Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (37 page)

Up at a Villa – Down in the City

Published
Men and Women
, 1855. The setting is Tuscany. 42.
Pulcinello-trumpet
Announcing a puppet show (Pulcinello is a Punch-figure). 44–6. Tuscany at the time was ruled by the Grand Duke Leopold II, with Austrian support: the ‘liberal thieves’ are Italian nationalists (with whom Browning, as opposed to the Catholic Church hierarchy, sympathized), and the ‘little new law’ a reactionary measure.

Fra Lippo Lippi

Published
Men and Women
, 1855. Giorgio Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists
, a favourite book, supplied most of the details for the career of the Florentine painter Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–69); the episode related by the poem is imaginary. Lippi’s opinions coincide with Browning’s at several, but by no means all points.
17
–
18
. Cosimo dei Medici (1389–1464) ruled Florence and was Lippi’s patron; his ‘house’ reappears in ‘The Statue and the Bust’ (ll. 33–9).
53
–
6
. Imitations of the
stornello
, a three-line Tuscan popular song beginning with the name of a flower. 121.
the Eight
The magistrates of Florence. 130.
antiphonary
Book of choral songs. 189.
Giotto
Florentine painter and architect (1267–1337), praised in ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ (
Men and Women
; not in this edition).
196
–
7
. Matthew 14:1–12, confusing Herodias with her daughter Salome; Browning took the error from Vasari, probably deliberately (contrast 11.273–80): it exposes the Prior’s ignorance or unease.
235
–
6
. Fra Angilico (1387–1455), a Dominican friar; Lorenzo Monaco (c. 1370-c. 1425), a Camaldolese: see
ll
.139–40. 273–80. Tomasso Guidi (1401–28), called ‘Masaccio’ (clumsy), Lippi’s teacher, not pupil; Browning misread a note in his edition of Vasari. 307.
cullion
Rascal. 323.
Saint Laurence
A deacon of Pope Sixtus II, martyred in 258 by being roasted on a gridiron.
327
.
phiz
Face.
347
.
They want a cast o’ my office
They want an example of my work (with bawdy pun: they lack what I can give them).
348
. The painting described in the following lines is ‘The Coronation of the Virgin’, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
354
. Saint John the Baptist.
363
. In Browning’s time this figure, kneeling in the right-hand bottom corner by a scroll reading ‘is perfecit opus’, was thought to be a self-portrait (‘he made the work’); it is now known to be a portrait of the benefactor who commissioned the painting (‘he made the work be’). Browning’s ‘Iste’ (1.377) is an error.
375
.
camel-hair
Worn by John the Baptist (Matthew 3:4).
380
.
kirtles
Skirts or petticoats.
381
.
hot cockles
Lippi’s bawdy joke depends on knowing that the real rustic game of hot cockles is one in which a blindfolded player has to guess who strikes him; it cannot, therefore, be played by only two people!

A Toccata of Galuppi’s

Published
Men and Women
, 1855. In 1887 Browning commented: ‘As for Galuppi, I had once in my possession two huge manuscript volumes almost exclusively made up of his “Toccata-pieces” – apparently a slighter form of the Sonata to be “touched” lightly off.’ Browning’s memory may be at fault; Baldassare Galuppi (1706–85) composed many keyboard pieces but no toccatas; in any event the piece here is imaginary. 1.
Baldassaro
The spelling is Browning’s error. 6. Saint Mark’s is the Cathedral of Venice; the Doges (chief magistrates in the days when Venice was a republic) performed an annual ceremony in which a ring was cast into the Adriatic to ‘wed’ the state to the sea, the source of its military and commercial power. 8.
Shy lock’s bridge The
Rialto, ‘where merchants most do congregate’ (
Merchant of Venice
I iii 44). 11.
masks
Probably meaning masquerades or masked balls (see
l.17
); but it may mean
masques, dramatic entertainments. 14.
bell-flower
Campanula 16.
afford
‘Time’ is understood; ‘spare the time to listen to your music’. 18.
clavichord
Galuppi was a harpsichordist and composed for this instrument, not the clavichord; P. Turner, in his edition of
Men and Women
(OUP, 1972) says that the clavichord’s softer tone would be ‘almost inaudible against the noise of general conversation’, which may be why Browning substituted it; the lovers have to ‘break talk off’ to listen. 19–25. The extent of Browning’s musical knowledge, and the precise bearing of the terminology used here, are debatable; the general sense is clear, however: the speaker suggests a link between Galuppi’s technique as a composer and the ‘message’ of his music, as interpreted both by his contemporary audience and (11.34–43) by the speaker himself. 19.
lesser thirds
Minor thirds, as in ‘A Lovers’ Quarrel’, 1.123.
sixths diminished
A diminished sixth is technically a minor sixth chromatically reduced by one semitone, and has ‘little beyond a theoretical existence’ (
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music
); a commentator in 1887 remarked that ‘mentioning diminished sixths in this off-hand way is rather like casually speaking of breakfasting off roc’s egg as a matter of everyday occurrence’. J. Pettigrew and T. J. Collins (
Robert Browning: the Poems
, Harmondsworth, 1981) suggest that ‘diminished’ may be loosely used for ‘minor’. 20.
Those suspensions, those solutions
A suspension is the prolongation of a note from one chord into the following chord, producing a discord which is then resolved into a concord (the solution or resolution). 24–5.
dominant’s persistence … octave struck the answer The
dominant is the fifth note above the keynote; a chord formed on this note is normally resolved on to the chord of the keynote. ‘Octave’ presumably refers to the keynote struck in octaves ‘to stress its finality’ (Turner). 37–42. Galuppi’s music shakes the speaker’s faith both in a hierarchy of ‘souls’ (whose progress beyond the material world is determined by the ‘degree’ of their spirituality) and in the place of his own rational, scientific soul in such a hierarchy. ‘Butterflies’ (1.39) may refer literally to the creatures themselves, or figuratively to the Venetians, or to both; the butterfly was a traditional emblem of the soul. ‘Extinction’ (1.39) refers not to death, but to there being nothing after it. According to Christ’s teaching, those who are fulfilled on earth ‘have their reward’ (Matthew 6:2) and will not find salvation in the afterlife; here, it is not salvation that is at stake, but existence itself. ‘Mirth and folly’ (1.41) suggests Ecclesiastes 7:2–4: ‘It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart … The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.’

An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician

Published
Men and Women
, 1855. The story of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus is in John 11:1–44; the form, as the title and opening suggest, is a secular counterpart to the New Testament Epistles, especially St Paul’s (see also
‘Cleon’
). Karshish, Abib, and their ‘lord the sage’ are invented characters. 1. The name ‘Karshish’ means ‘gatherer’ in Arabic. 28. Vespasian commanded
the Roman troops against the Jewish rebellion in A.D. 66, three years before he became Emperor; his son Titus carried on the war and destroyed Jerusalem in A.D. 70.30.
balls
Eyeballs. 42.
viscid choler
Sticky bile. 43.
tertians
Tertian fevers (which recur every other day). 44.
falling-sickness
Epilepsy. 50.
sublimate
A medicinal powder. 55.
gum-tragacanth
A substance exuded from a shrub native to the Middle East, used in medicine as a vehicle for drugs. 82.
exhibition
Administration, 117. Matthew 18:2–3. 177.
Greek fire
A primitive explosive compound, first used by the Greeks of Byzantium. 228.
affects
Loves. 240.
sublimed
Intensified. 248–59. Karshish’s garbled version of the crucifixion, Matthew 27. 247.
leech
Physician.

Mesmerism

Published
Men and Women
, 1855. Mesmerism, founded on the teachings of the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), was a precursor of hypnotism, and was widely discussed in the 1840s and 1850s. Like spiritualism it was a topic of debate and disagreement between the Brownings. The term is used here loosely to indicate the exercise of occult power, though certain features (e.g. the use of the hands) are specifically associated with mesmerism. 44–5. Calotypes were an early form of photograph. 75.
tractile
Capable of being drawn out to a thread.

A Serenade at the Villa

Published
Men and Women
, 1855.

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’

Published
Men and Women
, 1855. ‘I was conscious of no allegorical intention in writing it … Childe Roland came upon me as a kind of dream. I had to write it, then and there, and I finished it the same day, I believe. But it was simply that I had to do it. I did not know then what I meant beyond that, and I’m sure I don’t know now. But I’m very fond of it’ (Browning, 1887). A ‘childe’ is a young knight or candidate for knighthood. In the old Scottish ballad of Childe Roland, Roland, a son of King Arthur, rescues his sister from the castle of the King of Elfland. The subtitle refers to
King Lear
III iv 178–80, where Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, quotes the ballad, along with the Giant’s words in the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer: ‘Child Rowland to the dark tower came, / His word was still “Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man”.’ Browning carefully avoided ruling out an allegorical reading, only the conscious intention to write an allegory; readers who wish to try their hand should be warned that the enterprise strongly resembles carving a statue out of fog. 34.
staves
Verses (of the funeral psalm). 48.
estray
Legal term for stray animal. 66.
Calcine
Burn to ashes, utterly consume, with the additional sense of refine, purge. 68.
bents
Coarse grasses. 80.
colloped
The usual sense (‘having thick folds of flesh’) contradicts ‘gaunt’; perhaps ‘raw-looking’ (like a slice of meat). 106.
howlet
Owl. 114.
bespate
Bespattered (with suggestion of river ‘in full spate’). 130.
pad
Tread. 131.
plash
Marshy pool. 133.
fell cirque
Cruel, deadly
amphitheatre (as in Roman circus). 141.
brake
Machine (in several possible senses, e.g. a toothed instrument to crush flax, a heavy harrow); can also mean ‘trap’ or ‘cage’. 143.
Tophet
Biblical name for Hell. See also ‘Ned Brans’, I. 178n. 160.
Apollyon
in Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
, a ‘foul fiend’ with wings like a dragon (‘dragon-penned’), named after the ‘angel of the bottomless pit’ in Revelation 9:11.179.
nonce
Moment. 182.
blind as the fool’s heart
Psalm 14:1: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ 203.
slug-hom
A horn used in battle or to sound a challenge (Browning’s mistake, following Chatterton; the word is in fact a form of Anglo-Saxon ‘slogan’, battle-cry). The context recalls another Roland, the hero of Charlemagne’s time and subsequent legend, who sounded his horn (too late) at Roncesvalles.

The Statue and the Bust

Published
Men and Women
, 1855. The statue is real; the bust imaginary; the story mostly the latter, according to Browning: ‘the fiction in the poem … comprises everything but the (legendary) fact that the lady was shut up there by a jealous husband, and that the Duke commemorated his riding past her window by the statue’s erection … There are niches in the palace wall where such a bust
might
have been placed, “and if not, why not?”’ There is an analogy (though not a complete identification) with the story of Browning himself and Elizabeth Barrett; perhaps Browning also had in mind the twenty years waited by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor until the death of her husband allowed them to marry in 1851. 1–2. The equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand de Medici (1549–1608) stands in the Piazza Annunziata, looking towards the Palazzo Antinori, a palace formerly owned by the Riccardi family (not, as Browning exasperatedly pointed out, the same as Duke Ferdinand’s own palace, described in ll.33–9; this was the palace built by Cosimo dei Medici, Fra Lippo Lippi’s patron, and from which the painter in Browning’s poem plays truant). 21.
coal-black tree
Ebony. 22.
encolure
Mane (B.’s coinage, from Fr., neck of a horse). 23.
dissemble
Imitate, match. 38–9. Probably alluding to the Cosimo of ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, in effect absolute ruler of Florence from 1434, though he preserved the forms of republican government, and the epithet ‘cursed’ applies more to his grandson Lorenzo than to his son Piero; P. Turner, in his edition of
Men and Women
(OUP, 1972), suggests instead Cosimo I (1519–74) and his son Francesco (1541–87). 57.
catafalque
Hearse. 94.
Arno
The river on which Florence stands. 95.
Petraja
In the hills to the north of Florence; Ferdinand had a villa there. 159.
serpent’s tooth
Of time and self-frustration (but obliquely alluding to the origin of the phrase in
King Lear
I iv 288–9, in the sense that the embittered lady is the ‘thankless child’ of her past self). 169.
Robbia’s craft
If the allusion is specific, it must (anachronistically) be to the sculptor Luca della Robbia (1400–1482); it may however be to Robbia ware generally. The cornice in Browning’s time was decorated in Robbia ware: 202.
John of Douay
The sculptor Giovanni da Bologna (1524–1608) was born at Douai in northern France. 232–43. Human integrity does not depend on the moral value of an action, but on the degree of conviction with which it is undertaken. In the metaphor, playing a game for real money (‘pelf’,
‘coin’) is equivalent to doing something virtuous; playing for ‘a button’, a ‘counter’ is equivalent to doing something wrong. Since the test is of integrity, not moral quality, it would be absurd (‘an epigram’) to demand the real coin of virtue when the ‘button’ of crime will do just as well. The ‘stamp of the very Guelph’ means British money; the royal family are Guelphs by descent. 247. Luke 12:35, with Matthew 12:1–13 (the wise and foolish virgins). 250.
De te, fabula!
‘The story is about you’ (Horace,
Satires
I i 69–70).