As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things as intimately deep
As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.
I do distrust the poet who discerns
190 No character or glory in his times, And trundles back his soul five hundred years, Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court, To sing?oh, not of lizard or of toad Alive i' the ditch there,?'twere excusable,
195 But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,0 sheep stealer
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones;
And that's no wonder: death inherits death.
200 Nay, if there's room for poets in this world
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne's,2?this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
205 And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland3 with his knights at Roncesvalles.
To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,
Cry out for togas and the picturesque,
1. Deinocrates, a Macedonian architect (4th cen-2. Frankish conqueror (742?814), who created a tury B.C.E.) , is said to have suggested to Alexander European empire. the Great that Mount Athos be carved into the 3. Legendary medieval hero, whose adventures statue of a conqueror with a city in his left hand are told in the epic poem Chanson de Roland (11 th and a basin in his right, where all the waters of the century); his last battle is fought at Roncesvalles, region could be collected and used to water the a Spanish village. pasture lands below.
.
110 6 / ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
210 Is fatal,?foolish too. King Arthur's self
Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat
As Fleet Street4 to our poets.
Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
215 Upon the burning lava of a song
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress0 with reverent hand, and say impression
'Behold,?behold the paps? we all have sucked! breasts
220 This bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating: this is living art,
Which thus presents and thus records true life.'
1853-56 1857
Mother and Poet1
(Turin, After News from Gaeta, 1861)
i DEAD! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead! both my boys! When you sit at the feast
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
5 Let none look at me!
2
