Selections from Robert Browning

"Porphyria's Lover" and "Johannes Agricola in Meditation"
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:
"Porphyria": A deranged narrator tells of his lover, Porphyria coming in from the rain, (unreliably) saying that she seduced him ("She put my arm about her waist / And made her smooth white shoulder bare / And all her yellow hair displaced"). He doesn't know what to do at first, but then realizing that she "worshipped [him]," he becomes obsessive: "The moment she was mine, mine, fair." He then "found a thing to do," which was to strangle her with her own hair. He has frozen this moment of worship. The form of the speech is roughly iambic tetrameter, metrically, with an irregular rhyme scheme.

"Johannes Agricola": Johannes Agricola (historically a 16th-century Protestant antinomian) in Browning's formulation blindly believes in his own pre-destination and plucking out by God for salvation to the extent that he claims he need not act by good works nor try for theological understanding: "Guiltless for ever, like a tree / That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know / The law by which it prospers so. It's form is similar to "Porphyria."

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
Isobel Armstrong reads both of these poems as an expression of "monomaniacal hubris" which indicates the limits of Mill's ideas on poetic soliloquy. Mill argues that poetry is the expression of an emotional or psychological state which is "pure" in its exclusion from the realm of objective, scientific knowledge. All poetry then, is soliloquy since it shouldn't be self-conscious about its own expression (this would make it more objective). Browning's "Porphyria" and "Johannes Agricola" indicate expressive, private emotion gone awry--in which "mania, delusion, and visions of total power" scarily exclude all external connections.

"My Last Duchess"
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:
Browning's famous dramatic monologue of Duke Ferrara (historically a 16th-century Duke) begins with an address to a specific "you" but the relations between the Duke and this addressee are not revealed until near the end of the speech. He tells his addressee of a portrait of his "last duchess" and how she was none too discreet as far as her attentions went. Instead of "stooping" to correct her actions, it seems that he killed her: "Oh sir, she smiler, no doubt, / When'er I passed her'; but who passed without / Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together," he says simply. It is then revealed that the speaker is addressing some ambassador from a Count whose daughter the Duke wishes to wed. He evinces some interest in her dowry in a matter of fact way. Without hesitation, he begins to talk of other works of art on his wall: "Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea-horse..." The monologue is in pentameter and rhymed couplets with enjambed lines.

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
The speaker says that he struggles with speech, yet his regular rhymes suggest otherwise. The enjambment conveys a sense not of disorder but of his forceful, violent drive which is nonetheless contained by measured metrics and rhyme. Like the speaker of "Porphyria" or "Johannes Agricola," the Duke seems all the more frightful and grotesque because of the contrast between a seemingly regular, logical speech (and tone) and the darkness of the (barely veiled) content.

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
This dramatic monologue, which begins "G-r-r" consists of the angry ravings of a Spanish monk against one "Brother Lawrence." In the second stanza, the speaker mocks Brother Lawrence's pretentious talk of the weather and of his crops, giving the kinds of words BL might say in italics and his own reply in regular type: "Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely / Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt: / What's the Latin name for "parsely"? / What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout? In the following stanzas he mocks BL's fastidious habits with his utensils, his lecherous eyeing of "brown Dolores" squatting "outside the Convent Bank," and his gluttony. The speaker, after reading from Galatians, is inspired to find a way to condemn BL. He thinks about getting him to read a French novel, or perhaps to sell his own soul to Satan in order to have the power to condemn BL. The irony of the poem is in the speaker's unawareness of his hypocrisy--while he condemns BL, he clearly shares the same sins and is angry only with BL because he is jealous. The poem is in irregular tetrameter and stanzas rhyming ababcdcd.

BACKGROUND/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
This is a good example of dramatic irony generated from soliloquy. The speaker unwittingly reveals something about himself (his hypocrisy) which readers recognize while also knowing that the speaker is unaware of what he has revealed.

"Pictor Ignotus"
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
The speaker (a monastic Renaissance painter) brags that his work could have been just as good as the youth which the addressee apparently praises. The reason he has not exhibited his work, he says, because he could not bear to have his work "not go to heaven, but linger here / Here on my earth..." Fame and praise from the marketplace would soil his work. "At least no merchant traffics in my heart," he concludes. The monologue is in iambic pentameter and has a regular ababcdcdefef rhyme scheme.

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
George Bornstein in Victorian Poetry 19:1 charts this poem's stages from rational explanations of his position to greater and greater imaginative visions of "fame and friendship" and then an abrupt fall back into rational language. Indeed, the height of the poem's imaginative vision has to do with earthly fame: "Nor will I say I have not dreamed (how well!) / Of going--I, in each new picture--forth, / As, making new hearts beat and bosoms swell, / To Pope or Kaiser, East, West, South or North." This undermines, of course, the rational argument against earthly fame and creation of poems which are to have a place in heaven.

"The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church"
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
In this poem, a Bishop provides specific instructions to his nephews as to his burial in a certain niche at St. Praxed's Church. Besides the details of these instructions, the Bishop reveals a rivalry with one "Old Gandolf" over a woman, whom the Bishop seems to have won in the end. The instructions reveal that the Bishop has a aggressively high view of himself--he wishes his nephews to place lapis-lazuli between his knees as if he were God with a globe. By the end of the poem, however, the Bishop admits that his instructions are probably futile, and admits that in death such things are not for him to ensure. The speech is in blank verse and roughly iambic pentameter.

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
Armstrong argues that this poem combines "extreme intellectual and epistemological sophistication and an extreme commitment to the voracious power of anarchic, libidinal, emotion, and desire." This seems similar to the contrast I mentioned in "My Last Duchess" between logical speech and violent force. This poem was specifically admired by Ruskin, who felt that it perfectly expressed his notion of the "grotesque."

"Love Among the Ruins"
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
This is an oddly structured poem in which a longer line is followed by a short phrase which rhymes with it. These pairs are then structured into  stanzas consisting each of six pairs. The poem chronicles what used to stand upon the now empty land: "a city great and gay," "a domed and daring palace," a "hundred-gated circuit of a wall," "collonades," "causeys, bridges, aqueducts" and so on and so forth. Only a "single little turret remains. After such emphasis on the absence of all of these markers of civilization of old, the speaker shifts to tell of how in the present, "a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair" waits for him by the turret. Love has replaced these symbols of old, and the poem ends thus: "For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! / Shut them in, / With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! / Love is best."

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
It is tempting to read "love" in this poem as the new kind of life which ought to replace the heroic, masculine codes of the march of civilization. However, the final "Love is best" does sound a bit lame next to the lengthy lines expended on the civilization which is absent. Their negation doesn't negate the fact that these imagined ruins take up most of the space of the poem and the girl (who moreover is "breathless, dumb" until the speaker comes) and love receive only a few lines and phrases. Thus, Armstrong reads this poem as ambivalent about a new "mythos" (see Carlyle's ideas in Sartor Resartus, she suggests) of love -- old symbols of power might be exhausted, but the new one might not be so new either.

"Fra Lippo Lippi"
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
Fra Lippo Lippi, a painter commissioned for the Medici, has been shut up "A-painting for the great man, saints and saints / And saints again." He "could not paint all night" so finally he let himself out by means of ripping his curtains up and lowering himself out of the window, having been distracted by singing outside. Later in the poem he tells of how he came to the convent because he was a hungry boy and so became ensnared into a cloistered life because of his wants. Noticing his talents at painting (Fra Lippo Lippi details the lively painting that he did at first, capturing real and colorful life around him), the authorities take him up and tell him: "Your business is not to catch men with show, / With homage to the perishable clay, / But lift them over it, ignore it all, /Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh." In a word, they tell him to "paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!" Fra Lippo Lippi, however, still has his own creed for art, despite being forced to paint in this new way which ignores the world and strives for something higher. Instead, he believes that what God has created must be good to reproduce: "This world's no blot for us, / Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good." The poem ends with Fra Lippo Lippi engaging in some secret sexual encounter: after all, "You should not take a fellow eight years old / And make him swear to never kiss the girls."

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
At the center of "Fra Lippo Lippi" is the question of art's role in relation to life. Browning clearly falls on the side of art which falls on the side of capturing life in its variety, color, and vivacity. Art which strives for an ideal beyond human life constrains the artist who feels it to be natural to engage in the world. Lippi's sexual repression becomes a metaphor for this constraint; he has great energy, but the type of art which the authorities want him to do doesn't allow for an outlet for this energy.

"Andrea del Sarto"
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
"Andrea del Sarto" is addressed to his wife, Lucrezia, whom he asks for a moment of rest at the beginning of the poem, signaling that she is quite demanding on him: "But do not let us quarrel any more, / No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once." Like Lippi, the historical del Sarto was a painter in Florence, and was known for his technical precision, though has been overshadowed by the likes of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Rafael. Sarto comments on this skill of his, but laments that he has not the spiritual passion of these latter artists: "Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, / Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me...My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here." He is the opposite of Fra Lippo Lippi--he lacks energy connected to life and the world, though he obsesses about this lack and desires the energy. Sarto blames his wife for this lack, saying that "Had the mouth there urged / 'God and the glory!' never care for gain," he might have been able to rise beyond such petty material thoughts to reach a greater sense of heaven in his heart. At the end of the poem, it is revealed that Sarto's money has been going to a cousin (potentially also a lover) of Lucrezia's, and it is partially for this that he has been laboring.

BACKGROUNDS/CONTEXTS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
Armstrong links "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" as both poems which, like many of Browning's poems, are especially "about energy"--"whether it is the overflow" (Fra Lippo Lippi) or the "experience of its lack." Sarto's "lack" as well as Lippi's excess, Armstrong points out, is kind of a "distortion" of artistic energy. In both poems, this distortion of artistic energy is paired with the distortion of sexual energy. To bring these poems into Browning's contemporary context via a Marxist reading, Browning could be describing the results of alienated labor.

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
The subject matter of "Child Roland" is taken from Edgar's speech pretending to be a madman in King Lear. In Browning's "Childe Roland" a young man who has not yet been knighted tells of his quest for a "dark tower." An "old hoary cripple" at the beginning of the poem points out the direction and though he isn't particularly optimistic about this direction, he goes anyways. He wanders through a dark wasteland, where "grass...grew as scant as hair / In leprosy" and where "a sudden little river" yields "a water rat" which he spears and which cries out "a baby's shriek." Roland eventually reaches the dark tower, but he doesn't know that he has, at first. "Here ended, then, / Progress this way," he thinks, but then "Burningly it came on me all at once, / This was the place!" Before the tower, he sees a vision of all the "lost adventurers my peers" and before this vision, blew his horn to signal the end of his quest. "Childe Roland" is written in abbaab six line stanzas and in irregular pentameter.


BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
Written a day before "Love Ruins," "Childe Roland" also seems to make a critique of masculine values, this time of the heroic quest which believes in linear progress. Armstrong suggests that this poem reveals Browning's critique of the violent destruction in the Crimean War (1853-1856). Roland's blindness throughout the quest and inability to parse his surroundings (he thinks he spears a water-rat, but hears a baby's shriek) and also at the end of the quest when he hasn't realized that he has arrived undo the sense of a directed, heroic quest. This sense of not really getting anywhere might be mirrored in the abbaab stanza, which kind of folds back on itself first (abba, envelope rhyme) and then ends with a kind of truncated ramble outwards, "ab." 


“Caliban upon Setebos” 
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
This poem imagines Caliban of "The Tempest" pausing in his labors to reflect on existential questions. Unlike most of Browning's dramatic monologues, this monologue is framed by a beginning which narrates Caliban looking upon his surroundings while Prospero and Miranda sleep. Caliban's speech begins: "Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!" signaling the name of his God. The first four stanzas (of varying length) begin with "Thinketh" followed by reflections on God's creations, analogizing his creations to his own acts, and ending with "So He." For example, in the fourth stanza Caliban talks about how he is "strong myself compared to yonder crabs...Let twenty pass and stone the twenty first / Loving not, hating not, just choosing so," signaling that God similarly wields power. Caliban further ponders if there might be some higher power than Setebos himself, and since Setebos cannot soar to this height, "looks down here, and out of very spite / Makes this a bauble world to ape yon real." Caliban can find no "good" nor "evil" motives in what Setebos creates, it seems that "He has a spite against me, that I know, / Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why?" He concludes rather bleakly, "here are we, / And there is He, and nowhere help at all." The poem closes with the frame which narrates a thunderstorm, "Fool to gibe at Him!" the narration says of Caliban. The meter is irregular pentameter and without a rhyming pattern. 


BACKGROUND/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
As critics have remarked, Caliban expresses many modern Victorian ideas; in particular, he tests out for himself Darwinian theories of natural selection as well as questions of whether God is just or not. Caliban is a kind of naturalist, observing lesser creatures around him and how he acts on them, and also on how those such as Prospero act on him. He notes a kind of hierarchy and posits a "Quiet" who is greater even than Setebos. Seeing how such hierarchies work, however, doesn't answer the question "why" which he repeatedly come back to throughout the poem.   


“A Death in the Desert"
SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:
"A Death in the Desert" wrestles with issues of textual scholarship and religion via an imagining of the apostle John's death in the desert. John is the primary speaker of the poem, though he is framed by other voices throughout. The poem is written in iambic pentameter without a rhyming pattern. 


BACKGROUND/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
Critics point out that Browning challenges many of the assumptions of contemporary "Higher Criticism" (Renan, Strauss) which approached biblical text as an accretion of fact and myth. The separation of these two aspects tended to lead to arguments which undermine Christ's divinity (a historical Jesus who had supernatural myths attached to him). Browning rejects the equation between fact and truth, however, basically rejecting the terms of Renan or Strauss's arguments altogether. For Browning, there are other alternative models for knowing. According to Ian Lancashire: "The key to much of the poem's pattern is to be found in the "glossa of Theotypas" enclosed in square brackets (lines 81-103). Here Browning develops an important analogy between the human soul and the divine in terms of the doctrine of the Trinity." Specifically, "Power (or Will), Knowledge, and Love [are] attributes which man, in his finite way, shares with God (as Father, Holy Spirit, Christ)" (see Representative Poetry Online entry). In other words, Browning's model for truth involves cognition via these three different aspects which are all unified (and not opposed) within an individual. These three aspects may be roughly taken as "the faculty of sensation," of "the mind or intellect," and love. Truth therefore derives from all three of these means of cognition, and not "fact" gleaned from the first two epistemological models. 

"Bishop Blougram's Apology" and "An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician”

SUMMARY/STRUCTURE: 

"Karshish": In this dramatic monologue, the empirical Karshish consigns Lazarus's miracle to a diagnosis of mania: "Tis but a case of mania, subinduced / By epilepsy, at the turning point / Of trance prolonged unduly some three days." Still, at the end of his empirical proofs, Karshish admits that he can't explain "the awe indeed this man has touched me with." He ends also with a musing on what "the madman" says God has said through Christ: that humans have no power to comprehend the love which He gave, but that humans must love Him nevertheless who "died for thee."

"Blougram": The Bishop Blougram talks to one Mr. Gigadib (a humanist who disbelieves Catholic doctrine) over wine. In this dramatic monologue, the Bishop makes the case that material, worldly interests coincide with spiritual interests. The distance enabled by the dramatic monologue, however, reveals the Bishop's arguments to be clever but ultimately casuistic.  

BACKGROUNDS/CONTEXTS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:

Armstrong reads these two poems together, because of their special preoccupation with "what it means to believe anything...'Karshish' and 'Blougram' are concerned with the myth of Christianity at two different historical moments, its beginning and its end, AD 66, at the time of the Emperor Vespasian's invasion of Palestine, and contemporary England." Karshish is an empiricist whose empirical beliefs are satirized and ironized by the dramatic monologue. Karshish mistakenly assumes his own detachment and objectivity in observing Lazarus's resurrection, which is shown to be at least as much a "fiction" as the supernatural. 

Blougram's arguments dissolve the oppositional categories of "belief" and "unbelief," revealing that "belief becomes a mirror image of unbelief," in Armstrong's summary. This is brought about by the form of the poem, in which the first section which gives arguments for "unbelief" mirrors the arguments for "belief" in the second half. Through showing these categories to be mirrors and not opposites, the Bishop is able to make the case for his own spirituality in terms of his own material comfort.    

“Cleon”

SUMMARY/STRUCTURE:

Cleon was historically an Athenian statesmen with a reputation for being power-hungry propagandist. This dramatic monologue, unlike many of the others, is given as an epistle to his King Protus. In this letter, Cleon thinks that intellectual labor as the labor which moves history, writing off the physical labor done by slaves. When he gets to thinking about the present as a composite of the past, he faces the problem of being only "part" of this composite. This presents the problem of fragmentation, which he solves by saying that the development of the reflexive mind who can see that it is a "part" and reflect on this means higher development: "We called it an advance, the rendering plain / Man's spirit might grow conscious of man's life."

  

BACKGROUNDS/CONTEXTS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
Armstrong points out that Cleon's "solution" to fragmentation fails because it is tautological. His lines "duplicate the subject as object so that they fail to proceed to a new object: they include the categories of the subject in the object or they end with a preposition or infinitive which appears to seek a new predicate but doubles back to an antecedent one." In other words, the reflexive mind can't move beyond itself towards any sense of real progress. It traps itself within itself.