To suit my stature. I may love my art.
495 You'll grant that even a woman may love art,
Seeing that to waste true love on anything
Is womanly, past question.'
From Book 5 [POETS AND THE PRESENT AGE] The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods;2
I'll not believe it. I could never deem,
As Payne Knight3 did (the mythic mountaineer
Who travelled higher than he was born to live,
And showed sometimes the goitre4 in his throat
Discoursing of an image seen through fog),
That Homer's heroes measured twelve feet high.
They were but men:?his Helen's hair turned grey
Like any plain Miss Smith's who wears a front;5
And Hector's infant whimpered at a plume6
As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.
All actual heroes are essential men,
And all men possible heroes: every age,
Heroic in proportions, double-faced,
Looks backward and before, expects a morn
And claims an epos.0 epic poemAy, but every age
Appears to souls who live in't (ask Carlyle)7
Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours:
The thinkers scout it,? and the poets abound dismiss it scornfully
Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:
A pewter age,8.?mixed metal, silver-washed;
An age of scum, spooned off the richer past,
An age of patches for old gaberdines,0 coats
An age of mere transition,9 meaning nought
Except that what succeeds0 must shame it quite follows
If God please. That's wrong thinking, to my mind,
1. I.e., destroy my poetry. See 1 Corinthians 3.12? 6. In the Iliad, book 6, the Trojan hero Hector 15. reaches for his infant son, but the child clings to 2. Zeus, the ruler of the ancient Greek gods, was his nurse, frightened of his father's helmet and nursed by a goat. Agamemnon: the commander of crest. the Greeks in the Trojan War. 7. In Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in His3. Richard Payne Knight (1 750-1824), a classical tory (1841), Carlyle argues that the present age philologist who claimed that Lord Elgin had needs a renewed perception of the heroic. wasted his labor taking the marble friezes from the 8. Allusion to the convention, which originates in Parthenon in Greece to England because the mar-Hesiod (Greek poet, ca. 8th century B.C.E), of bles were not all Greek. describing civilization's decline through a succes4. A disease often contracted in high mountain sion of ages named for increasingly less precious areas because of the low iodine content of the materials: i.e., the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the water. Bronze Age. 5. A piece of false hair worn over the forehead by 9. In The Spirit of the Age (1831), John Stuart Mill women. calls the present age 'an age of transition.'
.
AURORA LEIGH / 1105
And wrong thoughts make poor poems.
Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it. We'll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Alexander schemed,
170 To some colossal statue of a man.1 The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear, Had guessed as little as the browsing goats Of form or feature of humanity Up there,?in fact, had travelled five miles off
175 Or ere the giant image broke on them, Full human profile, nose and chin distinct, Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky And fed at evening with the blood of suns; Grand torso,?hand, that flung perpetually
i8o The largesse of a silver river down To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus With times we live in,?evermore too great To be apprehended near. But poets should Exert a double vision; should have eyes
185 To see near things as comprehensively
