Robert Browning - The Complete Poems of Robert Browning - 22 Poetry Collections in One Edition

(‘T is winter with its sullenest of storms)

Beside that arras-length of broidered forms,

On tiptoe, lifting in both hands a light

Which makes yon warrior’s visage flutter bright

— Ecelo, dismal father of the brood,

And Ecelin, close to the girl he wooed,

Auria, and their Child, with all his wives

From Agnes to the Tuscan that survives,

Lady of the castle, Adelaide. His face

— Look, now he turns away! Yourselves shall trace

(The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine,

A sharp and restless lip, so well combine

With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive

Delight at every sense; you can believe

Sordello foremost in the regal class

Nature has broadly severed from her mass

Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames

Some happy lands, that have luxurious names,

For loose fertility; a footfall there

Suffices to upturn to the warm air

Half-germinating spices; mere decay

Produces richer life; and day by day

New pollen on the lily-petal grows,

And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.

You recognise at once the finer dress

Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness

At eye and ear, while round the rest is furled

(As though she would not trust them with her world)

A veil that shows a sky not near so blue,

And lets but half the sun look fervid through.

How can such love? — like souls on each full-fraught

Discovery brooding, blind at first to aught

Beyond its beauty, till exceeding love

Becomes an aching weight; and, to remove

A curse that haunts such natures — to preclude

Their finding out themselves can work no good

To what they love nor make it very blest

By their endeavour, — they are fain invest

The lifeless thing with life from their own soul,

Availing it to purpose, to control,

To dwell distinct and have peculiar joy

And separate interests that may employ

That beauty fitly, for its proper sake.

Nor rest they here; fresh births of beauty wake

Fresh homage, every grade of love is past,

With every mode of loveliness: then cast

Inferior idols off their borrowed crown

Before a coming glory. Up and down

Runs arrowy fire, while earthly forms combine

To throb the secret forth; a touch divine —

And the scaled eyeball owns the mystic rod;

Visibly through his garden walketh God.

So fare they. Now revert. One character

Denotes them through the progress and the stir, —

A need to blend with each external charm,

Bury themselves, the whole heart wide and warm, —

In something not themselves; they would belong

To what they worship — stronger and more strong

Thus prodigally fed — which gathers shape

And feature, soon imprisons past escape

The votary framed to love and to submit

Nor ask, as passionate he kneels to it,

Whence grew the idol’s empery. So runs

A legend; light had birth ere moons and suns,

Flowing through space a river and alone,

Till chaos burst and blank the spheres were strown

Hither and thither, foundering and blind:

When into each of them rushed light — to find

Itself no place, foiled of its radiant chance.

Let such forego their just inheritance!

For there ‘s a class that eagerly looks, too,

On beauty, but, unlike the gentler crew,

Proclaims each new revealment born a twin

With a distinctest consciousness within,

Referring still the quality, now first

Revealed, to their own soul — its instinct nursed

In silence, now remembered better, shown

More thoroughly, but not the less their own;

A dream come true; the special exercise

Of any special function that implies

The being fair, or good, or wise, or strong,

Dormant within their nature all along —

Whose fault? So, homage, other souls direct

Without, turns inward. “How should this deject

“Thee, soul?” they murmur; “wherefore strength be quelled

“Because, its trivial accidents withheld,

“Organs are missed that clog the world, inert,

“Wanting a will, to quicken and exert,

“Like thine — existence cannot satiate,

“Cannot surprise? Laugh thou at envious fate,

“Who, from earth’s simplest combination stampt

“With individuality — uncrampt

“By living its faint elemental life,

“Dost soar to heaven’s complexest essence, rife

“With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last,

“Equal to being all!”

In truth? Thou hast

Life, then — wilt challenge life for us: our race

Is vindicated so, obtains its place

In thy ascent, the first of us; whom we

May follow, to the meanest, finally,

With our more bounded wills?

Ah, but to find

A certain mood enervate such a mind,

Counsel it slumber in the solitude

Thus reached nor, stooping, task for mankind’s good

Its nature just as life and time accord

“ — Too narrow an arena to reward

“Emprize — the world’s occasion worthless since

“Not absolutely fitted to evince

“Its mastery!” Or if yet worse befall,

And a desire possess it to put all

That nature forth, forcing our straitened sphere

Contain it, — to display completely here

The mastery another life should learn,

Thrusting in time eternity’s concern, —

So that Sordello….

Fool, who spied the mark

Of leprosy upon him, violet-dark

Already as he loiters? Born just now,

With the new century, beside the glow

And efflorescence out of barbarism;

Witness a Greek or two from the abysm

That stray through Florence-town with studious air,

Calming the chisel of that Pisan pair:

If Nicolo should carve a Christus yet!

While at Siena is Guidone set,

Forehead on hand; a painful birth must be

Matured ere Saint Eufemia’s sacristy

Or transept gather fruits of one great gaze

At the moon: look you! The same orange haze, —

The same blue stripe round that — and, in the midst,

Thy spectral whiteness, Mother-maid, who didst

Pursue the dizzy painter!

Woe, then, worth

Any officious babble letting forth

The leprosy confirmed and ruinous

To spirit lodged in a contracted house!

Go back to the beginning, rather; blend

It gently with Sordello’s life; the end

Is piteous, you may see, but much between

Pleasant enough. Meantime, some pyx to screen

The full-grown pest, some lid to shut upon

The goblin! So they found at Babylon,

(Colleagues, mad Lucius and sage Antonine)

Sacking the city, by Apollo’s shrine,

In rummaging among the rarities,

A certain coffer; he who made the prize

Opened it greedily; and out there curled

Just such another plague, for half the world

Was stung. Crawl in then, hag, and couch asquat,

Keeping that blotchy bosom thick in spot

Until your time is ripe! The coffer-lid

Is fastened, and the coffer safely hid

Under the Loxian’s choicest gifts of gold.

Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,

And how he never could remember when

He dwelt not at Goito. Calmly, then,

About this secret lodge of Adelaide’s

Glided his youth away; beyond the glades

On the fir-forest border, and the rim

Of the low range of mountain, was for him

No other world: but this appeared his own

To wander through at pleasure and alone.

The castle too seemed empty; far and wide

Might he disport; only the northern side

Lay under a mysterious interdict —

Slight, just enough remembered to restrict

His roaming to the corridors, the vault