Selections From The Poems And Plays Of Robert Browning Part 38

[_She sleeps._

NOTES

SONGS FROM PARACELSUS

The poem _Paracelsus_ is divided into five parts, each of which describes an important period in the experience of Paracelsus, the celebrated German-Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher of the sixteenth century. Book I tells of the eagerness and pride with which he set out in his youth to compa.s.s all knowledge; he believed himself commissioned of G.o.d to learn Truth and to give it to mankind. Books II and III show him followed and idolized by mult.i.tudes to whom he imparts the fragments of knowledge he has gained. But though these fragments seem to his disciples the sum and substance of wisdom, his own mind is preoccupied with a desolating certainty that he has hardly touched on the outer confines of truth. In Book IV, after experiencing the ingrat.i.tude of his fickle adherents, he is represented as abjuring the dreams of his youth. At this point comes the first of the three songs given in the text. He builds an imaginary altar on which he offers up the aspirations, the hopes, the plans, with which he had begun his career.

SONG I

1-3. _Ca.s.sia_ is an unidentified fragrant plant; the wood of the _sandal_ tree is also fragrant; _labdanum_ or _ladanum_, is a resinous gum of dark color and pungent odor, exuding from various species of the cistus, a plant found around the Mediterranean; _aloe-b.a.l.l.s_ are made from a bitter resinous juice extracted from the leaves of aloe-plants; _nard_ is an ointment made from an aromatic plant and used in the East Indies. These substances have long been traditionally a.s.sociated in literature. In _Psalms_ xlv, 8 we read: "All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and ca.s.sia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad." Milton in _Paradise Lost_, v, 293, speaks of "flowering odors, ca.s.sia, nard, and balms."

4. _Such balsam_. The meaning of II. 4-8 is obscure. "Sea-side mountain pedestals" are presumably cliffs. In the tops of the trees on these cliffs the wind, weary of its rough work on the ocean, has gently dropped the fragrant things it has swept up from the island.

9-16. In this stanza the faint sweetness from the spices used in embalming, and the perfume still clinging to the tapestry in an ancient royal room carry suggestions of vanished power and beauty that add an appropriate pathos to the richly piled altar on which Paracelsus is to offer up the "lovely fancies" of his youth. "Shredded" is a transferred epithet, referring really to "arras," but transferred to the perfume of the arras.

SONG II. (Book IV)

When Paracelsus confesses the failure of his pursuit of absolute knowledge, his friend Festus urges him to redeem the past by making new use of what he has gained; but Paracelsus has no courage to attempt a reorganization of his life in accordance with a new ideal. His answer to Festus is the second of the three songs. He afterwards calls it,

"The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung To their first fault and withered in their pride."

The song is a beautiful and clear allegory, vivid in its pictures, rapid and musical.

SONG III. (Book V)

In Book V Paracelsus is described as lying ill in the Hospital of St.

Sebastian. Festus is endeavoring to divert the current of his dying friend's fierce, delirious thoughts into a gentler channel. He brings up one picture after another of the early happy life of Paracelsus, and dwells on the grandeur of his mind and achievements, and on the fame that shall be his. But the desired peace comes only when Festus sings the song of the river Mayne beside which their youth had been spent. At the end of the song Paracelsus exclaims,

"My heart! they loose my heart, those simple words; Its darkness pa.s.ses which naught else could touch."

The Mayne, or Main, is the most important of the right-hand tributaries of the Rhine. Wurzburg, where Festus and Paracelsus had been as students, is on its banks. Its University was especially noted for its medical department. Mr. Stopford Brooke (_The Poetry of Robert Browning_, p. 99) says of this lovely lyric: "I have driven through that gracious country of low hill and dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered banks only a foot high the slow river winds in gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the sentiment of the scenery.

But, as before, Browning quickly slides away from the beauty of inanimate nature into a record of the animals that haunt the streams. He could not get on long with mountains and rivers alone. He must people them with breathing, feeling things; anything for life!"

CAVALIER TUNES

These three, stirring songs represent the gay, reckless loyalty of the Cavaliers to the cause of King Charles I and their contempt for his Puritan opposers. The Puritans wore closely cropped hair; hence the Parliament which came together in 1640 and was controlled by the opponents of the King, is dubbed "crop-headed." John Pym and John Hampden were leaders in the struggle against the tyranny of the King.

Hazelrig, Fiennes, and young Sir Henry Vane were also adherents of Oliver Cromwell. Rupert, Prince of the Palatinate, was a nephew of Charles I and was a noted cavalry leader on the royal side during the Civil War. The followers of the King unfurled the royal standard at Nottingham in August, 1642; Kentish Sir Byng raised a troop and hurried on to join the main royal army. In September occurred the battle of Edgehill. The "Noll" (l. 16 of "Give a Rouse") is Oliver Cromwell. The third song was ent.i.tled originally "My Wife Gertrude." It was she who held the castle of Brancepeth against the Roundheads.

THE LOST LEADER

This poem indignantly records a poet's defection from the cause of progress and liberty. Who this poet might be was for some time a matter of conjecture. Wordsworth, Southey, and Charles Kingsley, all of whom had gone from radicalism in their youth to conservatism in their old age, were severally proposed as the original of Browning's portrait. The poem was published in 1845, two years after Wordsworth was made poet laureate. Early in 1845 Wordsworth was presented at court, a proceeding which aroused comment--sometimes amused, sometimes indignant--from those who recalled the poet's early scorn of rank and t.i.tles. Browning and Miss Barrett exchanged several gay letters on this subject in May, 1845.

In commenting on a letter from Miss Martineau describing Wordsworth in his home in 1846, Browning wrote, "Did not Sh.e.l.ley say long ago, 'He had no more imagination than a pint-pot'--though in those days he used to walk about France and Flanders like a man. _Now_, he is 'most comfortable in his worldly affairs' and just this comes of it! He lives the best twenty years of his life after the way of his own heart--and when one presses in to see the result of his rare experiment--what the _one_ alchemist whom fortune has allowed to get all his coveted materials and set to work at last with fire and melting pot--what he produces after all the talk of him and the like of him; why, you get _pulvis et cinis_--a man at the mercy of the tongs and shovel." In later life, however, Browning spoke of Wordsworth in a different tone. In a letter to Mr. Grosart, written Feb. 24, 1875, he said, "I have been asked the question you now address me with, and as duly answered, I can't remember how many times. There is no sort of objection to one more a.s.surance, or rather confession, on my part, that I _did_ in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerated personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter's model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account. Had I intended more--above all such a boldness as portraying the entire man--I should not have talked about 'handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon.' These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet--whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular face-about of his special party, was, to my private apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore. But, just as in the tapestry on my wall I can recognize figures which have _struck out_ a fancy, on occasion, that though truly enough thus derived, yet would be preposterous as a copy; so, though I dare not deny the original of my little poem, I altogether refuse to have it considered as the 'very effigies' of such a moral and intellectual superiority." For an interesting parallelism in theme, see Whittier's "Ichabod."

20. _Whom._ The reference is to the lower cla.s.ses, whom the Liberals were endeavoring to rouse to aspiration and action. The Conservatives opposed such beginnings of independence.

29. _Best fight on well._ It is the deserting leader who is exhorted to fight well. Though it is pain to have him desert their party, they have gloried in his power and it would be an even greater pain to see him weak. They wish him to fight well even though their cause is thereby menaced.

HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS FROM GHENT TO AIX

This poem was written during Mr. Browning's first journey to Italy, in 1838. He sailed from London in a merchant vessel bound for Trieste, on which he found himself the only pa.s.senger. The weather was stormy and for the first fortnight Browning was extremely ill. As they pa.s.sed through the straights of Gibraltar the captain supported him upon deck that he might not lose the sight. Of the Composition of the poem he says, "I wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after I had been at sea long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse 'York' there in my stable at home." The poem was written in pencil on the flyleaf of Bartoli's _Simboli_, a favorite book of his. Browning says that there was no sort of historical foundation for the story, but the Pacification of Ghent in 1576 has been suggested as an appropriate background. The incident narrated could naturally belong to the efforts of the united cities of Holland, Zealand, and the Southern Netherlands to combat the tyranny of Philip II.

6. Of this line Miss Barrett wrote: "It drew us out into the night as witnesses."

13. _'Twas moonset._ The distance from Ghent to Aix is something over a hundred miles. The first horse gave out at Ha.s.selt, about eighty miles from Ghent; the second horse failed at Dalhem in sight of Aix. Roland made the whole distance between midnight of one day and sunset of the next. The minute notes of time are for dramatic and picturesque effect rather than as exact indications of progress. Even the towns are not used with the exactness of a guide-book, for Looz and Tongres are off the direct route.

17. _Mecheln._ Flemish for Mechlin. The chimes they heard were probably from the cathedral tower.

41. _Dome-spire._ Over the polygonal monument founded by Charlemagne in Aix-la-Chapelle is a dome 104 feet high and 48 feet in diameter. The reference is probably to this dome.

THE FLOWER'S NAME

This poem and "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," a companion poem, appeared in _Hood's Magazine_, July, 1844, under the t.i.tle of "Garden Fancies."

"The Flower's Name" is a description of a garden by a lover whose conception of its beauty is heightened and made vital by the memories it enshrines. Of this poem Miss Barrett wrote to Browning, "Then the 'Garden Fancies'--some of the stanzas about the name of the flower, with such exquisite music in them, and grace of every kind--and with that beautiful and musical use of the word 'meandering,' which I never remember having seen used in relation to sound before. It does to mate with your '_simmering_ quiet' in _Sordello_, which brings the summer air into the room as sure as you read it." (_Letters of R. B. and E. B. B._, I, 134.)

10. _Box._ An evergreen shrub, dwarf varieties of which are used for low hedges or the borders of flower-beds.

MEETING AT NIGHT AND PARTING AT MORNING

These poems were published originally simply as "Night" and "Morning."

The second of these love lyrics is somewhat difficult to interpret. If the man is speaking, the "him" in l. 3 must refer to the sun. In any case, after the isolation with the woman he loved as described in the first poem, there comes with the morning a sense of the world of action to which the man must return. The two poems are fully discussed in _Poet-Lore_, Volume VII, April, May, June-July. The poems are noteworthy for the fusion of human emotion and natural scenery and for the startlingly specific phrasing of the first quatrain.

EVELYN HOPE

In this lyric are embodied Browning's faith in personal immortality, his belief in the permanence of true love and in the value of love though unrequited in this world.

34. _What meant._ From this point on through line 52 the lover repeats what he shall say to Evelyn Hope when in the life to come he claims her.

LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

A man is on his way across the fields to a turret where he is to meet the girl he loves. As he walks through the solitary pastures he mentally recreates the powerful life and varied interests of the city which, tradition has it, once occupied this site, and he seems to be absorbed in a melancholy recognition of the evanescence of human glory. The girl is not mentioned till stanza 5. Does the emphasis on the scenery and its historic a.s.sociations unduly minimize the love element of the poem? Or is the whole picture of vanished joy and woe, pride and defeat, but a background against which stands out more clearly the rapture of the meeting in the ruined turret?

80. _Earth's returns._ This phrase refers to the ruins which are all that now remains of the centuries of folly, noise, and sin. "Them" in l.

81 refers apparently to the "fighters" and the others of the first part of the stanza.