Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/109

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
100
AURORA LEIGH.

While working with the other for myself
And art. You swim with feet as well as hands
Or make small way. I apprehended this,—
In England, no one lives by verse that lives;
And, apprehending, I resolved by prose
To make a space to sphere my living verse.
I wrote for cyclopædias, magazines,
And weekly papers, holding up my name
To keep it from the mud. I learnt the use
Of the editorial ‘we’ in a review,
As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains,
And swept it grandly through the open doors
As if one could not pass through doors at all
Save so encumbered. I wrote tales beside,
Carved many an article on cherry-stones
To suit light readers,—something in the lines
Revealing, it was said, the mallet-hand,
But that, I’ll never vouch for. What you do
For bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes,
Although you have a vineyard in Champagne,—
Much less in Nephelococcygia,
As mine was, peradventure.
Having bread
For just so many days, just breathing room
For body and verse, I stood up straight and worked
My veritable work. And as the soul
Which grows within a child, makes the child grow,—
Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God,
Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,

And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikes