The Poetry - Volume I: Garibaldi & Olivia

By Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835.

Braddon suffered early family trauma at age five, when her mother, Fanny, separated from her father, Henry, in 1840. When she was aged ten her brother Edward left England for India and later Australia.

However, after being befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle she was much taken by acting. For three years she took minor acting roles, which supported both her and her mother, However, her interest in acting began to wane as she began to write. It was to be her true vocation.

In 1860, Mary met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals. By the next year they were living together. The situation and the view from polite society was complicated by the fact that Maxwell was already married with five children, and his wife was under care in an Irish asylum. Until 1874 Mary was to act as stepmother to his children as well as to the six offspring their own relationship produced.

Braddon, with a large and growing family, still found time to produce a long and prolific writing career. Her most famous book was a sensational novel published in 1862, ‘Lady Audley's Secret’. It won her both recognition and best-seller status.

Her works in the supernatural genre were equally prolific and brought new menace to the form. Her pact with the devil story ‘Gerald, or the World, the Flesh and the Devil’ (1891), and the ghost stories ‘The Cold Embrace’, ‘The Face in the Glass’ and ‘At Chrighton Abbey’ are regarded as classics.

In 1866 she founded the Belgravia magazine. This presented readers with serialised sensation novels, poems, travel narratives and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history and science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers an excellent source of literature at an affordable cost. She was also the editor of The Temple Bar magazine.

Maxwell’s wife died in 1874 and the couple who had been together for so long were at last able to wed.

Mary Elizabeth Brandon died on 4th February 1915 in Richmond and is buried in Richmond Cemetery.

After her death her short story masterpieces would be regularly anthologised. But for the rest of her canon her reputation then went into decline. In the past decade her reputation and talent is once more being given the attention it so rightly deserves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Jan 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781787803671

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was an English novelist and actress during the Victorian era. Although raised by a single mother, Braddon was educated at private institutions where she honed her creative skills. As a young woman, she worked as a theater actress to support herself and her family. When interest faded, she shifted to writing and produced her most notable work Lady Audley's Secret. It was one of more than 80 novels Braddon wrote of the course of an expansive career.

Book preview

The Poetry of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Volume I – Garibaldi & Olivia

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835.

Braddon suffered early family trauma at age five, when her mother, Fanny, separated from her father, Henry, in 1840.  When she was aged ten her brother Edward left England for India and later Australia.

However, after being befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle she was much taken by acting. For three years she took minor acting roles, which supported both her and her mother, However, her interest in acting began to wane as she began to write. It was to be her true vocation.

In 1860, Mary met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals. By the next year they were living together.  The situation and the view from polite society was complicated by the fact that Maxwell was already married with five children, and his wife was under care in an Irish asylum.  Until 1874 Mary was to act as stepmother to his children as well as to the six offspring their own relationship produced. 

Braddon, with a large and growing family, still found time to produce a long and prolific writing career.  Her most famous book was a sensational novel published in 1862, ‘Lady Audley's Secret’.  It won her both recognition and best-seller status.

Her works in the supernatural genre were equally prolific and brought new menace to the form. Her pact with the devil story ‘Gerald, or the World, the Flesh and the Devil’ (1891), and the ghost stories ‘The Cold Embrace’, ‘The Face in the Glass’ and ‘At Chrighton Abbey’ are regarded as classics.

In 1866 she founded the Belgravia magazine.  This presented readers with serialised sensation novels, poems, travel narratives and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history and science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers an excellent source of literature at an affordable cost. She was also the editor of The Temple Bar magazine.

Maxwell’s wife died in 1874 and the couple who had been together for so long were at last able to wed.

Mary Elizabeth Brandon died on 4th February 1915 in Richmond and is buried in Richmond Cemetery.

After her death her short story masterpieces would be regularly anthologised.  But for the rest of her canon her reputation then went into decline.  In the past decade her reputation and talent is once more being given the attention it so rightly deserves.

Index of Contents

PREFACE

GARIBALDI 

OLIVIA

MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON – A CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY

PREFACE

In submitting a volume of Poems to the critical Public, the inexperienced author can only appeal to the generous indulgence of that ever-generous tribunal.

The wonderful Sicilian campaign, which has made this departing year of 1860 one epic poem, has suggested the brief record here offered to the reader.

GARIBALDI

I.

I lived amongst a race of men who said,

"There is no good beneath the weary sun

The dead for ever burying the dead,

Great things for ever doing—never done;

All life without one purpose—without one:

We, burning the brief candle of our years

For a dull game we have no stake upon,

Mocking our Souls with acted hopes and fears,

Blind puppets dancing to the music of the spheres.

II.

"Not to our own—to music that we know not;

Not to our own,—no, not our own at best;

Our souls in other hands we go, or go not,

Hither or thither, at a strange behest.

Better the bird that broods upon her nest,

And questions not the instinct she obeys,—

Better the wave with foam upon its crest,

Whose changeless course the tyrant moonbeam sways,

Than we who wander blindfold through life's trackless ways,—

III.

"Which lead us—where? we know not, only on:

Or what if death be but a second birth,

Making us what we were before the sun

Lit up for us the stage of this great earth?

Oh, weary drama! Strife so little worth,

In which the hero gains a painted prize,

And only values it by others' dearth,

Fame comes so late in answer to his sighs,

That ere he clasps the lovely shade, the victor dies.

IV.

"Thrice hail, then, to the lotus-flowers of life!

Thrice hail, then, to the Moslem's easy creed,

Who, sitting on a carpet, sees the strife,

And wonders at the hearts that burn and bleed!

Oh, fool, to hold a world's applause thy meed!

Oh, fool, to strive, to weep, to do, to dream,

And perish failing in some mighty deed!

The wife men idly sit beside the stream,

And laugh to see the foolish wreck, the futile scheme."

V.

With words like these we wore the long years out,

So, without faith or hope, the days went by,

And in our minds the shadow men call—Doubt,

On life and after life fell gloomily,

That darkened all. They talked of Liberty!—

We sneered, and pointed to their hidden chains:

The loud laugh broke into the smothered sigh;

We with false pleasures masked too real pains,—

Slaves round Life's chariot-wheels, while Folly held the reins.

VI.

We had the day still, and the dark-blue night

Yet rose in all her olden mystery:

We had the trackless stars, whose awful light

Had travelled to us through Eternity,

Smiling when earth was chaos. Tyranny,

That shut men from the things that made their joy,

Taking life from them to forbid them die,

Could not, though strong, that Infinite destroy,

That shone down heaven's gold on earth's most dull alloy.

VII.

We heard of Italy, and in that name

Still the old witchery, but the lyre seemed dead

From which that found of bygone magic came;

Only the echo lived—the hymn was fled:

By all the blood in holy causes shed,—

By the dead hero and the deathless sage,—

By every noble soul in battle sped,—

By deeds that made her past one sacred page,

We, in Italia's name, recalled the Roman's age.

VIII.

And me was dead! In beauty as of yore,

Unchanged her loveliness—undimmed her smile,

Sweet slept the Zephyrs on her fertile shore,—

Still waved the vines about Sicilia's isle:

And in her lonely grandeur all the while,

Venice still sunned her beauties in the sea,—

A purple mirror for each stately pile,

That crowned her Queen of lovely Lombardy,—

So fair—yet dead in this—no more could me be free!

IX.

We tolled her death-knell in that common phrase—

No more! Her Carbonari—where were they?

Dead of the sickness of their wasted days.

Her poet-patriot?—Oh, how still he lay,

Low in the English churchyard, far away

From the loved land whose skies illumed his life,—

Whose wrongs consumed his heart! That bright array

Of eager souls once burning for the strife,—

How dwindled by despair, the prison, and the knife!

X.

A thousand noble words her sons had spoken,—

A thousand lovely dreams her sons had dreamed,—

A thousand oaths,—loud, fervent, and yet broken,—

A thousand swords were sheathed or e'er they gleamed,—

A thousand lamps of theories that beamed

And died,—and nothing done but this. Their woes

Were doubled by their struggles, since it seemed

Their efforts changed mere tyrants into foes,

When, as of old some war-god, Garibaldi rose!

XI.

We wait for such men,—Born of what? The hour!

The incarnation of a people's prayer,

They come at last—Invincible! With power

Wide as our want, and great as our despair,—

Born to uphold the burden of our care,

They come, and we believe, and gather near,

And sun ourselves beneath the forehead, where

God writes, "The crown of Victory is here,

And where this man comes never yet came fear!"

XII.

We wait for such men—they, like living light,

Come when the hour is darkest. It may be,

They, with the stars, mine ever, but the night

Alone reveals their fullest majesty.

Then through the darkness, suddenly we see

The pole-star of our blind and troubled way

Shining in grand and awful mystery

Beck'ning us onward with unchanging ray,

Till groping through the night we reach a fairer day.

XIII.

God had not hid Himself from