The Brownings
Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s passionate outpourings of love-poetry in the Sonnets from
the Portuguese (1850),
Addressed
from a woman to a man, publicly recall a powerful, private emotional awakening.
Despite the implications of the title, there are no Portuguese originals (the
‘Portuguese’ of the title being an esoteric reference to the sixteenth century
Portuguese poet Camoens and to Robert Browning’s nickname for his wife). The
sonnets were written during the courtship of the two poets, he junior to her
both in years and in terms of publication, but her fourth poem expresses a
deferential acceptance of the reversal of roles, she the senior now allowing
that her ‘cricket’ merely chirps against his ‘mandolin’. Since the time of
their marriage Robert Browning’s reputation has overshadowed that of his wife
and it is only relatively recently that the real individuality, and quality, of
the work of Elizabeth Barrett (1806- 61) has been critically recognized. Her
precocious early poetry, including a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus
Bound (1833) and the favorably received The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838),
is relatively unadventurous compared to her later work. The translation of
Aeschylus was, however, reworked for publication in the Poems of 850,
the volume that also contained the florid Sonnets from the Portuguese.
Following their decision to live in Italy in 1846, both husband and wife
responded variously to the history, the tradition, and the effervescent
politics of a nation experiencing a painful evolution into a modern state.
Where Robert Browning generally retreated into historical perspectives,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning confronted contemporary issues (as she had earlier
done with English social problems) in her sequence Casa Guidi Windows (1851).
The poems may lack the republican commitment of Swinburne and the vivid
questioning of Clough, but they boldly and intelligently confront Italian
political flux and the often contradictory nature of nationalist aspirations.
Barrett Browning’s most substantial work in every sense is her long blank-verse
‘novel’ Aurora Leigh: A Poem in Nine Books (1856). Its verse may not be
consistently inspired, and its encyclopedic show of learning may sometimes clog
both its imagery and its narrative line, but it remains a vital, highly
original and outspoken feminist statement. Aurora Leigh traces two
careers, one male, one female, one philanthropic, one artistic, and it allows
for digression into other lives and other circumstances beyond the comfortable
world of the heroine. Aurora’s autobiography is written for her ‘better self’,
as a poet exploring experience, inspiration, and independence, knowing that she
must ‘analyse, | Confront, and question’. It traces processes of self
liberation which are related to informed confrontation and informed
questioning In Book I, for example,
Aurora first amusedly, then ecstatically, recalls her discovery of poetry:
I
had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled
high with cases in my father's name,
Piled
high, packed large, — where, creeping in and out
[p.
433]
Among
the giant fossils of my past,
Like
some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a
mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At
this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In
heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The
first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under
my pillow, in the morning's dark,
An
hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
At last because the time was ripe,
I
chanced upon the poets.
As
the earth
Plunges
in fury, when the internal fires
Have
reached and pricked her heart ...
. .
. . .
—
Thus, my soul,
At
poetry's divine first finger-touch,
Let
go conventions and sprang up surprised...
Poetry
erupts volcanically and, like a geological rift, it releases ‘elemental
freedom’, a freedom that Aurora here and
Elsewhere
enthusiastically embraces. The poem ends confidently with a glimpsed vision of
a new dawn reflecting its
heroine’s
name, a new Day ‘which should be builded out of heaven to God’. Robert
Browning’s own verse ‘novel’, The Ring and the Book (1868-9), differs
radically from his wife’s. The viewpoint is multiple, the effect cumulative,
and the narrative line, or lines; require exploration rather than mere
imaginative sympathy or suspension of disbelief. Browning (1812-89) obliges his
reader to play the role of an alert investigating magistrate, probing
confessions and impressions and sifting a weight of contradictory evidence. The
Ring and the Book is the culmination of his long poetic experiment with
the dramatic monologue and of his fascination with the establishment of
‘truth’, a truth that can be objective and subjective, external and
experiential. In 1860 Browning had discovered the source for his poem, a
collection of documents, bound together, concerning a sensational Roman murder
trial of 1698. This chance find on a Florentine bookstall appealed to
Browning’s delight in exploring the self justifying contortions of the minds of
sinners and criminals; it also stimulated his intellectual and poetic
curiosity. The finished poem is as layered as a texture of voices, each of the
narratives qualifying and expanding on the one preceding it, each of his
witnesses opening up freshly complex vistas and new questions. The Ring and
the Book appeared in four volumes over a period of as many months, thus
signaling to its first readers its relationship to the contemporary serial
novel. Browning’s reputation as a major poet was already firmly established,
based on what are still recognized as his four most important volumes of verse,
Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men
and Women (1855), and Dramatis Personae (1864). As the titles of
these volumes suggest, the nature of drama, or rather the characters of drama,
served to stimulate Browning’s most distinctive writing. In spite of his early
ambition to write for the stage, and the modest success of his play Strafford
(1837), his real penchant was for scenes and for monologues divorced from the
theatre. The characters of his poetry do not necessarily have to interact with
others, for the majority are overheard in self revelatory, if scarcely truth
telling soliloquy. The situations he presents, however, require a reader's
complicity. In the case of Fra Lippo Lippi, a compromised painter in holy
orders forces his confession on those who discover him, ‘at an alley’s end |
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar’. In ‘My Last Duchess’
participation is yet more uneasy. As the Duke of Ferrara gradually explains
both himself and the select contents of his privy chamber, a reader is cast in
the role of listening ambassador opening the preliminaries to the acquisition
of the next duchess (the last one having been disposed of). The Duke's menace,
like his cultivation, is established cumulatively:
She
thanked men, — good! but thanked
Somehow
— I know not how — as if she ranked
My
gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With
anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This
sort of trifling? ...
. .
. . .
and
I choose
Never
to stoop. O sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er
I passed her; but who passed without
Much
the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then
all smiles stopped together.
In
many instances Browning wrenches us into a troubled private history by making
that history work itself out before us. It is the method of Sir Walter Scott
returned to its proper origins in the drama of Shakespeare, and remoulded into
single charged incidents recounted by single, expressive voices. Even when
Browning’s soliloquizes are not known historical figures, as in the instances
of the unnamed monk in his Spanish cloister or of the Bishop ordering his tomb,
he establishes a physical context through carefully selected details, references,
or objects. None floats in the relatively unallocated realms of Tennyson’s
Ulysses and Tithonus. Each of the speaking voices is given an individual
articulation, a turn of phrase, an emphasis, a pause, a reiteration, or an
idiolect which serves to identify them. Significantly, most of them are
connoisseurs (like the Duke), artists, musicians, thinkers or even, in the case
of Mr Sludge the Medium, manipulators. Creativity, or at least an appreciation
of the creative process, marks the individuality of each of them. Even
Browning’s theologians, from the worldly Bishop Bloughram and the earthy
Caliban to the more spiritual Rabbi Ben Ezra and Johannes Agricola, speculate
from a physical base in the world of the senses or from an appreciation of
sensual experience. Those poems of Browning are which dispense with an
identified persona as narrator generally retains a conversational directness,
even an easy familiarity between addresser and addressee. ‘The Lost Leader’,
for example, may noisily explode in its vexation and may insist on a sharing of
the indignation, but ‘De Gust bus’ gives a very different impression of
emerging from quieter, amorous discourse shaped around the oppositions of
England and Italy. ‘Two in the Campagna’ opens with a questioning voice reminiscent
of Donne’s, but it speaks of distinctness not union, of agnosticism in love not
of ideal convergence. The famous ‘Home — Thoughts, from Abroad’ opens with a
gasped aspiration and refers possessively to ‘my blossomed pear-tree’ and to a
‘you’ who might think the thrush incapable of recapturing ‘the first careless
rapture’. The narrator of the children’s poem ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ talks
of ‘my ditty’ and ends addressing ‘Willy’ on the virtues of keeping faith with
pipers. Browning’s most elusive and suggestive poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came’ has a first-person narrator who draws us into his quest by
suggesting an eerily Gothic response to an already posed question:
My
first thought was, he lied in every word,
That
hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance
to watch the working of his lie
On
mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression
of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its
edge, at one more victim gained thereby.
The
poem takes its suggestive title from one of Edgar’s songs in King Lear,
but the line provides merely a footing
on
which Browning builds a complex fabric, vaguely medieval in its setting but
ominous and disturbing in its precise evocation of horror (‘— It may have been
a water-rat I speared, | But, ugh! It sounded like a baby’s shriek’, ‘Toads in
a poisoned tank, | or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage’). In a sense the poem
circles back to its title as the knight blows his ‘slug horn’, announcing both
his presence and his recognition of how and why he framed his journey. Unlike
the narrators of Browning’s other poems, the very strangeness of the knight and
his quest preclude the familiar; a reader is alienated, not by a character, but
by an impersonality and by receding layers of ‘truth’ and ‘lying’ which look
forward to the experiments of the early twentieth-century Modernists.