Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/109

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