Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (39 page)

Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island

Published
Dramatis Personae
, 1864. The epigraph is from Psalm 50:21; the context of the surrounding verses is also relevant: ‘Offer unto God thanks-giving; and pay thy vows unto the most High: and call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shall glorify me. But unto the wicked God saith, What hast thou to do to declare my statutes, or that thou shouldest take my covenant in thy mouth? … Thou givest thy mouth to evil, and thy tongue frameth deceit. Thou sittest and speakest against thy brother; thou slanderest thine own mother’s son. These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes. Now consider this, ye that forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver. Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me: and to him that ordereth his conversation aright will I shew the salvation of God.’ Browning’s Caliban, who is represented in the poem at a time before the action of
The Tempest
begins, resembles Shakespeare’s creation in being both monstrous and sensitive, especially in his close observation of the natural world. See e.g.,
The Tempest
II ii 157
–62: ‘I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow; / And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts; / Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how / To snare the nimble marmoset; I’ll bring thee / To clust’ring filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee / Young scammels from the rock.’ Caliban mentions Setebos, the god worshipped by his ‘dam’ (mother), the witch Sycorax, at I ii 372–3, but does not speculate about his nature; the ‘Quiet’, the divinity above Setebos, is Browning’s invention. The poem’s intellectual sources are those of contemporary debates about evolution and the ‘missing link’ (Darwin,
Origin of Species
, 1859) and, as the title suggests, of older attempts to prove the existence or benevolence of God by reference to the design of the natural world (William Paley,
Natural
Theology
, 1802; see also the note on the ‘Bridgewater Treatises’ in ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium” ’, I.1140). Caliban, by contrast, deduces a cruel, jealous and capricious God from his own experience and observation; his notion of Setebos combines pagan and Old Testament ideas of sacrifice and propitiation with Calvinist ideas about predestination and God’s arbitrary selection of saved and damned. Caliban refers to himself in the third person in some parts of the poem (often eliding the pronoun and putting an apostrophe before the verb, so that ‘’Will’ in I.1 means ‘He will’, ‘’Thinketh’ in I.25 means ‘He thinketh’ etc.). As in
The Tempest
, the plants and creatures described in the poem are an eclectic mixture of English and exotic species (as befits an imaginary and magical landscape). 7.
pompion-plant
Pumpkin. 20–21. Prospero, magician and ruler of the island in
The Tempest;
Miranda, his daughter. Caliban, who inherited the island from Sycorax, is now Prospero’s ‘slave’: ‘he does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / That profit us’ (I ii 308, 311–13). Caliban says of Prospero, ‘’tis a custom with him / I’ th’ afternoon to sleep’ (III iii 83–4). 22–3.
gibe … speech
‘[Caliban] You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse’ (I ii 363–4). 50.
pie
Woodpecker. 51.
oakwarts
Oak-apple galls, growths produced on oak-trees by the larvae of a species of gall wasp. 83.
grigs
Crickets. 92.
mankin
Puny creature; ‘manakin’ is also the name of a small, brightly coloured tropical species of bird. 142. The cuttlefish, a cephalopod, has eight arms and two longer tentacles. 156.
oncelot
Ocelot, a leopard-like cat, grey with fawn spots edged with black.
157.
ounce
Lynx. 160. In
The Tempest
, Caliban attempted to rape Miranda; it was after this that Prospero enslaved him (I ii 344–50). 161.
Ariel
The spirit who carries out Prospero’s magic commands in
The Tempest
. 163–6. Caliban in
The Tempest
is compared to a fish (II ii 18f.), and kept in a hole in a rock (I ii 342–3). 177.
orc
The killer whale; but Caliban probably means an unspecified sea-monster (so used by Browning in
The Ring and the Book
ix 970). 211.
ball
Meteorite. 214–15. The allusion is to a fossil. 229.
urchin
Hedgehog. 258.
films
Membranes.

Confessions

Published
Dramatis Personae
, 1864. 1.
buzzing in my ears
Marlowe,
Doctor Faustus
II i 12–14: ‘[Good Angel] Faustus, repent. Yet God will pity thee. [Evil Angel] Thou art a spirit. God cannot pity thee. [Faustus] Who buzzeth in my ears I am a spirit?’ 3.
vale of tears
Book of Common Prayer, Psalm 84:6 (‘vale of misery’).

Youth and Art

Published
Dramatis Personae
, 1864. In Rome in the winter of 1859–60 Browning did a lot of modelling in clay, and the sculptor John Gibson (1790–1866), mentioned in 1.8, was an admired friend. ‘Smith’ the sculptor and ‘Kate Brown’ the singer, are, as their names suggest, invented characters. 12.
Grisi
Giulia Grisi (1811–69), Italian soprano. 31.
shook upon E
in alt Trilled
a high E (above the treble stave); trilling or ‘shaking’ a note is a technical term and does not imply poor control. 32.
chromatic scale
A musical scale which uses nothing but semitones (as distinct from the diatonic scales). 34.
gave guesses
Gossiped about who was in love with whom. 57. The ‘Prince’ may be Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert (d. 1861), or the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII whom Browning met in Rome in 1859. The ‘Board’ may be that of a grand dinner (e.g., the Royal Academy Dinner of 1851, attended by Prince Albert), or the Board of a public or charitable institution; in either case, this mark of social success and public importance, like his knighthood and membership of the Royal Academy (I.60), denotes Smith’s sacrifice of his youthful ambition to be a great artist, as does Kate Brown’s mercenary marriage. 58.
bals-paré
Full-dress evening balls.

A Likeness

Published
Dramatis Personae
, 1864. 10.
John’s corns ail
. The insensitive comments of his wife and her cousin make John wince. 14.
masks, gloves and foils
Equipment for fencing. 16. A tandem is a two-wheeled carriage with two horses harnessed one before the other, hence the need for the long whip. 18.
the Tipton Slasher
William Perry, from Tipton in Staffordshire, English boxing champion 1850–57; he lost the title to Tom Sayers (see below). 21
Chablais
A district in the French Alps, east of Geneva. 22.
Rarey drumming on Cruiser
In John S. Rarey’s
Art of Taming Horses
, which Browning bought in 1858, there is a picture of Rarey whipping his horse, Cruiser. 23. Tom Sayers was English boxing champion, 1857–60. See ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium” ’, I.1269n. 34.
mezzotint
Engraving by a method in which part of a roughened plate is scraped to give lights and half lights, the rest left to give shadows. 49.
pencil and lyre
Art and music. 54.
Marc Antonios
Marcantonio Raimondi, early-sixteenth century engraver, famous for his prints from Raphael. 55.
Festina lentè!
‘Hasten slowly!’, a tag from the Roman historian Suetonius. 61.
Volpato’s
Giovanni Volpato (1733–1803), renowned engraver.

Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium’

Published
Dramatis Personae
, 1864. A craze for spiritualism swept England and America in the 1850s; Elizabeth Barrett strongly believed in it, while Browning was a resolute sceptic. Sludge is modelled on the American medium Daniel Dunglass Home (1833–86) whom Browning had denounced after attending a seance in London in 1855, later claiming that he had detected Home in the act of cheating. In a letter of 1863 Browning referred to Home as a ‘dung-ball’. After the publication of the poem, Home retaliated by claiming that Browning was jealous of the fact that the ‘spirits’ had crowned his wife with a wreath during the seance and passed him over; Browning mentions this in a letter of 1871, adding: ‘If I ever cross the fellow’s path I shall probably be silly enough to soil my shoe by kicking him … Indeed, I have got to consider such a beast as the proper associate and punishment of those who choose to shut their eyes and open their arms to bestiality incarnate.’ The character of Sludge’s patron,
Hiram H. Horsefall, is imaginary. The setting of the poem in Boston reflects the fact that New England was the centre of American intellectual life and in particular of Transcendentalist philosophy, many of whose adherents were also believers in spiritualism. Sludge is Browning’s only American mono-loguist; though neither of the Brownings ever visited America, they had many American friends in Italy. 9.
Catawba
A light sparkling wine, from a variety of grape named after the Catawba River in South Carolina where it was first discovered. Browning may have taken it from Longfellow’s poem ‘Catawba Wine’ (publ. 1858); see
l.1440
. 31.
undeveloped
Spiritualist jargon: the spirit has not passed through the stages of purification and refinement in the afterlife. 35–7. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), first Postmaster-General of the new United States, which, with his reputation for practical business sense and his association with electricity, makes him a suitable figure for Sludge to call on. American spiritualist circles claimed Franklin as head of the ‘College of Spirits’, a posthumous reversal of his rationalism and scepticism about supernatural phenomena during his lifetime. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), radical and rationalist, author of
The Rights of Man
and
The Age of Reason;
Franklin helped him to settle in America in 1774. 54.
Greeley’s newspaper
Horace Greeley (1811–72) founded the
New-York Tribune
in 1841 and was editor until his death. 65.
Vs
Five-dollar bills; see
l.100
, ‘V-notes’. 81. In his essay ‘Of Vicissitude of Things’, Bacon reports the opinion that were it not for the constancy of the fixed stars and the earth’s diurnal motion, ‘no individual would last one moment; certain it is, that the matter is in a perpetual flux, and never at a stay’. ‘Bacon came’ may refer to his historical existence, or to his ‘appearance’ at one of Sludge’s seances. 121–2.
rare philosophers / In plaguy books
Browning’s father’s library contained many such books on alchemy and the occult, on which Browning drew extensively for
Paracelsus
(1835). 132.
signs and wonders
A Biblical, and especially New Testament tag, e.g., Jesus’s words in John 4:48: ‘Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.’ 133.
scouts
Scorns. 136. Samuel Johnson (1709–84); John Wesley (1703–91), founder of Methodism. ‘Talking of ghosts, he [Johnson] said, “It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it” ’ (Boswell,
Life of Johnson
, Tue. 31 Mar. 1778). Immediately following this entry there is a reference to Wesley. Browning probably read in Southey’s
Life of Wesley
of the episode of the poltergeist in Wesley’s father’s parsonage. 158. Hamlet to the sceptical Horatio,
Hamlet
I v 166–7: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Sludge quotes twice more from this play (II.246–7, 461) as well as from another Shakespeare play with a supernatural element,
Macbeth
(see
l.654n
.). 168.
Parson
. Richard Person (1759–1808), Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and one of the greatest classical scholars of his time. 218.
the stranger in your gates
A visitor who is not a family member; from Exodus 20:10, ‘thy stranger that is within thy gates’. 220.
guest without the wedding-garb
Expelled from the feast in Jesus’s parable, Matthew 22:11–14. 221.
doubling Thomas
The apostle Thomas doubted the reality of Jesus’s resurrection until convinced by touching his wounds, John 20:24–9. 233.
Mexican War
Between Mexico and the United States, 1846–8. 234.
free of
Free to enjoy (‘given the freedom of’). 246–7.
gulling you / To the top o’ your bent Hamlet
III ii 374–5: ‘They fool me to the top of my bent.’ 265.
canvas-backs
A variety of North American duck, famous for its flavour. 280. Pennsylvania was one of the early centres of the spiritualist movement in America, with reports of congregations speaking in tongues; see also below,
I.417. 286.
Horseshoe
The Horseshoe Falls, the Canadian Falls at Niagara. 303–46. Sludge’s satirical account is close to Browning’s own opinion, written shortly after his encounter with Home, of the results of ‘a voluntary prostration of the intelligence before what is assumed to transcend all intelligence’: ‘Once arrived at this point, no trick is too gross; absurdities are referred to as “low spirits”, falsehoods to “personating spirits” – and the One, terribly apparent spirit – the father of lies – has it all his own way.’ 309–12. The correct version should be that Francis Bacon (1561–1626), on his elevation to the peerage took the title of Baron Verulam; he was born not at York but at York House in London, and died at St Albans, not Wales; the rule (not ‘reign’) of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) as Lord Protector during the Interregnum began in 1653, long after Bacon’s death. 328.
Tread on their neighbour’s kibes
Treat their neighbours unfeelingly (‘kibes’ are chilblains). 330.
Barnum
P. T. Barnum (1810–91), the American showman. 343.
a Thirty-third Sonata
For the piano, of which Beethoven wrote thirty-two. 345. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, founded by an Englishwoman, Ann Lee, who emigrated to America in 1774, were called ‘Shakers’ because of their physical response to spiritual influences in their services.
G, with a natural F
A musical impossibility; the scale of G demands F sharp. 346. the ‘
Stars and Stripes
’ Probably ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, the song by Francis Scott Key which became the American national anthem. If it were ‘set to consecutive fourths’ it would sound discordant. 353.
gamboge
Gum resin used as a yellow pigment. 387.
cockered
Pampered. 393
kennel
Gutter. 431–3. Sludge compares his slide into cheating with that of an alcoholic who begins by putting a dash of brandy in his tea (‘souchong’) and ends up drinking brandy straight. 461.
Very like a whale
Polonius, mocked by Hamlet in
Hamlet
III ii 372.480.
Saul and Jonathan
The King of Israel before David, and his son, whom he attempts to kill at one point (I Samuel 18f.). 481.
Pompey and Caesar
Rivals for power in the last Roman republic; Pompey was Caesar’s son-in-law. 500.
blow of blacks
Coal-smuts blown by the wind, an image of gossip. 526.
their Broadway
Perhaps the Corso in Rome. 528.
lapstone
The stone that cobblers lay in their laps to beat leather upon. 576.
prairie-dog
A slip by Browning; the prairie-dog is a rodent, not, as intended, a wild dog. 589.
Milton composing baby-rhymes
A double irony: it would be absurd to imagine Milton writing ‘baby-rhymes’, yet Sludge (or Browning) may also be alluding to Milton’s ‘Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, with its celebration of the infant Jesus. 589–90.
Locke / Reasoning in gibberish
The philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), whose major work was the
Essay concerning Human Understanding
. 591–2.
Asaph setting psalms / To crotchet and quaver
Another
musical impossibility: Asaph, Biblical musician and singer in the time of King David, could not set his psalms in a musical notation developed centuries later. 595.
pothooks
Curved strokes in handwriting, associated with a learner’s hand. 654.
strut and fret his hour Macbeth
V v 24–5: ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.’ 655.
spawl
Spit copiously;
target
Shield. 659–60. Sludge has been forced to act a part, speaking the fustian lines and wearing the humiliating make-up imposed on him by his patrons. 667.
Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Swedish mystic whose visionary writings had a strong attraction for spiritualists (among them, as Browning was aware, Elizabeth Barrett). 678. Rahab was the prostitute who helped Joshua’s spies in Jericho (Joshua 2); ‘Miss Stokes’ stands for the respectable spiritualist who ‘prostitutes’ herself by telling lies in a good cause. 683.
a live coal from the altar
Isaiah 6:6–7: ‘Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.’ 690–93. This famous anecdote is told of Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen, 1801.694:
a real love of a lie
Bacon, in his essay ‘Of Truth’, speaks of ‘a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself. 706–7.
marching on / To the promised land
A phrase from the hymn ‘Through the night of doubt and sorrow’ (number 274,
Hymns Ancient and Modern
). 740–45. Alluding to the episode in Acts 17, in which the frivolous Athenians invite Paul to preach to them on ‘Mars’ hill’, the Areopagus: ‘For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.’ 775.
fribble
Trifler. 784. The ‘greenhorn’ is the prostitute’s inexperienced young client; the ‘bully’ her ‘protector’. 788.
Pasiphae
In Greek myth, wife of Minos, King of Crete, whose union with a bull produced the Minotaur. 802.
sympathetic ink
Invisible ink. 803.
odic lights
Supposed to be emanations of a spiritual force called Od, ‘discovered’ by the German chemist Karl von Reichenbach in 1845. 805–6.
though it seem to set / The crooked straight again
In defiance of Ecclesiastes 1:15: ‘That which is crooked cannot be made straight.’ 832.
delf
Glazed earthenware, from Delft or Delf in Holland. 846.
Samuel’s ghost appeared to Saul
Conjured up by the help of a medium, I Samuel 28:7–25.910.
raree-show
A show carried in a box, such a peep-show or puppet-show, exhibited at markets and fairs. 919.
The Bible says so
Genesis 1:14: ‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven … and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.’ 921.
Charles’s Wain
The constellation of the Great Bear, or Big Dipper. 929.
powder-plots prevented
Referring to the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605.995–1004. The informal ‘knocking’ represents the unorthodox summons to belief conveyed by intimations from the spirit-world, in contrast to the ‘bell’ of human reason, natural theology, or the ‘traditional peal’ of church bells, i.e., orthodox Christianity. 1035.
canthus
Corner of the eye, where the lids meet. 1074.
the “Great and Terrible Name”
Psalm 99:1–3: ‘The Lord reigneth; let the people tremble: he sitteth between the cherubims; let the earth be moved. The Lord is great in Zion; and he is high above all the people. Let them praise thy great and
terrible name; for it is holy.’ Further on (I.1086f.) Sludge alludes to the refusal of orthodox Jews to pronounce the name of Jahweh (Jehovah). 1117.
stomachcyst
Apparently Browning’s coinage, meaning a minute primitive organism, such as the one described in the following lines. 1128–40. For the ‘natural theology’ outlined here, see note to ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ above. 1137.
We are His children
St Paul’s words to the Athenians (see
ll.740–5n
.), Acts 17:28, though the context is the reverse of the one Sludge alludes to here (that ‘all things minister / To man’): ‘in him [God] we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.’ See note to ‘Cleon’ above. 1140.
the Bridgewater book
The Reverend Francis, Earl of Bridgewater (1758–1829), left money in his will for the writing of essays ‘On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as Manifested in the Creation’. The ‘Bridgewater Treatises’ were published 1833–40; the first, by Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), was called ‘The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man’. See note to ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, above. 1170.
boblink
Usually ‘bobolink’, a North American songbird. 1187.
that same personage
Sludge, who is using the metaphor of himself as ‘heir’ (see
ll. 1140ff
.), invokes the analogy of the literal heir to the English throne, the Prince of Wales (future Edward VII), whose entourage during his visit to America caused much comment in the American press. 1225.
‘Time’ with the foil in carte
A technical term in fencing, meaning to judge the correct moment to parry an opponent’s thrust. 1227.
Make the red hazard
Pocket the red ball in billiards. 1268.