Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and historicism

Rag of flesh, scrap of bone in dim disuse,

Smoking flax that fed fire once: prompt therein

I enter, spark-like, put old powers to play." (RBRB I. 749-55)

Here the poet compares himself to a magus. But the imagery also suggests
that the poet, like Aeneas, has the power to descend into the underworld,
just as he is a Promethean figure who can bring the past "spark-like" to life
and rescue what might otherwise be lost to oblivion.
But in other respects, like Michael Field, Browning critiques the dream of
wholeness that so many of his contemporaries found so seductive. Else-
where he offers instead an ironic acknowledgment of the contingency,
fictiveness, and indeed partiality of any attempt to reconstruct the past in
such a way as to undermine the truth claims of history. In the much earlier
Sordello (1840) - a long poem of epic dimensions featuring the life of a
thirteenth-century troubadour during the Guelf-Ghibelline wars - the poet
is figured as a grave-snatching impresario: "poets know the dragnet's trick,
/ Catching the dead" (RB I. 35-36):

... Here they are: now view
The host I muster! Many a lighted face
Foul with no vestige of the grave's disgrace;
What else should tempt them back to taste our air
Except to see how their successors fare?
My audience! (I. 44-49)

The past is made before our very eyes, the scene is set, exploding into view,
conjured like a genie from a lamp:

Lo, the past is hurled

In twain: up-thrust, out-staggering on the world,

Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears

Its outline, kindles at the core, appears

Verona. (1.73-77)

Browning's historicist convictions are inscribed even more tellingly in the
formal constitution of his poetry, which does not aspire to coherence, and
deliberately demands of the reader an active engagement in the process of
producing the past. As Joseph Bristow has shown, the unusual structure of
Sordello, which veers alarmingly between the writer's present and the
historical setting, and which "chops up its narrative sequence - so that the
story... has to be pieced together, bit by bit," should be read as the poet's
deliberate attempt "to put an avant-garde method of historiography into
poetic practice." 36

It is in the dramatic monologue that Browning's interrogation of both
history and the historical subject is most dynamically realized. J. Hillis

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