Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (2 page)

In the same piece (‘Browning in Westminster Abbey’, later included in
English Hours
) James gave the best summary critical judgement of Browning when he called him ‘a tremendous and incomparable modern’. James, of course, meant by ‘modern’ what we now call ‘Victorian’; but the ‘all-touching, all-trying spirit of his work, permeated with accumulations and playing with knowledge’ connects Browning as much with our century as with his own. It is as a contemporary that Browning strikes us, not as the funereal grammarian of a past culture. I do not deny that Browning is a poet of his period, but I do deny that he is a period poet. The author of the lines ‘God’s in his heaven / All’s right with the world’ has been praised and blamed for being a breezy Victorian optimist, even though the lines are spoken by a young girl outside a house where an adulterous couple are quarrelling over the recent murder of the lady’s husband. Such misconceptions haunt Browning’s work – ironically perhaps, for he was a poet of misconceptions (the title of one of his poems), of failures, of abortive lives and loves, of the just-missed and the nearly fulfilled: a poet, in other words, of desire, perhaps the greatest in our language. The rapid colloquial energy of his style, his gift for the memorable phrase (especially in the vivid openings of poems: ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us’, ‘It was roses, roses, all the way’, ‘Stop! Let me have the truth of that’), are not the concomitants of uplift and robust optimism: the three poems I have just cited are all about disillusion and disenchantment. The experience of reading Browning’s poems is far from depressing, yet fall and loss are closely woven into their design. They witness to a double vision, famously put in the closing lines of ‘Two in the Campagna’: ‘The old trick! Only I discern / Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn.’ The poems dramatize the recognition that fulfilment lies beyond reach (as in Fra Lippo Lippi’s anticipation that the painters who
succeed
him will also
succeed
where he has failed), but this aftermath is never represented, only gestured towards, and sometimes not even then: ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ is absolutely
stopped
by the indecipherable enigma of its last line, which repeats the title and, disallowing the question ‘what happened next’, throws the poem back on itself.

Desire, then, is the keynote of Browning’s poetry, its ruling spirit,
that which rescues it from Matthew Arnold’s charge of ‘confused multitudinousness’. Yet the impression of multitudinousness is undeniably there, seized in this early tribute from Walter Savage Landor:

     Since Chaucer was alive and hale,

No man hath walked along our road with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.

          (‘To Robert Browning’, 1845)

The varied discourse of Browning’s poetry is perhaps its most immediate attraction; the title of
Men and Women
, as democratic in its way as Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
(published the same year), opens the gates of poetry to the common people and to everyday things. High and low rub shoulders; the landscape is as likely to be suburban as sublime; Browning’s kingdom, like the kingdom of heaven, is a homely as well as a glorious place. In part we can see here the influence of both drama (especially Shakespeare) and the contemporary novel on Browning’s conception of poetry; but it is also a matter of temperament, of native wit. Writing to Elizabeth Barrett in 1845, Browning expressed his dislike of Mary Shelley’s
Rambles in Germany and Italy
, and in doing so revealed the focus and bent of his own imagination:

And then that way, when she and the like of her are put in a new place, with new flowers, new stones, faces, walls, all new – of looking wisely up at the sun, clouds, evening star, or mountain top and wisely saying ‘who shall describe
that
sight!’ – Not
you
, we very well see – but why dont you tell us that at Rome they eat roasted chestnuts, and put the shells into their aprons, the women do, and calmly empty the whole on the heads of the passengers in the street below; and that at Padua when a man drives his waggon up to a house and stops, all the mouse-coloured oxen that pull it from a beam against their foreheads sit down in a heap and rest … Her remarks on art … are amazing. Fra Angelico, for instance, only painted Martyrs, Virgins &c – she had no eyes for the divine
bon-bourgeoisie
of his pictures; the dear common folk of his crowds, those who sit and listen (spectacle at nose and bent into a comfortable heap to hear better) at the sermon of the Saint – and the children, and women, – divinely pure they all are, but fresh from the streets & market place …

Sun, clouds, evening star, mountain top: these are the traditional props of Romantic lyric, beloved of Browning’s early idol, Shelley, now rejected in the prose of Shelley’s widow – rejected in favour of the ‘streets & market place’, closely observed and concretely rendered. The passage brings us close to the aesthetic of ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, but it would be a mistake to assume that Browning is advocating, or practised himself, a naïve, literal-minded realism. For one thing, the style is too sophisticated, the detail too ordered: the oxen sitting down in a heap to rest are echoed by the people ‘bent into a comfortable heap to hear better’; Mary Shelley has no
eyes
for those who sit ‘spectacle at nose’; the ‘common folk’ are ‘fresh from the streets & market place’ in the sense that they have just come from there, and also because they have the freshness, the immediacy of the actual life from which they are drawn. Still they are there for ‘the sermon of the Saint’; the transcendental is shifted from its unreal, ineffable plane (‘who shall describe
that
sight!’) to the plane of the human. You have to look
up
in order to see clouds and mountain tops; you look directly
at
flowers, stones, and above all faces – they are on your level.

Just as Browning’s observation takes in the ‘common folk’ as well as the ‘Saint’, so his style insists on the full human scale, on the demotic as well as the learned, the prosaic as well as the lyric. ‘You have taken a great range,’ Elizabeth Barrett wrote to him, ‘– from those high faint notes of the mystics which are beyond personality . .
*
to dramatic impersonations, gruff with nature.’ She goes on to cite, as one of these gruffnesses, the last words of
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
, ‘Gr–r–r – you swine!’ Browning was to scandalize the gentleman’s club atmosphere of English poetry with other snorts, coughs, grunts, and onomatopoeic noises. ‘
Bang, whang, whang
, goes the drum,
tootle-te-tootle
the fife,’ says the speaker of ‘Up at a Villa – Down in the City’ (and he ‘an Italian person of quality’!). ‘Fol-lol-the-rido-liddle-iddle-ol!’ sings Mr Sludge, embarking on the story of his impudent and irrepressible life. But here again we should not forget the artistry with which such effects are created and controlled. Browning’s speakers,
from the racy, chatty Fra Lippo Lippi to the melancholy Andrea del Sarto, from Caliban’s grotesque primitivism to Cleon’s over-refined eloquence, from the colloquial urbanity of the speaker in ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ to the grave plainsong of St John in ‘A Death in the Desert’, never miss a step in the metrical dance which Browning has choreographed for them. That exclamation of Mr Sludge is, at second glance, a perfectly allowable iambic pentameter. The Duke in ‘My Last Duchess’, that arch manipulator, is manipulated by the couplets into which his lofty and condescending cadences unknowingly fall. The ‘speaking subject’ whom the dramatic monologue evokes is also, inevitably, subjected to the poem’s imaginative design.

A brief word about the selection and order of poems for this volume. I have tried to strike a balance between the poems for which Browning is best known (but which are not always his best) and those my own taste leads me to recommend; at times the choice has been hard, nowhere more so than in the exclusion of ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ to make way for ‘A Death in the Desert’. With two exceptions I have chosen only complete poems; Browning’s long poems are not easily broken up, and they are too long to print in their entirety. Readers should be aware of the imbalance this will cause in their impressions of Browning’s work; I can only urge them to try the long poems (especially
The Ring and the Book
) for themselves. The two exceptions are the song from
Pippa Passes
containing Browning’s best-known lines, which it seemed perverse to omit; and (prompted by Kenneth Allott’s inclusion of it in his selection, Oxford University Press, 1967) a scene from the same work which does stand up on its own, and is interesting as a rare example of successful dramatic dialogue in Browning. The poems are printed in the order of their first publication, except for ‘Spring Song’, which seemed to me the right note (of elegy, of triumph) on which to end.

D
ANIEL
K
ARLIN

Note on the Text

The text is that of the two-volume edition of Browning’s poems edited by John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins in the Penguin English Poets series (Harmondsworth, 1981). The copy-text used (with minor emendations and corrections) by Pettigrew and Collins is that of the last collected edition which appeared in Browning’s lifetime, the
Poetical Works
of 1888–9. The poems (except for the last one) are printed in order of publication; the volumes in which they first appeared are identified in the Notes.

Porphyria’s Lover

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;

[10] 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,

[20] And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,

Murmuring how she loved me – she

Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour,

To set its struggling passion free

From pride, and vainer ties dissever,

And give herself to me for ever.

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:

[30] So, she was come through wind and rain.

Be sure I looked up at her eyes

Happy and proud; at last I knew

Porphyria worshipped 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

[40] 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,

[50] 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,

[60] And yet God has not said a word!

Johannes Agricola in Meditation

There’s heaven above, and night by night

I look right through its gorgeous roof;

No suns and moons though e’er so bright

Avail to stop me; splendour-proof

I keep the broods of stars aloof:

For I intend to get to God,

For ’tis to God I speed so fast,

For in God’s breast, my own abode,

Those shoals of dazzling glory passed,

[10] I lay my spirit down at last.

I lie where I have always lain,

God smiles as he has always smiled;

Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,

Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled

The heavens, God thought on me his child;

Ordained a life for me, arrayed

Its circumstances every one