The Angel in the House. Coventry Patmore

More graciously than he succeeds.

      Her spirit, compact of gentleness,

         If Heaven postpones or grants her pray’r,

      Conceives no pride in its success,

         And in its failure no despair;

      But his, enamour’d of its hurt,

         Baffled, blasphemes, or, not denied,

      Crows from the dunghill of desert,

         And wags its ugly wings for pride.

      He’s never young nor ripe; she grows

         More infantine, auroral, mild,

      And still the more she lives and knows

         The lovelier she’s express’d a child.

      Say that she wants the will of man

         To conquer fame, not check’d by cross,

      Nor moved when others bless or ban;

         She wants but what to have were loss.

      Or say she wants the patient brain

         To track shy truth; her facile wit

      At that which he hunts down with pain

         Flies straight, and does exactly hit.

      Were she but half of what she is,

         He twice himself, mere love alone,

      Her special crown, as truth is his,

         Gives title to the worthier throne;

      For love is substance, truth the form;

         Truth without love were less than nought;

      But blindest love is sweet and warm,

         And full of truth not shaped by thought,

      And therefore in herself she stands

         Adorn’d with undeficient grace,

      Her happy virtues taking hands,

         Each smiling in another’s face.

      So, dancing round the Tree of Life,

         They make an Eden in her breast,

      While his, disjointed and at strife,

         Proud-thoughted, do not bring him rest.

IILove in Tears

      If fate Love’s dear ambition mar,

         And load his breast with hopeless pain,

      And seem to blot out sun and star,

         Love, won or lost, is countless gain;

      His sorrow boasts a secret bliss

         Which sorrow of itself beguiles,

      And Love in tears too noble is

         For pity, save of Love in smiles.

      But, looking backward through his tears,

         With vision of maturer scope,

      How often one dead joy appears

         The platform of some better hope!

      And, let us own, the sharpest smart

         Which human patience may endure

      Pays light for that which leaves the heart

         More generous, dignified, and pure.

IIIProspective Faith

      They safely walk in darkest ways

         Whose youth is lighted from above,

      Where, through the senses’ silvery haze,

         Dawns the veil’d moon of nuptial love.

      Who is the happy husband?  He

         Who, scanning his unwedded life,

      Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free,

         ’Twas faithful to his future wife.

IVVenus Victrix

      Fatal in force, yet gentle in will,

         Defeats, from her, are tender pacts,

      For, like the kindly lodestone, still

         She’s drawn herself by what she attracts.

      THE VIOLETS

1

      I went not to the Dean’s unbid:

         I would not have my mystery,

      From her so delicately hid,

         The guess of gossips at their tea.

      A long, long week, and not once there,

         Had made my spirit sick and faint,

      And lack-love, foul as love is fair,

         Perverted all things to complaint.

      How vain the world had grown to be!

         How mean all people and their ways,

      How ignorant their sympathy,

         And how impertinent their praise;

      What they for virtuousness esteem’d,

         How far removed from heavenly right;

      What pettiness their trouble seem’d,

         How undelightful their delight;

      To my necessity how strange

         The sunshine and the song of birds;

      How dull the clouds’ continual change,

         How foolishly content the herds;

      How unaccountable the law

         Which bade me sit in blindness here,

      While she, the sun by which I saw,

         Shed splendour in an idle sphere!

      And then I kiss’d her stolen glove,

         And sigh’d to reckon and define

      The modes of martyrdom in love,

         And how far each one might be mine.

      I thought how love, whose vast estate

         Is earth and air and sun and sea,

      Encounters oft the beggar’s fate,

         Despised on score of poverty;

      How Heaven, inscrutable in this,

         Lets the gross general make or mar

      The destiny of love, which is

         So tender and particular;

      How nature, as unnatural

         And contradicting nature’s source,

      Which is but love, seems most of all

         Well-pleased to harry true love’s course;

      How, many times, it comes to pass

         That trifling shades of temperament,

      Affecting only one, alas,

         Not love, but love’s success prevent;

      How manners often falsely paint

         The man; how passionate respect,

      Hid by itself, may bear the taint

         Of coldness and a dull neglect;

      And how a little outward dust

         Can a clear merit quite o’ercloud,

      And make her fatally unjust,

         And him desire a darker shroud;

      How senseless opportunity