Waring

Waring

Original Text
Dramatic Lyrics, Bells and Pomegranates, III (1842).
I.
i.
2Since he gave us all the slip,
3Chose land-travel or seafaring,
5Rather than pace up and down
6Any longer London-town?
ii.
7Who'd have guessed it from his lip,
8Or his brow's accustomed bearing,
9On the night he thus took ship,
10Or started landward, little caring
11For us, it seems, who supped together,
12 (Friends of his too, I remember)
13And walked home thro' the merry weather,
14Snowiest in all December;
15I left his arm that night myself
16For what's-his-name's, the new prose-poet,
17That wrote the book there, on the shelf --
18How, forsooth, was I to know it
19If Waring meant to glide away
20Like a ghost at break of day!
21Never looked he half so gay!
iii.
22He was prouder than the Devil:
23How he must have cursed our revel!
24Ay, and many other meetings,
25Indoor visits, outdoor greetings,
26As up and down he paced this London,
27With no work done, but great works undone,
28Where scarce twenty knew his name.
29Why not, then, have earlier spoken,
30Written, bustled? Who's to blame
31If your silence kept unbroken?
32True, but there were sundry jottings,
33Stray-leaves, fragments, blurrs and blottings,
34Certain first steps were achieved
35Already which -- (is that your meaning?)
36Had well borne out whoe'er believed
37In more to come: but who goes gleaning
40Pride alone, puts forth such claims
41O'er the day's distinguished names.
iv.
42Meantime, how much I loved him,
43I find out now I've lost him:
45-- Could so carelessly accost him,
46Never shall get free
47Of his ghostly company,
48And eyes that just a little wink
49As deep I go into the merit
50Of this and that distinguished spirit --
51His cheeks' raised colour, soon to sink,
52As long I dwell on some stupendous
53And tremendous (God defend us!)
55Demoniaco-seraphic
56Penman's latest piece of graphic.
57Nay, my very wrist grows warm
58With his dragging weight of arm!
59E'en so, swimmingly appears,
60Thro' one's after-supper musings,
61Some lost lady of old years,
62With her beauteous vain endeavour,
63And goodness unrepaid as ever;
64The face, accustomed to refusings,
65We, puppies that we were . . . Oh never
67Being aught like false, forsooth, to?
68Telling aught but honest truth to?
69What a sin had we centupled
70Its possessor's grace and sweetness!
71No! she heard in its completeness
72Truth, for truth's a weighty matter,
73And, truth at issue, we can't flatter!
74Well, 'tis done with; she's exempt
75From damning us thro' such a sally;
76And so she glides, as down a valley,
78Past our reach; and in, the flowers
79Shut her unregarded hours.
v.
80Oh, could I have him back once more,
81This Waring, but one half-day more!
82Back, with the quiet face of yore,
83So hungry for acknowledgment
85Feed, should not he, to heart's content?
86I'd say, "to only have conceived
87"Your great works, tho' they never progress,
88"Surpasses all we've yet achieved!"
89I'd lie so, I should be believed.
90I'd make such havoc of the claims
91Of the day's distinguished names
92To feast him with, as feasts an ogress
93Her sharp-toothed golden-crowned child!
94Or, as one feasts a creature rarely
95Captured here, unreconciled
96To capture; and completely gives
98Requiring that it lives.
vi.
99Ichabod, Ichabod,
101Travels Waring East away?
102Who, of knowledge, by hearsay,
103Reports a man upstarted
104Somewhere as a God,
105Hordes grown European-hearted,
106Millions of the wild made tame
107On a sudden at his fame?
109Or, North in Moscow, toward the Czar,
110Who, with the gentlest of footfalls
111Over the Kremlin's pavement, bright
113Steps, with five other Generals,
114Who simultaneously take snuff,
115That each may have pretext enough
116To kerchiefwise unfold his sash
117Which, softness' self, is yet the stuff
118To hold fast where a steel chain snaps,
119And leave the grand white neck no gash?
120In Moscow, Waring, to those rough
121Cold natures borne, perhaps,
123Thro' the circle of mute kings,
124Unable to repress the tear,
125Each as his sceptre down he flings),
126To the Dome at Taurica,
127Where now a priestess, she alway
128Mingles her tender grave Hellenic speech
129With theirs, tuned to the hailstone-beaten beach,
132Where breed the swallows, her melodious cry
133Amid their barbarous twitter!
134In Russia? Never! Spain were fitter!
135Ay, most likely 'tis in Spain
136That we and Waring meet again --
137Now, while he turns down that cool narrow lane
138Into the blackness, out of grave Madrid
139All fire and shine -- abrupt as when there's slid
140Its stiff gold blazing pall
141From some black coffin-lid.
142Or, best of all,
143I love to think
144The leaving us was just a feint;
145Back here to London did he slink;
146And now works on without a wink
147Of sleep, and we are on the brink
148Of something great in fresco-paint:
149Some garret's ceiling, walls and floor,
150Up and down and o'er and o'er
151He splashes, as none splashed before
153Then down he creeps and out he steals
154Only when the night conceals
155His face -- in Kent 'tis cherry-time,
156Or, hops are picking; or, at prime
157Of March, he steals as when, too happy,
158Years ago when he was young,
159Some mild eve when woods were sappy,
160And the early moths had sprung
161To life from many a trembling sheath
162Woven the warm boughs beneath,
163While small birds said to themselves
164What should soon be actual song,
165And young gnats, by tens and twelves,
166Made as if they were the throng
167That crowd around and carry aloft
168The sound they have nursed, so sweet and pure,
169Out of a myriad noises soft,
170Into a tone that can endure
171Amid the noise of a July noon,
172When all God's creatures crave their boon,
173All at once and all in tune,
174And get it, happy as Waring then,
175Having first within his ken
176What a man might do with men,
177And far too glad, in the even-glow,
178To mix with the world he meant to take
179Into his hand, he told you, so --
180And out of it his world to make,
181To contract and to expand
182As he shut or oped his hand.
183Oh, Waring, what's to really be?
184A clear stage and a crowd to see!
186The heart of Hamlet's mystery pluck?
187Or, where most unclean beasts are rife,
189His sleeve, and out with flaying-knife!
190Some Chatterton shall have the luck
192Some one shall somehow run a muck
193With this old world, for want of strife
194Sound asleep: contrive, contrive
195To rouse us, Waring! Who's alive?
196Our men scarce seem in earnest now.
197Distinguished names, but 't is, somehow,
198As if they played at being names
199Still more distinguished, like the games
200Of children. Turn our sport to earnest
201With a visage of the sternest!
202Bring the real times back, confessed
203Still better than the very best!
II.
i.
204"When I last saw Waring . . ."
205(How all turned to him who spoke --
206You saw Waring? Truth or joke?
207In land-travel, or sea-faring?)
ii.
209"Where a day or two we harboured:
210"A sunset was in the West,
211"When, looking over the vessel's side,
212"One of our company espied
215"At once, so came the light craft up,
217"And turns (the water round its rims
218"Dancing as round a sinking cup)
219"And by us like a fish it curled,
220"And drew itself up close beside,
221"Its great sail on the instant furled,
222"And o'er its planks a shrill voice cried,
225"'Or fruit, tobacco and cigars?
226"'A Pilot for you to Triest?
228"'They'll never let you up the bay!
229"'We natives should know best.'
230"I turned, and 'just those fellows' way,'
232"'Are laughing at us in their sleeves.'
iii.
233"In truth, the boy leaned laughing back;
234"And one, half-hidden by his side
235"Under the furled sail, soon I spied,
236"With great grass hat, and kerchief black,
237"Who looked up, with his kingly throat,
238"Said somewhat while the other shook
239"His hair back from his eyes to look
240"Their longest at us; and the boat,
241"I know not how, turned sharply round,
242"Laying her whole side on the sea
244"Into the weather cut somehow
245"Her sparkling path beneath our bow;
246"And so went off, as with a bound,
247"Into the rose and golden half
248"Of the sky, to overtake the sun,
250"Its singing cave; yet I caught one
251"Glance ere away the boat quite passed,
252"And neither time nor toil could mar
253"Those features: so I saw the last
254"Of Waring!" -- You? Oh, never star
255Was lost here, but it rose afar!
256Look East, where whole new thousands are!
257In Vishnu-land what Avatar?

Notes

1] Waring: kindly meant of Alfred Domett (1811-87), a close friend of Browning's who had just emigrated to New Zealand. Back to Line
4] staff and script: the pilgrim's cane and satchel. Back to Line
38] chance-blades: randomly appearing blades of grass. Back to Line
39] o'erweening: too ambitious. Back to Line
44] moved: troubled. Back to Line
54] "Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens" (Virgil, Aeneid III.658, here `Monster misshapen, immense, horrid'). Back to Line
66] nice: careful and exacting. Back to Line
77] Taking up: perhaps `putting up with' (accepting). Back to Line
84] to his bent: according to his (self-deceiving) disposition. Back to Line
97] pettish: petulant, bad-tempered. Back to Line
100] "And she [Eli's daughter-in-law] named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel" (1 Samuel 4.21). Back to Line
108] Vishnu-land: India. Avatar: a descendant of Vishnu, the Hindu god of creation. Back to Line
112] serpentine: greenish rock that looks like a snake's skin. siennite: syenite, a granite-like rock. Back to Line
122] lambwhite maiden: Iphigenia, supposed sacrificed by a vote of her father Agamemnon and the generals of the Greeks against Troy (a vote signified by casting down a sceptre), but actually exiled to Artemis' temple at Tauris, Scythia, where she was a priestess. Back to Line
130] myrrhy lands: the land from which one of the three magi or kings came to Jerusalem bearing myrrh, that is, the far east. Back to Line
131] whirlblast: whirlwind. Back to Line
152] Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio (ca. 1492-1543), a painter. Back to Line
185] David Garrick (1717-79), the 18th-century actor renowned for Shakespearean parts such as Hamlet, whose words to his false friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are echoed in the following line. Back to Line
188] Junius: anonymous Whig letter-writer who attacked George III and his ministers in the press 1769-72, now believed to be Sir Philip Francis on the basis of authorship tests. Back to Line
191] Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), a poet who passed off his writings as belonging to an invented medieval poet named Rowley. Back to Line
208] Triest: Trieste, port city in north-east Italy on the gulf named after it. Back to Line
213] larboard: "The side of a ship which is to the left hand of a person looking from the stern towards the bows" (OED). Back to Line
214] sea-duck: "Any duck of the sub-family Fuligulinæ, as the common scoter, Oedemia nigra, and the eider-duck" (OED). Back to Line
216] lateen sail: "a triangular sail suspended by a long yard at an angle of about 45 degrees to the mast" (OED). Back to Line
223] Lascar: East Indian sailor. Back to Line
224] Brig: "A vessel with two masts square-rigged like a ship's fore- and main-masts, but carrying also on her main-mast a lower fore-and-aft sail with a gaff and boom" (OED). Back to Line
227] look you ne'er so big: no matter how imposing you seem. Back to Line
231] long-shore: seamen who work on land. Back to Line
243] lee: the side of a ship turned away from the wind. Back to Line
249] sea-calf: seal. Back to Line
Publication Start Year
1842
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2002