Swinburne dries out - the most horrible and loathsome book ever to be got into type and other edifying subjects

Let’s check in with Algernon Swinburne, the fourth of six volumes of his Letters (1960, ed. Cecil Lang), covering 1877 through 1882.  I have run into a selfish problem.  With two volumes of letters to go, I fear that the bulk of the best ones might be behind me.

Swinburne begins the book as an out of control alcoholic, constantly ill, on the verge of death either from internal complaints or a drunken accident.  His friends and mother conspire against him to move him into the house of his lawyer, agent, nurse, and number one fan Theodore Watts, in order to not just dry Swinburne out but to keep him away from bottles.  A seven month gap in the letters is the only indication of the difficulty of the task of keeping Swinburne alive.  His friends succeed, and Swinburne lives, and writes, for another thirty years.

Afterwards, though, Swinburne is not quite as interesting in his letters.  But he is a lot more interesting than if he were dead.

Some highlights:

Swinburne’s repeated attacks on “that brute beast” Zola’s L’assommoir, a “damnable dunghill of a book” (letter 866, June 8, 1877), “the most horrible and loathsome book ever to be got into type” (942, July 11, 1879).  He singles out not the novel’s alcoholism, which would be too ironic, but the child abuse and filth.  Later (1020, July 3, 1880), Swinburne declares Humphrey Clinker “all but utterly unreadable to me” because of its scatology, at which point I find myself baffled by Swinburne’s Victorian fastidiousness.  All of this from the great champion of Sade’s Justine! “[D]e Sade at his foulest was to Zola at his purest ‘as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine’ in the faculty of horrifying and nauseating the human stomach and the human soul” (942).  Some of this must be class, the aristocrat clubbing the bourgeois upstart with a Marquis.

Celebrity sightings, several before the fact, such as a letter from an 1882 letter by a young Oscar Wilde on behalf of an old Walt Whitman.  Wilde, at this point, had published a single book of poems and was touring America as a celebrity aesthete.  Writes Swinburne, “I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody, and had no notion he was the sort of man to play the mountebank as he seems to have been doing” (1132, Aug. 4, 1882).

And here is John Davidson, at this point a pale aesthete in training, a decade from writing good poetry, declaring Swinburne “the greatest poet since Shakespere” (912, March 28, 1878).  Impressive how Davidson was eventually able to purge all trace of this early worship from his poems.

Speaking of Shakespeare, Swinburne gets into a pointless feud with Robert Browning, the figurehead president of the New Shakespeare Society, over an insult from another member of that organization.  More snobbery: “no person who remains in any way or in any degree associated with the writer of that pamphlet is fit to hold any intercourse or keep up any acquaintance with me” (1065, Feb. 20, 1881).  Good riddance, Browning must have thought, sitting on his balcony in Florence.

Near the end of the book, Swinburne finally meets his hero Victor Hugo.  The episode is a triumph – a triumph of staying alive.  The breathless letter describing the encounter (1193, Nov. 26, 1882) is, charmingly, to his mother.

His white hair is as thick as his dark eyebrows, and his eyes are as bright and clear as a little child’s.  After dinner, he drank my health with a little speech, of which – tho’ I sat just opposite him – my accursed deafness prevented my hearing a single word.

During these years, Swinburne wrote numerous articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica, a verse play, and enough poetry for an astonishing four books – three published in 1880 alone.  There are two great poems in that mass, two I know of.  Tomorrow for those.

The Best Books of 1864 - This could but have happened once, / And we missed it, lost it for ever.

I begin with James McNeill Whistler’s 1864 Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, on display at the Freer, just because I like it, and for the metaphor, and because it prevents me from using a bizarre and hideous Millais that has tempted me.  No further japonisme follows.

An English reader in 1864 was in serial novel paradise.  Dickens had begun Our Mutual Friend; Trollope had completed Small House at Allington and started Can You Forgive Her?; Elizabeth Gaskell had Wives and Daughters in motion; if he also happened to subscribe to Dublin University Magazine he was getting Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, which sure ain’t Dickens but does have a locked room mystery.

Now, if I were alive in 1864 I would have ignored all of that while hashing away at the Best Books of 1714, but a wiser reader would have had a good time with the above.  Dickens was a celebrity, Trollope and Gaskell famous enough – I don’t know about Le Fanu – so these were all good candidates for Best of the Year lists, if the Victorians had had such vulgar things.

The novels would have had to compete with John Henry Newman’s memoir Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which I read this year but never mentioned here as perhaps a bit over my head, Tennyson’s pathetic Enoch Arden, and Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae.  The latter is a masterpiece: “Caliban upon Setebos”! “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’”!  Byronism!  I took this post’s title from one of its poems, “Youth and Art,” where the context is a little different.

The great caveat, as always: in English.  My pick for best book of the year is either the Browning or the Dickens, but the winner at this point in influence and status has been Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, one of the many literary responses to Fathers and Sons and that crazy Chernyshevsky novel.  Dostoevsky would likely not have made the Russian Best of the Year list, though, since his novella was ignored at the time.  Maybe Nikolai Leskov’s No Way Out, yet another response to Turgenev and nihilism, would have made it.  Lists would not even make sense in an environment like that, where literature is a branch of political and philosophical argument and no one cares about whether or not a book is a “good read,” whatever that is.

Two almost secret firsts.  Henry James published his first short story – strangely, a noir thriller about a contract murder – in a short-lived abolitionist magazine.  No one could have guessed what was to come.  Not such an important event, since if this one had not worked out the next one would have, or the one after that.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Mendele Mocher Sforim published his story “The Little Man” in the Yiddish supplement to a Hebrew-language newspaper, thus inventing modern Yiddish literature, just like that.  What a mystery, for such an act to have such consequences.  Mendele would write better fiction, including a redone novella-length version of this story, and his disciple Sholem Aleichem would write better fiction than that.  Something new had been brought into the world.  Almost no one in the world knew about it, but enough knew, and just the right ones, so it was not missed, not lost, but preserved.

All was folly - I laughed and mocked - sympathy with Browning's murderer

Each party wants too much, claims sympathy
For its object of compassion, more than just.  (IV, ll. 1572-3)

Oddly, this description of the opposing sides in The Ring and the Book is almost true.

One of the parties is a man who viciously stabbed his teenage bride, and her parents, because he suspected her of adultery, and whose defense is, primarily: what else can you expect a husband to do?  Browning is modern enough to assume an audience that finds this defense appalling, yet the murderous Count Guido is given his own monologue, his pleas before the priestly judges who will sentence him to execution and who have extracted a confession by torture:

Noblemen were exempt, the vulgar thought,
From racking: but, since the law thinks otherwise,
I have been put to the rack…
Much could not happen, I was quick to faint…  (V, ll. 11-14, 18)

Maybe a little sympathy begins to sneak in.  A little bit of pity.  After all, Count Guido is a man of his time, not ours, with different ideas of honor.  Maybe I actually can, spending some time with him, become able to see his point of view, regardless of whether I agree with it.  The power of fiction, or anyway the power of the first person narrator.

Count Guido gets two chapters, though.  Book V was titled “Count Guido Franscechini.”  Book XI is just “Guido.”  Two hooded priests have just entered his cell to give him the Pope’s decision – death, tomorrow.  All appeals are exhausted.  So Guido talks to them, just lets it all out.

You have my last word, - innocent am I
As Innocent my Pope and murderer,
Innocent as a babe, as Mary’s own
As Mary’s self, - I said, say and repeat, -  (XI, ll. 28-31)

The horror of Guido’s monologue lies in the discovery that he is much worse than he had seemed before, and yet the blasphemous passage above is sincere, or as sincere as anything in this Mephistophelian chapter can be.  The chapter is an outpouring of bile, blood, sarcasm, and heresy rare in the nineteenth century outside of, perhaps, certain other Robert Browning poems.

I am used to this sort of thing in later fiction.  I know how to keep my distance from Humbert Humbert in Lolita or the fictional murderers, dictators, and lunatics who have been narrating their own stories for the last century.  I do not believe I would have been so savvy in 1869.  I would have fallen for the tricks.  Maybe I still did, a bit, because I was still a bit shocked by the end of the chapter, when death is truly at hand and Guido has exhausted his arsenal, and he turns to his Beatrice, Pompilia, his murdered child-wife.

Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while
Out of the world of words I had to say?
Not one word!  All was folly – I laughed and mocked!
Sirs, my first true word, all truth and no lie,
Is – save me notwithstanding!  Life is all!
I was just stark mad,- let the madman live
Pressed by as many chains as you pleas pile!
Don’t open!  Hold me from them!  I am yours,
I am the Granduke’s – no, I am the Pope’s!
Abate,- Cardinal, - Christ, - Maria, - God,…
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?  (XI, 2409-19, ellipses in original)

Oh there’s repristination! - or, Robert Browning roasts a porcupine

Here is where I lean on quotations I pulled from The Ring and the Book for various reasons.  It’s an instructive exercise!   I hope.

First, one example of one reason Robert Browning is difficult.  He is describing the ring in the poem’s title, how it was made:

That trick is, the artificer melts up wax
With honey, so to speak; he mingles gold
With gold’s alloy, and, duly tempering both,
Effects a manageable mass, then works:
But his work ended, once the thing a ring,
Oh there’s repristination!  Just a spirt
O’ the proper fiery acid o’er its face,
And forth the alloy unfastened flies in fume…  (I, ll. 17-24)

Word-power builders like “repristination” are regular features of Browning’s poems.  “A coinage of B’s, meaning a return to an earlier, purer state,” note on p. 263, emphasis added to make me feel better about not knowing the meaning of “repristination.”

Please review the last two lines above.  Goal #1 is to follow the rules of blank verse, to count syllables and stresses.  Goal #2 is to make the blank verse natural enough to credibly fit the character speaking the lines.  Goal # 3 is cranking up the poetic effects, like the long string of “f” words in those two lines. 

Granite, time’s tooth should grate against, not graze, -
Why, this proved sandstone, friable, fast to fly  (I, 660-1)

Or even better:

Come, here’s the last drop does its worst to wound,
Here’s Guido poisoned to the bone, you say,
Your boasted still’s full strain and strength: not so!
One master-squeeze from screw shall bring to birth
The hoard i’ the heart o’ the toad, hell’s quintessence.  (II, 1364-8)

It is possible that the more the poetic effects are laid on, the more obscure the verse becomes and the more damage is done to Goal #2, naturalness.  An entire poem or this length written this way – well, Browning could never have finished it.  Algernon Swinburne even in quite long poems is attracted to the idea that every single line must be puffed and polished to peaks of poetic perfection, and as a result he is even more obscure than Browning, at times a poet of songful gibberish, lovely, sonorous gibberish.

As interesting as the story is and as cleverly designed as the multiple perspectives are, the reader of The Ring and the Book has to enjoy the poetry, or else the enterprise if pointless.  That is what I am trying to say.

Or, if not the poetry, the recipes (Gigia is the cook):

(There is a porcupine to barbacue;
Gigia can jug a rabbit well enough,
With sour-sweet sauce and pine-pips; but, good Lord,
Suppose the devil instigate the wench
To stew, not roast him? Stew my porcupine?
If she does, I know where his quills shall stick!
Come, I must go myself and see to things:
I cannot stay much longer stewing here)  (VIII, 1368-75)

The old Joy of Cooking is with Gigia – porcupines are for stewing.  A bit earlier (ll. 535-41) there is a recipe for liver with parsley and fennel – “nothing stings / Fried liver out of its monotony / Of richness, like a root of fennel, chopped.”  How I would like this to be Browning’s comment on his poetry.  He must constantly sting his blank verse out of its monotony.  He uses every trick he’s got.

How happy those are who know how to write! - Browning's little joke - a post on The Ring and the Book

No one wants to read about it and I don’t want to write about it, but I read The Ring and the Book (1868-9) so I’m going to get some blog posts out of it.  It’s Robert Browning’s massive 21,000 line verse novel about a sensational Roman murder and trial from 1698.  Not exactly pulled from the headlines, but rather from a yellow book of documents Browning bought from an antique dealer in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria.

The problems with Browning’s “Italian murder thing” (Vol. VII, p. 261) are, to be clear: 1) length (800 pages of blank verse), 2) difficulty (it’s by Robert Browning), and 3) monotony, although much of the latter is a necessary help with the book’s difficulty.

The poem is in twelve chapters, an introduction by a narrator I will call Browning, ten dramatic monologues by participants in the case, including two by Count Guido, the murderer, and a return to Browning for a wrap-up.  Each of the characters tells the story of the murder in his (or, once, her) own words, which means that the entire story is actually repeated ten times, each time with subtle variations in detail and emphasis.  Ideally, I would I would file away every discrepancy and error with an eye to discovering the motive of the speaker, then filtering it all to piece together the True Story of the murder.

In practice, it was hard enough just keeping track of where I was in each retelling.  “Oh, this is where Pompilia meets the priest, right.”  Very useful, repetition, for the reader who is lost.

The murder story is complicated, but Browning had the right instinct, since it’s a good one.  Pompilia, all of fourteen, has been married off by her aged parents to the noble but poor Count Guido, who mistreats her.  With the help of a young priest Pompilia flees her husband.  The fugitives are captured and separated, the priest exiled, Pompilia put in a convent.  The twists start coming – e.g., Pompilia is pregnant (but by whom?) – leading to Count Guido’s murder of his child wife and her parents.  One more twist – Pompilia, a tough teenager, clings to life long enough to identify her own murderer, along with a 1,828 line dramatic monologue.  “How happy those are who know how to write!” she says in line 81, an inside joke from a poet whose specialty is speech in verse.

Anyway, thus the trial, the real-life documents, and the imagined monologues, from the murderer, the victim, the priest, lawyers for both parties, and even the Pope.

Jeanne of Necromancy Never Pays was, on her sixth anniversary, taking requests for poems.   Eying the bulk of the thing myself, I suggested The Ring and the Book – as a joke, I swear, as a joke, except that I was going to and in fact did read it. The poem’s a stunner, a great achievement, and I will do my best, or at least second-best, let’s not go nuts, to point out some of its real pleasures, despite the element of absurdity about the whole thing – to reading it, or writing about it, or, directed at Browning, having written it.

I felt, once I had finished the poem, that I was finally ready to read it, that if I turned back to the first line and began again I might be able to get somewhere.  But instead I read something else and write this.

I read The Ring and the Book in volumes VII, VIII, and IX of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Ohio University Press, 1985-9.

I am not interested in art. I am interested in the obstacles to art. - Richard Howard's Robert Browning

A swerve:  Richard Howard’s poem “November 1889,” found in Findings (1971).  The Howard poem is an imagined monologue by an elderly Browning, speaking to his son in Venice about – oh, everything.  Browning died on December 12, 1889.  That should frame the poem.  Hey, look, Browning was born on May 7, 1812, so this is his bicentenary year, too, just like Dickens.

Browning, knowing death is near, is delivering to his son Pen the box of his and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letters, “five-hundred letters, by my count” for posthumous publication:

      Some twenty years since I looked
          at what is in the box.
          Cowardice, call it that;
    I do not know the name.  Sufficient
for me, knowing they are there.

Browning has been thinking about his and Elizabeth’s reputation:  “I dread but one thing: biography.”  His typically optimistic solution is openness:

                                       It should be two volumes…
          Nothing but ourselves then,
          though that be too much now
      for me.  Put the box away,
      high and dry.  I am still here.

Those ellipses belong to Howard; the complete correspondence of the Brownings with each other and everyone else has now been published in eighteen volumes.  Browning was so rarely himself in his poems that I take Howard’s line as a curious inversion of death, a surrender not of but into Browning’s own self.

That is the plot, so to speak.  The rest of the poem is commentary:  Browning on Venice through the years (“the marble blacker / the patience of ruin deeper”), comments on Wilkie Collins, who had died in September (“Well, we are all stewing-pans, and can cook only what we can hold”).  Browning is having trouble writing because of “the torment of starch / in my new shirts,” and also because he fears he is wasting his time at idiotic parties, including one at which a woman “with queenly airs / and a snake, I vow, tattooed on her ankle” tries to seduce him.

I am not sure how much later Browning I really plan to read.  His critical reputation after The Ring and the Book is not so hot, but I can admire the man that Howard depicts.  What relationship this character has to the real Browning I cannot say, but I see what Howard, or Browning, or “Browning," means in this passage, a potential motto for Wuthering Expectations:

                      They seem
to care so deeply
for what they call art:
          I suppose it is like one
          of those indelicate subjects
                  which always sounds better
                   in a foreign language.
    I am not interested in art.
I am interested in the obstacles
    to art.

***

Richard Howard is a master of Browning-like dramatic monologues.  The book before Findings, the 1969 Untitled Subjects is full of nothing but – poems spoken by or about Richard Strauss , Walter Scott, John Ruskin, Thackeray (“probably Thackeray,” Howard notes).  Howard is probably best known as a translator from the French: Baudelaire and Stendhal and a shelf of Roland Barthes.  But anyone with sympathy for Browning and his century should try Howard’s poems.

Don’t it want trimming, turning, furbishing up and polishing over? - Robert Browning the Medium

I have been reading Robert Browning’s poems not in some Selected Poems of but in replicas of the original published volumes.  Ugly and unsatisfying replicas, such as The Complete Works of Robert Browning Volume VI, Ohio University Press, 1996, where I read Dramatis Personae and part II of Men and Women, simply ignoring the fifth or third of the page describing the manuscript variants.

I wish I could read Browning’s four great collections – Dramatic Lyrics (1841), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1855), and Dramatis Personae (1864) – as four separate objects, as books.  I guess I could edit an electronic text, pick a cover, and send it to a print-on-demand joint.  If I ever need another hobby, I’ll do that.

Selected Poem volumes and anthologies pull almost all of their Robert Browning from these four books.  My Norton Anthology of English Literature gives Browning about 90 pages, a huge amount of space.  Three poems in two pages are from his later work.  The Penguin Classics Selected Poems is more generous to Late Browning, giving only 240 of 290 pages to his four major books.  In both cases, the enormous 1868-9 The Ring and the Book is omitted.  I have not read it, but I will, I hope.

Dramatis Personae was published after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although many of the poems were written earlier.  It is, and this is one good reason to read the collection as a book, suffused with EBB, even though only one poem, “Prospice,” a challenge to Death, is actually about her:

And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
                Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
                Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul!  I shall clasp thee again,
                 And with God be the rest!  (23-28)

If I am mistaking the speaker, as is likely, then the poem is not about EBB, at least not directly.

About a third of Dramatis Personae is given to a single long monologue, “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’.”  The medium’s name tells me what I need to know about Browning’s attitude towards spiritualism.  Elizabeth was a believer, Robert was not, although he apparently kept his frustration at what he saw as his wife’s gullibility to himself.  Or he directed it into this poem, which I doubt he would have published while Elizabeth lived.  Mr. Sludge is simply a fraud, a con man,  and the poem is his long, drunken confession.

At least that is how it begins.  The confession, including details about the magician’s tricks of floating tables and ghostly presences, somehow turns into a justification (“As for religion – why, I served it, sir! \ I’ll stick to that!”, 664-5), and the justification becomes a metaphysics (“I live by signs and omens,” 971), imposture as a system of belief:

Well, when you hear, you’ll answer them [genuine spiritual signs], start up
And stride into the presence, top of toe,
And there find Sludge beforehand, Sludge that sprang
At noise o’ the knuckle on the partition-wall!
I think myself the more religious man.  (1001-5)

Like all great con men, Sludge is able to bring himself to believe whatever nonsense he spouts, at least for the moment, so there is no stable position for the reader.  The audience, the “you,” is not merely a Browning-like skeptic, but a blackmailer, so that he is not much help either.  Sludge’s system inevitably (with the help of the booze) collapses into self-interest:

What need I care?  I cheat in self-defence,
And there’s my answer to a world of cheats!
Cheat?  To be sure, sir!  What’s the world worth else?
Who takes it as he finds, and thanks his stars?
Don’t it want trimming, turning, furbishing up
And polishing over?  (1346-51)

A line has been crossed here.  Is Sludge a spiritualist, or an artist, a poet?  Browning and the fraud converge.  Both are magicians.  One is rather more skilled than the other.

Such good books.

I joy because the quails come - obscure Browning, difficult Browning

Robert Browning was, for a time, best known – well, first he was best known as the husband of a famous and beloved poet, so I mean aside from the sheen of Elizabeth Barrett Browning – he was best known as the author of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”:

     Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
     And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
    And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles…

This first-rate children’s poem has been replaced by “My Last Duchess,” now the representative* Browning anthology piece.  “My Last Duchess” is a perfect textbook on how to read the dramatic monologue.  The narrator is a character, certainly not Robert Browning, who was not an Italian duke.  He tells us a story but skips crucial juicy bits (“This grew; I gave commands; \ Then all smiles stopped together”) but I can sleuth out the gaps without much trouble.  Maybe I have to read the short poem twice.

My point is that these two famous Robert Browning poems are clear.  Reading Browning in bulk, though, I cannot escape the fact that much of his work is defiantly obscure.  His earliest works, the long Shelleyan closet dramas Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) are close to incomprehensible; Sordello (1840) was more than close, and defeated me after a few pages.   As if I remember a thing about the first two, which I read!

Young Browning was allusive and learned, but he also left out too much.  His leaps in argument are too great.  Perhaps we see a reason I like Browning so much; the same charges could be brought against Wuthering Expectations.

In Browning’s mature poems, obscurity transforms into difficulty.  “Caliban Upon Setebos; Or Natural Theology in the Island,” one of the masterpieces from Dramatis Personae (1864) will show what I mean.  Caliban leads me to The Tempest, but what is Setebos, a person, a place?  The name is from the play, invoked twice by Caliban, “my dam’s god Setebos,” so a god, or God.

Caliban is the speaker or thinker in the poem, but he refers to himself in both the third and the first person, sometimes hiding the “I” behind an apostrophe:

‘Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,  (1-2)

Only in the pit can Caliban safely speculate on the purpose and nature of Setebos (“Because to talk about Him, vexes”).  God cannot see into the cave, it seems.

All of this is clear enough upon re-reading, but is baffling at first.  Early references to Miranda and Prospero at least assure me that I have picked the right Caliban, but the where and how and why require work, and of course Caliban does not develop his ideas in a coherent order.  Of course there are huge gaps in his natural theology.  For whom is that not true?

It is only looking back, for example, that I see that Caliban is worried about first causes, “the something over Setebos \ That made Him” (129-30).  The monster speculates that Setebos may have driven off an earlier god, who still exists somewhere, perhaps in the stars, the part of the universe Setebos did not create (27).  Setebos himself lives in the moon.  Caliban has a really fine imagination.

But now the leap, after the invocation of the absent god:

I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring  quails here when I have a mind (135-6)

The mysterious actions of the absent or arbitrary or incomprehensible god is a source of joy to Setebos, just as the quails are to Caliban, and the joy comes from Caliban’s (and thus God’s) lack of control over them.  Caliban always makes Setebos in his image, but then models his own behavior after his God:

‘Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
‘Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.

A storm approaches as the poem ends, sent by Setebos, who after all can see into the cave, to chastise Caliban.  “Fool to gibe at Him!”  The Tempest is about to begin.

*  Or maybe “’Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’”?  No, surely “My Last Duchess.”

Visiting the Paris Morgue with Robert Browning

The subject at hand is not Robert Browning, but Browning’s 1864 book Dramatis Personae, a great book, his fourth great book in a row.  I looked at one of its less known poems yesterday, seldom collected elsewhere.  Today I will enjoy a better known poem, although not one of the book’s big anthology hits like “Rabbi ben Ezra” or “Caliban Upon Setebos”.  This one, “Apparent Failure,” is about suicide, and includes a fairly direct statement of Browning’s religious belief, assuming that the speaker of the poem is Robert Browning, and the real one at that.  Who knows.

The poem has an epigraph, from a “Paris newspaper”: “We shall soon lose a celebrated building.”  That building is the morgue on the Ile de la Cité, which I last visited with Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White (1860 - why did I not write about this?), and will soon see again (I am respecting chronology) in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867).  The building was not demolished, at least not then, as it appears again in an 1883 story by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

This particular morgue (“The dead-house where you show your drowned”) was famous because it was open to the public, with the bodies, many pulled from the Seine and in horrible states of decay, on display in hopes of identification.  Zola is direct about the entertainment value of corpse-watching.  Why does Browning go in, as he did in 1856?

One pays  one’s debt in such a case;
        I plucked up heart and entered, - stalked,
Keeping a tolerable face
       Compared with some whose cheeks were chalked:
Let them!  No Briton’s to be baulked!

I see.  A demonstration of national fortitude.

Here are the corpses.  Browning has no interest in Zola’s evocation of disgust, but rather with the dignity of the undignified dead.

Poor men, God made, and all for that!
         The reverence struck me; o’er each head
Religiously was hung its hat,
          Each coat dripped by the owner’s bed,
Sacred from touch: each had his berth,
          His bounds, his proper place of rest,
Who last night tenanted on earth
        Some arch, where twelve such slept abreast, -
Unless the plain asphalte seemed best.

Browning puzzles over the causes of suicide: thwarted idealism, the world’s cruelty, plus the usual stuff, money and women.  He hopes for the best, for the suicides, for all of us.

It’s wiser being good than bad;
        It’s safer being meek than fierce:
It’s fitter being sane than mad.
        My own hope is a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
        That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
        That which began best, can’t end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.

Youth and truth With loves and doves - reading and misreading Robert Browning

When I started this Robert Browning poem, as usual a monologue, I got everything wrong.

Dîs Aliter Visum; Or, Le Byron de Nos Jours

Wait, I had better unpack the title first.  The Latin is from the Aeneid, and means “the gods see things differently”; the French is “the Byron of our time.”  What gods?  Why in French?  Etc.  Typical Robert Browning.  The poem begins:

I

Stop, let me have the truth of that!
        Is that all true?  I say, the day
Ten years ago when both of us
        Met on a morning, friends – as thus
We meet this evening, friends or what? –

II

Did you – because I took your arm
        And sillily smiled, “A mass of brass
That sea looks, blazing underneath!”
        While up the cliff-road edged with heath,
We took the turns nor came to harm –

A pause again: that “mass of brass” is hard to ignore.  Moving back to the first stanza, and leafing ahead, I see that line 2 always features this close internal rhyme.  “Walked and talked,” “youth and mouth,” verse and worse.”  I do not know the name of the form: ABCCA, but with B hiccupping.

The narrator is a well-to-do English woman, the “you” a famous French poet.  He is the Byron of our time, and also perhaps the god who sees things differently.  Ten years ago, the woman wanted to marry him.  The poet was tempted  but for egotistical reasons never pressed the point.  They both subsequently married others, and married worse.  The woman spends the poem recreating the meeting when, with some sort of nudge, both of their lives could have been different.  And should have been, she argues, whether to herself or to the poet’s face I can only guess.

All of this has been pieced together from the rest of the poem.  On my first pass I became confused about who was speaking and even more confused about the identity of the French poet’s “you,” in effect inventing a third character.  My imaginary poem was not bad, but awfully confusing, and in the last stanza it crumbled in my hands.  Oh, oops.  Start again.  Robert Browning poems.

The odd rhyme scheme now looks integral to the poem.  Taking “mass of brass” as genuine speech, we hear the young narrator trying to impress the famous poet (in his words, or, really, her imagined version of his words “she tries to sing… Reads verse and thinks she understands”).  The repetition of the repetition in each stanza becomes a parody of the poet, climaxing in his description of her (her imagined etc.) in stanza XIII, when the internal rhymes explode:

“And this young beauty, round and sound
           As a mountain-apple. Youth and truth
With loves and doves, at all events
            With money in the Three per Cents;
Whose choice of me would seem profound: –

The narrator, over the last ten years seems to have learned something about poetry, or has at least revised her valuation of the French Byron’s verse, if not his person.  They should have married – “you had saved two souls: nay, four.”  Kind of a sad poem, whatever the struggle to pull out the sadness.

The poem is from the 1864 Dramatis Personae.  I wonder if I have the fortitude for a week of Browning.  I will find out.

Moving Day

For the Amateur Reader, not for Wuthering Expectations.  Posting will be intermittent or non-existent until life becomes less kerfoozled.

Does it feed the little lake below?
     The speck of white just on its marge
Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow,
     How sharp the silver spear-heads charge
When Alp meets heaven in snow!

Robert Browning, “By the Fire-side,” Men and Women, 1855. Stanza IX

A little spare the night I loved, \ And hold it solemn to the past. - Christmas and context

I have committed a venial literary sin and am duly chastened.

I read Robert Browning's long poem Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) in part just because I wanted to filch Christmasy bits for the blog.  I found nothing, absolutely nothing, and instead read a long, dull poem in the Victorian Faith and Doubt genre.

A traveller, escaping from a Christmas Eve storm, enters a little chapel.  He may or may not be a religious skeptic, but he is contemptuous of the small-town church and sermon.  He falls asleep, or has a mystical experience, in which he is transported by Christ to Rome, and then to Germany, and learns to not be so rude in other people's churchs.  Or something like that.  Here's a good description, of a woman entering the chapel:

Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,
In came the flock: the fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
  Her umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
  A wreck of whalebones (47-52)

Pretty good, but not really very Christmasy, is it?  And most of the poem is not descriptive but argumentative.

I was surprised to find so much about Christmas in Tennyson's In Memoram (also 1850).  Three Christmas scenes provide one of the few concrete structural devices in a mostly abstractly structured poem.  From the third Christmas:

The time draws near the birth of Christ;
  The moon is hid, the night is still;
  A single church below the hill
Is pealing, folded in the mist (Stanza 104).

Which is nice enough, I guess, but treating a chunk of this poem about grief and loss as Christmas decoration seems misguided.  This particular Christmas is the third since the loss of Tennyson's best friend, so the theme is acceptance:

Let cares that petty shadows cast,
  By which our lives are chiefly proved,
  A little spare the night I loved,
And hold it solemn to the past. (105)

Not exactly cheery, but suitably serious.  Even useful to this reader, but useless out of context.

As a result, readers of Wuthering Expectations will have to make due, tomorrow, with a sculpture of Santa with a possum in his pocket.