ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

1806-1861

The most inspired woman of all who have composed in ancient or modern tongues, or flourished in any land or time.-E. C. Stedman.

Optional Poems

Cowper's Grave.

Lady Geraldine's Courtship.

The Lady's "Yes."

The Cry Of The Children.

A Song For The Ragged Schools.

The Dead Pan.

A Court Lady.

My Heart And I.

De Profundis.

Sonnets From The Portuguese.

Phrases

Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which, if cut deep

down the middle,

Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
Lady Geraldine's Courtship.

For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts

Than men in benediction.

Aurora Leigh.

And floated from me like a silent cloud

That leaves the sense of thunder. — Aurora Leigh.

the eyes smiled too,

But 'twas as if remembering they had wept,

And knowing, they should, some day, weep again.

-Aurora Leigh.

A holiday of miserable men

Is sadder than a burial-day of Kings. — Aurora Leigh.

Albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing, The foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her singing. - Felicia Hemans.

Hold, in high poetic duty,

Truest Truth the fairest Beauty! — The Dead Pan.

A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

I

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat
5 And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river?

II

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river.
The limpid water turbidly ran,

10 And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.

III

High on the shore sate the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river,

15 And hacked and hewed as a great god can
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

IV

20

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,

(How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith like the heart of a man
Steadily from the outside ring,

Then notched the poor, dry, empty thing

In holes as he sate by the river.

25

30

V

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan, (Laughed while he sate by the river!)

"The only way since gods began

To make sweet music they could succeed."
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

He blew in power by the river!

VI

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan,
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,

35 And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

VII

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan
To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man.

40 The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain For the reed which grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river.

Compare this poem with James Russell Lowell's "The Finding of the Lyre" and with Thomas Moore's "The Origin of the Harp." Andrew Marvell of the seventeenth century, in "The Garden," writes: "When we have run our passion's heat,

Love hither makes his best retreat.

The gods, who mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race;
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,

Not as a nymph, but for a reed."

HOW DO I LOVE THEE?

(Sonnets from the Portuguese)

XLIII.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being, and ideal Grace.

5 I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use.

10 In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Discuss the overlying, beautiful sense-rhythm " that transcends this sonnet's metrical structure, and compare the waves of emotion to those in the systolic and diastolic sonnet CXVI. of Shakespere's.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

1822-1888

Tell Mat not to write any more of those prose things, like 'Literature and Dogma,' but to give us something like his 'Thyrsis,' 'Scholar Gypsy,' or 'Forsaken Merman.'

Tennyson.

Optional Poems

Requiescat.

Resignation.

Sohrab And Rustum.

Tristram And Iseult.

West London.
Immortality.

The Strayed Reveller.

Philomela.

A Wish.

The Scholar-Gypsy.

Rugby Chapel.

Thyrsis.

Phrases

Cold, cold as those who lived and loved

A thousand years ago. Tristram and Iseult.

The aids to noble life are all within.

Worldly Place.

that cold succor, which attends

The unknown little from the unknowing great,

And points us to a better time than ours.

West London.

only he

His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,

Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life. — Immortality.