An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Part 14

IV. 'Along the Beach'.--It does not appear that she anywhere in the poem addresses her husband, face to face.

It is soliloquy throughout. In this section it does appear, more than in the others, that she is directly addressing him; but it's better to understand it as a mental expostulation.

He wanted her love, and got it, in its fulness; though an expectation of all harvest and no dearth was not involved in that fulness of love.

Though love greatens and even glorifies, she knew there was much in him waste, with many a weed, and plenty of pa.s.sions run to seed, but a little good grain too. And such as he was she took him for hers; and he found her his, to watch the olive and wait the vine of his nature; and when rivers of oil and wine came not, the failure only proved that he was her whole world, all the same.

But he has been averse to, and has resented, the tillage of his nature to which she has lovingly devoted herself, feeling it to be a bondage;

"And 'tis all an old story, and my despair Fit subject for some new song:"

such as the one with which she closes this soliloquy, representing a love which cares only for outside charms (which, later in the poem, we learn she has not) and looks not deeper.

V. 'On the Cliff'.--Leaning on the barren turf, which is dead to the roots, and looking at a rock, flat as an anvil's face, and left dry by the surf, with no trace of living thing about it (Death's altar by the lone sh.o.r.e), she sees a cricket spring gay, with films of blue, upon the parched turf, and a beautiful b.u.t.terfly settle and spread its two red fans, on the rock. And then there is to her, wholly taken up, as she is, with their beauty,

"No turf, no rock; in their ugly stead, See, wonderful blue and red!"

and they symbolize to her, Love settling unawares upon men, the level and low, the burnt and bare, in themselves (as are the turf and the rock).

VI. 'Reading a Book, under the Cliff'.--The first six stanzas of this section she reads from a book. *

-- * They were composed by Mr. Browning when in his 23d year, and published in 1836, in 'The Monthly Repository', vol. x., pp. 270, 271, and ent.i.tled simply 'Lines'. They were revised and introduced into this section of 'James Lee', which was published in 'Dramatis Personae' in 1864.

Her experiences have carried her beyond what these Lines convey, and she speaks of them somewhat sarcastically and ironically.

This "young man", she thinks, will be wiser in time,

"for kind Calm years, exacting their accompt Of pain, mature the mind:"

and then the wind, when it begins among the vines, so low, so low, will have for him another language; such as this:--

"Here is the change beginning, here the lines Circ.u.mscribe beauty, set to bliss The limit time a.s.signs."

This is the language SHE has learned: We cannot draw one beauty into our hearts' core, and keep it changeless. This is the old woe of the world; the tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.

RISE WITH IT, THEN! REJOICE THAT MAN IS HURLED FROM CHANGE TO CHANGE UNCEASINGLY, HIS SOUL'S WINGS NEVER FURLED!

To this philosophy of life has she been brought. But she must still sadly reflect how bitter it is for man not to grave, on his soul, one fair, good, wise thing just as he grasped it! For himself death's wave; while time washes (ah, the sting!) o'er all he'd sink to save.

This reflection must be understood, in her own case, as prompted by her unconquerable wifely love. It is this which points the sting.

VII. 'Among the Rocks'.--The brown old earth, in autumn, when all the glories of summer are fading, or have faded, wears a good gigantic smile, looking not backward, but forward, with his feet in the ripples of the sea-wash, and listening to the sweet twitters of the 'white-breasted sea-lark'. The entire stanza has a mystical meaning and must be interpreted in its connection.

She has reached, in this soliloquy, high ground:--

"If you loved only what were worth your love, Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you: Make the low nature better by your throes!

GIVE EARTH YOURSELF, GO UP FOR GAIN ABOVE!"

The versification of the first stanza of this section is very lovely, and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits the completest inspiration. No mere metrical skill, nor metrical sensibility even, could have produced it.

VIII. 'Beside the Drawing-Board'.--She is seated at her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coa.r.s.e hand of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model, to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who

"Drew and learned and loved again, While fast the happy moments flew, Till beauty mounted into his brain And on the finger which outvied His art, he placed the ring that's there, Still by fancy's eye descried, In token of a marriage rare: For him on earth his art's despair, For him in heaven his soul's fit bride."

Her effort has taught her a wholesome lesson: "the worth of flesh and blood at last!" There's something more than beauty in a hand.

Da Vinci would not have turned from the poor coa.r.s.e hand of the little girl who has been standing by in wondering patience. He, great artist as he was, owed all he achieved to his firm grasp upon, and struggle with, and full faith in, the real. She imagines him saying:--

"Shall earth and the cramped moment-s.p.a.ce Yield the heavenly crowning grace?

Now the parts and then the whole! *

Who art thou with stinted soul And stunted body, thus to cry 'I love,--shall that be life's strait dole?

I must live beloved or die!'

This peasant hand that spins the wool And bakes the bread, why lives it on, Poor and coa.r.s.e with beauty gone,-- What use survives the beauty? Fool!"

-- * "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round."--Abt Vogler.

She has been brought to the last stage of initiation into the mystery of Life. But, as is shown in the next and final section of the poem, the wifely heart has preserved its vitality, has, indeed, grown in vitality, and cherishes a hope which shows its undying love, and is not without a touch of pathos.

IX. 'On Deck'.--In Sections V.-VIII. the soliloquies are not directed to the husband, as they are in I.-IV. In this last, he is again mentally addressed. She is on board the vessel which is to convey, or is conveying, her to her English home, or somewhere else. As there is nothing in her for him to remember, nothing in her art efforts he cares to see, nothing she was that deserves a place in his mind, she leaves him, sets him free, as he has long shown to her he has wished to be. She, conceding his att.i.tude toward her, asks him to concede, in turn, that such a thing as mutual love HAS been.

There's a slight retaliation here of the wounded spirit.

But her heart, after all, MUST have its way; and it cherishes the hope that his soul, which is now cabined, cribbed, confined, may be set free, through some circ.u.mstance or other, and she may then become to him what he is to her. And then, what would it matter to her that she was ill-favored?

All sense of this would be sunk in the strange joy that he possessed her as she him, in heart and brain. Hers has been a love that was life, and a life that was love. Could one touch of such love for her come in a word of look of his, why, he might turn into her ill-favoredness, she would know nothing of it, being dead to joy.

A Tale.

(The Epilogue to 'The Two Poets of Croisic'.)

The speaker in this monologue is the wife of a poet, and she tells the story to her husband, of the little cricket that came to the aid of the musician who was contending for a prize, when one of the strings of his lyre snapped. So he made a statue for himself, and on the lyre he held perched his partner in the prize.

If her poet-husband gain a prize in poetry, she asks, will some ticket when his statue's built tell the gazer 'twas a cricket helped his crippled lyre; that when one string which made "love" sound soft, was snapt in twain, she perched upon the place left vacant and duly uttered, "Love, Love, Love", whene'er the ba.s.s asked the treble to atone for its somewhat sombre drone?

Confessions.

The speaker is a dying man, who replies very decidedly in the negative to the question of the attendant priest as to whether he views the world as a vale of tears. The memory of a past love, which is running through his mind, still keeps the world bright.

Of the stolen interviews with the girl he loved he makes confession, using the physic bottles which stand on a table by the bedside to ill.u.s.trate his story.

The monologue is a choice bit of grotesque humor touched with pathos.

Respectability.