“Nay,
Be still,” I answered, “do not wake the child!”
— For so, my two-months’ baby sleeping lay
In milky dreams upon the bed and smiled,
And I thought “He shall sleep on, while he may,
Through the world’s baseness: not being yet defiled,
Why should he be disturbed by what is done?”
Then, gazing, beheld the long-drawn street
Live out, from end to end, full in the sun,
With Austria’s thousand; sword and bayonet,
Horse, foot, artillery, — cannons rolling on
Like blind slow storm-clouds gestant with the heat
Of undeveloped lightnings, each bestrode
By a single man, dust-white from head to heel,
Indifferent as the dreadful thing he rode,
Like a sculpted Fate serene and terrible.
As some smooth river which has overflowed
Will slow and silent down its current wheel
A loosened forest, all the pines erect,
So swept, in mute significance of storm,
The marshalled thousands; not an eye deflect
To left or right, to catch a novel form
Of Florence city adorned by architect
And carver, or of Beauties live and warm
Scared at the casements, — all, straightforward eyes
And faces, held as steadfast as their swords
And cognizant of acts, not imageries.
From CASA GUIDI WINDOWS, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1851
The excerpt describes the entry of the Austrian army into Florence at request of the Duke of Florence, an Austrian, on the collapse of attempts to re-unify Italy: the Risorgimento. The three leaders most identified with this were Guiseppi Mazzini, Carlo Cattaneo, and Guiseppi Garibaldi.
The imagery here is startling: the pregnant storm-clouds, and connected with those the flooded river carrying away fallen river banks still cohering around trees.
The image of destruction is compounded by the silent, contained, aspect of relentlessness: the soldiers as images of Fates.
The measured language and form of the poem contain and constrain huge energies. Within that containment is a huge emotional sweep.
Wiki tells us:
… exiles were deeply immersed in European ideas, and often hammered away at what Europeans saw as Italian vices, especially effeminacy and indolence. These negative stereotypes emerged from Enlightenment notions of national character that stressed the influence of the environment and history on a people’s moral predisposition. Italian exiles both challenged and embraced the stereotypes and typically presented gendered interpretations of Italy’s political “degeneration”. They called for a masculine response to feminine weaknesses as the basis of national regeneration and fashioned their image of the future Italian nation firmly in the standards of European nationalism.
Notions like these also constrained English gender relations.
And yet, as evidenced here, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her writing, was far from the standard image of the fragile, weak, female.
michael9murray 