (10 Jan. 1845; Correspondence x 17) Cp. Pauline 4–5: ‘a screen / To shut me in with thee, and from all fear’ (p. 13), Lovers’ Quarrel 140 (p. 383), and the image in Henry Alford’s ‘An Answer to a Question’: ‘When the thing thou lovest puts a screen / Thy heart and thy heart’s Christ between’ (ll. 3–4). Mary Russell Mitford gave EBB. a copy of Alford’s Poems and Poetical Fragments (1833) in which this poem appeared (Correspondence iv 16).
196. willed it] willed so (H proof).
198. fix: see Cristina l. 8n. (I 775).
201–10. The speaker suggests that he might have allowed the ‘screen’ to remain between himself and his wife because his heart was like a tree in winter with just one leaf left on it; had he been in his prime he could have withstood many such tests. This metaphor might answer EBB.’s representation of herself as a ‘wild vine’ wrapping itself around a ‘strong tree’ (Sonnets from the Portuguese xxix); see headnote. This passage also recalls EBB.’s ‘The Weakest Thing’ (Poems, 1850): ‘Which is the weakest thing of all … / The wind, a little leaf above, / Though sere, resisteth? / What time that yellow leaf was green, / My days were gladder … / Ah me! a leaf with sighs can wring/ My lips asunder?’ (ll. 1, 7–10, 13–14).
202. now over its best: now its best (time) was over.
204. bring to the last leaf ] bring the last leaf to (H proof).
205. says the rhyme.] runs the rhyme. (1863–88, except 1865 which has no full stop at the end of the line; taken by itself this looks like a mispr., but it makes sense taken with the rev. in the following line). We have not found this proverbial ‘rhyme’, but the phrase ‘Hold fast’ occurs several times in the Bible, once in proverbial form in 1 Thessalonians v 21: ‘Prove all things; hold fast that which is good’, and once with an internal rhyme in Revelation iii 11: ‘hold that fast which thou hast’. Cp. also Richard Crashaw’s ‘In the Glorious Assumption of our Blessed Lady. The Hymn’: ‘Thy pretious name shall be / Thy self to us; & we / With holy care will keep it by us. / We to the last / Will hold it fast / And no Assumption shall deny us’ (ll. 46–51). Note, however, the difference between B.’s ‘the last [thing]’ and Crashaw’s ‘to the last [moment of time]’.
206. much,] much. (1865), joining this line syntactically to l. 205, instead of initiating a new sentence.
208–9.] Tug though you venture a myriad such; / Nothing you mar but the year can mend: (H proof).
211–15. Fortunately the leaf flutters down of its own accord and lands on ‘Leonor’, making its home in her heart in a way she had ‘trembled’ to ‘forestal’.
212. Eddying down] Eddying it down (H proof).
216–30. Had ‘Leonor’ decided to ‘test’ the speaker, then she would have been worth the most intense ‘striving’ and ‘agonising’; but, aware of his vulnerability, she has ‘spared’ him the ‘trial’ which might have cost him too much, and ‘filled his empty heart at a word’. With this notion of a woman’s ‘test’ of a man’s love, cp. In a Balcony iii 172–5n. (III 445).
219. a very hell] a veriest hell (1870–88).
221. Oh, you might] You might (1868–88).
222. Set him a space] Set him such a space (H proof, but not H proof 2).
225. The test is that the man’s feelings should remain the same at the end of his ordeal as at the beginning: he must avoid becoming either too confident through ‘hope’ or too cast down by ‘despair’.
226. the heart you are: it is unusual to find ‘heart’ used as a term of endearment without a preceding adjective (e.g. ‘dear’ or ‘sweet’); see OED sense 14a.
227. filled my] filled up my (H proof, but not H proof 2).
228–30. Cp. Two in the Campagna 39–40n. (p. 561).
228. If you join two lives] If two lives join (1865–88).
230. One near one] One beside one (H proof).
234. Cp. B.’s letter to EBB. of 25 Dec. 1845 (another passage from which is cited at ll. 141–5n.): ‘My dear Christmas gift of a letter! I will write back a few lines … just that I may forever .. certainly during our mortal “forever”—mix my love for you, and, as you suffer me to say, your love for me .. dearest! .. these shall be mixed with the other loves of the day and live therein’ (Correspondence xi 261).
236–40. On the possible literary sources for the forest in the poem see headnote.
237. for a second] for a moment (1865–88).
238. so, for] here for (H proof, but not H proof 2). for once and for good: combining ‘for once and all’ and ‘for good’ as meaning both ‘forever’ and ‘for the good of both’. and for good] and good (1868–88).
242. all we perceive] all we see (H proof, but not H proof 2).
244–5. Cp. Matthew vii 16–17: ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits … every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.’
246. Hate … Love] hate … love (18652, 1868–88).
247. It forwards] It goes to (H proof, but not H proof 2). General Deed of Man] general deed of man (1868–88).
248.] And each of the millions helps recruit (H proof). 1868–88 have ‘many’. recruit: ‘To repair any thing wasted by new supplies’ (J.).
250. Each living] Each man with (H proof). to boot: as well; i.e. each individual lives his own life as well as participating in ‘the life of the race’.
251. named and known: a legal phrase used (e.g.) in adoption documents. that hour’s] that moment’s (1865–88).
252–3. There … So] So … There (H proof).
256–60. A reprise, with variations, of ll. 111–15.
261.] So, earth has gained by one man the more (1870–88).
263–5. Cp. the poem’s opening lines.
264. the autumn] autumn (1865–88).