whom we knew’. Tennyson said that the poem expressed his own ‘need of going
forward and braving the struggle of life’ after the death of Hallam; the need can
be felt more than the braving. The ghosts of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and
Milton speak in the rhythms and phrasing ofUlysses. Tennyson was steeped in the
classical, and, more than any predecessor, in the whole of the English poetic tradi-
tion also. As an undergraduate he had translated a little ofBeowulf, the first
English poet to do so. He chose the lines in which Beowulf ‘his wordhoard
unlocked’.
Tithonus, like Tiresias,The Lotos-Eaters and other poems drafted after 1833,
longs for death. Its speaker was loved by the goddess Aurora (Dawn), who gave
him eternal life but not eternal youth. Nothing is more Tennysonian than the
opening:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms ...Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
In 1846 Robert Browning(1812–1889) married Elizabeth Barrett(1806–1861) in
a marriage kept secret from her father; she was his senior by six years, and far better
known as a poet. Only after her death in 1861, when he returned to England from
Italy, did his reputation eclipse hers. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese (not transla-
tions,but her own love-poems) were then much admired – ‘How do I love thee? Let
me count the ways’ – but they now seem too declamatory. The lower-pitched reaches
of her verse-novel Aurora Leigh make much better reading.
Browning lacks Tennyson’s beauty of verse and language, but the poets apply the
Romantic legacy in ways that can be compared. After his early verse was criticized as
self-obsessed, Browning chose not to wear his heart on his sleeve. Turning outwards,
he wrote a number of unsuccessful plays – melodramatic acting vehicles – then went
back to the dramatic monologue. Whereas Tennyson spoke indirectly through clas-
sical myth and literary legend, Browning’s speakers are, or seem, historical. He had
read much out-of-the-way Renaissance history, as demonstrated in the romance
Sordello. He perfected the monologue in ‘My Last Duchess’: the Duke, who speaks,
has had his last wife killed because she smiled at everyone. Browning develops the
form further in Men and Women (1855),Dramatis Personae (1864), and others. ‘The
Bishop Orders his Tomb’, a compact and energetic short story, is a fine representa-
ti ve of the form.
Browning was prolific, and his artists, humanists and clerics, ancient and
modern, hold forth as compulsively as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Like characters
in the ‘humour’ comedy of Ben Jonson, they sacrifice proportion, humanity and
morality to a ruling passion. Spirit and strong will can seem self-justifying in these
confessions, for the author does not offer context or judgement. Yet in Browning, as
in Dickens, the fascination of egotism is to be read against a humane and anti-
dogmatic Christianity. His upbringing in South London Dissent comes through in
his attitude to Italy. He was pro-Italian, and, like many educated Italians, anti-
clerical, but also simply anti-Catholic. When authorial judgement is explicit, as in
VICTORIAN ROMANTIC POETRY 277