Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.--

Then, as if they loved to see the death of their quarry, cried, without
one touch of sympathy:

"Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"

And once, so divided from our life is her life, she pities her own case
and refuses our pity. Man cannot help her. The starved, ignoble country
in _Childe Roland_, one of the finest pieces of description in Browning,
wicked, waste and leprous land, makes Nature herself sick with peevish
wrath. "I cannot help my case," she cries. "Nothing but the Judgment's
fire can cure the place."

On the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more,
Nature is alive in Browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all
at one with us. Tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise
her. The other poets of the century do make her alive, but they
harmonise her in one way or another with us. Browning is distinct from
them all in keeping her quite divided from man.

But then he has observed that Nature is expressed in terms of man, and
he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to
explain this. He does explain it in a passage in _Paracelsus_. Man once
descried, imprints for ever

His presence on all lifeless things; the winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh,
Never a senseless gust now man is born.
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts
A secret they assemble to discuss
When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat
Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph
Swims bearing high above her head: no bird
Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above
That let light in upon the gloomy woods,
A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top,
Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye.
The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour.
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
Beneath a warm moon like a happy face:
--And this to fill us with regard for Man.

He does not say, as the other poets do, that the pines really commune,
or that the morn has enterprise, or that nymphs and satyrs live in the
woods, but that this _seems_ to be, because man, as the crown of the
natural world, throws back his soul and his soul's life on all the
grades of inferior life which preceded him. It is Browning's
contradiction of any one who thinks that the pathetic fallacy exists in
his poetry.

Nature has then a life of her own, her own joys and sorrows, or rather,
only joy. Browning, indeed, with his intensity of imagination and his
ineradicable desire of life, was not the man to conceive Nature as dead,
as having no conscious being of any kind. He did not impute a
personality like ours to Nature, but he saw joy and rapture and play,
even love, moving in everything; and sometimes headded to this delight
she has in herself--and just because the creature was not human--a touch
of elemental unmoral malice, a tricksome sportiveness like that of Puck
in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. The life, then, of Nature had no relation
of its own to our life; but we had some relation to it because we were
conscious that we were its close and its completion.

It follows from this idea of Browning's that he was capable of
describing Nature as she is, without adding any deceiving mist of human
sentiment to his descriptions; and of describing her as accurately and
as vividly as Tennyson, even more vividly, because of his extraordinary
eye for colour. And Nature, so described, is of great interest in
Browning's poetry.

But, then, in any description of Nature, we desire the entrance into
such description of some human feeling so that it may be a more complete
theme for poetry. Browning does this in a different way from Tennyson,
who gives human feelings and thoughts to Nature, or steeps it in human
memories. Browning catches Nature up into himself, and the human element
is not in Nature but in him, in what _he_ thinks and feels, in all that
Nature, quite apart from him, awakens in him. Sometimes he even goes so
far as to toss Nature aside altogether, as unworthy to be thought of in
comparison with humanity. That joy in Nature herself, for her own sake,
which was so distinguishing a mark of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
Byron and Keats, is rarely, if ever, found in Browning. This places him
apart. What he loved was man; and save at those times of which I have
spoken, when he conceives Nature as the life and play and wrath and
fancy of huge elemental powers like gods and goddesses, he uses her as a
background only for human life. She is of little importance unless man
be present, and then she is no more than the scenery in a drama. Take
the first two verses of _A Lovers' Quarrel_,

Oh, what a dawn of day!
How the March sun feels like May!
All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.

That is well done--he has liked what he saw. But what is it all, he
thinks; what do I care about it? And he ends the verse:

Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey.

Then take the next verse:

Runnels, which rillets swell.
Must be dancing down the dell,
With a foaming head
On the beryl bed
Paven smooth as a hermit's cell.

It is excellent description, but it is only scenery for the real passion
in Browning's mind.

Each with a tale to tell--
Could my Love but attend as well.

_By the Fireside_ illustrates the same point. No description can be
better, more close, more observed, than of the whole walk over the hill;
but it is mere scenery for the lovers. The real passion lies in their
hearts.

We have then direct description of Nature; direct description of man
sometimes as influenced by Nature; sometimes Nature used as the scenery
of human passion; but no intermingling of them both. Each is for ever
distinct. The only thing that unites them in idea, and in the end, is
that both have proceeded from the creative joy of God.

Of course this way of thinking permits of the things of Nature being
used to illustrate the doings, thinkings and character of man; and in
none of his poems is such illustration better used than in _Sordello_.
There is a famous passage, in itself a noble description of the opulent
generativeness of a warm land like Italy, in which he compares the rich,
poetic soul of Sordello to such a land, and the lovely line in it,

And still more labyrinthine buds the rose,

holds in its symbolism the whole essence of a great artist's nature. I
quote the passage. It describes Sordello, and it could not better
describe Italy:

Sordello foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from the mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames
Some happy lands, that have luxurious names,
For loose fertility; a footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half-germinating spices; mere decay
Produces richer life; and day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.

That compares to the character of a whole country the character of a
whole type of humanity. I take another of such comparisons, and it is as
minute as this is broad, and done with as great skill and charm.
Sordello is full of poetic fancies, touched and glimmering with the dew
of youth, and he has woven them around the old castle where he lives.
Browning compares the young man's imaginative play to the airy and
audacious labour of the spider. He, that is, Sordello,

O'er-festooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, making light
Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
From barbican to battlement: so flung
Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh
Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh
Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.

It could not be better done. The description might stand alone, but
better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and
creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and
imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them
subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse,
and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth.

Again, in _A Bean-stripe: also Apple-Eating_, Ferishtah is asked--Is
life a good or bad thing, white or black? "Good," says Ferishtah, "if
one keeps moving. I only move. When I stop, I may stop in a black place
or a white. But everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is
nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and
colour on them as I move. It is I who make life good or bad, black or
white. I am like the moon going through vapour"--and this is the
illustration:

Mark the flying orb
Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh
At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through
This was and is and will be evermore
Coloured in permanence? The glory swims
Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight
By night's abysmal gloom, unglorified
Behind as erst before the advancer: gloom?
Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds
From the abandoned heaven a next surprise.
And where's the gloom now?--silver-smitten straight,
One glow and variegation! So, with me,
Who move and make,--myself,--the black, the white.
The good, the bad, of life's environment.

Fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a
few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in Browning image what
is in man from that which is within Nature--hints, prognostics,
prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.

There is, however, one human passion which Browning conceives as
existing in Nature--the passion of joy. But it is a different joy from
ours. It is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are
so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter
even for a brief hour into the rapture of Nature. That rapture, in
Browning's thought, was derived from the creative thought of God
exercising itself with delight in the incessant making of Nature. And
its manifestation was life, that joyful rush of life in all things into
fuller and fuller being. No poet felt this ecstasy of mere living in
Nature more deeply than Browning. His own rapture (the word is not too
strong) in it appears again and again in his poetry, and when it does,
Browning is not a man sympathising from without with Nature. He is then
a part of Nature herself, a living piece of the great organism, having
his own rejoicing life in the mightier life which includes him; and
feeling, with the rest, the abounding pleasure of continuous life
reaching upwards through growth to higher forms of being, swifter powers
of living. I might give many examples, but one will suffice, and it is
the more important because it belongs not to his ardent youth, but to
his mature manhood. It is part of the song of Thamyris in _Aristophanes'
Apology_. Thamyris, going to meet the Muses in rivalry, sings as he
walks in the splendid morning the song of the rapture of the life of
Earth, and is himself part of the rejoicing movement.

Thamuris, marching, laughed "Each flake of foam"
(As sparklingly the ripple raced him by)
"Mocks slower clouds adrift in the blue dome!"

For Autumn was the season; red the sky
Held morn's conclusive signet of the sun
To break the mists up, bid them blaze and die.

Morn had the mastery as, one by one
All pomps produced themselves along the tract
From earth's far ending to near heaven begun.

Was there a ravaged tree? it laughed compact
With gold, a leaf-ball crisp, high brandished now,
Tempting to onset frost which late attacked.

Was there a wizened shrub, a starveling bough,
A fleecy thistle filched from by the wind,
A weed, Pan's trampling hoof would disallow?

Each, with a glory and a rapture twined
About it, joined the rush of air and light
And force: the world was of one joyous mind.

Say not the birds flew! they forebore their right--
Swam, revelling onward in the roll of things.
Say not the beasts' mirth bounded! that was flight--

How could the creatures leap, no lift of wings?
Such earth's community of purpose, such
The ease of earth's fulfilled imaginings,--

So did the near and far appear to touch
I' the moment's transport,--that an interchange
Of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much;

And had the rooted plant aspired to range
With the snake's licence, while the insect yearned
To glow fixed as the flower, it were not strange--

No more than if the fluttery tree-top turned
To actual music, sang itself aloft;
Or if the wind, impassioned chantress, earned

The right to soar embodied in some soft
Fine form all fit for cloud companionship,
And, blissful, once touch beauty chased so oft.

Thamuris, marching, let no fancy slip
Born of the fiery transport; lyre and song
Were his, to smite with hand and launch from lip--

The next thing to touch on is his drawing of landscape, not now of
separate pieces of Nature, but of the whole view of a land seen under a
certain aspect of the heavens. All the poets ought to be able to do this
well, and I drew attention to the brief, condensed, yet fan-opening
fashion in which Tennyson has done it. Sometimes the poets describe what
they see before them, or have seen; drawing directly from Nature.
Sometimes they invent a wide or varied landscape as a background for a
human subject, and arrange and tone it for that purpose. Shelley did
this with great stateliness and subtlety. Browning does not do it,
except, perhaps, in _Christmas-Eve_, when he prepares the night for the
appearance of Christ. Nevertheless, even in _Christmas-Eve_, the
description of the lunar rainbow is of a thing he has seen, of a
not-invented thing, and it is as clear, vivid and natural as it can be;
only it is heightened and thrilled through by the expectancy and the
thrill in Browning's soul which the reader feels and which the poet,
through his emotion, makes the reader comprehend. But there is no
suggestion that any of this feeling exists in Nature. The rainbow has no
consciousness of the vision to come or of the passion in the poet (as it
would have had in Wordsworth), and therefore is painted with an accuracy
undimmed by any transference to Nature of the soul of the poet.

I quote the piece; it is a noble specimen of his landscape work:

But lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon's consummate apparition.
The black cloud barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.

'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon's self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its severe proper colours chorded
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white,--
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier and flightier,--
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the key-stone of that arc?

This is only a piece of sky, though I have called it landscape work. But
then the sky is frequently treated alone by Browning; and is always
present in power over his landscapes--it, and the winds in it. This is
natural enough for one who lived so much in Italy, where the scenery of
the sky is more superb than that of the earth--so various, noble and
surprising that when Nature plays there, as a poet, her tragedy and
comedy, one scarcely takes the trouble of considering the earth.

However, we find an abundance of true landscapes in Browning. They are,
with a few exceptions, Italian; and they have that grandeur and breadth,
that intensity given by blazing colour, that peculiar tint either of
labyrinthine or of tragic sentiment which belong to Italy. I select a
few of them:

The morn when first it thunders in March
The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say;
As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch
Of the villa gate this warm March day,
No flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled
In the valley beneath where, white and wide
Washed by the morning water-gold,
Florence lay out on the mountain side
River and bridge and street and square
Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
Through the live translucent bath of air,
As the sights in a magic crystal ball.

Here is the Roman Campagna and its very sentiment:

The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air--
Rome's ghost since her decease.

And this might be in the same place:

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward through the twilight--

This is a crimson sunset over dark and distant woods in autumn:

That autumn eve was stilled:
A last remains of sunset dimly burned
O'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned
By the wind back upon its bearer's hand
In one long flare of crimson; as a brand
The woods beneath lay black. A single eye
From all Verona cared for the soft sky.

And if we desire a sunrise, there is the triumphant beginning of _Pippa
Passes_--a glorious outburst of light, colour and splendour, impassioned
and rushing, the very upsoaring of Apollo's head behind his furious
steeds. It begins with one word, like a single stroke on the gong of
Nature: it continues till the whole of the overarching vault, and the
world below, in vast disclosure, is flooded with an ocean of gold.

Day!
Faster and more fast,
O'er night's brim, day boils at last;
Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim
Where spurting and suppressed it lay.
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled.
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.

This is chiefly of the sky, but the description in that gipsy-hearted
poem, _The Flight of the Duchess_, brings before us, at great length,
league after league of wide-spreading landscape. It is, first, of the
great wild country, cornfield, vineyards, sheep-ranges, open chase, till
we arrive at last at the mountains; and climbing up among their pines,
dip down into a yet vaster and wilder country, a red, drear, burnt-up
plain, over which we are carried for miles:

Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore.

Or we may read the _Grammarian's Funeral_, where we leave the city walls
and climb the peak on whose topmost ledge he is to be buried. As we
ascend the landscape widens; we see it expanding in the verse. Moreover,
with a wonderful power, Browning makes us feel the air grow keener,
fresher, brighter, more soundless and lonelier. That, too, is given by
the verse; it is a triumph in Nature-poetry.

Nor is he less effective in narrow landscape, in the description of
small shut-in spaces of Nature. There is the garden at the beginning of
_Paracelsus_; the ravine, step by step, in _Pauline_; the sea-beach, and
its little cabinet landscapes, in _James Lee's Wife_; the exquisite
pictures of the path over the Col di Colma in _By the Fireside_--for
though the whole of the landscape is given, yet each verse almost might
stand as a small picture by itself. It is one of Browning's favourite
ways of description, to walk slowly through the landscape, describing
step by step those parts of it which strike him, and leaving to us to
combine the parts into the whole. But _his_ way of combination is to
touch the last thing he describes with human love, and to throw back
this atmosphere of feeling over all the pictures he has made. The verses
I quote do this.

Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright;
How grey at once is the evening grown--
One star, its chrysolite!

We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
Till the trouble grew and stirred.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!

There are many such miniatures of Nature in Browning's poetry.
Sometimes, however, the pictures are larger and nobler, when the natural
thing described is in itself charged with power, terror or dignity. I
give one instance of this, where the fierce Italian thunderstorm is
enhanced by being the messenger of God's vengeance on guilt. It is from
_Pippa Passes_. The heaven's pillars are over-bowed with heat. The
black-blue canopy descends close on Ottima and Sebald.

Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood-screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead--

That is as splendid as the thing itself.

Again, no one can help observing in all these quotations the
extraordinary love of colour, a love Tennyson has in far fainter
measure, but which Browning seems to possess more than any other English
poet. Only Sir Walter Scott approaches him in this. Scott, knowing the
Highlands, knew dark magnificence of colour. But Browning's love of
colour arose from his having lived so long in Italy, where the light is
so pure, clear, and brilliant that colour is more intense, and at dawn
and sunset more deep, delicate, and various than it is in our land.
Sometimes, as Ruskin says, "it is not colour, it is conflagration"; but
wherever it is, in the bell of a flower, on the edge of a cloud, on the
back of a lizard, on the veins of a lichen, it strikes in Browning's
verse at our eyes, and he only, in English poetry, has joy enough in it
to be its full interpreter.

He sees the wild tulip blow out its great red bell; he sees the thin
clear bubble of blood at its tip; he sees the spike of gold which burns
deep in the bluebell's womb; the corals that, like lamps, disperse thick
red flame through the dusk green universe of the ocean; the lakes which,
when the morn breaks,

Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun;

the woodland brake whose withered fern Dawn feeds with gold; the moon
carried oft at sunrise in purple fire; the larch-blooms crisp and pink;
the sanguine heart of the pomegranate; the filberts russet-sheathed and
velvet-capped; the poppies crimson to blackness; the red fans of the
butterfly falling on the rock like a drop of fire from a brandished
torch; the star-fish, rose-jacynth to the finger-tips; and a hundred
other passionate seizures of colour. And, for the last of these colour
remembrances, in quieter tints--almost in black and white--I quote this
lovely verse from _James Lee's Wife_:

The swallow has set her six young on the rail,
And looks seaward:
The water's in stripes like a snake, olive pale
To the leeward,--
On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind.
"Good fortune departs, and disaster's behind"--
Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!

So, not only do we possess all these landscapes but we possess them in
colour. They are painted as well as drawn. It is his love of colour
which made at least half of the impulse that drove him at times into
Impressionism. Good drawing is little to the impressionist painters. It
is the sudden glow, splash or flicker of colour that moves them, which
makes on them the swift, the momentary impression they wish to record.

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