his station in the Past! 125Was I, the world arraigned,6 Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last!7 22 isoNow, who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? 1352 3 Not on the vulgar0 massCalled 'work,' must sentence pass, Things done, that took the eye and had the price; O'er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: common i4oM Rut all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb,8 So passed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.9 26 155Aye, note that Potter's wheel, That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay? Thou, to whom fools propound,1 When the wine makes its round, 'Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize today!'
6. I.e., was I, whom the world arraigned. 7. Stanzas 20 and 21 affirm that in age we can more readily think independently than in youth. Maturity enables us to ignore the pressure of having to conform to the thinking of the crowd of small-minded people. 8. Allusion to a merchant or buyer feeling fabric to determine its price or value. 9. The speaker's highest qualities of soul were shaped on a potting wheel into an enduring 'pitcher' or vessel by God. Cf. Isaiah 64.8. 1. Perhaps addressed to Omar Khayyam, whose poem. The Rubaiydt, urged men to eat, drink, and be merry. See FitzGerald's 1859 translation (p. 1213).
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131 0 / ROBERT BROWNING
27
Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 160 What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.
28
He fixed thee 'mid this dance Of plastic0 circumstance, molded
165 This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:2 Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
29
What though the earlier grooves 170 Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base,3 no longer pause and press? What though, about thy rim, Skull-things in order grim
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?
3? 175 Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips a-glow! 180 Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?
31 But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who moldest men;
And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I?to the wheel of life 185 With shapes and colors rife, Bound dizzily?mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:
32 So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! 190 My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!
ca.1862 1864
2. I.e., you would be glad to stop ('arrest') time at to figures of cherublike boys, often featured in this present point of your life. Renaissance art. 3. Of the clay pitcher. 'Laughing loves' may refer
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1311
EMILY BRONTE 1818-1848
Emily Bronte spent most of her life in a stone parsonage in the small village of Haworth on the wild and bleak Yorkshire moors. She was the fifth of Patrick and Maria Bronte's six children. Her father was a clergyman; her mother died when she was two. At the age of six, she was sent away to a school for the daughters of poor clergy with her three elder sisters; within a year, the two oldest girls had died, in part the result of the school's harsh and unhealthy conditions, which Charlotte Bronte was later to portray in Jane Eyre (1847). Mr. Bronte brought his two remaining daughters home, where, together with their brother and younger sister, he educated them himself. Emily was the most reclusive and private of the children; she shunned the company of those outside her family and suffered acutely from homesickness in her few short stays away from the parsonage.
Despite the isolation of Haworth, the Bronte family shared a rich literary life. Mr. Bronte discussed poetry, history, and politics with his children, and the children themselves created an extraordinary fantasy world together. When Mr. Bronte gave his son a box of wooden soldiers, each child excitedly seized one and named it. The soldiers became for them the centers of an increasingly elaborate set of stories that they first acted out in plays and later recorded in a series of book-length manuscripts, composed for the most part by Charlotte and her brother, Branwell. The two younger children, Emily and Anne, later started a separate series, a chronicle about an imaginary island called Gondal.
In 1850 Charlotte Bronte told the story of how she and her sisters came to write for publication. One day when she accidentally came upon a manuscript volume of verse in Emily's handwriting, she was struck by the conviction 'that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write.' With some difficulty, Charlotte persuaded her intensely private sister to publish some of her poems in a selection of poetry by all three Bronte sisters. Averse to personal publicity and afraid that 'authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice,' Charlotte, Emily, and Anne adopted the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Although the 1846 book sold only two copies, its publication inspired each of the Bronte sisters to begin work on a novel; Emily's was Wuthering Heights (1847). She began work on a second novel, but a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, she died of tuberculosis.
Many of Emily's poems?'Remembrance' and 'The Prisoner,' for example?were written for the Gondal saga and express its preoccupation with political intrigue, passionate love, rebellion, war, imprisonment, and exile.
