Aurora Leigh (excerpts)
[Book 1]
I am like,
They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows
Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth
Of delicate features, -- paler, near as grave ;
But then my mothers smile breaks up the whole,
And makes it better sometimes than itself.
So, nine full years, our days were hid with God
Among his mountains : I was just thirteen,
Still growing like the plants from unseen roots
In toied Springs, -- and suddenly awoke
To full life and life s needs and agonies,
With an interong, struggli beside
A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp oh,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, `Love --
`Love, my child, love, love ! -- (then he had doh grief)
`Love, my child. Ere I answered he was gone,
And none was left to love in all the world.
There, ended childhood. What succeeded
I recollect as, after fevers, men
Thread back the passage of delirium,
Missing the turn still, baffled by the door ;
Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives ;
A weary, wormy darkness, spurrd i the flank
With flame, that it should eat and end itself
Like some tormented scorpion. Then at last
I do remember clearly, how there came
A stranger with authority, nht,
(I thought not) who anded, caught me up
From old Assuntas neck ; how, with a shriek,
She let me go, -- while I, with ears too full
Of my fathers sileo shriek back a word,
In all a childs astonishment at grief
Stared at the wharf-edge where she stood and moaned,
My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned !
The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,
Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,
Like one in anger drawing back her skirts
Which supplits catch at. Theter sea
Inexorably pushed between us both,
And sweeping up the ship with my despair
Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.
Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep ;
Ten nights and days, without the on face
Of any day ht ; the moon and sun
Cut off from the green reg earth,
To starve into a blind ferocity
And glare unnatural ; the very sky
(Dropping its bell- down upon the sea
As if no huma should scape alive,)
Bedraggled with the desolating salt,
Until it seemed no more that holy heaven
To which my father went. All new and strange
The universe turranger, for a child.
Then, land ! -- then, England ! oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home
Among those mean red houses through the fog ?
And when I heard my fathers language first
From alien lips which had no kiss for mine
I wept aloud, then laughed, the, the,
And some one near me said the child was mad
Through much sea-siess. The trai us on.
Was this my fathers England ? the great isle ?
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship
Of verdure, field from field, as man from man ;
The skies themselves looked loositive,
As almost you could touch them with a hand,
And dared to do it they were so far off
From Gods celestial crystals ; all things blurred
And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here ? -- not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant colour up
Or active outline on the indiffere