Robert Browning: How to Know Him Part 39

And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was, Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest, Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as gla.s.s, Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest: For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire, When a great illumination surprises a festal night-- Outlined round and round Rome's dome from s.p.a.ce to spire) Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.

IV

In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man's birth, Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I; And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth, As the earth had done her best, in my pa.s.sion, to scale the sky: Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine, Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star; Meteor-moons, b.a.l.l.s of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine, For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.

V

Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow, Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast, Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow, Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last; Or else the wonderful Dead who have pa.s.sed through the body and gone, But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new: What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon; And what is,--shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.

VI

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul, All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth, All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole, Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth: Had I written the same, made verse--still, effect proceeds from cause, Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told; It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws, Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:--

VII

But here is the finger of G.o.d, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.

Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught: It is everywhere in the world--loud, soft, and all is said: Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought: And there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!

VIII

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared; Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow; For one is a.s.sured at first, one scarce can say that he feared, That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.

Never to be again! But many more of the kind As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?

To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind To the same, same self, same love, same G.o.d: ay, what was, shall be.

IX

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name.

Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!

What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

X

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The pa.s.sion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to G.o.d by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.

XI

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?

Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?

Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?

Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: But G.o.d has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know.

XII

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, Sliding by semitones till I sink to the minor,--yes, And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground, Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

In the autumn following his wife's death Browning wrote the poem _Prospice_, which t.i.tle means _Look Forward_! This is the most original poem on death in English Literature. It shows that Browning strictly and consistently followed the moral appended to _The Glove_ --_Venienti occurrite morbo_, run to meet approaching disaster!

Although the prayer-book expresses the wish that the Good Lord will deliver us from battle, murder, and sudden death, that hope was founded on the old superst.i.tion that it was more important how a man died than how he lived. If a man who had lived a righteous, sober and G.o.dly life died while playing cards or in innocent laughter, with no opportunity for the ministrations of a priest, his chances for the next world were thought to be slim. On the other hand, a d.a.m.nable scoundrel on the scaffold, with the clergyman's a.s.surances a.s.sented to, was supposed to be jerked into heaven. This view of life and death was firmly held even by so sincere and profound a thinker as Hamlet: which explains his anguish at the fate of his father killed in his sleep, and his own refusal to slay the villain Claudius at prayer.

It is probable that thousands of wors.h.i.+ppers who now devoutly pray to be delivered from sudden death, would really prefer that exit to any other. The reason is clear enough: it is to avoid the pain of slow dissolution, the sufferings of the death-bed, and the horrible fear of the dark. Now Browning boldly asks that he may be spared nothing of all these grim terrors. True to his conception of a poet, as a man who should understand all human experiences, he hopes that he may pa.s.s conscious and aware through the wonderful experience of dying. Most sick folk become unconscious hours before death and slip over the line in total coma: Browning wants to stay awake.

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, And bade me creep past.

I want to taste it all, the physical suffering, the fear of the abyss: I want to hear the raving of the fiend-voices, to be in the very thick of the fight. He adds the splendid line,

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave.

Brave hearts turn defeat into victory.

Browning died twenty-eight years after he wrote this poem, and his prayer was granted. He was conscious almost up to the last second, and fully aware of the nearness of death. Even the manner of death, as described in the first line of the poem, came to be his own experience: for he died of bronchitis.

PROSPICE

1864

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face, When the snows begin, and the blasts denote I am nearing the place, The power of the night, the press of the storm, The post of the foe; Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, Yet the strong man must go: For the journey is done and the summit attained, And the barriers fall, Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers The heroes of old, Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears Of pain, darkness and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, The black minute's at end, 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 G.o.d be the rest!

One can hardly repress a smile at Browning's thorough-going optimism, when he reads the poem, _Apparent Failure_, and then glances back at the t.i.tle. _Apparent_ failure! Of all the defeated sons of earth, the nameless suicides whose wretched bodies are taken to the public morgue, ought surely, we should imagine, to be cla.s.sed as absolute failures. But Browning does not think so. It is possible, he says, that the reason why these poor outcasts abandoned life, was because their aspirations were so tremendously high that dull reality overpowered their spirits. Goodness is better than badness: meekness better than ferocity: calm sense than mad ravings. But, after all, these poor fellows were G.o.d's creatures. His sun will eventually pierce the darkest cloud earth can stretch. Somewhere, after many ages in the next life, these men will develop into something better under the suns.h.i.+ne of the smile of G.o.d.

APPARENT FAILURE

1864

"We shall soon lose a celebrated building."

_Paris Newspaper_.