James Lee’s Wife

( Dram at is Personæ , 1864; originally entitled James Lee .) This is a story of an unfortunate marriage, told in a series of meditations by the wife. Mr. Symons describes the psychological proce es detailed in the poem as “the development of disillusion, change, alienation, severance and parting.” The key-notes of the nine divisions of the work are: I. Anxiety; II. Apprehension; III. Expostulation; IV. Despair; V. Reflection; VI. Change; VII. Self-denial; VIII. Resignation; IX. Self-Sacrifice. I. At the Window. —The wife reflects that summer has departed. The chill, which settles upon the earth as the sun’s warm rays are withheld, falls heavily on her heart. Her husband has been absent but a day, and as she thinks of the changing year, she asks, with apprehension, “Will he change too?” II. By the Fireside. —He has returned, but not the sun to her heart. As they sit by the fire in their seaside home, she reflects that the fire is built of “shipwreck wood.” Are her hopes to be shipwrecked too? Sailors on the stormy waters may envy their security as they behold the ruddy light from their fire over the sea, and “gnash their teeth for hate” as they reflect on their warm safe home; but ships rot and rust and get worm-eaten in port, as well as break up on rocks. She wonders who lived in that home before them. Did a woman watch the man with whom she began a happy voyage—see the planks start, and hell yawn beneath her? III. In the Doorway. —The steps of coming winter hasten; the trees are bare; soon the swallows will forsake them. The wind, with its infinite wail, sings the dirge of the departed summer. Her heart shrivels, her spirit shrinks; yet, as she stands in the doorway, she reflects that they have every material comfort. They have neither cold nor want to fear in any shape, only the heart-chill, only the soul-hunger for the love that is gone. God meant that love should warm the human heart when material things without were cold and drear. She will “live and love worthily, bear and be bold.” IV. Along the Beach. —The storm has burst; it is no longer misgiving, fear, apprehension: it is certainty. She meditates, as she watches him, that he wanted her love; she gave him all her heart He has it still: she had taken him “for a world and more.” For love turns dull earth to the glow of God. She had taken the weak earth with many weeds, but with “a little good grain too.” She had watched for flowers and longed for harvest, but all was dead earth still, and the glow of God had never transfigured his soul to her. But she did love, did watch, did wait and weary and wear, was fault in his eyes. Her love had become irksome to him. V. On the Cliff. —It is summer, and she is leaning on the dead burnt turf, looking at a rock left dry by the retiring waters. The deadne of the one and the barrenne of the other suit her melancholy; they are symbols of her position, and as she muses, a gay, blithe gra hopper springs on the turf, and a wonderful blue-and-red butterfly settles on the rock. So love settles on minds dead and bare; so love brightens all! So could her love brighten even his dead soul. VI. Reading a Book, under the Cliff. —She is reading the poetry of “some young man” (Mr. Browning himself, who published these “Lines to the Wind” when twenty-six years old). The poet asks if the ailing wind is a dumb winged thing, entrusting its cause to him; and as she reads on she grows angry at the young man’s inexperience of the mystery of life. He knows nothing of the meaning of the moaning wind: it is not suffering, not distre ; it is change. That is what the wind is trying to say, and trying above all to teach: we are to “Rejoice that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul’s wings never furled!” “Nothing endures,” says the wind. “There’s life’s pact—perhaps, too, its probation; but man might at least, as he grasps ‘one fair, good, wise thing,’—the love of a loving woman—grave it on his soul’s hands’ palms to be his for ever.” VII. Among the Rocks. —Earth sets his bones to bask in the sun, and smiles in the beauty with which the rippling water adorns him; and so she comforts herself by reflecting that we may make the low earth-nature better by suffusing it with our love-tides. Love is gain if we love only what is worth our love. How much more to make the low nature better by our throes! VIII. Beside the Drawing-Board. —She has been drawing a hand. A clay cast of a perfect thing is before her. She has learned something of the infinite beauty of the human hand—has studied it, has praised God, its Maker, for it; and as she contemplates the world of wonders to be discovered therein, she is fain to efface her work and begin anew, for somehow grace slips from soulle finger-tips. The cast is that of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci. She has pa ionately longed to copy its perfection, but as the great master could not copy the perfection of the dead hand, so she has failed to draw the cast. And so she turns to the peasant girl model who is by her side that day, “a little girl with the poor coarse hand,” and as she contemplates it she begins to understand the worth of flesh and blood, and that there is a great deal more than beauty in a hand. She has read Bell on the human hand, and she knows something of the infinite uses of the mechanism which is hidden beneath the flesh. She knows what use survives the beauty in the peasant hand that spins and bakes. The living woman is better than the dead cast. She has learned the le on that all this craving for what can never be hers—for the love she cannot gain, any more than the perfection she cannot draw—is wasting her life. She will be up and doing, no longer dreaming and sighing. IX. On Deck. —It was better to leave him! She will set him free. She had no beauty, no grace; nothing in her deserved any place in his mind. She was harsh and ill-favoured (and perhaps this was the secret of the trouble). Still, had he loved her, love could and would have made her beautiful. Some day it may be even so; and in the years to come a face, a form—her own—may rise before his mental vision, his eyes be opened, his liberated soul leap forth in a pa ionate “’Tis she!”