The Columbia History of British Poetry (109 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 432
Browning achieved these goals still more successfully in the forms he was to make most distinctively his ownvariations on the dramatic monologue, dramatic lyric, and soliloquy. In such poems as "Porphyria's Lover," "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," and many others, he presented dramatized speakers at crucial points in their lives, generally at moments of conscious self-depiction and unconscious self-revelation. The form enabled Browning to explore the psychological depths that had been opened by Romantic poetry, but without the egotism of talking about his own inner depths, or the overarching ambition of formulating universal truths about the relations of the individual mind to the cosmos. Browning cogently described his sense of limitation in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett: "You speak out,
you
,I only make men and women speakgive you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light."
Browning's remarks call to mind the distinction between what he elsewhere called the "objective" and the "subjective" poet. The "subjective" poet, a thoroughly Romantic ideal, seeks the pure white light: "Not what man sees, but what God seesthe
ideas
of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand . . . and he digs where he standspreferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind." This kind of poet, Browning acknowledged, must be "the ultimate requirement of every age,'' but after his early experiments with the "subjective" mode, he found his own distinctive style as an "objective" poet, "one whose endeavour [was] to reproduce things external (whether the phenomena of the scenic universe, or the manifested action of the human heart and brain)" for the better "apprehension of his fellow men."
Something very like Browning's own aesthetic creed is expressed in his dramatic monologue "Fra Lippo Lippi," where the monk enthusiastically describes his true vocation as a painter dedicated to reproducing "the beauty and the wonder and the power" of "God's workspaint any one, and count it crime / To let a truth slip." Yet Browning was far less interested in representing the external beauty of "God's works" than in the generally quirky, always subtle "manifested action of the human heart and brain."
Although he was an "objective" poet by virtue of representing minds other than his own, his real subject was subjectivity, and his dramatic monologues characteristically explore the ways in which individual identity is circumscribed by historical contingency, by prevailing sys-
 
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tems of belief, and by emotional needs. Even though Browning himself believed in God and in some ultimate and absolute truth, his historical relativism shows, almost by definition, the limitations of human perception, the impossibility of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. His works explore the inner workings of a gallery of characters comparable only to Shakespeare'sranging from the lunacy of "Porphyria's Lover" to the utter lucidity of St. John in "A Death in the Desert," from the bestial growl of the thwarted monk in ''Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" to the aristocratic eloquence of the Duke in "My Last Duchess," from the subhuman reasonings of "Caliban upon Setebos" to the subtle casuistry of "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
Browning's most ambitious examination of the extreme difficulties involved in finding the truth among the kaleidoscopic perspectives of limited human visions is
The Ring and the Book
, a poem of over twenty thousand lines based on a somewhat lurid and seemingly unpromising Italian account of a murder that occurred in 1698. The poem represents the events in lengthy, intricate monologues from the widely different perspectives of the murderer, the dying victim, the chivalrous priest who attempted to rescue her, various gossiping townspeople, the lawyers involved, and even the Pope, to whom a final appeal has been made.
The Ring and the Book
multiplies the challenge always present in Browning's dramatic monologuesthe challenge to read through the distorting subjectivity of any individual speaker to find truth.
Yet although Browning took as his primary subject the difficulties of human subjectivity, his skepticism was limited by the belief that ultimate truths do exist, and can be at least vaguely intuited through a kind of imaginative faith. In fact, Browning offered a cheering faith to readers in his doubting age. In such poems as "A Death in the Desert," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and many about musicians and painters, he expressed his own conviction that at our best we can intuit a transcendent God, and believe on faith even without empirical evidence.
Indeed, Browning made a virtue of the necessity of doubtlike his Rabbi Ben Ezra, he could "prize the doubt / Low kinds exist without," because doubt is precisely the "spark" that kindles the highest human aspirations. In the words of his Andrea del Sarto (who fails to live up to them), "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?" Victorian readers found comfort in Browning's optimistic creed that mortal incompleteness and imperfection only imply an immortal
 
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completeness and perfection beyond this life: "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round" ("Abt Vogler").
Modern readers, however, far from looking to Browning for an "idea of the world," are more likely to appreciate him as the poet of multi-tudinousness, of near-anarchic life and energy. His collected works offer not only a multitude of exceedingly diverse characters and voices, but also of exceedingly diverse poetic formsa seemingly new and different poetic idiom for every speaker. His pages seem as full of grotesquely proliferating life as the leaves of the volume tossed into a stagnant puddle in "Sibrandus Schnafnaburgensis," "tickled and tousled and browsed" by worm, slug, eft, and water beetle: "All that life and fun and romping, / All that frisking and twisting and coupling.''
Browning is not likely to have been disturbed by Walter Bagehot's complaint that his "grotesque" art was too "showy" to guide what he regarded as the debased "taste of England." He would, on the other hand, probably have been pleased by G. K. Chesterton's affirmation that
The Ring and the Book
(and Browning's works taken collectively) may be regarded as the epic of a newly democratic age "because it is the expression of the belief . . . that no man ever lived upon this earth without possessing a point of view" and that no one person's point of view, not even the poet's, can adequately represent or even guide all others. For Browning the poetic imagination was no longer "imperial." His departure from traditional forms, his utter break with poetic decorum, his adoption of conversational, idiomatic, occasionally grotesque language enabled him to create a new poetic mode for the modern age. Despite his own belief in the ability of the "subjective poet" to intuit the pure white light of truth, Browning's poetry shows that the myriad prismatic hues of human perception can never be resolved back into whiteness.
Nevertheless, Browning retained enough belief in the expressionistic Romantic aesthetic to praise Elizabeth Barrett in 1845 for being able to "speak out" the "completest expression of [her] being." Browning's praise echoed Barrett's own description of her poetic vocation in her 1844
Poems
: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing. . . . I have done my work, so far, as work,not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being,but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain." The passage admirably sums up Barrett's poetic aspirationsshe conceived of herself within the Romantic tradition of the inspired
 
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visionary, and she sought to satisfy the Victorian imperative of social duty by the hard work of leading humanity towards the highest ideals. Such a self-conception would be ambitious for any Victorian poet, but it was quite extraordinary for a woman.
Victorian assumptions about women's role in society made it extremely difficult for a woman to "speak out" at all, let alone to become a prophet-bard. Even Barrett herself believed that "there is a natural inferiority of mind in women . . . the history of art and of genius testifies to this fact openly." According to contemporary science, women's brains were not only small, but were ill-adapted to intellectual pursuits. Even George Eliot thought that women's brains lacked the "voltaic pile" necessary to crystallize ideas. The scientific mumbo-jumbo, of course, merely reinforced the nearly universal assumption that woman's place was in the homea confined place that felt to many women like a prison.
The cultural limits assigned to women inevitably included women poets, or "poetesses," who were expected to maintain a ladylike submissiveness and humility in their verses, and to confine themselves to relatively "artless" outpourings of approproately womanly emotionsreligious devotion, love, loss, and grief. "L. E. L." (Letitia Landon) characterized her role as an early Victorian poetess: "My power is but a woman's power, / Of softness and of sadness made'' ("The Golden Violet"). And Mackenzie Bell's comments on Jean Ingelow's range sum up the prevailing view that women's poetry generally should be restricted to a "tender womanliness, a reverent simplicity of religious faith, and a deep touch of sympathy."
Staying within these bounds, Felicia Hemans, Landon, Ingelow, and other women were able to achieve widespread popularity and even considerable (though somewhat condescending) critical praise. But for a poet as ambitious as Barrett, there was no significant female tradition in poetrythere were plenty of "poetesses," but no women poets of real stature. Barrett herself lamented the absence of a tradition to follow: "I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none." Also, within the male poetic tradition, women were represented as the object of the poet's desire or quest or visionthere was no precedent for the woman as the central perceiving or creative subjectivity, and therefore no defined role for the aspirant woman poet. Finally, creativity was defined within the Romantic tradition as a kind of repetition of the creative fiat of God the Fatherlike priesthood, it was a masculine prerogative.
 
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The normal restrictions on women were actually exaggerated in Barrett's case. Until her marriage to Robert Browning in 1846, the combination of a sternly protective father and her own invalidism kept her almost entirely confined to the home. Struggling to find a poetic role for herself in the mid 1820s, she saw her isolation as a serious handicap: "I am more & more convinced that an unagitated life is not the life for a Poet. His mind should ever & anon be transplanted like a young tree. It should be allowed to shoot its roots in a free soil, & not vegetate in a corner." Significantly, the Poet is gendered maleeven in her poetry Barrett consistently represented the poetic character as masculine until the mid-1840s, so that the "completest expression of that being to which [she] could attain" evidently did not include an expression of her being as a woman poet.
In fact, Barrett's early works reflect a resistance to her culturally enforced role and an attempt to find a place for herself within masculine discourse. She studied the traditional masculine subjects, Latin and Greek, and by 1833 had achieved sufficient proficiency to produce a translation of Aeschylus's
Prometheus Bound
and to assert, at the age of thirteen, that "even the female may drive her Pegasus through the realms of Parnassus."
Her first mature volume of original poetry,
The Seraphim and Other Poems
(1838), reveals Barrett's ambivalence about her poetic vocation in several ways. The ambitious title poem, which adopts the form of Greek tragedy to represent the dialogue of two angels watching the crucifixion, significantly avoids the problem of a gendered poetic voice by its dramatic form, and by presenting visionary truths through the ungendered voices of the angels. A human voice only appears in a closing epilogue, and only to deprecate the "counterfeit" of "seraph language." But in her early poems Barrett was ultimately less concerned with the difficulties of singing as a woman than with the difficulties of singing as a Christianindeed, the most striking feature of these poems is their piety and Christian humility. In several poems where the poet fails to be a priest,
he
is explicitly contrasted with the Christian, especially when he vaingloriously celebrates his own creativity instead of praising God's creation.
Even more frequently, as in "A Song Against Singing," the point is made that fallen human nature can only sing imperfectlythe highest and best utterances should be "prayer in place of singing." Indirectly, of course, gender is probably still an issue herethe humbly submissive
 
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stance was especially appropriate to a woman poet. Many of Barrett's difficulties are oddly reflected in the title poem of her 1844 volume,
A Drama of Exile
. Like "The Seraphim," this poem is set squarely in the male traditionusing the form of Greek tragedy to retell the story of Genesis. Again the dramatic form avoids the problem of a gendered poetic voice, but in this poem Barrett began to find poetic opportunities rather than limitations in her gender. She noted that it was written "with a peculiar reference to Eve's allotted grief," which seemed to her "more expressible by a woman than a man." Still, she gave the role of visionary not only to various spirits and to Christ, but also to Adam, who is inspired by "God breathing through my breath.'' Eve's role is to be "woman, wife, and mother," and her highest good is "worthy endurance of permitted pain."
Characteristically, Barrett's early poems lament the fallen state of humanity and look forward in Christian hope to redemption. "The Island," "The Deserted Garden," "My Doves," "The Lost Bower," "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," and "Hector in the Garden" all express regret for a lost innocence, submission to God's will, and prayerful anticipation of the "Heavenly promise." Like most women's poetry of the day, their dominant tone is melancholy, and despite what contemporary reviewers sometimes referred to as the "virile" appropriation of male forms in some of the most ambitious poems, they both implicitly and explicitly assign a subordinate role to women. The poems that contributed most to Barrett's contemporary popularity were a series of ballad romances about women's tribulations in love"The Romaunt of Margret," "A Romance of the Ganges," "The Romaunt of the Page," "The Lay of the Brown Rosary," "The Rhyme of the Duchess May," and "Bertha in the Lane." The one ballad that did not represent the woman losing all for love was the extremely popular "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," in which the highborn lady accepts the love of her lowborn suitorbut only because he is a poet, and therefore "noble, certes."
In none of these poems does Barrett seem to "speak out" the full "expression of her being," yet she was certainly not satisfied with the cultural role assigned the mere "poetess," and Robert Browning was right in seeing full self-expression as her ultimate aim. She did "speak out" in "The Cry of the Children," her passionate poem of protest against the exploitation of children in factories and mines. And in a series of sonnets she attempted to sing "the music of my nature," to

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