Philip James Bailey

Philip James Bailey (1816―1902) is a Victorian poet primarily known for his extensive 1839 poem Festus, a version of the Faust legend, which he later revised for a second edition in 1845. Festus was very popular ― gaining admiration from such poets as Tennyson, Longfellow, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning ― but his subsequent books did not sell well. When these further books failed to gain popularity, Bailey tried to incorporate extracts from several of these poems into Festus, wherever he could make the lines fit, which extended the poem with every new edition.

Mischa Willet has edited a new critical edition of Festus (2021, Edinburgh University Press) based on the first American edition of 1845. He explains, “The poem explores themes of love, faith, and redemption, as well as the relationship between God and humanity. It also reflects the tensions between traditional religious values and the emerging scientific and secular worldviews of the time, as well as the social and economic upheavals that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.” This is the first new edition of the work in over a century.

Philip James Bailey travelled extensively in his later years ― living in London and Devon before returning to his birthplace in Nottingham. He was buried in Nottingham Rock Cemetery.

The following poem is from his collection The Angel World and Other Poems (1850).

A Ruin

In a cot-studded, fruity, green deep dale,
There grows the ruin of an abbey old;
And on the hill side, cut in rock, behold
A sainted hermit's cell; so goes the tale.
What of that ruin? There is nothing left
Save one sky-framing window arch, which climbs
Up to its top point, single stoned, bereft
Of prop or load. And this strange thing sublimes
The scene. For the fair great house, vowed to God,
Is hurled down and unhallowed; and we tread
O'er buried graves which have devoured their dead;
While over all springs up the green-lifed sod,
And arch, so light and lofty in its span―
So frail, and yet so lasting―tis like man.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Robert Browning*

Robert Browning (1812—1889) is seen today, not only as one of the major poets of the 19th century, but as a celebrated romantic figure. He and the poet (then known as) Elizabeth Barrett eloped against her father’s wishes, escaping to Italy, where her health concerns had a greater chance of recovery.

It is for Robert Browning that Elizabeth wrote the famous sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese (his affectionate nickname for her, because of her olive complexion). This collection includes her Sonnet #43 — one of the most famous love poems of all time.

Robert Browning is particularly known for his lengthy dramatic poems — influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and in turn influencing such poets as Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot.

God, Thou Art Love

If I forget,
Yet God remembers! If these hands of mine
Cease from their clinging, yet the hands divine
Hold me so firmly that I cannot fall;
And if sometimes I am too tired to call
For Him to help me, then He reads the prayer
Unspoken in my heart, and lifts my care.

I dare not fear, since certainly I know
That I am in God’s keeping, shielded so
From all that else would harm, and in the hour
Of stern temptation strengthened by His power;
I tread no path in life to Him unknown;
I lift no burden, bear no pain, alone:
My soul a calm, sure hiding-place has found:
The everlasting arms my life surround.

God, Thou art love! I build my faith on that.
I know Thee who has kept my path, and made
Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow
So that it reached me like a solemn joy;
It were too strange that I should doubt Thy love.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Robert Browning: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning*

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806―1861) is one of the nineteenth century’s greatest poets. She was outspoken against many abuses of human rights ― including against slavery, and the reliance upon slave labour on her family’s Jamaican sugar plantations. She also boldly expressed her Christian faith, and spoke out against issues such as child labour, even though these were not popular with many readers.

Her 11,000-line epic poem Aurora Leigh (1856) ― which is described as a novel in blank verse ― tells the story of the young woman, Aurora, who aspires to be a poet. One important focus of the story is the difficulty for women to have artistic ambitions, due to the restrictive expectations of women’s roles, and limited opportunities for education. Browning saw it as the most mature of her works. The critic John Ruskin called Aurora Leigh the greatest long poem of the nineteenth century.

The opening setting for Aurora Leigh is Florence, where Elizabeth and her husband Robert Browning primarily lived from 1846 until her death.

From Aurora Leigh ― Book VII

And truly, I reiterate, . . nothing's small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim:
And,–glancing on my own thin, veined wrist,–
In such a little tremour of the blood
The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul
Doth utter itself distinct. Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more, from the first similitude.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Elizabeth Barrett Browning: first post, second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning*

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806—1861) is one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. She suffered from ill health from her teens onward, beginning with a lung ailment when she was 14, and a spinal injury at 15. The prescribed laudanum and morphine she became reliant upon may have also contributed to her frail health.

Her family was very supportive of her writing — collecting one of the largest collections of juvenilia relating to any English writer — but was later so over-protective of her that she and Robert Browning had to elope to become married.

She dedicated herself to an educated expression of Christian faith, learning Hebrew while still in her teens, and later turning to Greek. She also read Milton's Paradise Lost, and Dante's Inferno while still young. Barrett Browning passionately believed that Christianity was naturally suited to being explored through poetry — that the highest poetry was essentially religious. She said in an 1842 letter to her friend Mary Russell Mitford, “The failure of religious poets turns less upon their being religious, than on their not being poets. Christ’s religion is essentially poetry — poetry glorified.”

A Thought For A Lonely Death-Bed

If God compel thee to this destiny,
To die alone, with none beside thy bed
To ruffle round with sobs thy last word said
And mark with tears the pulses ebb from thee,—
Pray then alone, ' O Christ, come tenderly!
By thy forsaken Sonship in the red
Drear wine-press,—by the wilderness out-spread,—
And the lone garden where thine agony
Fell bloody from thy brow, —by all of those
Permitted desolations, comfort mine!
No earthly friend being near me, interpose
No deathly angel 'twixt my face and thine,
But stoop Thyself to gather my life's rose,
And smile away my mortal to Divine!'

Sonnet 22

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvèd point,—what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Belovèd,—where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Elizabeth Barrett Browning: first post, second post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Robert Browning*

Robert Browning (1812—1889) is as much celebrated for his romance with poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning as he is for his poetry. His first published book Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession was denounced by John Stuart Mill as being dominated by the poet’s personal emotions and self-consciousness; this critique may be responsible for Browning subsequently veiling himself from his readers in his dramatic monologues.

He was raised in an evangelical home, but briefly became an atheist after having immersed himself in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. This was short-lived, however, and after his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning his Christian faith grew steadily deeper — although, like much of his private life, was not declared in a personal way in his poetry.

His extensive piece Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day is an examination of different attitudes towards Christianity, and is one of his most significant contributions from his married years (1846 to 1861). Robert and Elizabeth lived primarily in Florence. Her grave is in the English Cemetery there, and his is in Westminster Abbey.

from Christmas-Eve - X

Earth breaks up, time drops away,
In flows heaven, with its new day
Of endless life, when He who trod,
Very man and very God,
This earth in weakness, shame and pain,
Dying the death whose signs remain
Up yonder on the accursed tree,—
Shall come again, no more to be
Of captivity the thrall,
But the one God, All in all,
King of kings, Lord of lords,
As His servant John received the words,
“I died, and live for evermore!”

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Robert Browning: first post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Christina Rossetti*

Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) is one of the greatest Victorian female poets — perhaps only second to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her first poetic triumph was the book Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). She is also known for her children’s poems in Sing-Song (1872). She wrote six devotional studies, the last of which The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892) featured Rossetti’s verse-by-verse reflections on the Book of Revelation, and includes more than two hundred poems.

In the early 1870s she became seriously ill with Graves’ Disease. After her recovery she dedicated much of her attention to writing devotional prose. These writings reveal much of how she viewed the world as symbolic of spiritual truths; they also demonstrate her Christocentric view of scripture.

When asked about her poetic influences she wrote, “If any one thing schooled me in the direction of poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to prowl all alone about my grandfather’s cottage-grounds some thirty miles from London.” Despite her love of nature, she lived most of her adult life in London.

Good Friday

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon —
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Christina Rossetti: first post, second post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning*

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806—1861) is one of the nineteenth century's most influential poets. She was so admired by Emily Dickinson that she had a framed picture of the English poet in her bedroom.

Elizabeth Barrett suffered a spinal injury while saddling a pony, when she was 15 years old; that, along with a lung ailment, eventually made her an invalid. "Books and dreams were what I lived in and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like bees about the grass," she said years later. In her teens she taught herself Hebrew so she could read the Old Testament, and later began learning Greek.

Her father was overly protective of her, and disapproved of her romance with Robert Browning. In 1846 the couple eloped and moved to Italy, where her health improved significantly. They soon settled in Florence, where they lived until her death 15 years later. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sarcophagus is in the Protestant Cemetery in Florence.

A Child's Thought of God

They say that God lives very high;
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God; and why?
And if you dig down in the mines,
You never see Him in the gold,
Though from Him all that’s glory shines.
God is so good, He wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across His face,
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that His embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place;
As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses’ pressure,
Half waking me at night, and said,
“Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?”

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Elizabeth Barrett Browning: first post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

William Cowper

William Cowper (1731—1800) is celebrated as a poet and hymn writer. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him "the best modern poet". Even though he was a significant influence on the romantics, and the author of many well-loved hymns, his life was troubled. When he was six years old his mother died, and he was sent away to a boarding school where he was neglected and bullied. Cowper struggled with mental illness throughout his life — both before and after he embraced Evangelicalism — experiencing four extreme bouts of depression during which he unsuccessfully attempted to take his own life.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning expresses well the paradox of Cowper's melancholy in her poem "Cowper's Grave", which begins, as follows, with struggle but concludes with a vision of hope.

---It is a place where poets crowned may feel
--------the heart's decaying —
---It is a place where happy saints may weep
--------amid their praying;
---Yet let the grief and humbleness as low as
--------silence languish!
---Earth surely now may give her calm to whom
--------she gave her anguish

---O poets! from a maniac's tongue was poured
--------the deathless singing!
---O Christians! at your cross of hope a hopeless
--------hand was clinging...

One of the most important friendships in his life was with John Newton — the former slave ship captain and writer of "Amazing Grace". Newton encouraged Cowper in his faith, and in the writing of hymns. In 1779 the two published Olney Hymns, which included many famous songs. Cowper experienced what he called his "fatal dream" which caused him to feel, during his darkest days, that the truth he believed in God's plan of salvation applied to everyone but himself.

In 1782 his first poetry collection — Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple — was published and very well received. Read John Piper's excellent reflection on the tragic life of William Cowper, here

God Moves In A Mysterious Way

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill,
He treasures up his bright designs
And works his sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

His purpose will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
the bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan his work in vain:
God is his own interpreter,
And he will make it plain.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about William Cowper: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was a prominent English Victorian poet. She had been a prodigy who, while still young, became enthusiastic for the study of classic literature and devoted to Christian faith. At about age 20, she began battling long-term illness which troubled her for the rest of her life.

Even though her domineering father’s income came partly from slave labour on Jamaican plantations, she was opposed to slavery — and wrote poems against it. When abolition came, in the 1830s, it undermined the family’s wealth. She also wrote The Cry of the Children (1842) which condemned child labour, and helped promote reform.

Her popular 1844 book, Poems, prompted Robert Browning to write a letter of admiration. By 1845 he had come to visit her, where she lived as an invalid in her father’s home. This began, perhaps, the most famous literary romance of all time. By 1846 the Brownings secretly married and eloped to Italy, where her health greatly improved; her father never forgave her, even though their marriage was happy.

Her famous sequence — Sonnets from the Portuguese — records the stages of her love for Robert Browning; the most famous of these is the following sonnet:

Sonnet #43

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.
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 with a passion put to use
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.

The Meaning of the Look

I think that look of Christ might seem to say—
`Thou Peter! art thou then a common stone
Which I at last must break my heart upon
For all God`s charge to his high angels may
Guard my foot better? Did I yesterday
Wash thy feet, my beloved, that they should run
Quick to deny me `neath the morning sun?
And do thy kisses, like the rest, betray?
The cock crows coldly.—GO, and manifest
A late contrition, but no bootless fear!
For when thy final need is dreariest,
Thou shalt not be denied, as I am here;
My voice to God and angels shall attest,
Because I KNOW this man, let him be clear.`

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Elizabeth Barrett Browning: second post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Robert Browning

Robert Browning (1812–1889) is one of the major figures of 19th century poetry. Ironically, prior to the death of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he was not well known, and was overshadowed by her. In his youth he had become an atheist, but later he rejected atheism to embrace Christianity. He clearly views this world as the place where imperfect souls are prepared for the perfection of heaven. His views only come through over the distance because his poems are “dramatic monologues” from the perspective of his characters; this makes it hard to know Browning himself.

In one poem — in the form of a letter from an incredulous Arab physician, named Karshish — we read of this man meeting with Lazarus. Karshish writes to a colleague the story of the man Christ raised. (Read the poem here)
He considers Lazarus to be mad, since “This grown man eyes the world now like a child” and believes that the one who raised him is “God himself / Creator and sustainer of the world”.

Some have accused Browning of being overly optimistic, but as The Norton Anthology of English Literature puts it: “Browning’s optimism was not blind. Few writers, in fact, seem to have been more aware of the existence of evil.” With this in mind we can read the following poem more in context.

Pippa’s Song

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Robert Browning: second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca