Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) Read online

  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

  Follow Penguin

  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.’

  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 ben
t 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.