Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/109

100 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