POEMS, 1838-50 PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1844 THE collection here offered to the public | consists of Poems which have been written in the interim between the period of the publication of my Seraphim and the present; variously coloured, or perhaps shadowed, by the life of which they are the natural expression, and, with the exception of a few contributions to English or American periodicals, are printed now for the first time. As the first poem of this collection, the Drama of Exile, is the longest and most important work (to me!) which I ever trusted into the current of publication, I may be pardoned for entreating the reader's attention to the fact, that I decided on publishing it after considerable hesitation and doubt. The subject of the Drama rather fastened on me than was chosen; and the form, approaching the model of the Greek tragedy, shaped itself under my hand, rather by force of pleasure than of design. But when the excitement of composition had subsided I felt afraid of my position. My subject was the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity, as it went forth from Paradise into the wilderness; with a peculiar reference to Eve's allotted grief, which, considering that self-sacrifice belonged to her womanhood, and the consciousness of originating the Fall to her offence, appeared to me imperfectly apprehended hitherto, and more expressible by a woman than a man. There was room, at least, for lyrical emotion in those first steps into the wilderness,-in that first sense of desolation after wrath,-in that first audible gathering of the recriminating 'groan of the whole creation,'-in that first darkening of the hills from the recoiling feet of angels, and in that first silence of the voice of God. And I took pleasure in driving in, like a pile, stroke upon stroke, the idea of EXILE,-admitting Lucifer as an extreme Adam, to represent the ultimate tendencies of sin and loss,—that it might be strong to bear up the contrary idea of the Heavenly love and purity. But when all was done I felt afraid, as I said before, of my position. I had promised my own prudence to shut close the gates of Eden between Milton and myself, so that none might say I dared to walk in his footsteps. He should be within, I thought, with his Adam and Eve unfallen or falling,—and I, without, with my EXILES,-/ also an exile! It would not do. The subject, and his glory covering it, swept through the gates, and I stood full in it, against my will, and contrary to my vow, till I shrank back fearing, almost desponding; hesitating to venture even a passing association with our great poet before the face of the public. Whether at last I took courage for the venture by a sudden revival of that love of manuscript which should be classed by moral philosophers among the natural affections, or by the encouraging voice of a dear friend, it is not interesting to the reader to inquire. Neither could the fact affect the question; since I bear, of course, my own responsibilities. For the rest, Milton is too high, and I am too low, to render it necessary for me to disavow any rash emulation of his divine faculty on his own ground; while enough individuality will be granted, I hope, to my poem, to rescue me from that imputation of plagiarism which should be too servile a thing for every sincere thinker. After all, and at the worst, I have only attempted, in respect to Milton, what the Greek dramatists achieved lawfully in respect to Homer. They constructed dramas on Trojan ground; they raised on the buskin and even clasped with the sock, the feet of Homeric heroes; yet they neither imitated their Homer nor emasculated him. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, who died in the bath, did no not build a church, by the very naming of it! As if the word God were not, every harm to, nor suffered any harm from, the Agamemnon of Homer who bearded Achilles. To this analogy-the more favour-where in His creation, and at every able to me from the obvious exception in moment in His eternity, an appropriate it, that Homer's subject was his own word! As if it could be uttered unfitly, if possibly by creation, whereas Milton's was devoutly! I appeal on these points, which his own by illustration only-I appeal. I will not argue, from the conventions of To this analogy-not to this comparison, the Christian to his devout heart; and be it understood-I appeal. For the I beseech him generously to believe of me analogy of the stronger may apply to that I have done that in reverence from the weaker; and the reader may have which, through reverence, he might have patience with the weakest while she abstained; and that where he might have suggests the application. been driven to silence by the principle of adoration, I, by the very same principle, have been hurried into speech. On a graver point I must take leave to touch, in further reference to my dramatic poem. The divine Saviour is represented in vision towards the close, speaking and transfigured; and it has been hinted to me that the introduction may give offence in quarters where I should be most reluctant to give any. A reproach of the same class, relating to the frequent recurrence of a Great Name in my pages, has already filled me with regret. How shall I answer these things? Frankly, in any case. When the old mysteries represented the Holiest Being in a rude familiar fashion, and the people gazed on, with the faith of children in their earnest eyes, the critics of a succeeding age, who rejoiced in Congreve, cried out 'profane.' Yet Andreini's mystery suggested Milton's epic; and Milton, the most reverent of poets, doubting whether to throw his work into the epic form or the dramatic, left, on the latter basis, a rough groundplan, in which his intention of introducing the Heavenly Love' among the persons of his drama is extant to the present day. But the tendency of the present day is to sunder the daily life from the spiritual creed, to separate the worshipping from the acting man, and by no means to 'live by faith.' There is a feeling abroad which appears to me (I say it with deference) nearer to superstition than to religion, that there should be no touching of holy vessels except by consecrated fingers, nor any naming of holy names except in consecrated places. As if life were not a continual sacrament to man, since Christ brake the daily bread of it in His hands! As if the name of God did It should have been observed in another place, the fact, however, being sufficiently obvious throughout the drama,—that the time is from the evening into the night. If it should be objected that I have lengthened my twilight too much for the East, I might hasten to answer that we know nothing of the length of mornings or evenings before the Flood, and that I cannot, for my own part, believe in an Eden without the longest of purple twilights. The evening, y, of Genesis signifies a 'mingling, and approaches the meaning of our 'twilight' analytically. Apart from which considerations, my 'exiles' are surrounded, in the scene described, by supernatural appearances; and the shadows that approach them are not only of the night. The next longest poem to the Drama of Exile, in the collection, is the Vision of Poets, in which I have endeavoured to indicate the necessary relations of genius to suffering and self-sacrifice. In the eyes of the living generation, the poet is at once a richer and poorer man than he used to be; he wears better broadcloth, but speaks no more oracles: and the evil of this social incrustation over a great idea is eating deeper and more fatally into our literature than either readers or writers may apprehend fully. I have attempted to express in this poem my view of the mission of the poet, of the self-abnegation implied in it, of the great work involved in it, of the duty and glory of what Balzac has beautifully and truly called 'la patience angélique du génie '; and of the obvious truth, above all, that if knowledge is power, suffering should be acceptable as a part of knowledge. It is enough to say of the other poems, that scarcely one of them is unambitious of an object and a significance. Since my Seraphim was received by the public with more kindness than its writer had counted on, I dare not rely on having put away the faults with which that volume abounded and was mildly reproached. Something indeed I may hope to have retrieved, because some progress in mind and in art every active thinker and honest writer must consciously or unconsciously make, with the progress of existence and experience: and, in some sort-since we learn in suffering what we teach in song,'-my songs may be fitter to teach. But if it were not presumptuous language on the lips of one to whom life is more than usually uncertain, my favourite wish for this work would be, that it be received by the public as a step in the right track, towards a future indication of more value and acceptability. I would fain do better-and I feel as if I might do better: I aspire to do better. It is no new form of the nympholepsy of poetry, that my ideal should fly before me: and if I cry out too hopefully at| sight of the white vesture receding between the cypresses, let me be blamed gently if justly. In any case, while my poems are full of faults-as I go forward to my critics and confess-they have my heart and life in them: they are not empty shells. If it must be said of me that I have contributed immemorable verses to the many rejected by the age, it cannot at least be said that I have done so in a light and irresponsible spirit. Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing: there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as worknot as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being, but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain; and as work I offer it to the public-feeling its shortcomings more deeply than any of my readers, because measured from the height of my aspiration, but feeling also that the reverence and sincerity with which the work was done should give it some protection with the reverent and sincere. LONDON, 50 WIMPOLE STREET, 1844. ADVERTISEMENT TO THE EDITION OF 1850 THIS edition, including my earlier and remembered against me by a few of my later writings, I have endeavoured to personal friends-I have replaced by an render as little unworthy as possible of entirely new version, made for them and the indulgence of the public. Several my conscience, in expiation of a sin of my poems I would willingly have withdrawn, youth, with the sincerest application of if it were not almost impossible to ex- my mature mind. This collection intricate what has been once caught and cludes, also, various poems hitherto uninvolved in the machinery of the press. printed, which I am glad to have the The alternative is a request to the gene- present opportunity of throwing behind rous reader that he may use the weak-me, so as to leave clear the path before, ness of those earlier verses, which no towards better aims and ends . . . may subsequent revision has succeeded in I hope? than any which are attained strengthening, less as a reproach to the writer, than as a means of marking some progress in her other attempts. One early failure, a translation of the Prometheus of Aeschylus-which, though happily free of the current of publication, may be here1. FLORENCE, January 1850. fourth edition, 1856 (from which the ensuing 1 Three additional pieces were added in the Poems are printed)-A Denial,' 'Proof and Disproof,' 'Question and Answer.' A DRAMA OF EXILE SCENE. The outer side of the gate of Eden shut fast with cloud, from the depth of which revolves a sword of fire self-moved. ADAM and EVE are seen in the distance flying along the glare. LUCIFER, alone. REJOICE in the clefts of Gehenna, My exiled, my host! Earth has exiles as hopeless as when a Heaven's empire was lost. Through the seams of her shaken founda tions, Smoke up in great joy! With the smoke of your fierce exultations Smoke up with your lurid revenges, Of the white heavens and taunt them We, in falling, while destiny strangles, Pull down with us all. Let them look to the rest of their angels ! Who's safe from a fall? He saves not. Where's Adam? Can pardon Requicken that sod? Other exiles are cast out of Eden,- I prevail now, and, angel or devil, [In sudden apparition a watch of in- Luc. Hail Gabriel, the keeper of the gate! Now that the fruit is plucked, prince I hold that Eden is impregnable |