‘The Lost Leader’, ‘Prospice’ and the Epilogue to Asolando, Browning’s attitudes are
pungent, even crude. Browning needed his masks. He insisted that his poems were
dramatic, not personal, as did Tennyson and Hardy. The modern speakers are often
lovers, dissatisfied, possessive or obsessive. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ tells of strangling
Porphyria with her own hair, ending ‘And yet God has not said a word.’ The
grotesque fascinates Browning, who rarely satisfies the curiosity he arouses. But he
did not want to satisfy: ‘a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Else what’s a heaven
for?’ (‘Andrea del Sarto’).
His later years produced The Ring and the Book, a verse-novel of monologues
about a 17th-century Roman murder, in which ten participants tell what happened.
This use of separate perspectives, found in the old epistolary novel, became a formal
principle in the work of Browning’s admirer, the American novelist Henry James. It
remains a formula of the detective story. Browning had a novelist’s fascination with
the inscrutability of motives and the unpredictability of their combined effects. The
monologue was a gift to Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot. In the hands of its master, however, the monologue offers the fascination of a
feat or a puzzle. Like many 19th-century musical virtuosi, for example the Abbé
Liszt, Browning enjoys drawing attention to his own skill, and manner upstages
matter. ‘Irks care the crop-full bird?’ asks the speaker of ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’: ‘Frets
doubt the maw-crammed beast?’
Browning’s striking talent is put to better use in short poems such as ‘Home-
Thoughts from Abroad’, ‘Meeting at Night’ and ‘Parting at Morning’, and in some of
his modern love-poems, such as ‘Two in the Campagna’, which ends:
No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth – I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak –
Then the good minute goes.
Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward,whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?
Just when I seemed about to learn?
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discer n –
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
This was a gift that he did not lose with his wife’s death, as testified by many late
poems, including one, ‘Inapprehensiveness’, from 1889, his last year.Matthew Arnold
English Romantic poetry was not always romantic. Keats was the first strongly
to associate Romantic yearning with love, the ideal of post-Romantic life and
literature.Matthew Arnold’s formally perfect ‘Dover Beach’ shows a historical
change of tack comparable to that noted in Gray’s Elegy(p. 208). It opens with
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