from Aurora Leigh, First Book

In those days, though, I never analysed

Myself even. All analysis comes late.

You catch a sight of Nature, earliest,

In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink

And drop before the wonder of ‘t; you miss

The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days,

And wrote because I lived–unlicensed else:

My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent flood

Abolished bounds,–and, which my neighbour’s field,

Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth.

We play at leap-frog over the god Term;

The love within us and the love without

Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,

We scarce distinguish. So, with other power.

Being acted on and acting seem the same:

In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels,

We know not if the forests move or we.

And so, like most young poets, in a flush

Of individual life, I poured myself

Along the veins of others, and achieved

Mere lifeless imitations of life verse,

And made the living answer for the dead,

Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste,

Nor handle,’–we’re too legal, who write young:

We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs,

As if still ignorant of counterpoint;

We call the Muse ... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’–

As if we had seen her purple-braided head.

With the eyes in it start between the boughs

As often as a stag’s. What make-believe,

With so much earnest! what effete results,

From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes

From such white heats!–bucolics, where the cows

Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud

In lashing off the flies,–didactics, driven

Against the heels of what the master said;

And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps

A babe might blow between two straining cheeks

Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh;

And elegiac griefs, and songs of love,

Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road,

The worse for being warm: all these things, writ

On happy mornings, with a morning heart,

That leaps for love, is active for resolve,

Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms

Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood.

The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped,

Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in.

Spare the old bottles!–spill not the new wine.

By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped

In gradual progress like another man,

But, turning grandly on his central self,

Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years

And died, not young,–(the life of a long life,

Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear

Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn

For ever;) by that strong excepted soul,

I count it strange, and hard to understand,

That nearly all young poets should write old;

That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen,

And beardless Byron academical,

And so with others. It may be, perhaps,

Such have not settled long and deep enough

In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,–and still

The memory mixes with the vision, spoils,

And works it turbid.

                  Or perhaps, again,

In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx,

The melancholy desert must sweep round,

Behind you, as before.–

For me, I wrote

False poems, like the rest, and thought them true.

Because myself was true in writing them.

I, peradventure, have writ true ones since

With less complacence.

                    But I could not hide

My quickening inner life from those at watch.

They saw a light at a window now and then,

They had not set there. Who had set it there?

My father’s sister started when she caught

My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say

I had no business with a sort of soul,

But plainly she objected,–and demurred,

That souls were dangerous things to carry straight

Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world.

She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you done

Your task this morning?–have you read that book?

And are you ready for the crochet here?’–

As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong,

I know I have not ground you down enough

To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust

For household uses and proprieties,

Before the rain has got into my barn

And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re green

With out-door impudence? you almost grow?’

To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task,

And verify my abstract of the book?

And should I sit down to the crochet work?

Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teased

The patient needle til it split the thread,

Which oozed off from it in meandering lace

From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad;

My soul was singing at a work apart

Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm

As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,

In vortices of glory and blue air.

And so, through forced work and spontaneous work,

The inner life informed the outer life,

Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms,

Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams,

And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin

Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks,

Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across

My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,

And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong.

The dogs are on us–but we will not die.’