POETS Day! Liking Robert Browning
Not a monk.
I’m feeling older this week. My son is now a rising high school senior, though I don’t suppose the “rising” does anything as a modifier. I doubt many recent graduates are still calling themselves seniors so there’s no danger confusing rising college freshmen, graduates entering the job market, or enlisted men and women with disgorged prep school juniors.
He’s considering his future and colleges. Labs loom there. He fancies a career in research; biochemistry. That’s the current plan. He’s not old like I am and gets to change his mind. Is it too early to point out that some chemical reactions require babysitting? I don’t want to helicopter the kid, but he needs to at least consider the advantages of a career where a premature Friday afternoon exit has less chance of resulting in an explosion. But what do I know, right? I’m just the dad. “Ooh la-la.”
That’s kids, though. One track minds, blinders on, whatever the metaphor. You know what I’m talking about. This POETS Day, when you do the right thing – Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday – keep in mind that there are impressionable young kids on summer break, milling about town. They’re usually in school that time of day and might not know the importance of a wasted afternoon. Be seen. Mentor a kid by hitting a bar in view of a ballroom dance classroom window. If there’s a kid working a summer job at the market, be loud about why you need sunscreen when you’re supposed to be at work. Show him that shirking doesn’t hide in the shadows. Be a role model.
But first, a little verse to kick start your weekend.
***
Last time I wrote about Robert Browning, I commented on a Hopkins quote. Specifically,
“Of Browning, the immeasurable Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote as like ‘a man bouncing up from a table with his mouth full of bread and cheese and saying that he meant to stand no blasted nonsense.’ I’ve read that repeatedly and I’m a Hopkins fan but it makes no sense whatsoever.”
I stand by the sentiment. The “whatsoever” part may have been overreach. It’ a great image, but I’m caught up short breaking it down. Bread and cheese are staples. He’s overindulging in them. “Nonsense” I take to be a reference to contemporary experimentation in poetry; he’s a stickler for tradition. And he’s bouncy, so eager to make his point. I have to allow that Hopkins thinks Browning so exuberantly highlights a rigidity that his work becomes something exotic, an experiment in retrenchment. I like that idea, but it’s more likely that Hopkins means he’s an enthusiastic exemplar whose efforts are spent doing rather than telling. He thinks Browning has a point to make but is too hard to understand, is a possibility. He could be dense.
The problem is that Browning wasn’t just a shower. He famously wrote On the Poet objective and subjective; on the latter’s aim; on Shelley as man and poet, (and breath) which isn’t something my library can put their hands on immediately but which Amazon tells me is three hundred and ninety-two pages long. That’s quite a bit of telling-not-showing, and not the only essay he penned on poetry. And though he stayed in form, Browning didn’t exactly fade into the traditionalist crowd.
“It seems to be admitted, even by many of the poet’s most devoted students, that his verse is, in its general character, harsh and rugged. To judge it fairly, one must free his mind of many merely conventional canons in regard to verse.”
That was written by Hiram Corson in his work An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning. I can’t say for certain when he wrote that, but the third edition was published in 1886, so it was during Browning’s lifetime. Corson goes on:
“but a psychological poet, who has made it his business to clothe psychic abstractions ‘in sights and sounds’, is entirely a novel appearance in literature.”
At least per Corson, Browning was seen by his contemporaries as an innovator. What I can say with more certitude about the Hopkins quote, is that it didn’t express admiration. Wikipedia lists Hopkins among the detractors. Apparently, Anthony Burgess wrote, “We all want to like Browning, but we find it very hard.” “Difficult” gets thrown around a lot, as does “obscure,” but those descriptors come from fans and critics alike.
In 1833 Browning anonymously published Pauline, a fairly long poem that didn’t sell a single copy at the time. He followed with Paracelsus, a five-part epic about the German alchemist and physician. It did better than Pauline, but not by much. In the introduction he wrote that his aim was,
“to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomena of the mind or the passions, by the operations of persons and events: and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernable in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. I have endeavored to write a poem, not a drama.”
Strafford, his first play, didn’t do that well either. He billed it as “Action in character rather than character in action.” Robert Bernard Martin notes in Victorian Poetry, that “sounds like an echo of the introduction to Paracelsus, with its disavowal of his intent to write drama.” Browning’s most famous poems are dramatic. They aren’t plays, but they may as well be excerpts. He writes long soliloquies where motivations, foibles, and fears are revealed. We have the character and the story from their perspective, but we’re limited.
He had a knack for memorable lines. “Less is more,” comes from “Andrea del Sarto,” also titled “The Faultless Painter,” a monologue from the painter to his demanding wife. The speaker is technically perfect as an artist but, a theme recurring at least in Browning’s “Pippa Passes” if not others, the perfection is itself a fault. Authorship or a touch of genius, something that distinguishes this perfection from the perfect works of another, is missing.
from Andrea del Sarto
Robert Browning (1812-1889)…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.
It’s Pippa Passes that gives us another of his famous lines. It’s painfully doe-eyed, coming after a scene in which two people involved in an adulterous affair discuss the murder of one’s husband.
Pippa’s Song
The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven,
All’s right with the world!
Sordello is set in thirteenth century Italy. It is a slough, at least I’m told. It’s long at six books, each a lengthy work on their own. I’ve attempted it several times and put it down gladly. Tennyson said of it,
“There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told!”
I’m never going to get to that last line. I’ve barely made it more than a couple of hundred lines before remembering what a buyer’s market of entertainment options I live in. “Difficult” and “obscure” taunt me from the margins. The whole is something I’ve written off, but I run across an excerpt and I’m charmed.
Here’s a bit that awes me. Ezra Pound highlights it in ABC of Reading to blast those “Victorian half-wits” who “claimed this poem was obscure,” by which he must have included Tennyson and, since I’m sure he wasn’t limiting his disdain merely to half-wits who happen to be Victorian, means me as well.
from Sordello, Book I
And every eve, Sordello’s visit begs
Pardon for them: constant as eve he came
To sit beside each in her turn, the same
As one of them, a certain space: and awe
Made a great indistinctness till he saw
Sunset slant cheerful through the buttress-chinks,
Gold seven times globed; surely our maiden shrinks
And a smile stirs her as if one faint grain
Her load were lightened, one shade less the stain
Obscured her forehead, yet one more bead slipt
From off the rosary whereby the crypt
Keeps count of the contritions of its charge?
What Carson writes about Browning’s verse generally may be true, but there is no “harsh and rugged” here. Pound likens it to Golding, advising that “the reader must read it as prose, pausing for the sense and not hammering the line-terminations.” I’ll add that it should be read aloud.
I don’t know what to make of Hopkin’s take. I don’t know what to make of Browning. He’s a frustrated dramatist writing poetry or a frustrated poet writing drama or he’s perfectly content with his middle niche. I’m not drawn to the whole but I’m amazed by pieces. In 1538, Paracelsus wrote “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” Browning can be so impressive, but just a little bit and I’m good.
