The Secret Ecstasy of Reading

Corot, "Girl Reading" (c. 1850/55)

Corot, “Girl Reading” (c. 1850/55)

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lengthy poem Aurora Leigh—it’s been a missing specimen from my life list—and am thoroughly enjoying the young heroine’s experiences with reading. Orphaned at a young age and sent to live with her stern aunt in England, Aurora reconnects with her father by going through the boxes of his books:

Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret room
Piled high with cases in my father’s name;
Piled high, packed large,–where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books! 

I love the way that Aurora plunges into the books “without considering whether they were fit/To do me good.” She talks about being “generous,” which is to say, she surrenders herself completely to whatever each book offers:

Or else I sat on in my chamber green,
And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed
My prayers without the vicar; read my books,
Without considering whether they were fit
To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits . . so much help
By so much rending. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth-
‘Tis then we get the right good from a book.

Aurora particularly loves poetry, which has a volcanic impact on her, sweeping away all constraints:

At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon the poets.
As the earth
Plunges in fury, when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat
The marts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom—thus, my soul,
At poetry’s divine first finger touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,
Convicted of the great eternities
Before two worlds.

To those who dismiss poets as “virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,/
Exaggerators of the sun and moon,” Aurora counters that they are

the only truth-tellers, now left to God,–
The only speakers of essential truth,
Posed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on a charnel wall,
To find man’s veritable stature out,
Erect, sublime…

Thus, while others might be impressed by kings and senators or by those who build pyramids and railroads, Aurora sees such people as “common men” when contrasted with poets:

The poet suddenly will catch them up
With his voice like a thunder. . “This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here’s God down on us!”

This is more or less what books mean to me. It’s exhilarating to find an author who describes my experiences.

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