Selections From The Poems And Plays Of Robert Browning Part 42

78. _Rough-foot merlin._ A species of hawk formerly trained to pursue other birds and game. A "falcon-lanner" is a long-tailed hawk. The word, when used in falconry, is restricted to the female hawk, which is larger than the male.

101. _Struck at himself._ Amazed at his own importance.

130. _Urochs._ The aurochs, the European bison, a species nearly extinct but preserved in the forests of Lithuania and the Caucasus. The "buffle"

is the buffalo.

135-153. Compare this lady with the one in "My Last d.u.c.h.ess."

216. _Well, early in autumn._ In writing "The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess"

Browning was interrupted by a friend on some important business which temporarily drove the story out of the poet's mind. Some months after the publication of the first part in _Hood's Magazine_, April, 1845, he was staying at Bettisfield Park in Shrops.h.i.+re when someone in commenting on the early approach of winter said that already the deer had to break the ice in the pond. This chance phrase roused the poet's fancy, and when he returned home he completed his poem.

238. _St. Hubert._ Before his conversion St. Hubert had been pa.s.sionately fond of hunting; hence he became the patron saint of hunters.

240-247. "The jerkin" or short coat; the "trunk-hose," or full breeches extending from the waist to the middle of the thigh; the big rimless hats with broad projections back and front and highly ornamented, were medieval articles of attire revived by the Duke for his "Middle Age"

hunting party.

249. _Venerers, p.r.i.c.kers, and Verderers_ are ancient names for huntsmen, hors.e.m.e.n, and preservers of venison.

263. _Horns wind a mort._ Horns announce the death of the stag; "at siege" probably means "brought to the appointed station." Possibly it means "at bay," in which case "wind a mort" must mean "announce that the death of the stag is imminent."

264. _p.r.i.c.k forth._ Spur her horse forth. She was to ride a jennet, a small Spanish horse known in the Middle Ages.

315. _Quince-tinct._ Tincture of quince was used as a cosmetic.

322. _Fifty-part canon._ "Mr. Browning explained that a 'canon, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated in various keys, and being strictly obeyed in the repet.i.tion, becomes the canon, the imperative law to what follows.' Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal; to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician." Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopaedia_: page 180.

480. _The band-roll._ Her head was ornamented with a band on which were strung Persian coins.

533. _Gor-crow's flappers._ Wings of carrion crow.

581. _Like the spots._ Effects of phosph.o.r.escence.

845. _I have seen my little lady._ It is not clear where or when he saw her. Possibly he refers only to his revived memory of her.

852. _And ... floats me._ This construction is what is known as the "ethical dative." The old servant merely says in jocose fas.h.i.+on that telling his story has made his blood course more rapidly and freely.

A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL

_The Revival of Learning._ The Revival of Learning, or the Renaissance, began as early as the tenth century. Its period of most rapid progress was from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. One phase of the interest in the revival of learning was the effort to restore Latin to its ancient purity. The word "grammarian" was more widely inclusive than now, meaning one who devoted himself to general learning. Of this poem Dr. Burton in "Renaissance Pictures in Browning" (_Poet-Lore_, Vol. x, pp. 60-76, No. 1, 1898) says: "I know of no lyric of the poet's more representative of his peculiar and virile strength than this, in that it makes vibrant and thoroughly emotional an apparently unemotional theme.

In relation to the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the moral is the higher inspiration derived from the new wine of the cla.s.sics, so that what in later times has cooled down too often to a dry-as-dust study of the husks of knowledge is shown to be, at the start, a veritable reveling in the delights of the fruit."

Mr. Stopford Brooke in _The Poetry of Browning_, p. 155, says, "This is the artist at work, and I doubt whether all the laborious prose written, in history and criticism, on the revival of learning, will ever express better than this short poem the inexhaustible thirst of the Renaissance in its pursuit of knowledge, or the enthusiasm of the pupils of a New Scholar for his desperate strife to know in a short life the very center of the universe."

3. _Leave we the common crofts._ As the procession starts up the hill they leave behind them the small farms and little villages of the plain.

8. _Rock-row._ Day is just breaking over the rocky summits of the mountains.

9. _There, man's thought._ The smoking crater of a volcano, described as a censer from which rise the fumes of incense, portends an outbreak of subterranean fire. The speaker fancifully considers this an appropriate spot in which to bury the scholar whose pa.s.sionate eagerness of thought chafed continually against the bounds of custom and ignorance and human weakness.

14. _Sepulture._ p.r.o.nounced here, _sepulture_. A burial place or tomb.

25. _Step to a tune._ Here and in various other places, as lines 41, 73, 76, etc., are directions to the pallbearers.

34. _Lyric Apollo._ The G.o.d Apollo was the ideal of manly beauty. The Grammarian was, it seems, endowed with rare charm of face and form.

35. _Long he lived nameless._ Youth had pa.s.sed before the Grammarian really entered upon his quest for knowledge. But he did not despair. His vanis.h.i.+ng of youth was but a signal to "leave play for work."

45. _Grappled with the world._ The world of knowledge, especially ancient learning, which was recovered slowly and with difficulty.

49. _Theirs._ He wishes to study the "shaping" or writings of poets and sages.

50. _Gowned._ Put on the scholastic gown.

64. _Queasy._ Sick at the stomach. He could not get knowledge enough to make him feel a distaste for it.

65-68. "It" in l. 66 refers to l. 67. The "it" in l. 68 refers to "such a life," l. 65.

70. _Fancy the fabric._ Under the figure of making a complete plan before beginning to build a house, he describes the Grammarian's purpose to know the whole scheme of life before he lived out any part of it.

86. _Calculus_ and _tussis_ (l. 88) are diseases, the stone and bronchitis, that attacked him.

95. _Soul-hydroptic._ "Hydroptic" is a rare word for "thirsty."

103. _G.o.d's task_, etc. He neglected the body, magnified the mind, and believed that the full realization of his aspirations would come in "the heavenly period."

113. _That low man_. This comparison between the "low man" and the "high man" could be effectively ill.u.s.trated from "Andrea del Sarto." Andrea is the "low man" who with his skillful hand "goes on adding one to one"

till he attains his "hundred," or excellence of technique. But the other painters, the ones with the "truer light of G.o.d" in them, reach the heaven above and take their place there although what they see transcends the power of their art to tell. They miss the "unit" of an adequate technique, but they gain the "million" of spiritual insight.

129. _Hoti ... Oun ... De._ Points in Greek grammar concerning which there was much learned discussion.

"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME"

Mrs. Orr (_Handbook of Browning's Works_, p. 274) says of this poem: "We can connect no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so dream-like and so disjointed: still less extract from it a definite moral; and we are reduced to taking the poem as a simple work of fancy, built up of picturesque impressions which have, separately or collectively, produced themselves in the author's mind." And she adds in a note: "I may venture to state that these picturesque materials included a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room--welded together in the remembrance of the line from '_King Lear_,' which forms the heading of the poem." The possible allegorical signification of the poem has been the subject of much, and often of singularly futile discussion. Dr.

Furnivall said he had asked Browning if it was an allegory, and in answer had on three separate occasions received an emphatic statement that it was simply a dramatic creation called forth by a line of Shakspere's. (Porter-Clarke, _Study Programmes_, p. 406.) Yet allegorical interpretations continue to be made. According to one line of interpretation the pilgrim is a "truth-seeker, misdirected by the lying spirit" (the h.o.a.ry cripple), and when he blows the slug-horn it is as a warning to others that he has failed in his quest, and that the way to the dark tower is the way of destruction and death. (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopaedia_, p. 105) According to other readings of the tale the blast which the pilgrim blows at the end of his quest is one of "spiritual victory and incitement to others." When the Rev. John S.

Chadwick visited the poet and asked him if constancy to an ideal--"He that endureth to the end shall be saved"--was not a sufficient understanding of the central purpose of the poem, Browning said: "Yes, just about that." With constancy to an ideal as the central purpose, the details of this poem, without being minutely interpreted, may yet serve as a representation of the depression, the hopelessness, the dullness and deadness of soul, the doubt and terror even of the man who travels the last stages of a difficult journey to a long-sought but unknown goal. His victory consists in the unfaltering persistence of his search.

The "squat tower," when he reaches it, is prosaic and ugly, but finding it is after all not the essential point. The essential element of his success is that, encircled by the last temptations to despair, he holds heart and brain steady, and carries out his quest to its last detail.

(See an article in _The Critic_, May 3, 1886, by Mr. Arlo Bates, in opposition to any definite allegory. Mr. Nettles.h.i.+p in _Robert Browning_ [p. 89] devotes a chapter to a paraphrase and an allegorical explanation.)

Mr. Herford (_Life of Browning_, p. 94) calls the poem "a great romantic legend" and emphasizes its intensity and boldness of invention. He compares its "horror-world" with that of Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner." "What 'The Ancient Mariner' is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendors of the sea, that 'Childe Roland' is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an atmosphere and scenery of steadily gathering menace."

Mr. Chesterton says of the scenery: "It is ... the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from the conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. He insists on celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gus...o...b..fore."

(_Robert Browning_, p. 159.)

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY