Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)

Robert Browning

SELECTED POEMS

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Daniel Karlin

Contents

INTRODUCTION

NOTE ON THE TEXT

Porphyria’s Lover

Johannes Agricola in Meditation

Song from
Pippa Passes
(‘The year’s at the spring’)

Scene from
Pippa Passes
(‘There goes a swallow to Venice …’)

My Last Duchess

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

The Pied Piper of Hamelin;
A Child’s Story

‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’

The Lost Leader

Meeting at Night

Parting at Morning

Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church

Love Among the Ruins

A Lovers’ Quarrel

Up at a Villa – Down in the City

Fra Lippo Lippi

A Toccata of Galuppi’s

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

Mesmerism

A Serenade at the Villa

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’

The Statue and the Bust

How It Strikes a Contemporary

The Patriot

Memorabilia

Andrea del Sarto

In a Year

Cleon

Two in the Campagna

A Grammarian’s Funeral

James Lee’s Wife

I James Lee’s Wife Speaks at the Window

II By the Fireside

III In the Doorway

IV Along the Beach

V On the Cliff

VI Reading a Book, Under the Cliff

VII Among the Rocks

VIII Beside the Drawing-Board

IX On Deck

Gold Hair:
A Story of Pornic

Dîs Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de Nos Jours

A Death in the Desert

Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island

Confessions

Youth and Art

A Likeness

Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium’

Apparent Failure

Epilogue [to Dramatis Personae]

House

Saint Martin’s Summer

Ned Bratts

Clive

[Wanting is – what?]

Donald

Never the Time and the Place

The Names

Now

Beatrice Signorini

Spring Song

NOTES

CHRONOLOGY

FURTHER READING

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PENGUIN CLASSICS

ROBERT BROWNING: SELECTED POEMS

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, in south-east London, in 1812. The major influences on his early development came from his father’s large and eccentric library, his mother’s deep Nonconformist piety, and his adolescent encounter with Romantic poetry (especially Shelley). After education at local schools and at home, he enrolled at the newly founded University of London in 1828, but left the following year. He travelled widely on the Continent in the 1830s and 1840s. He published
Pauline
anonymously and without success in 1833;
Paracelsus
(1835) made him known to London literary society. However,
Sordello
(1840), derided for its obscurity, blighted his career for over twenty years. He published a series of plays and collections of shorter poems,
Bells and Pomegranates
(1841–6). In January 1845 he began corresponding with Elizabeth Barrett; he met her in May 1845, and they were married in September 1846 after a clandestine courtship (because of Mr Barrett’s implacable opposition to the idea of any of his children marrying). The Brownings lived in Italy until Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861. Browning published
Men and Women
(1855), which contains some of his finest poems, but still did not restore his reputation (or his sales). After his wife’s death, Browning returned to England with their only son, and settled in London. He published
Dramatis Personae
(1864), a collection which began to repair his critical fortunes; this process was accomplished by the appearance of
The Ring and the Book
(1868–9). Among the works of his later years,
Fifine at the Fair
(1872),
Aristophanes’ Apology
(1875),
La Saisiaz
(1878),
Dramatic Idyls
(1879),
Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day
(1887) and
Asolando
(1889) are outstanding. Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889, and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Daniel Karlin is Professor of English Literature at University College London. He has published extensively on Browning (both editions and critical books) and has edited
The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse
for Penguin Classics. He has also edited Rudyard Kipling’s
The Jungle Books
for Penguin.

Introduction

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, in south-east London, on 7 May 1812. He was the son of Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, a mild, diffident man who was also an ardent book-lover and collector, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann, a woman of stronger character than her husband, and whose fervent Nonconformist piety was one of the abiding influences on her son’s development. What we know of Browning in his early years suggests intellectual precocity, an excess of nervous energy (he is recorded as gnawing the edge of his pew during a long sermon) and a passionate attachment to home. He was not to leave until his marriage at the age of thirty-four, and remained until then financially dependent on his father, who paid for the publication of his poems. He was educated at home, mainly through the resources of his father’s vast library. As a dissenter Browning could not go to Oxford or Cambridge; in 1828 he enrolled in London’s new University College, but after a year became its most distinguished drop-out. He consistently refused to take up a career, and, overcoming his parents’ opposition, formally dedicated himself to becoming a poet. As a young man he travelled extensively: in 1834 to Russia with a British diplomatic mission, in 1838 to Italy, returning through Germany and the Low Countries, in 1844, to Italy again. His literary career began in 1833 with the publication of
Pauline
, an anonymous poem which sank without trace and left Browning so ashamed of having written it that he suppressed it for over thirty years until the threat of piracy forced him to acknowledge it. Then came critical success with the appearance of
Paracelsus
, a long poem ostensibly about the sixteenth-century physician and alchemist, but in reality about the splendours and miseries of (Browning’s) genius.
Paracelsus
established Browning on the London literary scene (friendships followed with John Forster, Harriet Martineau, Carlyle, Landor, Dickens) and brought him to the attention of the actor-manager William Charles Macready, at whose prompting he wrote his
first play,
Strafford
, produced at Covent Garden in 1837. It did not flop, and Browning was encouraged to try again. He wrote eight plays in all, of which only
Pippa Passes
(1841)
and A Soul’s Tragedy
(1846) are other than mediocre. A disastrous production
of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon
(1843), during which Browning broke with Macready, and the subsequent failure of his negotiations with Macready’s great rival, Charles Kean, put an end to Browning’s theatrical ambitions. In the meantime a failure of a longer-lasting kind had afflicted his career with the publication of
Sordello
in 1840. This great poem, one of the most daring experiments with narrative structure since
Paradise Lost
, and the most radical (in politics and aesthetics) since
Prometheus Unbound
, was received with universal derision for its sublime difficulties of form and language. Tennyson said that there were only two lines in it that he understood, the first – ‘Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told’ – and the last – ‘Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told’ – and that both were lies. Carlyle claimed that his wife had read through the poem without being able to discover whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. Browning’s reputation was not to recover for a quarter of a century; the publication of two collections of shorter poems,
Dramatic Lyrics
(1842) and
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics
(1845), which between them contain some of his finest poems in the genre he was to make his own, the dramatic monologue, raised barely a whisper of recognition. Frustration with London literary life was at its height when he began his correspondence with the reclusive invalid, Elizabeth Barrett, prompted by a complimentary allusion to him in one of her recently published
Poems
(1844). She, six years older than he, had given herself up for lost in human and social terms; whatever the exaggerations and distortions of the legend, there is no doubt that Browning did, as she said, ‘lift me from the ground and carry me into life and the sunshine’. In September 1846, after a clandestine courtship in the shadow of Elizabeth Barrett’s domineering and disagreeable (rather than monstrous) father, they married and left England for Italy. There, first at Pisa and then at Florence, and with occasional trips to France and England, they remained until Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861. Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (‘Pen’) was born in 1849. Italy was congenial to Browning’s poetry; he was not spared the rebuke of English critics (among them Charles Kingsley) for his unpatriotic
liking for the landscapes and characters of ‘abroad’ (so different from the home life of their own dear Tennyson).
Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day
(1850), a pair of poems on religious subjects, is of interest to Browning specialists; of interest to everyone is
Men and Women
(1855), the collection generally held to be his masterpiece. I would personally prefer the claim of his next volume,
Dramatis Personae
(1864), the first to be published after his wife’s death, but there is no doubt that together, and with the addition of
The Ring and the Book
(1868–9), they make up the core of Browning’s enduring presence in the canon of English poetry.
The Ring and the Book
, twenty-one thousand lines long, consists of a series of interlocking dramatic monologues all telling the same story, that of an obscure seventeenth-century
cause célèbre
, the murder by Count Guido Franceschini of his wife, Pompilia, and his subsequent trial and execution. The element of sensation and melodrama is mixed with social satire, religious and philosophical meditation, and acute psychological probing: the whole represents Browning’s heroic attempt to fuse Milton with Dickens, the modern novel with the epic poem.
The Ring and the Book
also marked the decisive advent of critical and popular acclaim: living in London, Browning re-entered the literary and social scene from which he had been an exile; he was lionized, and eventually canonized with the formation of the Browning Society in 1881. (His attitude to the Society was one of guarded appreciation.) A long overdue reassessment of his writings after
The Ring and the Book
has taken place in recent years, though it must be accepted that, because of the established fame of the earlier works and the fact that many of the later ones are lengthy and recondite, they are unlikely to achieve the same standing in the tradition. Among the finest of the later works are
Fifine at the Fair
(1872), whose central character is Don Juan;
Aristophanes’ Apology
(1875);
La Saisiaz
(1878), a philosophical elegy; the two volumes of
Dramatic Idyls
(1879, 1880; the spelling was chosen to differentiate them from Tennyson’s ‘English Idylls’ and
Idylls of the King
);
Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day
(1887), an oblique intellectual autobiography; and his last volume,
Asolando
, published on the day of his death. Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. ‘A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey,’ wrote Henry James, ‘but none of
the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.’