Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

by survivor’s guilt. By dark coincidence, her poem of grief written after Bro’s death, ‘De Profundis’, appears in The Independent just three days later.

Yet as 1861 dawns, her poems, from ‘Little Mattie’ to ‘Nature’s Remorses’, increasingly adopt the fictional, often persona form that will dominate her hugely successful Last Poems when it appears in 1862. This style is a pre-echo of Robert’s Dramatis Personae, which will be published two years later; and it’s he who will prepare the posthumous volume, apparently following ‘a list drawn up’ in June 1861. Widower-poets face a difficult choice between ‘improving’ an uncompleted legacy or letting it go, perhaps overexposed, into the world. A century from now, for example, conspiracy stories will surround Ted Hughes’s attempts to do right by his late wife Sylvia Plath’s work, though his choices will clearly be good ones, as Plath’s posthumous reputation attests. No similar cloud of suspicion will hang over Robert’s head, even though the posthumous Elizabeth is much more in his own poetic image than she ever was alive. But suspicion without evidence is just gossip. Better perhaps to remember how long Elizabeth has been writing in persona: even 1826’s An Essay on Mind included ‘Riga’s Song’ among its ‘Other Poems’.

Now the living Elizabeth has a rare moment of cultural disconnect with ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’, which Thackeray turns down for Cornhill Magazine on grounds of immodesty. Usually so acutely tuned in to the zeitgeist, she has perhaps let herself get out of touch, as she busies herself preparing Italian literals of her own poetry for Francesco Dall’Ongaro to turn into Italian verse. Elizabeth’s heart is ‘heavy’ and Robert – ‘not inclined to write this winter’, as she tells Sarianna – is once again toying with visual art, this time modelling clay in William Story’s studio. Yet the couple remain a magnet for writers and artists. In April they talk with Joseph Severn, now British consul, about how he nursed the dying Keats forty years ago, right here at the Spanish Steps. In late May they go to the studio of Father Antonio D’Alessandri to be photographed. This is Elizabeth’s second sitting: last year he posed her with Pen. Now D’Alessandri records a face drawn by illness, and hair dyed jet-black like a disguise. This same month she also has a visit from Hans Christian Andersen. Her response is a homage, ‘The North and The South’, which she sends straight off to Thackeray for Cornhill.

It is 21 May 1861, and this is the last poem she will write. On 1 June, as if by a kind of instinct – though ostensibly because of the weather – the Brownings break the pattern of recent years and leave for Casa Guidi, arriving home on 5 June. The very next day, Cavour, that great statesman who was to unite Italy, dies. Elizabeth is shocked and grief-stricken; once again her ‘horrible vibrating body’ reacts. The death of her adored sister, and of what seems to be any hope of democracy and independence for her much-loved adopted country, bleed into each other. It feels as if nothing good can ever happen again.

Grief is a kind of yearning, and Elizabeth yearns from the apartment towards the sights and sounds of her beloved Florence, the elegant yet homely city astride the River Arno that she has made her home, but which she has become too ill to go out into. Now even Casa Guidi has its ghosts: of old freedoms when her health was improving and she went out and about with Robert, of happy days with Wilson, lit up by the blossoming romance with Ferdinando, of Pen’s infancy, of letters arriving from Henrietta, of those first civic parades. The unseasonably cool June means that even the apartment’s tall windows let in less brightness than usual. On 20 June, Elizabeth, trapped in nostalgia and grief, has them opened – and catches cold.

Two nights later, on 22 June, Robert has to call the doctor. Dr Wilson diagnoses congestion and a possible abscess in the right lung. Although feverish, with a racking cough and sore throat, Elizabeth is sure he’s wrong. She feels just the same as all the other times she’s been ill and besides, she can feel that it’s her left lung that’s troubling her, as always. Whether or not it is the same as usual, she spends the next five days coughing and, as a result, getting little sleep. She loses strength. Robert, too, passes these nights of coughing in a state of insomniac attention. It’s as if they’re keeping watch together to see whether the angel of death will pass over the house one more time.

Suddenly, on the evening of 28 June, there’s an injection of hopefulness. Isa Blagden calls with the news that the new prime minister, Baron Ricasoli, shares Cavour’s vision. Italy is going to be alright. It’s a close call, but the news for the country is miraculously good. The angel of death seems to have passed over the city roofs – over the entire peninsula – leaving it untouched. And it means, perhaps, that there’s no longer a battle for Elizabeth to brace herself against. Possibly she relaxes. At any rate, just after three in the morning of what is now 29 June, Robert notices that her feet have become very cold. He rouses Annunziata, and asks her to bring warm water and some jellied chicken, that soothing, sustaining food of invalids. He almost certainly administers some extra morphine, too. Elizabeth is confused as she half-wakes from a travel dream to exclaim ‘What a fine steamer – how comfortable!’

Annunziata bathes Elizabeth’s feet in the warm water, and feeds her some of the chicken. Robert sends the maid for more warm water and Elizabeth, with a trace of her old glitter, teases, ‘You are determined to make an exaggerated case of it’. But she lets him take her in his arms. They rest like that together. Sometime after 4am, Robert asks her if she knows him and she reassures him,