Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads
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That ignorance of what to do,
Bewilder’d still by wrong from you:
For what man ever yet had grace
Ne’er to abuse his power and place?
No magic of her voice or smile
Suddenly raised a fairy isle,
But fondness for her underwent
An unregarded increment, 60
Like that which lifts, through centuries,
The coral-reef within the seas,
Till, lo! the land where was the wave.
Alas! ’tis everywhere her grave.
Notes
1. Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House together with The Victories of Love (London: Routledge, 1905).
2. Edmund Gosse, Coventry Patmore (New York: Scribners, 1905), 68.
3. Patmore, The Angel in the House, 104–7.
4. amain: with full force
5. advertencies: attentions
6. Patmore, The Angel in the House, 183.
7. vestal: chaste
8. Patmore, The Angel in the House, 276–79.
9. dowers: endows
10. nuptial: marriage
11. Patmore, The Angel in the House, 280–82.
12. cataract: waterfall
Charles Baudelaire, “Causerie” (1857)1
In addition to being a poet, Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was an art critic, essayist, and translator—one credited with popularizing Edgar Allan Poe’s work in France. Taking a cue from Poe’s gothicism, Baudelaire relished the interstices between the beautiful and the ugly, the sacred and the profane, life and death. Those juxtapositions, along with the parallel synesthesia that pervades his verse, became the touchstone for the Symbolists—poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, who rejected realism in favor of sensual and sensory description. Though it would come to be regarded as a seminal work of French poetry, Baudelaire’s 1857 Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) initially inspired derision from most critics, who were appalled by its subject matter. He and his publisher were prosecuted, in fact, for offending the public morality, a charge he did little to discourage. In “Causerie,” Baudelaire employs the length, meter, and rhyme scheme of a conventional sonnet while at the same time challenging convention through the torrid subject matter and abrupt interruption in line 11. The speaker’s ambivalence—at once bemoaning the misery that women have caused him and desiring the woman at his side—is, like the poem’s heterodox approach to form, reminiscent of Meredith’s in “Modern Love.”
Causerie
Vous êtes un beau ciel d’automne, clair et rose!
Mais la tristesse en moi monte comme la mer,
Et laisse, en refluant, sur ma lèvre morose
Le souvenir cuisant de son limon amer.
—Ta main se glisse en vain sur mon sein qui se pâme;
Ce qu’elle cherche, amie, est un lieu saccagé
Par la griffe et la dent féroce de la femme.—
Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; des monstres l’ont mangé.
Mon coeur est un palais flétri par la cohue;
On s’y soûle, on s’y tue, on s’y prend aux cheveux 10
—Un parfum nage autour de votre gorge nue!—
O Beauté, dur fléau des âmes! tu le veux!
Avec tes yeux de feu, brillants comme des fêtes,
Calcine ces lambeaux qu’ont épargnés les bêtes!
Causerie2
You are an autumn sky, suffused with rose. . . .
Yet sadness rises in me like the sea,
And on my sombre lip, when it outflows,
Leaves its salt burning slime for memory.
Over my swooning breast your fingers stray;
In vain, alas! My breast is a void pit
Sacked by the tooth and claw of woman. Nay,
Seek not my heart; the beasts have eaten it!
My heart is as a palace plunderèd
By the wolves, wherein they gorge and rend and kill, 10
A perfume round thy naked throat is shed. . . .
Beauty, strong scourge of souls, O work thy will!
Scorch with thy fiery eyes which shine like feasts
These shreds of flesh rejected by the beasts! —Sir John Squire
Notes
1. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Brois, 1857), 121. Causerie means “chat” or “conversation.”
2. Sir John Squire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers (London: New Age Press, 1909), 60. Reprinted with permission of the author’s estate.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from Maud (1859)1
Alfred, Lord Tennyson became England’s Poet Laureate in 1850, on the heels of the publication of his masterpiece, In Memoriam. Maud (which was many, many years in the making) was first published in 1855 (increasingly longer versions appeared in 1856 and 1859). A series of short lyrics in various meters, Maud is divided into three parts; each of these parts has several subsections (indicated by capitalized roman numerals), some of which have subsections of their own (indicated by lowercase roman numerals). The poem is said to have been one of Tennyson’s favorites to read aloud. Maud’s speaker is an extremely unhappy young man who desires Maud, the daughter of the man who drove his father to suicide. When Maud’s brother finds the two lovers in a garden, he strikes the speaker in a fit of rage. The altercation results in a duel, after which the speaker flees England for Breton, certain he has killed Maud’s brother. He descends into madness, but finds redemption in fighting against the Russians in the Crimean War. While the outline of such a story may seem trite, in Tennyson’s hands it nevertheless becomes an opportunity to create a poetic meditation upon the relationship between the emotions and physical sensation. The similarities in plot, form, and style between Maud and infamous Spasmodic poems prompted some Victorian readers to label Tennyson’s poem Spasmodic. The line numbers in the excerpt refer to the poem in its entirety in order to give readers a sense of the tension between Maud’s narrative and lyric impulses.
From Part I
I. i.
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,
The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death.’
I. ii.
For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found
His who had given me life—O father! O God! was it well?—
Mangled, and flatten’d, and crush’d, and dinted into the ground:
There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.
I. iii.
Did he fling himself down? who knows, for a vast speculation2 had fail’d,
And ever he mutter’d and madden’d, and ever wann’d with despair, 10
And out he walk’d when the wind like a broken worldling wail’d,
And the flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands drove thro’ the air.
I. iv.
I remember the time, for the roots of my hair were stirr’d
By a shuffled step, by a dead weight trail’d, by a whisper’d fright,
And my pulses closed their gates with a shock on my heart as I heard
The shrill-edged shriek of a mother divide the shuddering night.
III.
Cold and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek,
Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown’d,
Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek, 90
Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound;
Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong
Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before
Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound,
Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long
Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more,
But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground,
Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,
Now to the scream of a madden’d beach dragg’d down by the wave,
Walk’d in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found 100
The shining daffodil dead, and Orion3 low in his grave.
V. i.
A voice by the cedar tree,
In the meadow under the Hall!
She is singing an air that is known to me,
A passionate ballad gallant and gay,
A martial song like a trumpet’s call!
Singing alone in the morning of life,
In the happy morning of life and of May,
Singing of men that in battle array,
Ready in heart and ready in hand, 170
March with banner and bugle and fife
To the death, for their native land.
V. ii.
Maud with her exquisite face,
And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky,
And feet like sunny gems on an English green,
Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,
Singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die,
Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean,
And myself so languid and base.
From Part II
V. i.4
Dead, long dead,
Long dead! 240
And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain,
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,
Only a yard beneath the street,
And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,
The hoofs of the horses beat,
Beat into my scalp and my brain,
With never an end to the stream of passing feet,
Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying, 250
Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter,
And here beneath it is all as bad,
For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;
To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?
But up and down and to and fro,
Ever about me the dead men go;
And then to hear a dead man chatter
Is enough to drive one mad.
Notes
1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Maud, and Other Poems (London: Edward Moxon, 1859), 1–3, 13–14, 23–24, 102–3.
2. speculation: According to his son, Tennyson described the poem as “a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age.” Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son (London: Macmillan, 1897), 396.
3. Orion: a constellation resembling a hunter with a sword on his belt
4. The speaker is now confined to a madhouse, a place that he figures as a shallow grave. He believes that he and the other inhabitants are dead.
Christina Rossetti, from “Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets” (1881)1
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894), younger sister to Meredith’s friend the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was a master of poetic form whose witty yet stern poetry often thematized religious belief, love, and death, as well as a conflict between sensory pleasures and their refusal. “Monna Innominata” was first published in 1881, as part of A Pageant and Other Poems. Its title is usually translated as “unnamed lady”; its subtitle—“A Sonnet of Sonnets”—refers to the fact that it is a sequence of fourteen 14-line sonnets that (when taken as a whole) function as a meditation on the masculine tradition of courtly-love sonnets—a tradition associated with Dante and Petrarch. In her preface to the poem, Rossetti suggests that their portrayals of their beloveds (Beatrice and Laura, respectively) may not have done these women justice. “Had such a lady spoken for herself,” she writes, “the portrait left us might have appeared more tender, if less dignified, than any drawn even by a devoted friend.”2 She goes on to discuss Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, suggesting that Barrett Browning’s happiness impeded her ability to use poetry to portray the kind of female speaker that Rossetti envisions. Thus, the speaker of “Monna Innominata” tells of her conflicted emotions, focusing not only on her feelings for her earthly lover, but also on how her relationship to him is shaped by her love for God. Perhaps because of her brother William’s intimation in his edition of her work and the melancholy tone of the final sonnet, some readers insist upon regarding the sequence as a poetic account of her relationship with Charles Cayley, a suitor Rossetti declined to marry on account of their religious differences.
3.
“O ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto!”—Dante3
“Immaginata guida la conduce.”—Petrarca4
I dream of you to wake: would that I might
Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;
Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,
As Summer ended Summer birds take flight.
In happy dreams I hold you full in sight,
I blush again who waking look so wan;
Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone,
In happy dreams your smile makes day of night.
Thus only in a dream we are at one,
Thus only in a dream we give and take 10
The faith that maketh rich who take or give;
If thus to sleep is sweeter than to wake,
To die were surely sweeter than to live,
Though there be nothing new beneath the sun.5
6.
“Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender de l’amor che a te mi scalda.”—Dante6
“Non vo’che da tal nodo amor mi scioglia.”—Petrarca7
Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke,
I love, as you would have me, God the most;
Would lose not Him, but you, must one be lost,
Nor with Lot’s wife cast back a faithless look
Unready to forego what I forsook;
This say I, having counted up the cost,
This, though I be the feeblest of God’s host,
The sorriest sheep Christ shepherds with His crook.
Yet while I love my God the most, I deem
That I can never love you overmuch; 10
I love Him more, so let me love you too;
Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such
I cannot love you if I love not Him,
I cannot love Him if I love not you.
11.
“Vien dietro a me e lascia dir le genti.”—Dante8
“Contando i casi della vita nostra.”—Petrarca9
Many in aftertimes will say of you
“He loved her”—while of me what will they say?
Not that I loved you more than just in play,
For fashion’s sake as idle women do.
Even let them prate;10 who know not what we knew
Of love and parting in exceeding pain,
Of parting hopeless here to meet again,
Hopeless on earth, and heaven is out of view.
But by my heart of love laid bare to you,
My love that you can make not void nor vain, 10
Love that foregoes you but to claim anew
Beyond this passage of the gate of death,
I charge you at the Judgment make it plain
My love of you was life and not a breath.
14.
“E la Sua Volontade è nostra pace.”—Dante11
“Sol con questi pensier, con altre chiome.”—Petrarca12
Youth gone, and beauty gone if ever there
Dwelt beauty in so poor a face as this;
Youth gone and beauty, what remains of bliss?
I will not bind fresh roses in my hair,
To shame a cheek at best but little fair,—
Leave youth his roses, who can bear a thorn,—
I will not seek for blossoms anywhere,
Except such common flowers as blow
with corn.
Youth gone and beauty gone, what doth remain?
The longing of a heart pent up forlorn, 10
A silent heart whose silence loves and longs;
The silence of a heart which sang its songs
While youth and beauty made a summer morn,
Silence of love that cannot sing again.
Notes
1. Christina Rossetti, “Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets,” in A Pageant and Other Poems (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1881), 57, 60, 65, 68.
2. Ibid., 54.
3. “O ombre . . . l’aspetto!”: “O shades, empty save in semblance!” (Purgatorio, 2.79). All epigraph translations for “Monna Innominata” are by William Rossetti. The sources are Dante’s Divine Comedy and Petrarch’s sonnets. The epigraphs underscore Rossetti’s reversal of poetic convention, giving voice to the Beatrices and Lauras (adored and idealized objects of Dante’s and Petrarch’s love, respectively) of so many love poems without silencing the male perspective.
4. “Immaginata . . . conduce”: “An imaginary guide conducts her” (277.9).
5. “Though there be nothing new beneath the sun”: cf. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes. 1:9)
6. “Or puoi . . . scalda”: “Now canst thou comprehend the quantity of the love which glows in me towards thee.” (Purgatorio, 21.133–34).
7. “Non vo’che . . . scioglia”: “I do not choose that Love should release me from such a tie.” (59.17).
8. “Vien dietro . . . genti”: “Come after me, and leave folk to talk.” (Purgatorio, 5.13).
9. “Contando . . . nostra”: “Relating the casualties of our life.” (285.12).
10. prate: chatter
11. “E la Sua . . . pace”: “And His will is our peace.” (Paradiso, 3.85)
12. “Sol con questi . . . chiome”: “Only with these thoughts, with different locks.” (30.32)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Harry Ploughman” (1887)1
Hopkins’s poetry was first published in 1918, twenty-nine years after his death, by his friend and literary executor, the poet Robert Bridges. His poems are praised for their experimental meter and diction; Hopkins himself was hailed as a pioneer of “Modern” literature—even in the early twentieth century, when his fellow Victorian poets were vociferously derided. Like its companion piece “Tom’s Garland,” “Harry Ploughman” is a caudate sonnet, that is, a sonnet with a tail consisting of so-called burden lines. The poem asks readers to see God’s strength and grace in the body of a common working man and is an excellent example of Hopkins’s poetic technique. Joseph Bristow suggests that the image this poem paints may have been inspired by Hamo Thornycroft’s The Sower, a statue that Hopkins encountered at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1886.2