Robert Browning’s Poetry

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

[h=3]Context[/h] Robert Browning was born in 1812, the son of fairly liberal parents who took an interest in his education and personal growth. He read voraciously as a youth, and began to write poetry while still quite young, influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose radicalism urged a rethinking of modern society. However, Browning’s earliest works garnered him some negative attention for their expression of strong sensations their morbid tone. Thus for a time he set poetry aside to work on plays, finding in their fictional world an apt space for experimentation and development as a creative mind. Most of the plays did not find success, however, and Browning turned back again to verse.

Browning’s first important poem was the lengthy Paracelsus, which appeared in 1835. Really a long dramatic monologue, the poem described the career of the sixteenth-century alchemist, and achieved popular success, establishing Browning as a familiar name with the reading public, if not yet as a great poet. In 1841 Browning put out Pippa Passes, a loosely structured set of poems that draw from the sensationalism of modern media. This was followed by 1842’s Dramatic Lyrics and 1845’s Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. Along with the 1855 volume Men and Women and the 1864 book Dramatis Personae, these two collections, although not wild successes, contain most of the poems today considered central to the Browning canon. But the poet achieved true literary stardom with the publication of his verse novel The Ring and the Book, a historical tragedy based on a group of documents Browning had found at an Italian bookseller’s. The work appeared in installments from 1868 to 1869, and Browning societies soon sprang up all over England, rocketing Browning into a fame he enjoyed until his death in 1889.
Just as Browning’s professional life centered around this crucial publication, so, too did his personal life center around a crucial relationship. Following the appearance of her celebrated first collection, Browning had begun corresponding with the poet Elizabeth Barrett, a semi-invalid who lived in the home of her extremely protective father. Not long after their first face-to- face meeting, the two poets married in secret and fled to Italy, where they lived until Elizabeth’s death in 1861. During this time critics considered Elizabeth much the finer poet, and scholars even proposed her as a candidate for poet laureate when William Wordsworth died (Alfred Tennyson received the honor instead). Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work still receives much scholarly attention, Robert Browning’s subtle, detail-oriented poems have proven attractive to modern critics, and he has now replaced his wife as the Browning of favor.
Browning lived and wrote during a time of major societal and intellectual upheaval, and his poems reflect this world. England was becoming increasingly urban, and newspapers daily assaulted the senses with splashy tales of crime and lust in the city. Many people began to lose faith in religion as various new scientific theories rocked society—most notably Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, articulated in his 1859 The Origin of Species, and many questioned the old bases of morality. Just as religion and science were shifting in their roles, so, too, was art: artists and critics were moving toward what would become the “art for art’s sake” movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Browning responded to these cultural upheavals in the 1840s and ’50s with poems in which he explores the relationship of morality to art, and the conflict between aesthetics and didacticism. Mid- 19th-century Britain experienced economic turmoil as well: wealth and consumption were on the rise at the same time that poverty soared, and the need to reconcile these two facts finds an analogue in the struggle to decide between material beauty—often manifested in luxurious furnishings, decorations, ornament, and clothing—and morality—in the form of a concern for the poor. Browning explores all of these issues in his poetry, even though he sets many of them in the Renaissance or other distant historical periods; this is part of his way of achieving relevance while never becoming moralistic or overly strident. But Browning’s genius lay not so much in his choice of subject matter or setting, but in his craftsmanship: the fascination of his poetry owes to his strong portrayal of characters and his wealth of detail.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

[h=3]Analysis[/h] Browning’s most important poetic message regards the new conditions of urban living. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the once-rural British population had become centered in large cities, thanks to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. With so many people living in such close quarters, poverty, violence, and *** became part of everyday life. People felt fewer restrictions on their behavior, no longer facing the fear of non-acceptance that they had faced in smaller communities; people could act in total anonymity, without any monitoring by acquaintances or small-town busybodies. However, while the absence of family and community ties meant new-found personal independence, it also meant the loss of a social safety net. Thus for many city-dwellers, a sense of freedom mixed with a sense of insecurity. The mid-nineteenth century also saw the rapid growth of newspapers, which functioned not as the current-events journals of today but as scandal sheets, filled with stories of violence and carnality. Hurrying pedestrians, bustling shops, and brand-new goods filled the streets, and individuals had to take in millions of separate perceptions a minute. The resulting overstimulation led, according to many theorists, to a sort of numbness. Many writers now felt that in order to provoke an emotional reaction they had to compete with the turmoils and excitements of everyday life, had to shock their audience in ever more novel and sensational ways. Thus violence became a sort of aesthetic choice for many writers, among them Robert Browning. In many of his poems, violence, along with ***, becomes the symbol of the modern urban-dwelling condition. Many of Browning’s more disturbing poems, including “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess,” reflect this notion.

This apparent moral decay of Victorian society, coupled with an ebbing of interest in religion, led to a morally conservative backlash. So-called Victorian prudery arose as an attempt to rein in something that was seen as out- of-control, an attempt to bring things back to the way they once were. Thus everything came under moral scrutiny, even art and literature. Many of Browning’s poems, which often feature painters and other artists, try to work out the proper relationship between art and morality: Should art have a moral message? Can art be immoral? Are aesthetics and ethics inherently contradictory aims? These are all questions with which Browning’s poetry struggles. The new findings of science, most notably evolution, posed further challenges to traditional religious ideas, suggesting that empiricism—the careful recording of observable details—could serve as a more relevant basis for human endeavor, whether intellectual or artistic.
In exploring these issues of art and modernity, Browning uses the dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue, to paraphrase M.H. Abrams, is a poem with a speaker who is clearly separate from the poet, who speaks to an implied audience that, while silent, remains clearly present in the scene. (This implied audience distinguishes the dramatic monologue from the soliloquy—a form also used by Browning—in which the speaker does not address any specific listener, rather musing aloud to him or herself). The purpose of the monologue (and the soliloquy) is not so much to make a statement about its declared subject matter, but to develop the character of the speaker. For Browning, the genre provides a sort of play-space and an alternative persona with which he can explore sometimes controversial ideas. He often further distances himself by employing historical characters, particularly from the Italian Renaissance. During the Renaissance in Italy art assumed a new humanism and began to separate from religion; concentrations of social power reached an extreme. Thus this temporal setting gives Browning a good analogue for exploring issues of art and morality and for looking at the ways in which social power could be used (and misused: the Victorian period saw many moral pundits assume positions of social importance). Additionally, the monologue form allows Browning to explore forms of consciousness and self-representation. This aspect of the monologue underwent further development in the hands of some of Browning’s successors, among them Alfred Tennyson and T.S. Eliot.
Browning devotes much attention not only to creating a strong sense of character, but also to developing a high level of historic specificity and general detail. These concerns reflected Victorian society’s new emphasis on empiricism, and pointed the way towards the kind of intellectual verse that was to be written by the poets of high Modernism, like Eliot and Ezra Pound. In its scholarly detail and its connection to the past Browning’s work also implicitly considers the relationship of modern poets to a greater literary tradition. At least two of Browning’s finest dramatic monologues take their inspiration from moments in Shakespeare’s plays, and other poems consider the matter of one’s posterity and potential immortality as an artist. Because society had been changing so rapidly, Browning and his contemporaries could not be certain that the works of canonical artists like Shakespeare and Michelangelo would continue to have relevance in the emerging new world. Thus these writers worried over their own legacy as well. However, Browning’s poetry has lasted—perhaps precisely because of its very topical nature: its active engagement with the debates of its times, and the intelligent strategies with which it handles such era-specific material.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

[h=3]Themes, Motifs and Symbols[/h] [h=4]Themes[/h] [h=5]Multiple Perspectives on Single Events[/h] The dramatic monologue verse form allowed Browning to explore and probe the minds of specific characters in specific places struggling with specific sets of circumstances. In The Ring and the Book, Browning tells a suspenseful story of murder using multiple voices, which give multiple perspectives and multiple versions of the same story. Dramatic monologues allow readers to enter into the minds of various characters and to see an event from that character’s perspective. Understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of a character not only gives readers a sense of sympathy for the characters but also helps readers understand the multiplicity of perspectives that make up the truth. In effect, Browning’s work reminds readers that the nature of truth or reality fluctuates, depending on one’s perspective or view of the situation. Multiple perspectives illustrate the idea that no one sensibility or perspective sees the whole story and no two people see the same events in the same way. Browning further illustrated this idea by writing poems that work together as companion pieces, such as “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto.” Poems such as these show how people with different characters respond differently to similar situations, as well as depict how a time, place, and scenario can cause people with similar personalities to develop or change quite dramatically.

[h=5]The Purposes of Art[/h] Browning wrote many poems about artists and poets, including such dramatic monologues as “Pictor Ignotus” (1855) and “Fra Lippo Lippi.” Frequently, Browning would begin by thinking about an artist, an artwork, or a type of art that he admired or disliked. Then he would speculate on the character or artistic philosophy that would lead to such a success or failure. His dramatic monologues about artists attempt to capture some of this philosophizing because his characters speculate on the purposes of art. For instance, the speaker of “Fra Lippo Lippi” proposes that art heightens our powers of observation and helps us notice things about our own lives. According to some of these characters and poems, painting idealizes the beauty found in the real world, such as the radiance of a beloved’s smile. Sculpture and architecture can memorialize famous or important people, as in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (1845) and “The Statue and the Bust” (1855). But art also helps its creators to make a living, and it thus has a purpose as pecuniary as creative, an idea explored in “Andrea del Sarto.”

[h=5]The Relationship Between Art and Morality[/h] Throughout his work, Browning tried to answer questions about an artist’s responsibilities and to describe the relationship between art and morality. He questioned whether artists had an obligation to be moral and whether artists should pass judgment on their characters and creations. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Browning populated his poems with evil people, who commit crimes and sins ranging from hatred to murder. The dramatic monologue format allowed Browning to maintain a great distance between himself and his creations: by channeling the voice of a character, Browning could explore evil without actually being evil himself. His characters served as personae that let him adopt different traits and tell stories about horrible situations. In “My Last Duchess,” the speaker gets away with his wife’s murder since neither his audience (in the poem) nor his creator judges or criticizes him. Instead, the responsibility of judging the character’s morality is left to readers, who find the duke of Ferrara a vicious, repugnant person even as he takes us on a tour of his art gallery.

[h=4]Motifs[/h] [h=5]Medieval and Renaissance European Settings[/h] Browning set many of his poems in medieval and Renaissance Europe, most often in Italy. He drew on his extensive knowledge of art, architecture, and history to fictionalize actual events, including a seventeenth-century murder in The Ring and the Book, and to channel the voices of actual historical figures, including a biblical scholar in medieval Spain in “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864) and the Renaissance painter in the eponymous “Andrea del Sarto.” The remoteness of the time period and location allowed Browning to critique and explore contemporary issues without fear of alienating his readers. Directly invoking contemporary issues might seem didactic and moralizing in a way that poems set in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries would not. For instance, the speaker of “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” is an Italian bishop during the late Renaissance. Through the speaker’s pompous, vain musings about monuments, Browning indirectly criticizes organized religion, including the Church of England, which was in a state of disarray at the time of the poem’s composition in the mid-nineteenth century.

[h=5]Psychological Portraits[/h] Dramatic monologues feature a solitary speaker addressing at least one silent, usually unnamed person, and they provide interesting snapshots of the speakers and their personalities. Unlike soliloquies, in dramatic monologues the characters are always speaking directly to listeners. Browning’s characters are usually crafty, intelligent, argumentative, and capable of lying. Indeed, they often leave out more of a story than they actually tell. In order to fully understand the speakers and their psychologies, readers must carefully pay attention to word choice, to logical progression, and to the use of figures of speech, including any metaphors or analogies. For instance, the speaker of “My Last Duchess” essentially confesses to murdering his wife, even though he never expresses his guilt outright. Similarly, the speaker of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” inadvertently betrays his madness by confusing Latin prayers and by expressing his hate for a fellow friar with such vituperation and passion. Rather than state the speaker’s madness, Browning conveys it through both what the speaker says and how the speaker speaks.

[h=5]Grotesque Images[/h] Unlike other Victorian poets, Browning filled his poetry with images of ugliness, violence, and the bizarre. His contemporaries, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in contrast, mined the natural world for lovely images of beauty. Browning’s use of the grotesque links him to novelist Charles Dickens, who filled his fiction with people from all strata of society, including the aristocracy and the very poor. Like Dickens, Browning created characters who were capable of great evil. The early poem “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836) begins with the lover describing the arrival of Porphyria, then it quickly descends into a depiction of her murder at his hands. To make the image even more grotesque, the speaker strangles Porphyria with her own blond hair. Although “Fra Lippo Lippi” takes place during the Renaissance in Florence, at the height of its wealth and power, Browning sets the poem in a back alley beside a brothel, not in a palace or a garden. Browning was instrumental in helping readers and writers understand that poetry as an art form could handle subjects both lofty, such as religious splendor and idealized passion, and base, such as murder, hatred, and madness, subjects that had previously only been explored in novels.

[h=4]Symbols[/h] [h=5]Taste[/h] Browning’s interest in culture, including art and architecture, appears throughout his work in depictions of his characters’ aesthetic tastes. His characters’ preferences in art, music, and literature reveal important clues about their natures and moral worth. For instance, the duke of Ferrara, the speaker of “My Last Duchess,” concludes the poem by pointing out a statue he commissioned of Neptune taming a sea monster. The duke’s preference for this sculpture directly corresponds to the type of man he is—that is, the type of man who would have his wife killed but still stare lovingly and longingly at her portrait. Like Neptune, the duke wants to subdue and command all aspects of life, including his wife. Characters also express their tastes by the manner in which they describe art, people, or landscapes. Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance artist who speaks the poem “Andrea del Sarto,” repeatedly uses the adjectives gold and silver in his descriptions of paintings. His choice of words reinforces one of the major themes of the poem: the way he sold himself out. Listening to his monologue, we learn that he now makes commercial paintings to earn a commission, but he no longer creates what he considers to be real art. His desire for money has affected his aesthetic judgment, causing him to use monetary vocabulary to describe art objects.

[h=5]Evil and Violence[/h] Synonyms for, images of, and symbols of evil and violence abound in Browning’s poetry. “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” for example, begins with the speaker trying to articulate the sounds of his “heart’s abhorrence” (1) for a fellow friar. Later in the poem, the speaker invokes images of evil pirates and a man being banished to hell. The diction and images used by the speakers expresses their evil thoughts, as well as indicate their evil natures. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) portrays a nightmarish world of dead horses and war-torn landscapes. Yet another example of evil and violence comes in “Porphyria’s Lover,” in which the speaker sits contentedly alongside the corpse of Porphyria, whom he murdered by strangling her with her hair. Symbols of evil and violence allowed Browning to explore all aspects of human psychology, including the base and evil aspects that don’t normally appear in poetry.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Porphyria’s Lover

Porphyria’s Lover

Complete Text

The rain set early in tonight,

The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
and did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

Summary

“Porphyria’s Lover,” which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning’s dramatic monologues. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him. He realizes that she “worship” him at this instant. Realizing that she will eventually give in to society’s pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.

Form

“Porphyria’s Lover,” while natural in its language, does not display the colloquialisms or dialectical markers of some of Browning’s later poems. Moreover, while the cadence of the poem mimics natural speech, it actually takes the form of highly patterned verse, rhyming ABABB. The intensity and asymmetry of the pattern suggests the madness concealed within the speaker’s reasoned self-presentation.

This poem is a dramatic monologue—a fictional speech presented as the musings of a speaker who is separate from the poet. Like most of Browning’s other dramatic monologues, this one captures a moment after a main event or action. Porphyria already lies dead when the speaker begins. Just as the nameless speaker seeks to stop time by killing her, so too does this kind of poem seek to freeze the consciousness of an instant.
Commentary

“Porphyria’s Lover” opens with a scene taken straight from the Romantic poetry of the earlier nineteenth century. While a storm rages outdoors, giving a demonstration of nature at its most sublime, the speaker sits in a cozy cottage. This is the picture of rural simplicity—a cottage by a lake, a rosy-cheeked girl, a roaring fire. However, once Porphyria begins to take off her wet clothing, the poem leaps into the modern world. She bares her shoulder to her lover and begins to caress him; this is a level of overt ***uality that has not been seen in poetry since the Renaissance. We then learn that Porphyria is defying her family and friends to be with the speaker; the scene is now not just ***ual, but transgressively so. Illicit *** out of wedlock presented a major concern for Victorian society; the famous Victorian “prudery” constituted only a backlash to what was in fact a popular obsession with the theme: the newspapers of the day reveled in stories about prostitutes and unwed mothers. Here, however, in “Porphyria’s Lover,” *** appears as something natural, acceptable, almost wholesome: Porphyria’s girlishness and affection take prominence over any hints of immorality.

For the Victorians, modernity meant numbness: urban life, with its constant over-stimulation and newspapers full of scandalous and horrifying stories, immunized people to shock. Many believed that the onslaught of amorality and the constant assault on the senses could be counteracted only with an even greater shock. This is the principle Browning adheres to in “Porphyria’s Lover.” In light of contemporary scandals, the ***ual transgression might seem insignificant; so Browning breaks through his reader’s probable complacency by having Porphyria’s lover murder her; and thus he provokes some moral or emotional reaction in his presumably numb audience. This is not to say that Browning is trying to shock us into condemning either Porphyria or the speaker for their ***uality; rather, he seeks to remind us of the disturbed condition of the modern psyche. In fact, “Porphyria’s Lover” was first published, along with another poem, under the title Madhouse Cells, suggesting that the conditions of the new “modern” world served to blur the line between “ordinary life”—for example, the domestic setting of this poem—and insanity—illustrated here by the speaker’s action.
This poem, like much of Browning’s work, conflates ***, violence, and aesthetics. Like many Victorian writers, Browning was trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work. How is it that society considers the beauty of the female body to be immoral while never questioning the morality of language’s sensuality—a sensuality often most manifest in poetry? Why does society see both *** and violence as transgressive? What is the relationship between the two? Which is “worse”? These are some of the questions that Browning’s poetry posits. And he typically does not offer any answers to them: Browning is no moralist, although he is no libertine either. As a fairly liberal man, he is confused by his society’s simultaneous embrace of both moral righteousness and a desire for sensation; “Porphyria’s Lover” explores this contradiction.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

Complete Text

Gr-r-r — there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims —
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
At the meal we sit together;
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt;
What’s the Latin name for “parsley?”
What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout?
Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps —
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
— Can’t I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as ’twere a Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if he’d let it show!)
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp —
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp.
Oh, those melons? If he’s able
We’re to have a feast! so nice!
One goes to the Abbot’s table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange! — And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure as can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in ’t?
Or, there’s Satan! — one might venture
Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine ...
“St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratiâ
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r — you swine!

Summary

This highly entertaining poem portrays the grumblings of a jealous monk who finds his pleasures more in the flesh than in the spirit. Presenting himself as the model of righteousness, the speaker condemns a fellow monk, Brother Lawrence, for his immorality; but we soon recognize that the faults he assigns to Lawrence are in fact his own. Unlike many of Browning’s monologues, this one has no real historical specificity: we have no clues as to when the speaker might have lived, and the Spanish cloister is simply an anonymous monastery.

Form

The poem comprises nine eight-line stanzas, each rhyming ABABCDCD. The lines fall roughly into tetrameter, although with some irregularities. Browning makes ample use of the conventions of spoken language, including nonverbal sounds (“Gr-r-r-”) and colloquial language (“Hell dry you up with its flames!”). Many of the later dramatic monologues dispense with rhyme altogether, but this poem retains it, perhaps to suggest the speaker’s self-righteousness and careful adherence to tradition and formal convention.

Because the speaker here is talking to himself, the poem is not technically a dramatic monologue as so many of Browning’s poems are; rather, it is, as its title suggests, a “soliloquy” (even though it is a freestanding poem, and not a speech from a play). Nevertheless it shares many of the features of the dramatic monologues: an interest in sketching out a character, an attention to aestheticizing detail, and an implied commentary on morality.

Commentary

“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” explores moral hypocrisy. On the surface, the poem may seem to be a light historical piece, the utterings of a grumpy but interesting monk—however, it repeatedly approaches a tone similar to that used by the more strident of Victorian essayists and religious figures. Browning portrays this man’s interior commentary to show that behind righteousness often lurks self-righteousness and corruption. The speaker levels some rather malevolent curses at Brother Lawrence, accusing his fellow monk of gluttony and lechery, when it is obvious, based on the examples he gives, that it is the speaker himself who is guilty of these sins (for example, when describing the supposed focus of Lawrence’s lecherous attentions, the speaker indulges in fairly abundant detail; clearly he has been looking for himself.) Moreover, the speaker’s fantasies about trapping Lawrence into damnation suggest that Lawrence is in fact a good man who will receive salvation. Thus Browning implies that the most vehement moralists invent their own opposition in order to elevate themselves.

Perhaps most importantly, the speaker describes a bargain he would make with Satan to hurt Lawrence. The speaker claims he could make such a bargain that Satan would believe he was getting the speaker’s soul when in fact a loophole would let the speaker escape. The paradox here is that making any sort of bargain with the devil to the disadvantage of another, whether one tricks Satan in the end or not, must necessarily involve the loss of one’s soul: the very act of making such a treacherous bargain constitutes a mortal sin. No one could admire this speaker’s moral dissolution; yet he represents a merely thinly veiled version of people whose public characters are very much admired—the moralists and preachers of Browning’s day. Browning exposes such people’s hypocrisy and essential immorality.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

My Last Duchess

My Last Duchess

Complete Text

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat”: such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Summary

This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century. The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come to negotiate the Duke’s marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the daughter of another powerful family. As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing about the portrait sessions, then about the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his “gift of a nine-hundred-years- old name.” As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: when her behavior escalated, “[he] gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” Having made this disclosure, the Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another marriage, with another young girl. As the Duke and the emissary walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out other notable artworks in his collection.

Form

“My Last Duchess” comprises rhyming pentameter lines. The lines do not employ end-stops; rather, they use enjambment—gthat is, sentences and other grammatical units do not necessarily conclude at the end of lines. Consequently, the rhymes do not create a sense of closure when they come, but rather remain a subtle driving force behind the Duke’s compulsive revelations. The Duke is quite a performer: he mimics others’ voices, creates hypothetical situations, and uses the force of his personality to make horrifying information seem merely colorful. Indeed, the poem provides a classic example of a dramatic monologue: the speaker is clearly distinct from the poet; an audience is suggested but never appears in the poem; and the revelation of the Duke’s character is the poem’s primary aim.

Commentary

But Browning has more in mind than simply creating a colorful character and placing him in a picturesque historical scene. Rather, the specific historical setting of the poem harbors much significance: the Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his contemporaries, for it represented the flowering of the aesthetic and the human alongside, or in some cases in the place of, the religious and the moral. Thus the temporal setting allows Browning to again explore ***, violence, and aesthetics as all entangled, complicating and confusing each other: the lushness of the language belies the fact that the Duchess was punished for her natural ***uality. The Duke’s ravings suggest that most of the supposed transgressions took place only in his mind. Like some of Browning’s fellow Victorians, the Duke sees sin lurking in every corner. The reason the speaker here gives for killing the Duchess ostensibly differs from that given by the speaker of “Porphyria’s Lover” for murder Porphyria; however, both women are nevertheless victims of a male desire to inscribe and fix female ***uality. The desperate need to do this mirrors the efforts of Victorian society to mold the behavior—g***ual and otherwise—gof individuals. For people confronted with an increasingly complex and anonymous modern world, this impulse comes naturally: to control would seem to be to conserve and stabilize. The Renaissance was a time when morally dissolute men like the Duke exercised absolute power, and as such it is a fascinating study for the Victorians: works like this imply that, surely, a time that produced magnificent art like the Duchess’s portrait couldn’t have been entirely evil in its allocation of societal control—geven though it put men like the Duke in power.

A poem like “My Last Duchess” calculatedly engages its readers on a psychological level. Because we hear only the Duke’s musings, we must piece the story together ourselves. Browning forces his reader to become involved in the poem in order to understand it, and this adds to the fun of reading his work. It also forces the reader to question his or her own response to the subject portrayed and the method of its portrayal. We are forced to consider, Which aspect of the poem dominates: the horror of the Duchess’s fate, or the beauty of the language and the powerful dramatic development? Thus by posing this question the poem firstly tests the Victorian reader’s response to the modern world—git asks, Has everyday life made you numb yet?—gand secondly asks a question that must be asked of all art—git queries, Does art have a moral component, or is it merely an aesthetic exercise? In these latter considerations Browning prefigures writers like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church

The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church

Complete Text

Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews -sons mine ... ah God, I know not! Well —
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What’s done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since;
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.
Life, how and what is it? As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all.
St Praxed’s ever was the church for peace;
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:
— Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South
He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!
Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
One sees the pulpit o’ the epistle-side,
And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,
And up into the aery dome where live
The angels, and a sunbeam’s sure to lurk:
And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And ’neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.
- Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,
Put me where I may look at him! True peach,
Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!
Draw close: that conflagration of my church
- What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!
My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig
The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,
Drop water gently till the surface sinks,
And if ye find...ah God, I know not, I!...
Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast...
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,
That brave Frascati villa with its bath,
So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,
Like God the Father’s globe on both his hands
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!
Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black -
’Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripon, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
St Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,
And Moses with the tables...but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o’er with beggar’s mouldy travertine
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me -all of jasper, then!
’Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world -
And have I not St Praxed’s ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line -
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees,
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes for a mort-cloth drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s-work:
And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts
Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,
About the life before I lived this life,
And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
St Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet,
- Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas: will ye ever eat my heart?
Ever your eyes were as a lizard’s quick,
They glitter like your mother’s for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down,
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death -ye wish it -God, ye wish it! Stone -
Gritsone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through -
And no more lapis to delight the world!
Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,
But in a row: and, going, turn your backs
- Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers -
Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

Summary

A fictional Renaissance bishop lies on his deathbed giving orders for the tomb that is to be built for him. He instructs his “nephews”—gperhaps a group of younger priests—on the materials and the design, motivated by a desire to outshine his predecessor Gandolf, whose final resting place he denounces as coarse and inferior. The poem hints that at least one of the “nephews” may be his son; in his ramblings he mentions a possible mistress, long since dead. The Bishop catalogues possible themes for his tomb, only to end with the realization that his instructions are probably futile: he will not live to ensure their realization, and his tomb will probably prove to be as much of a disappointment as Gandolf’s.

Although the poem’s narrator is a fictional creation, Saint Praxed’s Church refers to an actual place in Rome. It is dedicated to a martyred Roman virgin.

Form

This poem, which appears in the 1845 volume Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, represents a stylistic departure for Browning. The Bishop speaks in iambic pentameter unrhymed lines—blank verse. Traditionally, blank verse was the favored form for dramatists, and many consider it the poetic form that best mimics natural speech in English. Gone are the subtle yet powerful rhyme schemes of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” or “My Last Duchess.” The Bishop, an earthly, businesslike man, does not try to aestheticize his speech. The new form owes not only to the speaker’s earthy personality, but also his situation: he is also dying, and momentary aesthetic considerations have given way to a fervent desire to create a more lasting aesthetic monument.

Commentary

Poetry has always concerned itself with immortality and posterity. Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, repeatedly discuss the possibility of immortalizing one’s beloved by writing a poem about him or her. Here, the Bishop shares the poet’s drive to ensure his own life after death by creating a work of art that will continue to capture the attention of those still living. He has been contemplating the issue for some time, as shown by his discussion of Gandolf’s usurpation of his chosen burial spot. His preparation has spanned years: he reveals that he has secreted away various treasures to be used in the monument’s construction, including a lump of lapis lazuli he has buried in a vineyard. The discussion as a whole reveals a fascinating attitude toward life and death: we come to see that the Bishop has spent so much of his time on earth preparing not for his salvation and afterlife, but for the construction of an earthly reminder of his existence. This suggests that the Bishop lacks religious conviction: if he were a true Christian, the thought of an eternal life in Heaven after his death would preclude his tomb-building efforts. Obviously, too, the Bishop does not expect to be remembered for his leadership or good deeds. And yet the monument he plans will be a work of magnificent art. Thus, as a whole, the poem reminds us that often the most beautiful art results from the most corrupt motives. Again, coming to this conclusion, Browning prefigures writers like Oscar Wilde, who made more explicit claims for the separation of art and morality.

Despite the Bishop’s rough speech and dying gasps, this poem achieves great beauty. Part of this beauty lies in its attention to detail and the cataloguing of the various semiprecious stones that are to line the tomb. Natural history provided endless fascination for the Victorians, and the psyche of the period gave special prominence to the notion of collecting. Collecting offers a way to gather together objects of beauty without necessarily having to involve oneself in the act of creation. Instead, the collector can just gather bits of nature’s—or God’s—handiwork. Indeed, this notion of collecting provides an analog for Browning’s employment of dramatic monologues like this one: in their way, they resemble found objects, the speeches of characters he has just “stumbled across.” The poems are thus neither moral nor immoral; they just are. By taking such an attitude Browning may be trying to move beyond speculations on the moral dangers of modern, city-centered life, focusing more on anthropological than philosophical or religious aspects of existence.
The poem ends with the Bishop’s vision of his corpse’s decay. The image hints at an underlying commonality of experience, a commonality more fundamental than any social power structures or aesthetic ambitions. While the notion of death as an equalizer may seem nihilistic, it can also prove liberating; for indeed, it relieves the Bishop, and implicitly Browning, of the burden of posterity.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Home-Thoughts, From Abroad

Home-Thoughts, From Abroad

Complete Text

Oh, to be in England,
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England - now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows -
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray’s edge -
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Summary

“Home-Thoughts, From Abroad” celebrates the everyday and the domestic, taking the form of a short lyric. The poet casts himself in the role of the homesick traveler, longing for every detail of his beloved home. At this point in his career, Browning had spent quite a bit of time in Italy, so perhaps the longing for England has a bit of biographical urgency attached to it. The poem describes a typical springtime scene in the English countryside, with birds singing and flowers blooming. Browning tries to make the ordinary magical, as he describes the thrush’s ability to recreate his transcendental song over and over again.

Form

Except for the poem’s rhyme scheme and number of lines, it resembles an inverted sonnet: it divides into two sections, each of which is characterized by its own tone. The first, shorter stanza establishes the emotional tenor of the poem—the speaker longs for his home. This section contains two trimeter lines, followed by two tetrameter lines, three pentameter lines, and a final trimeter line; it rhymes ABABCCDD. The metrical pattern and the rhyme scheme give it a sort of rising and falling sense that mirrors the emotional rise and fall of the poem’s central theme: the burst of joy at thinking of home, then the resignation that home lies so far away.

The second section is longer, and consists almost entirely of pentameter lines, save the eighth line, which is tetrameter. It rhymes AABCBCDDEEFF. The more even metrical pattern and more drawn-out rhyme plan allow for a more contemplative feel; it is here that the poet settles back and thinks on the progress of the seasons that cycle outside of him. In its metrical irregularity and surprising last line, as well as its overall tone, the poem suggests the work of Emily Dickinson.

Commentary

This seemingly simple little poem reacts in quite complex ways to both Romanticism and the development of the British Empire. The domestic bliss and rapturous exchange with nature that characterize many Romantic poems emerge here as the constructions of people who do not live the life about which they write. But these constructions were integral to an illusion of “Rural England” that served as a crucial background for many philosophical ideas, and as a powerful unifying principle for many Britons: as the British Empire grew, and more British citizens began to live outside the home islands, maintaining a mythical conception of “England” became important as a way to differentiate oneself from the colonies’ native population. As works like Forster’s A Passage to India show, the British abroad in the colonies (such as India) worked much harder at being British than their compatriots in London. Thus in this period, sentimental thoughts of the English countryside, such as the ones in this poem, hardly ever present a pure nostalgia; rather, they carry a great deal of ideological weight.

Nevertheless this poem contains much sincerity. Browning had left Britain, although he lived in Italy and not in a British colony. And as is evident from the poem, his relationship with “home” was a troubled one: although the speaker here longs for home, he doesn’t miss it enough to live there. Perhaps some things are best appreciated from abroad; perhaps some emotions are felt more acutely away from home. And perhaps, as this light little poem implies, it is only away from “home” that one can create serious dramatic poetry.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Fra Lippo Lippi

Fra Lippo Lippi

[h=4]Complete Text[/h]

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.
Zooks, what’s to blame? you think you see a monk!
What, ’tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley’s end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?
The Carmine’s my cloister: hunt it up,
Do, — harry out, if you must show your zeal,
Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole,
And nip each softling of a wee white mouse,
Weke, weke, that’s crept to keep him company!
Aha, you know your betters! Then, you’ll take
Your hand away that’s fiddling on my throat,
And please to know me likewise. Who am I?
Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend
Three streets off — he’s a certain ... how d’ye call?
Master — a ... Cosimo of the Medici,
I’ the house that caps the corner. Boh! you were best!
Remember and tell me, the day you’re hanged,
How you affected such a gullet’s-gripe!
But you, sir, it concerns you that your knaves
Pick up a manner nor discredit you:
Zooks, are we pilchards, that they sweep the streets
And count fair prize what comes into their net?
He’s Judas to a tittle, that man is!
Just such a face! Why, sir, you make amends.
Lord, I’m not angry! Bid your hangdogs go
Drink out this quarter-florin to the health
Of the munificent House that harbours me
(And many more beside, lads! more beside!)
And all’s come square again. I’d like his face —
His, elbowing on his comrade in the door
With the pike and lantern, — for the slave that holds
John Baptist’s head a-dangle by the hair
With one hand (“Look you, now,” as who should say)
And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped!
It’s not your chance to have a bit of chalk,
A wood-coal or the like? or you should see!
Yes, I’m the painter, since you style me so.
What, Brother Lippo’s doings, up and down,
You know them and they take you? like enough!
I saw the proper twinkle in your eye —
’Tell you, I liked your looks at very first.
Let’s sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch.
Here’s spring come, and the nights one makes up bands
To roam the town and sing out carnival,
And I’ve been three weeks shut up within my mew,
A-painting for the great man, saints and saints
And saints again. I could not paint all night —
Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air.
There came a hurry of feet and little feet,
A sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song, —
Flower o’ the broom,
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
Flower o’ the quince,
I let Lisa go, and what good in life since?
Flower o’ the thyme — and so on. Round they went.
Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter
Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight, — three slim shapes,
And a face that looked up ... zooks, sir, flesh and blood,
That’s all I’m made of! Into shreds it went,
Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,
All the bed-furniture — a dozen knots,
There was a ladder! Down I let myself,
Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped,
And after them. I came up with the fun
Hard by Saint Laurence, hail fellow, well met, —
Flower o’ the rose,
If I’ve been merry, what matter who knows?
And so as I was stealing back again
To get to bed and have a bit of sleep
Ere I rise up tomorrow and go work
On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast
With his great round stone to subdue the flesh,
You snap me of the sudden. Ah, I see!
Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your head —
Mine’s shaved — a monk, you say — the sting’s in that!
If Master Cosimo announced himself,
Mum’s the word naturally; but a monk!
Come, what am I a beast for? tell us, now!
I was a baby when my mother died
And father died and left me in the street.
I starved there, God knows how, a year or two
On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks,
Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day,
My stomach being empty as your hat,
The wind doubled me up and down I went.
Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,
(Its fellow was a stinger as I knew)
And so along the wall, over the bridge,
By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there,
While I stood munching my first bread that month:
“So, boy, you’re minded,” quoth the good fat father
Wiping his own mouth, ’twas refection-time, —
“To quit this very miserable world?
Will you renounce” ... “the mouthful of bread?” thought I;
By no means! Brief, they made a monk of me;
I did renounce the world, its pride and greed,
Palace, farm, villa, shop and banking-house,
Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici
Have given their hearts to — all at eight years old.
Well, sir, I found in time, you may be sure,
’Twas not for nothing — the good bellyful,
The warm serge and the rope that goes all round,
And day-long blessed idleness beside!
“Let’s see what the urchin’s fit for” — that came next.
Not overmuch their way, I must confess.
Such a to-do! They tried me with their books:
Lord, they’d have taught me Latin in pure waste!
Flower o’ the clove,
All the Latin I construe is, “amo” I love!
But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets
Eight years together, as my fortune was,
Watching folk’s faces to know who will fling
The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires,
And who will curse or kick him for his pains, —
Which gentleman processional and fine,
Holding a candle to the Sacrament,
Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch
The droppings of the wax to sell again,
Or holla for the Eight and have him whipped, —
How say I? — nay, which dog bites, which lets drop
His bone from the heap of offal in the street, —
Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,
He learns the look of things, and none the less
For admonition from the hunger-pinch.
I had a store of such remarks, be sure,
Which, after I found leisure, turned to use.
I drew men’s faces on my copy-books,
Scrawled them within the antiphonary’s marge,
Joined legs and arms to the long music-notes,
Found eyes and hose and chin for A’s and B’s,
And made a string of pictures of the world
Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun,
On the wall, the bench, the door. The monks looked black.
“Nay,” quoth the Prior, “turn him out, d’ye say?
In no wise. Lose a crow and catch a lark.
What if at last we get our man of parts,
We Carmelites, like those Camaldolese
And Preaching Friars, to do our church up fine
And put the front on it that ought to be!”
And hereupon he bade me daub away.
Thank you! my head being crammed, the walls a blank,
Never was such prompt disemburdening.
First, every sort of monk, the black and white,
I drew them, fat and lean: then, folk at church,
From good old gossips waiting to confess
Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends, —
To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim’s son
Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,
Signing himself with the other because of Christ
(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this
After the passion of a thousand years)
Till some poor girl, her apron o’er her head,
(Which the intense eyes looked through) came at eve
On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,
Her pair of earrings and a bunch of flowers
(The brute took growling), prayed, and so was gone.
I painted all, then cried “ ’Tis ask and have;
Choose, for more’s ready!” — laid the ladder flat,
And showed my covered bit of cloister-wall.
The monks closed in a circle and praised loud
Till checked, taught what to see and not to see,
Being simple bodies, — “That’s the very man!
Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog!
That woman’s like the Prior’s niece who comes
To care about his asthma: it’s the life!”
But there my triumph’s straw-fire flared and funked;
Their betters took their turn to see and say:
The Prior and the learned pulled a face
And stopped all that in no time. “How? what’s here?
Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!
Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true
As much as pea and pea! it’s devil’s-game!
Your business is not to catch men with show,
With homage to the perishable clay,
But lift them over it, ignore it all,
Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.
Your business is to paint the souls of men —
Man’s soul, and it’s a fire, smoke ... no, it’s not ...
It’s vapour done up like a new-born babe —
(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)
It’s ... well, what matters talking, it’s the soul!
Give us no more of body than shows soul!
Here’s Giotto, with his Saint a-praising God,
That sets us praising, — why not stop with him?
Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head
With wonder at lines, colours, and what not?
Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!
Rub all out, try at it a second time.
Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts,
She’s just my niece ... Herodias, I would say, —
Who went and danced and got men’s heads cut off!
Have it all out!” Now, is this sense, I ask?
A fine way to paint soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can’t stop there, must go further
And can’t fare worse! Thus, yellow does for white
When what you put for yellow’s simply black,
And any sort of meaning looks intense
When all beside itself means and looks naught.
Why can’t a painter lift each foot in turn,
Left foot and right foot, go a double step,
Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,
Both in their order? Take the prettiest face,
The Prior’s niece ... patron-saint — is it so pretty
You can’t discover if it means hope, fear,
Sorrow or joy? won’t beauty go with these?
Suppose I’ve made her eyes all right and blue,
Can’t I take breath and try to add life’s flash,
And then add soul and heighten them threefold?
Or say there’s beauty with no soul at all —
(I never saw it — put the case the same —)
If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents:
That’s somewhat: and you’ll find the soul you have missed,
Within yourself, when you return him thanks.
“Rub all out!” Well, well, there’s my life, in short,
And so the thing has gone on ever since.
I’m grown a man no doubt, I’ve broken bounds:
You should not take a fellow eight years old
And make him swear to never kiss the girls.
I’m my own master, paint now as I please —
Having a friend, you see, in the Corner-house!
Lord, it’s fast holding by the rings in front —
Those great rings serve more purposes than just
To plant a flag in, or tie up a horse!
And yet the old schooling sticks, the old grave eyes
Are peeping o’er my shoulder as I work,
The heads shake still — “It’s art’s decline, my son!
You’re not of the true painters, great and old;
Brother Angelico’s the man, you’ll find;
Brother Lorenzo stands his single peer:
Fag on at flesh, you’ll never make the third!”
Flower o’ the pine,
You keep your mistr- manners, and I’ll stick to mine!
I’m not the third, then: bless us, they must know!
Don’t you think they’re the likeliest to know,
They with their Latin? So, I swallow my rage,
Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
To please them — sometimes do and sometimes don’t;
For, doing most, there’s pretty sure to come
A turn, some warm eve finds me at my saints —
A laugh, a cry, the business of the world —
(Flower o’ the peach,
Death for us all, and his own life for each!)
And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over,
The world and life’s too big to pass for a dream,
And I do these wild things in sheer despite,
And play the fooleries you catch me at,
In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass
After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so,
Although the miller does not preach to him
The only good of grass is to make chaff.
What would men have? Do they like grass or no —
May they or mayn’t they? all I want’s the thing
Settled for ever one way. As it is,
You tell too many lies and hurt yourself:
You don’t like what you only like too much,
You do like what, if given at your word,
You find abundantly detestable.
For me, I think I speak as I was taught;
I always see the garden and God there
A-making man’s wife: and, my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh,
I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.
You understand me: I’m a beast, I know.
But see, now — why, I see as certainly
As that the morning-star’s about to shine,
What will hap some day. We’ve a youngster here
Come to our convent, studies what I do,
Slouches and stares and lets no atom drop:
His name is Guidi — he’ll not mind the monks —
They call him Hulking Tom, he lets them talk —
He picks my practice up — he’ll paint apace,
I hope so — though I never live so long,
I know what’s sure to follow. You be judge!
You speak no Latin more than I, belike;
However, you’re my man, you’ve seen the world
— The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises, — and God made it all!
— For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What’s it all about?
To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? oh, this last of course! — you say.
But why not do as well as say, — paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God’s works — paint anyone, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works
Are here already; nature is complete:
Suppose you reproduce her” — (which you can’t)
“There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then.”
For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted — better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now,
Your cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk,
And trust me but you should, though! How much more,
If I drew higher things with the same truth!
That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,
Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh,
It makes me mad to see what men shall do
And we in our graves! This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
“Ay, but you don’t so instigate to prayer!”
Strikes in the Prior: “when your meaning’s plain
It does not say to folk — remember matins,
Or, mind you fast next Friday!” Why, for this
What need of art at all? A skull and bones,
Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what’s best,
A bell to chime the hour with, does as well.
I painted a Saint Laurence six months since
At Prato, splashed the fresco in fine style:
“How looks my painting, now the scaffold’s down?”
I ask a brother: “Hugely,” he returns —
“Already not one phiz of your three slaves
Who turn the Deacon off his toasted side,
But’s scratched and prodded to our heart’s content,
The pious people have so eased their own
With coming to say prayers there in a rage:
We get on fast to see the bricks beneath.
Expect another job this time next year,
For pity and religion grow i’ the crowd —
Your painting serves its purpose!” Hang the fools!
— That is — you’ll not mistake an idle word
Spoke in a huff by a poor monk, God wot,
Tasting the air this spicy night which turns
The unaccustomed head like Chianti wine!
Oh, the church knows! don’t misreport me, now!
It’s natural a poor monk out of bounds
Should have his apt word to excuse himself:
And hearken how I plot to make amends.
I have bethought me: I shall paint a piece
... There’s for you! Give me six months, then go, see
Something in Sant’ Ambrogio’s! Bless the nuns!
They want a cast o’ my office. I shall paint
God in their midst, Madonna and her babe,
Ringed by a bowery flowery angel-brood,
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root
When ladies crowd to Church at midsummer.
And then i’ the front, of course a saint or two —
Saint John, because he saves the Florentines,
Saint Ambrose, who puts down in black and white
The convent’s friends and gives them a long day,
And Job, I must have him there past mistake,
The man of Uz (and Us without the z,
Painters who need his patience). Well, all these
Secured at their devotion, up shall come
Out of a corner when you least expect,
As one by a dark stair into a great light,
Music and talking, who but Lippo! I! —
Mazed, motionless and moonstruck — I’m the man!
Back I shrink — what is this I see and hear?
I, caught up with my monk’s-things by mistake,
My old serge gown and rope that goes all round,
I, in this presence, this pure company!
Where’s a hole, where’s a corner for escape?
Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing
Forward, puts out a soft palm — “Not so fast!”
— Addresses the celestial presence, “nay —
He made you and devised you, after all,
Though he’s none of you! Could Saint John there draw —
His camel-hair make up a painting-brush?
We come to brother Lippo for all that,
Iste perfecit opus!” So, all smile —
I shuffle sideways with my blushing face
Under the cover of a hundred wings
Thrown like a spread of kirtles when you’re gay
And play hot cockles, all the doors being shut,
Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops
The hothead husband! Thus I scuttle off
To some safe bench behind, not letting go
The palm of her, the little lily thing
That spoke the good word for me in the nick,
Like the Prior’s niece ... Saint Lucy, I would say.
And so all’s saved for me, and for the church
A pretty picture gained. Go, six months hence!
Your hand, sir, and good-bye: no lights, no lights!
The street’s hushed, and I know my own way back,
Don’t fear me! There’s the grey beginning. Zooks!

[h=4]Summary[/h] “Fra Lippo Lippi,” another of Browning’s dramatic monologues, appeared in the 1855 collection Men and Women. Fra (Brother) Lippo Lippi was an actual Florentine monk who lived in the fifteenth century. He was a painter of some renown, and Browning most probably gained familiarity with his works during the time he spent in Italy. “Fra Lippo Lippi” introduces us to the monk as he is being interrogated by some Medici watchmen, who have caught him out at night. Because Lippo’s patron is Cosimo de Medici, he has little to fear from the guards, but he has been out partying and is clearly in a mood to talk. He shares with the men the hardships of monastic life: he is forced to carry on his relationships with women in secret, and his superiors are always defeating his good spirits. But Lippo’s most important statements concern the basis of art: should art be realistic and true-to-life, or should it be idealistic and didactic? Should Lippo’s paintings of saints look like the Prior’s mistress and the men of the neighborhood, or should they evoke an otherworldly surreality? Which kind of art best serves religious purposes? Should art even serve religion at all? Lippo’s rambling speech touches on all of these issues.

[h=4]Form[/h] “Fra Lippo Lippi” takes the form of blank verse—unrhymed lines, most of which fall roughly into iambic pentameter. As in much of his other poetry, Browning seeks to capture colloquial speech, and in many parts of the poem he succeeds admirably: Lippo includes outbursts, bits of songs, and other odds and ends in his rant. In his way Browning brilliantly captures the feel of a late-night, drunken encounter.

[h=4]Commentary[/h] The poem centers thematically around the discussion of art that takes place around line 180. Lippo has painted a group of figures that are the spitting image of people in the community: the Prior’s mistress, neighborhood men, etc. Everyone is amazed at his talent, and his great show of talent gains him his place at the monastery. However, his talent for depicting reality comes into conflict with the stated religious goals of the Church. The Church leadership believes that their parishioners will be distracted by the sight of people they know within the painting: as the Prior and his cohorts say, “ ‘Your business is not to catch men with show, / With homage to the perishable clay.../ Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh. / Your business is to paint the souls of men.’ ” In part the Church authorities’ objections stem not from any real religious concern, but from a concern for their own reputation: Lippo has gotten a little too close to the truth with his depictions of actual persons as historical figures—the Prior’s “niece” (actually his mistress) has been portrayed as the seductive Salome. However, the conflict between Lippo and the Church elders also cuts to the very heart of questions about art: is the primary purpose of Lippo’s art—and any art—to instruct, or to delight? If it is to instruct, is it better to give men ordinary scenes to which they can relate, or to offer them celestial visions to which they can aspire? In his own art, Browning himself doesn’t seem to privilege either conclusion; his work demonstrates only a loose didacticism, and it relies more on carefully chosen realistic examples rather than either concrete portraits or abstractions. Both Fra Lippo’s earthly tableaux and the Prior’s preferred fantasias of “ ‘vapor done up like a new-born babe’ ” miss the mark. Lippo has no aspirations beyond simple mimesis, while the Prior has no respect for the importance of the quotidian. Thus the debate is essentially empty, since it does not take into account the power of art to move man in a way that is not intellectual but is rather aesthetic and emotional.

Lippo’s statements about art are joined by his complaints about the monastic lifestyle. Lippo has not adopted this lifestyle by choice; rather, his parents’ early death left him an orphan with no choice but to join the monastery. Lippo is trapped between the ascetic ways of the monastery and the corrupt, fleshly life of his patrons the Medicis. Neither provides a wholly fulfilling existence. Like the kind of art he espouses, the Prior’s lifestyle does not take basic human needs into account. (Indeed, as we know, even the Prior finds his own precepts impossible to follow.) The anything-goes morality of the Medicis rings equally hollow, as it involves only a series of meaningless, hedonistic revels and shallow encounters. This Renaissance debate echoes the schism in Victorian society, where moralists and libertines opposed each other in fierce disagreement. Browning seems to assert that neither side holds the key to a good life. Yet he concludes, as he does in other poems, that both positions, while flawed, can lead to high art: art has no absolute connection to morality.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

A Toccata of Galuppi’s

A Toccata of Galuppi’s

[h=4]Complete Text[/h]

I.
Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I give you credit, ’tis with such a heavy mind!

II.
Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice, where the merchants were the kings
Where St. Marks is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?

III.
Ay, because the sea’s the street there; and ’tis arched by ...what you call
...Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival!
I was never out of England-it’s as if I saw it all!

IV.
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

V.
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red, —
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head?

VI.
Well (and it was graceful of them) they’d break talk off and afford
— She, to bite her mask’s black velvet, he to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?

VII.
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions — “Must we die?”
Those commiserating sevenths-“Life might last! we can but try!”

VIII.
“Were you happy?”—“Yes.”—“And are you still as happy?”—“Yes—And you?”
—“Then more kisses”—“Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?”
Hark—the dominant’s persistence, till it must be answered to!

IX.
So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking, when I hear a master play.”

X.
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death came tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.

XI.
But when I sit down to reason,—think to take my stand nor swerve
Till I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve,
In you come with your cold music, till I creep thro’ every nerve,

XII.
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned
Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned!
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.

XIII.
“Yours for instance, you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,—you’ll not die, it cannot be!

XIV.
As for Venice and its people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop,
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

XV.
“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

[h=4]Summary[/h] Published in the 1855 volume Men and Women, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” gives the reflections of a man who is either playing or listening to a piece by the 18th-century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi. A toccata is a short, showy piece meant to allow a musician to show off his skill. The music inspires in the speaker visions of Venice: he sees these images in rich detail, even though he has not left England. He envisions a masked ball at which Galuppi performs, and he invents a conversation between two lovers at the ball, who speak of love and happiness in trivial terms. The sense of corruption and decay hangs heavy over the scene, though, and the speaker imagines Galuppi berating Venice for its soullessness and wild ways. The combined melancholy and gaiety produce a powerful effect on the speaker.

[h=4]Form[/h] This poem is famous for its form. It is one of the few poems in English to be written in octameter: sixteen-syllable, or eight-stress, lines. Moreover, the stresses display a trochaic pattern (stressed followed by unstressed syllables), which can be difficult to sustain in English. Just as a toccata is a kind of virtuoso performance, so this poem represents a kind of metrical bravado: Browning shows off his technical skills. He performs yet another flourish by writing in rhyming triplets, another difficult poetic task in English, which has a vocabulary short on rhymes compared to that of many European languages. The poem’s language therefore attains a kind of flamboyant, musical effect, which, although it can obscure the poem’s content at times, constitutes an accomplishment in itself.

[h=4]Commentary[/h] This poem’s air of ruined decadence can be seen as a logical continuation of earlier poems such as “My Last Duchess,” which celebrate high Renaissance glory. The poem introduces science as an alternative to art: some critics theorize that the speaker of this poem is actually supposed to be a scientist himself (see stanza 13). However, whether we cling to science or art, ultimately neither has proven able to keep humanity from decay. (On the other hand, the power that Galuppi’s toccata possesses over the speaker seems to suggest that art and music may offer some residual immortality.)

Galuppi’s music most interests the speaker is its persistent motifs of discord followed by resolution: the struggle within the music seems to echo the struggles of life. Indeed, the triplet form of the poem itself mirrors this: the third rhyming line dangles and is only resolved when the next stanza introduces a new rhyme. Discord can find only temporary resolution, though—for each following stanza, like each following generation, contains its own, new conflicts.
Melancholy figures prominently in Victorian literature, and the speaker’s attitude at the end of “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” evokes a decidedly melancholy mood. This poem suggests that the kind of art that evokes melancholy may best reflect the reality of life.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

[h=4]Complete Text[/h]

I.
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the workings of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

II.
What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch ’gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare.

III.
If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed, neither pride
Now hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.

IV.
For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out through years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

V.
As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,
And hears one bit the other go, draw breath
Freelier outside, (‘since all is o’er,’ he saith
And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;’)

VI.
When some discuss if near the other graves
be room enough for this, and when a day
Suits best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves and staves
And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and stay.

VII.
Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among ’The Band’ to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower’s search addressed
Their steps - that just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now - should I be fit?

VIII.
So, quiet as despair I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.

IX.
For mark! No sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backwards a last view
O’er the safe road, ’twas gone; grey plain all round;
Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound.
I might go on, naught else remained to do.

X.
So on I went. I think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers - as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind with none to awe,
You’d think; a burr had been a treasure trove.

XI.
No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. ‘See
Or shut your eyes,’ said Nature peevishly,
It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
’Tis the Last Judgement’s fire must cure this place
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.’

XII.
If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped, the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? Tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute’s intents.

XIII.
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupified, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!

XIV.
Alive? he might be dead for aught I knew,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain.
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

XV.
I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart,
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards, the soldier’s art:
One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

XVI.
Not it! I fancied Cuthbert’s reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm to mine to fix me to the place,
The way he used. Alas, one night’s disgrace!
Out went my heart’s new fire and left it cold.

XVII.
Giles then, the soul of honour - there he stands
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first,
What honest man should dare (he said) he durst.
Good - but the scene shifts - faugh! what hangman hands
Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!

XVIII.
Better this present than a past like that:
Back therefore to my darkening path again!
No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
Will the night send a howlet or a bat?
I asked: when something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.

XIX.
A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend’s glowing hoof - to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

XX.
So petty yet so spiteful! All along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate’er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.

XXI.
Which, while I forded - good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man’s cheek,
Each step, of feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
- It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.

XXII.
Glad was I when I reached the other bank.
Now for a better country. Vain presage!
Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage,
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage -

XXIII.
The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque,
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No footprint leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

XXIV.
And more than that - a furlong on - why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel
Men’s bodies out like silk? With all the air
Of Tophet’s tool, on earth left unaware
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

XXV.
Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood -
Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth.

XXVI.
Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s
Broke into moss, or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

XXVII.
And just as far as ever from the end!
Naught in the distance but the evening, naught
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon’s bosom friend,
Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap - perchance the guide I sought.

XXVIII.
For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains - with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me - solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.

XXIX.
Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when -
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts - you’re inside the den.

XXX.
Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!

XXXI.
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest’s mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

XXXII.
Not see? because of night perhaps? - why day
Came back again for that! before it left
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, -
’Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!’

XXXIII.
Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers, my peers -
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

XXXIV.
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. ’Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’

[h=4]Summary[/h] Published in the volume Men and Women, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” takes its title and its inspiration from the song sung by Edgar in Shakespeare’s King Lear, when he pretends to be a madman. “Childe” is an archaic aristocratic title indicating a young man who has not yet been knighted. This particular young man is on a quest for the “Dark Tower”: what the tower’s significance is we do not know (perhaps it holds the Holy Grail). He wanders through a dark, marshy waste-land, filled with horrors and terrible noises. He thinks of home and old friends as he presses forward. Fighting discouragement and fear, he reaches the tower, where he sounds his horn, knowing as he does that his quest and his life have come to an end.

[h=4]Form[/h] “Childe Roland” divides into six-line stanzas, mostly in irregularly stressed pentameter lines. The stanzas rhyme ABBAAB. Much of the language in this poem makes a rough, even unpoetic impression: it reflects the ugly scenery and hellish journey it discusses. Lines such as “In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves...” wind so contortedly that they nearly confound all attempts at reading them aloud. Both the rhyme scheme and the poem’s vocabulary suggest a deliberate archaicness, similar to some of Tennyson’s poems. However, unlike Tennyson’s poems, this poem recreates a medieval world that does not evoke pleasant fairy tales, but rather dark horrors.

[h=4]Commentary[/h] Browning’s vision of the wasteland prefigures T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and other works of high modernism. The barren plains symbolize the sterile, corrupted conditions of modern life. Although they are depopulated and remote, they serve as a stand-in for the city. Childe Roland hallucinates about dead comrades and imagines horrors that aren’t actually there: like the modern city, this place strains his psyche and provokes abnormal responses. Indeed, he has only arrived here by way of a malevolent guide: Roland’s first instinct is to think that the man is lying to him, but his lack of spiritual guidance and his general confusion lead him to accept the man’s directions.

Childe Roland’s quest has no pertinence to the modern world, a fact evidenced by the fact that the young man has no one with whom to celebrate his success—in fact, no one will even know of it. In this way his journey speaks to the anonymity and isolation of the modern individual. The meaninglessness of Roland’s quest is reinforced by its origins: Childe Roland is not the creation of a genuine madman, but of a man (Edgar in Lear) who pretends to be mad to escape his half-brother’s murderous intentions. The inspiration for Browning’s poem thus springs from no sincere emotion, not even from genuine madness: it is a convenience and a folly, a sane man’s approximation of what madness might look like. The inspiration is an empty performance, just as the quest described here is an empty adventure.
Much of the poem’s imagery references the storm scene in Lear from whence its inspiration comes. Shakespeare is, of course, the patriarch of all English literature, particularly poetry; but here Browning tries to work out his own relationship to the English literary tradition. He also tries to analyze the continued importance of canonical works in a much-changed modern world. (Via his reference to Shakespeare and to medieval themes, Browning places especial emphasis on these two eras of literature.) He suggests that while the Shakespearean and medieval modes still have aesthetic value, their cultural maintains a less certain relevance. That no one hears Roland’s horn or appreciates his deeds suggests cultural discontinuity: Roland has more in common with the heroes of the past than with his peers; he has nothing in common with Browning’s contemporaries except an overwhelming sense of futility. Indeed, the poem laments a meaninglessness so all-pervasive that even the idea of the wasteland cannot truly describe modern life or make a statement about that life; it is this sense of meaninglessness that dominates the poem.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Memorabilia

Memorabilia

Complete Text

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!

But you were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at—
My starting moves your laughter!

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone
’Mid the blank miles round about:

For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—
Well, I forget the rest.

Summary

According to historical anecdote, this poem stems from an encounter Browning had with a person who had once met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley died quite young, when Browning himself was only ten). Browning reacted with awe when the man described his meeting with the famed poet, and the man is said to have laughed at him for this reaction. This short lyric relates Browning’s feelings about this encounter to his feelings at walking across a moor and finding an eagle’s feather.

Form

“Memorabilia” consists of four four-line stanzas, written in iambic tetrameter. The stanzas rhyme ABAB. The form appears frequently in William Wordsworth’s lyrics, and this poem does have an almost Wordsworthian outlook: it is contemplative and spiritual, and parallels the natural world to the human one.

Commentary

The title of this poem suggests a kind of memory that is linked with physical objects. Browning’s encounter with the man who has met Shelley takes its importance from the fact that this man was once physically with Shelley and is now physically with Browning. This second-degree encounter with the great poet, now dead, corresponds metaphorically to the second-degree encounter with the eagle, now flown away having left only a feather; but the encounters also correspond physically, in that the physical object of the feather triggers the thought of the human encounter. This suggests a much more mundane and direct concept of natural reality and memory than that postulated by the Romantics (to whom Shelley belonged). Neither the encounter with the feather (nature) nor the memory of Shelley result in rapture or epiphany in Browning’s poem (as they do in Romantic lyrics); rather, they imply a sense of loss and distance, of separation.

Indeed, not only does memory fail to lead to rapture, it has very little evocative power at all: Browning does not remember the rest of his walk on the moor beyond the finding of the feather. Moreover, Browning places little faith here in the life of the mind, the ability of analysis: he finds himself unable to elaborate more on the relationship between the feather and the man who met Shelley. Yet somehow this world of mundane physical objects and faint mental suggestions can provide as much material for poetry as the wild spiritual inspirations of Shelley’s “West Wind” or Wordsworth’s daffodils.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Andrea del Sarto

Andrea del Sarto

[h=4]Complete Text[/h]

But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
I’ll work then for your friend’s friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?
Oh, I’ll content him,—but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think,
This evening more than usual, and it seems
As if—forgive now—should you let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,
Both of one mind, as married people use,
Quietly, quietly the evening through,
I might get up to-morrow to my work
Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try.
To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this!
Your soft hand is a woman of itself,
And mine the man’s bared breast she curls inside.
Don’t count the time lost, neither; you must serve
For each of the five pictures we require:
It saves a model. So! keep looking so—
My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!
—How could you ever prick those perfect ears,
Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet—
My face, my moon, my everybody’s moon,
Which everybody looks on and calls his,
And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn,
While she looks—no one’s: very dear, no less.
You smile? why, there’s my picture ready made,
There’s what we painters call our harmony!
A common greyness silvers everything,—
All in a twilight, you and I alike
—You, at the point of your first pride in me
(That’s gone you know),—but I, at every point;
My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.
There’s the bell clinking from the chapel-top;
That length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God’s hand.
How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead;
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie!
This chamber for example—turn your head—
All that’s behind us! You don’t understand
Nor care to understand about my art,
But you can hear at least when people speak:
And that cartoon, the second from the door
—It is the thing, Love! so such things should be—
Behold Madonna!—I am bold to say.
I can do with my pencil what I know,
What I see, what at bottom of my heart
I wish for, if I ever wish so deep—
Do easily, too—when I say, perfectly,
I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge,
Who listened to the Legate’s talk last week,
And just as much they used to say in France.
At any rate ’tis easy, all of it!
No sketches first, no studies, that’s long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
—Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive—you don’t know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,—
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)—so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate’er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand of mine.
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that’s shut to me,
Enter and take their place there sure enough,
Though they come back and cannot tell the world.
My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here.
The sudden blood of these men! at a word—
Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too.
I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks
Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
“Our head would have o’erlooked the world!” No doubt.
Yonder’s a work now, of that famous youth
The Urbinate who died five years ago.
(’Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.)
Well, I can fancy how he did it all,
Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,
Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art—for it gives way;
That arm is wrongly put—and there again—
A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,
Its body, so to speak: its soul is right,
He means right—that, a child may understand.
Still, what an arm! and I could alter it:
But all the play, the insight and the stretch—
(Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?
Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,
We might have risen to Rafael, I and you!
Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think—
More than I merit, yes, by many times.
But had you—oh, with the same perfect brow,
And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth,
And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird
The fowler’s pipe, and follows to the snare —
Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind!
Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged
“God and the glory! never care for gain.
“The present by the future, what is that?
“Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo!
“Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!”
I might have done it for you. So it seems:
Perhaps not. All is as God over-rules.
Beside, incentives come from the soul’s self;
The rest avail not. Why do I need you?
What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo?
In this world, who can do a thing, will not;
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:
Yet the will’s somewhat—somewhat, too, the power—
And thus we half-men struggle. At the end,
God, I conclude, compensates, punishes.
’Tis safer for me, if the award be strict,
That I am something underrated here,
Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth.
I dared not, do you know, leave home all day,
For fear of chancing on the Paris lords.
The best is when they pass and look aside;
But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all.
Well may they speak! That Francis, that first time,
And that long festal year at Fontainebleau!
I surely then could sometimes leave the ground,
Put on the glory, Rafael’s daily wear,
In that humane great monarch’s golden look,—
One finger in his beard or twisted curl
Over his mouth’s good mark that made the smile,
One arm about my shoulder, round my neck,
The jingle of his gold chain in my ear,
I painting proudly with his breath on me,
All his court round him, seeing with his eyes,
Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls
Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts,—
And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond,
This in the background, waiting on my work,
To crown the issue with a last reward!
A good time, was it not, my kingly days?
And had you not grown restless... but I know—
’Tis done and past: ’twas right, my instinct said:
Too live the life grew, golden and not grey,
And I’m the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt
Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.
How could it end in any other way?
You called me, and I came home to your heart.
The triumph was—to reach and stay there; since
I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost?
Let my hands frame your face in your hair’s gold,
You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine!
“Rafael did this, Andrea painted that;
“The Roman’s is the better when you pray,
“But still the other’s Virgin was his wife—”
Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge
Both pictures in your presence; clearer grows
My better fortune, I resolve to think.
For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives,
Said one day Agnolo, his very self,
To Rafael . . . I have known it all these years . . .
(When the young man was flaming out his thoughts
Upon a palace-wall for Rome to see,
Too lifted up in heart because of it)
“Friend, there’s a certain sorry little scrub
“Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how,
“Who, were he set to plan and execute
“As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings,
“Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!”
To Rafael’s!—And indeed the arm is wrong.
I hardly dare . . . yet, only you to see,
Give the chalk here—quick, thus, the line should go!
Ay, but the soul! he’s Rafael! rub it out!
Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth,
(What he? why, who but Michel Agnolo?
Do you forget already words like those?)
If really there was such a chance, so lost,—
Is, whether you’re—not grateful—but more pleased.
Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed!
This hour has been an hour! Another smile?
If you would sit thus by me every night
I should work better, do you comprehend?
I mean that I should earn more, give you more.
See, it is settled dusk now; there’s a star;
Morello’s gone, the watch-lights show the wall,
The cue-owls speak the name we call them by.
Come from the window, love,—come in, at last,
Inside the melancholy little house
We built to be so gay with. God is just.
King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights
When I look up from painting, eyes tired out,
The walls become illumined, brick from brick
Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold,
That gold of his I did cement them with!
Let us but love each other. Must you go?
That Cousin here again? he waits outside?
Must see you—you, and not with me? Those loans?
More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that?
Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend?
While hand and eye and something of a heart
Are left me, work’s my ware, and what’s it worth?
I’ll pay my fancy. Only let me sit
The grey remainder of the evening out,
Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly
How I could paint, were I but back in France,
One picture, just one more—the Virgin’s face,
Not yours this time! I want you at my side
To hear them—that is, Michel Agnolo—
Judge all I do and tell you of its worth.
Will you? To-morrow, satisfy your friend.
I take the subjects for his corridor,
Finish the portrait out of hand—there, there,
And throw him in another thing or two
If he demurs; the whole should prove enough
To pay for this same Cousin’s freak. Beside,
What’s better and what’s all I care about,
Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff!
Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he,
The Cousin! what does he to please you more?
I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less.
Since there my past life lies, why alter it?
The very wrong to Francis!—it is true
I took his coin, was tempted and complied,
And built this house and sinned, and all is said.
My father and my mother died of want.
Well, had I riches of my own? you see
How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot.
They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died:
And I have laboured somewhat in my time
And not been paid profusely. Some good son
Paint my two hundred pictures—let him try!
No doubt, there’s something strikes a balance. Yes,
You loved me quite enough. it seems to-night.
This must suffice me here. What would one have?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance—
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me
To cover—the three first without a wife,
While I have mine! So—still they overcome
Because there’s still Lucrezia,—as I choose.

Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my Love.

[h=4]Summary[/h] This poem represents yet another of Browning’s dramatic monologues spoken in the voice of an historical Renaissance painter. Andrea del Sarto, like Fra Lippo Lippi, lived and worked in Florence, albeit a little later than Lippo, and was later appointed court painter by Francis, the King of France. Under the nagging influence of his wife Lucrezia, to whom he speaks in this poem, he left the French court for Italy but promised to return; he took with him some money that Francis had given him to purchase Italian artworks for the court, and also the money advanced to him for his own commissioned paintings. However, he spent all of the money on a house for himself and his wife in Italy and never returned to France. This poem finds Andrea in the house he has bought with the stolen money, as he thinks back on his career and laments that his worldly concerns have kept him from fulfilling his promise as an artist. As he and Lucrezia sit at their window, he talks to her of his relative successes and failures: although Michelangelo (here, Michel Agnolo) and Raphael (Rafael) enjoyed higher inspiration and better patronage—and lacked nagging wives—he is the better craftsman, and he points out to her the problems with the Great Masters’ work. But while Andrea succeeds technically where they do not (thus his title “The Faultless Painter”), their work ultimately triumphs for its emotional and spiritual power. Andrea now finds himself in the twilight of his career and his marriage: Lucrezia’s “Cousin”—probably her lover—keeps whistling for her to come; she apparently either owes the man gambling debts or has promised to cover his own. The fond, weary Andrea gives her some money, promises to sell paintings to pay off her debts, and sends her away to her “Cousin,” while he remains to sit quietly and dream of painting in Heaven.

[h=4]Form[/h] “Andrea del Sarto” unrolls in pentameter blank verse, mostly iambic. It is a quiet poem, the musings of a defeated man. Both in language and in form it is modest and calm. Yet it also manages to mimic natural speech quite effectively, with little interjections and asides.

[h=4]Commentary[/h] This poem has a most compelling premise—an artist’s comparison of his own work to that of the Great Masters. Andrea blames his disappointing career on his inability to match his unparalleled technical skills with appropriate subject matter: all the Virgins he paints look like his wife, and he has never had the time at court to allow his work to blossom. While Raphael and Michelangelo often err in their representations (while he speaks Andrea mentally “fixes” a figure’s arm in a scene by Raphael), the intentions and the spirit behind their work shine through so strongly that their work nonetheless surpasses his. This seems to contradict what Browning asserts in other poems about the unconnectedness of art on the one hand and morality or intention on the other. But perhaps we can explain this seeming contradiction by interpreting the Great Masters’ motivation as not so much any specific spiritual or moral purpose, but rather an all-consuming passion for their art. As Andrea notes, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo did not have wives: they lived for their work. For Andrea, painting is reduced to a means to make money; he has the avaricious Lucrezia to support. Between trying to pay her debts, buying her the things she wants, and keeping her attention, Andrea cannot afford to focus solely on his art. Is the creation of art incompatible with a “normal” life, a life of mundane duties and obligations?

It may be worth considering why Browning chooses to write about painters rather than poets in his discussions on art and the artist-figure. During the Renaissance era where Browning sets his verses, poetry would have had a somewhat limited audience: it would have been enjoyed by those who had both the extra money and time to spend on books, not to mention the necessary literacy (although much poetry would have been read aloud). Painting, on the other hand, was—and still is—a more public art form. Whether a painting hangs in a museum or on the wall of a church, it remains constantly accessible and on display to anyone who passes, regardless of his or her education. Moreover, particularly since most Renaissance art portrayed religious themes, painting had a specific didactic purpose and thus an explicit connection to moral and spiritual issues. This connection between art and morals is precisely what most interests Browning in much of his work—indeed, it much preoccupied Victorian society in general. Browning and his contemporaries asked, What can be forgiven morally in the name of aesthetic greatness? Does art have a moral responsibility? Because Renaissance painting was public and fairly representational, it highlights many of these issues; poetry is always indirect and symbolic, and usually private, and thus makes a harder test case than painting. Indeed, Andrea’s paintings in particular, which often depict religious scenes, get right at the heart of the art-morality question, especially given his works’ imbalance between technical skill and lofty intentions.
Andrea presents us with a different kind of character than we are used to seeing in Browning’s work. Unlike the Duke of “My Last Duchess,” Fra Lippo Lippi, or Porphyria’s Lover, Andrea expresses a resigned, melancholy outlook; his wife keeps him completely under her thumb. He lacks the hubris of these other characters, and thus to some extent seems to represent Browning’s insecurities. The reader should keep in mind that Browning did not enjoy public success until the late in his career, and at the time that Men and Women was published critics considered Browning’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the far greater poet. While by every indication their relationship thrived on mutual respect and support, it is nevertheless possible that Browning may have felt, as Andrea does, that domestic life and his wife’s presence weakened his art.

Like “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” this poem “takes place” (is spoken) after the fact: Andrea has long since left Francis’s court, and the money he stole has long since disappeared into the house and Lucrezia’s wardrobe. While this monologue comes across as dramatic in nature, it does not dramatize anyone’s actions. Rather, it seeks to capture a mood and an attitude. In this way it has more in common with Tennyson’s dramatic monologues (such as “Ulysses”) than it does with other poems of Browning’s.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Two in the Campagna

Two in the Campagna

[h=4]Complete Text[/h]

I wonder how you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalized me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellow fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,

Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles, -blind and green they grope
Among the honey meal: and last,
Everywhere on the grassy slope
O traced it. Hold it fast!

The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air-
Rome’s ghost since her decease.

Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal ***** forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers!

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O’ the wound, since wound must be?

I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs, - your part my part
In life, for good and ill.

No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth, - I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak-
Then the good minute goes.

Already how am I so far
Our of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The Old trick! Only I discern-
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

[h=4]Summary[/h] This represents one of Browning’s more abstract poems. Returning to some of the themes developed in “Porphyria’s Lover,” albeit in a very different context, “Two in the Campagna” explores the fleeting nature of love and ideas. The speaker regrets that, just as he cannot ever perfectly capture an idea, he cannot achieve total communion with his lover, despite the helpful erotic suggestions of nature. Though our hearts be finite, we yearn infinitely; the resulting pain serves as a reminder of human limitations.

[h=4]Form[/h] “Two in the Campagna” divides into five-line stanzas, the first four lines in tetrameter and the final line in trimeter. The stanzas rhyme ABABA, although, because the lines are enjambed (sentence breaks do not necessarily coincide with line breaks), the rhyme undergoes a certain weakening. Sections of the poem come in fairly regular iambs, but this often breaks down: just as the poet can’t quite capture either his ideas or his lover, he can’t quite conquer language either.

[h=4]Commentary[/h] The “Campagna” refers to the countryside around Rome. Until the middle of the twentieth century it grew fairly wild and unclaimed. Because its swampy areas nurtured mosquitoes carrying malaria, the conventional English tourist largely avoided the Campagna, leaving it to the Italian peasants, who farmed sections of it. However, in nineteenth-century literature the Campagna also symbolized a sort of alternative space, where rules of society did not apply and anything could happen; we see this notion expressed in such works as Henry James’s Italian-set novels and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. In this poem, the Campagna seems to suggest to the speaker that he can in fact transcend his human limitations to put his subtle ideas into poetry or see the world through his lover’s eyes. However, in suggesting this the wild space merely plays a cruel trick; teased and disappointed, the speaker is left more melancholy than ever.

The comparison between love and art comments on the difficulty of interpersonal communication. Just as the speaker can never really see through his lover’s eyes, so too can he never communicate the subtle shadings of his thoughts through his poetry. Experience lies beyond the grasp of language. Yet—as the existence of this poem itself attests—we can approximate experience, however inaccurately, and these approximations are not without their significance and value. Indeed, it is perhaps our awareness that poetry, like love, is necessarily imperfect that lends it its beauty. Irony, too—one of the most sophisticated forms of communication—results from our human failings, as the poem’s conclusion shows; “The old trick” both thwarts and enables poetry.

*زهره* · Aug 22, 2012

Caliban Upon Setibos

Caliban Upon Setibos

[h=4]Complete Text[/h]

“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself.”

’Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:
And while above his head a pompion-plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,—
He looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times)
And talks to his own self, howe’er he please,
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.
Because to talk about Him, vexes—ha,
Could He but know! and time to vex is now,
When talk is safer than in winter-time.
Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep
In confidence he drudges at their task,
And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.

’Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

’Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only, she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breath,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

’Thinketh, He made there at the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole—He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
He could not, Himself, make a second self
To be His mate; as well have made Himself:
He would not make what He mislikes or slights,
An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:
But did, in envy, listlessness or sport,
Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be—
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
Things He admires and mocks too,—that is it.
Because, so brave, so better though they be,
It nothing skills if He begin to plague.
Look now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash,
Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived,
Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,—
Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all,
Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain;
Last, throw me on my back i’ the seeded thyme,
And wanton, wishing I were born a bird.
Put case, unable to be what I wish,
I yet could make a live bird out of clay:
Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban
Able to fly?—for, there, see, he hath wings,
And great comb like the hoopoe’s to admire,
And there, a sting to do his foes offence,
There, and I will that he begin to live,
Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns
Of grigs high up that make the merry din,
Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.
In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,
And he lay stupid-like,—why, I should laugh;
And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,
Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,
Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,—
Well, as the chance were, this might take or else
Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,
And give the mankin three sound legs for one,
Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg,
And lessoned he was mine and merely clay.
Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme,
Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,
Making and marring clay at will? So He.

’Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
’Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
’Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
’Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
’Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: so He.

Well then, ’supposeth He is good i’ the main,
Placable if His mind and ways were guessed,
But rougher than His handiwork, be sure!
Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself,
And envieth that, so helped, such things do more
Than He who made them! What consoles but this?
That they, unless through Him, do naught at all,
And must submit: what other use in things?
’Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint
That, blown through, gives exact the scream o’ the jay
When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue:
Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay
Flock within stone’s throw, glad their foe is hurt:
Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth
“I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing,
I make the cry my maker cannot make
With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!”
Would not I smash it with my foot? So He.

But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease?
Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that,
What knows,—the something over Setebos
That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought;
Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance.
There may be something quiet o’er His head,
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind:
This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
’Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,
But never spends much thought nor care that way.
It may look up, work up,—the worse for those
It works on! ’Careth but for Setebos
The many-handed as a cuttle-fish,
Who, making Himself feared through what He does,
Looks up, first, and perceived he cannot soar
To what is quiet and hath happy life;
Next looks down here, and out of very spite
Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real,
These good things to match those as hips do grapes.
’Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport.
Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, ’stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words;
Has peeled a wand and called it by a name;
Weareth at whiles for an enchanter’s robe
The eyed skin of a supple oncelot;
And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole,
A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch,
Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye,
And saith she is Miranda and my wife:
’Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane
He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge;
Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared,
Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole o’ the rock and calls him Caliban;
A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.
’Plays thus at being Prosper in a way,
Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He.

His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: ’holds not so.
Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex.
Had He meant other, while His hand was in,
Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,
Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,
Or overscale my flesh ’neath joint and joint,
Like an orc’s armor? Ay,—so spoil His sport!
He is the One now: only He doth all.
’Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him.
Ay, himself loves what does him good; but why?
’Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast
Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose,
But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate
Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes.
Also it pleaseth Setebos to work,
Use all His hands, and exercise much craft,
By no means for the love of what is worked.
’Tasteth, himself, no finer good i’ the world
When all goes right, in this safe summer-time,
And he wants little, hungers, aches not much,
Than trying what to do with wit and strength.
’Falls to make something: ’piled yon pile of turfs,
And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk,
And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each,
And set up endwise certain spikes of tree,
And crowned the whole with a sloth’s skull a-top,
Found dead i’ the woods, too hard for one to kill.
No use at all i’ the work, for work’s sole sake;
’Shall some day knock it down again: so He.

’Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!
One hurricane will spoil six good months’ hope.
He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as He favors Prosper, who knows why?
So it is, all the same, as well I find.
’Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm
With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises
Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave,
Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck,
Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue,
And licked the whole labor flat; so much for spite.
’Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies)
Where, half an hour before, I slept i’ the shade:
Often they scatter sparkles: there is force!
’Dug up a newt He may have envied once
And turned to stone, shut up inside a stone.
Please Him and hinder this?—What Prosper does?
Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He!
There is the sport: discover how or die!
All need not die, for of the things o’ the isle
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees;
Those at His mercy,—why, they please Him most
When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice!
Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth.
You must not know His ways, and play Him off,
Sure of the issue. ’Doth the like himself:
’Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears
But steals the nut from underneath my thumb,
And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence:
’Spareth an urchin that contrariwise,
Curls up into a ball, pretending death
For fright at my approach: the two ways please.
That either creature counted on its life
To-morrow and the next day and all days to come,
Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart,
“Because he did so yesterday with me,
And otherwise with such another brute,
So must he do henceforth and always.”—Ay?
Would teach the reasoning couple what “must” means!
’Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.

’Conceiveth all things will continue thus,
And we shall have to live in fear of Him
So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change,
If He have done His best, make no new world
To please Him more, so leave off watching this,—
If He surprise not even the Quiet’s self
Some strange day,—or, suppose, grow into it
As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we,
And there is He, and nowhere help at all.

’Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.
His dam held different, that after death
He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:
Idly! He doth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
Saving last pain for the worst,—with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
Is, not to seem too happy. ’Sees, himself,
Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink,
Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both.
’Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball
On head and tail as if to save their lives:
Moves them the stick away they strive to clear.

Even so, ’would have Him misconceive, suppose
This Caliban strives hard and ails no less,
And always, above all else, envies Him;
Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights,
Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh,
And never speaks his mind save housed as now:
Outside, ’groans, curses. If He caught me here,
O’erheard this speech, and asked “What chucklest at?”
’Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off,
Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,
Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree,
Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste:
While myself lit a fire, and made a song
And sung it, “What I hate, be consecrate
To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate
For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?”
Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,
Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier He
Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.

What, what? A curtain o’er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—or, yes,
There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
It was fool’s play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death’s house o’ the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze—
A tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! ’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape!

[h=4]Summary[/h] This poem picks up on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. Caliban, the enslaved, monstrous native of the island on which the play takes place, is here given a chance to speak his mind. For many who have seen the play, Caliban is a figure of curious sympathy: although he harbors malevolent intentions, he suffers such bad treatment that one cannot help but feel sorry for him. Here in Browning’s poem Caliban pauses in his labors to ponder the world around him. From the natural order of the island and from his own limited powers he tries to infer what his god—“Setebos”—must be like. Caliban considers both ideas of divine justice and natural processes. Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection hover in the background of Caliban’s thinking.

The poem ends with Setebos “reawakening” and Caliban once again cowering in fear of the god’s arbitrariness. “Caliban Upon Setebos” appeared in the 1864 volume Dramatis Personae.
[h=4]Form[/h] “Caliban Upon Setebos” is written in unrhymed pentameter lines. It contains many metrical irregularities, which suggest the speech of one who is uneducated and coarse in nature. Caliban speaks of himself in the third person, and often uses no pronoun at all (“’Conceiveth,” “’Believeth,” etc.): in part this results from Caliban’s own intentions; he speaks this way to escape the attention of Setebos. Bit it also reflects the poet’s intentions; Browning uses the technique to give Caliban’s speech a Biblical, objectified quality that reflects the monster’s theological speculations and his comparisons of himself with a god. Because no audience seems present, the poem technically classifies as a soliloquy rather than a dramatic monologue.

[h=4]Commentary[/h] This poem reflects many of its era’s struggles with religion and with man’s place in the natural order. Caliban lies at the mercy of a figure who is mysterious and capricious, yet at times Caliban himself is able to act is a similar manner towards lesser creatures, like the crabs whom he either feeds or kills, at will. Caliban’s soliloquy abounds with concrete examples from the natural world, one of the most dramatic of which is the anecdote of the freshwater fish who tries to survive in the ocean (lines 33-43). In order to account for the apparent cruelties and inconsistencies of nature, Caliban must postulate another power higher than Setebos, whom he calls the “Quiet.” Caliban’s increasingly convoluted explanation demonstrates one of the difficulties the Victorian world was having with Christianity: theology was having to become more and more contorted to explain both the facts of the modern world and the findings of modern science. Many found it increasingly difficult to maintain traditional ideas about a just God. Caliban struggles with the same doubts, and his thinking also highlights the problem with traditional analogies between man and God: if man is made in God’s image, what does man’s corrupt behavior suggest about God?

This problem emerges particularly clearly in Caliban’s consideration of evolution. Caliban does not believe what his mother has told him, that nature has been created arbitrarily by the “Quiet” and that God, or Setebos, just does what He can with what is already there. Caliban believes instead that Setebos made creatures, including Caliban, expressly so that their weaknesses can be used against them. He explains a fossilized newt he once found as a creature that Setebos envied and so turned to stone. Caliban’s mother (“Sycorax” in Shakespeare’s play) asserts that there exist forces separate from and more powerful than any God, which operate neutrally and disinterestedly. The theory of evolution would fit within this system of thought. In its way, then, this is the same as the crisis of faith facing the Victorians: does a God exist, whose qualities are up for debate? Or is science right, and is our society the product of an infinite number of arbitrary, impartial natural processes? Caliban finds neither prospect a sufficient justification of his misery, just as the Victorians found neither option a sufficient explanation for the suffering and corruption of modern society.

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Robert Browning’s Poetry

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