by Harold Bloom
The lilt and mad energy of this carries us along, yet the speaker is reluctant to accept the sophistication of Galuppi and of his audience. The useless good that Galuppi’s music still brings saddens the monologuist even as he performs the madcap piece, vainly resisting its implications:
V
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,—
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head?
VI
Well, and it was graceful of them—they’d break talk off and afford
—She, to bite her mask’s black velvet—he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?
VII
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—‘Must we die?’
Those commiserating sevenths—‘Life might last! we can but try!’
VIII
‘Were you happy?’—‘Yes.’—‘And are you still as happy?’—‘Yes. And you?’
—‘Then, more kisses!’—‘Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?’
Hark, the dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to!
Browning’s charming devotion to the beauty of women animates and estranges his speaker’s sense of the gathering doom of the sweet life. The kisses cannot reply to the dominant’s persistence, and yet, even at eighty-seven, one wants to share the illusion of more life, while knowing, like Galuppi’s admirers, that time must have a stop:
IX
So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
‘Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!’
X
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.
XI
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.
XII
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
‘Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.
The dance became a dance of death, with only two prospects: lives coming to nothing, and deeds that should not have been. Seeking a fixed point, the monologuist suffers his own illusive triumph but then is overwhelmed by the cold splendor of the toccata. Sexually and financially, Venice spent what it earned, and Galuppi cricket-like sounds out what Wallace Stevens, indebted to Browning’s music poems, meant by “The house will crumble and the books will burn” in “The Auroras of Autumn”:
XIII
‘Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,—you’ll not die, it cannot be!
XIV
‘As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?’
XV
‘Dust and ashes!’ So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
The soul, mortal or immortal, can no longer be discerned when the kissing has to stop. In the marvelous final tercet, to my ear and mind, Browning, almost in spite of himself, fuses with his speaker. Several of my remaining friends in my vanishing generation are given to quoting the two final lines. I brood on women I loved who have departed forever and recall how beautifully they were attired on a particular day and the glory of their tresses. I too feel chilly and grown old.
Robert Browning, Pauline
“MEMORABILIA” was written by Browning in 1851. A friend recalled Browning saying “with characteristic vehemence: ‘I was one day in the shop of Hodgson, the well-known London bookseller, when a stranger…spoke of something that Shelley had once said to him. Suddenly the stranger paused, and burst into laughter as he observed me staring at him with blanched face; and,’ the poet continued, ‘I still vividly remember how strangely the presence of a man who had seen and spoken with Shelley affected me.’ ”
Browning’s sixteen-line tribute to things worth remembering has a simplicity beyond measure and yet condenses his lifelong obsession with Shelley, which began in 1826 when he was fourteen. He had been given a small pirated edition of Shelley’s lyrics, and at once he renounced his mother’s evangelical Christianity. His attachment to his mother was so close that he yielded to her and promised to abandon Shelley. That proved impossible, and all of his poetry, though it swerves from Shelleyan lyricism to dramatic monologues, in its essence was always Shelleyan:
I
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems and new!
II
But you were living before that,
And you are living after;
And the memory I started at—
My starting moves your laughter.
III
I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone
’Mid the blank miles round about:
IV
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather!
Well, I forget the rest.
Quatrains III and IV subtly translate Browning’s wonder. Without any continuity, the poet crosses a moor, one brief stretch of which shines out of the blankness. He picks up a single moulted eagle-feather and places it inside his breast. And that is all. He shrugs and says, “I forget the rest.” The aura of Shelley subdues any context. In the early poem Pauline, Browning had saluted Shelley as the Sun-treader:
Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever!
Thou art gone from us; years go by and spring
Gladdens and the young earth is beautiful,
Yet thy songs come not, other bards arise,
But none like thee: they stand, thy majesties,
Like mighty works which tell some spirit there
Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn,
Till, its long task completed, it hath risen
And left us, never to return, and all
Rush in to peer and praise when all in vain.
The air seems bright with thy past presence yet,
But thou art still for me as thou hast been
When I have stood with thee as on a throne
With all thy dim creations gathered round
Like mountains, and I felt of mould like them,
And with them creatures of my own were mixed,
Like things half-lived, catching and giving life.
This is the incarnation of the poetical character in 1826, very different from the birth of the poet in the odes of William Collins (1721–
59). Dying at thirty-seven of alcoholism and derangement, Collins left only a slender body of work, but it included his wonderful “Ode on the Poetical Character.” In our time, one thinks of the hilarious “Mrs. Alfred Uruguay” by Wallace Stevens, in which the youth with flashing eyes and floating hair of Collins and of Coleridge in “Kublai Khan” appears again as “A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,” who rushes down the mountain to find “The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.”
Browning beholds Shelley as the ultimate incarnation of the poet: “The air seems bright with thy past presence yet.” Nothing could be more unlike “I feel chilly and grown old.” Stevens saw the poet as being always in the sun, inheriting this from Shelley in part through the mediumship of Browning. The exceeding brightness of the Sun-treader makes his heirs conceive how dark they have become.
The Condition of Fire at the Dark Tower
I CAN NO LONGER RECALL how many commentaries I have written upon “Childe Roland” (to call it that, since whether the poem has a title is questionable, as is all else in Browning’s nightmare vision). The monologuist is nameless, and as a useful convention he can be called Roland. He is certainly not the hero of The Song of Roland, the battle epic that is the oldest poem in the French language.
Everyone who has been in a military situation, whether training troops or preparing for a particular mission, knows how dangerous over-preparing the event can be. Too long a focus on an expected action can lead to blindness when the actual site comes into view:
XXIX
Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when—
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts—you ’re inside the den!
XXX
Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Couched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain…Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!
XXXI
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest’s mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.
“What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?” With that outcry, Roland’s quest falls away into the iniquity of oblivion. Since he wants to fail, like the knights in “The Band” before him, his apparent defeat may also be victory:
XXXII
Not see? because of night perhaps?—why, day
Came back again for that! 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,—
“Now stab and end the creature—to the heft!”
XXXIII
Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,—
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
XXXIV
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”
Browning said this astonishing monologue was the work of a single day following a dream. The windowless tower suggests the imprisonment of the poet Torquato Tasso in the days of his madness and recalls Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo”:
I looked, and saw between us and the sun
A building on an island; such a one
As age to age might add, for uses vile,
A windowless, deformed and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung;
We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue:
The broad sun sunk behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief.—‘What we behold
Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,’…
Lines 98–107
Byron, in the guise of Count Maddalo, addresses Shelley, who will enter Roland’s monologue at the close: “Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy!” Browning takes the slug-horn from Thomas Chatterton, who poisoned himself at the age of seventeen, when his forgery of the supposed Thomas Rowley was uncovered and scorned. William Blake and William Wordsworth both venerated Chatterton, seeing him as a harbinger of what we call High Romanticism. “Slug-horn” was a Chattertonian corruption of “slogan” and serves to bind Roland to the band of brothers that for Browning embraced Shelley, Tasso, Chatterton, and all the other lost adventurers who quested for the Dark Tower.
* * *
—
Roland, facing not an ogre but a sheet of flame constituted by his peers ringed round him, cries out:
And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”
“Dauntless” is the word that the ruined quester has earned. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, Roland could also have chanted: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Robert Browning,
“Thamuris Marching”
ROBERT BROWNING, exuberant beyond belief, composed a palinode to his “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” in a late, long poem, Aristophanes’ Apology. The poem I find barely readable except for the chant of Thamuris as he marches pridefully and courageously toward his doomed contest with the Muses. Here is Browning’s source, Iliad II, lines 594–600.
…and Dorion, where the Muses
encountering Thamyris the Thracian stopped him from singing
as he came from Oichalia and Oichalian Eurytos;
for he boasted that he would prevail, if the very Muses,
daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis, were singing against him,
and these in their anger struck him maimed, and the voice of wonder
they took away, and made him a singer without memory….
Translation by Richmond Lattimore
Shelley’s ongoing influence on Browning emerges again in the High Romanticism of a section of Aristophanes’ Apology I have entitled “Thamuris Marching”:
Thamuris marching,—lyre and song of Thrace—
(Perpend the first, the worst of woes that were,
Allotted lyre and song, ye poet-race!)
Thamuris from Oichalia, feasted there
By kingly Eurutos of late, now bound
For Dorion at the uprise broad and bare
Of Mount Pangaios (ore with earth enwound
Glittered beneath his footstep)—marching gay
And glad, Thessalia through, came, robed and crowned,
From triumph on to triumph, ’mid a ray
Of early morn,—came, saw and knew the spot
Assigned him for his worst of woes, that day.
Balura—happier while its name was not—
Met hi
m, but nowise menaced; slipt aside,
Obsequious river, to pursue its lot
Of solacing the valley—say, some wide
Thick busy human cluster, house and home,
Embanked for peace, or thrift that thanks the tide.
The river Balyra, from the Greek for “cast away,” was named because Thamyris, after the Muses blinded him, threw his lyre into it. Robed and crowned, glorified by the morning sunlight, Thamuris boldly marches to disaster. But, in total antithesis to Childe Roland, this lost adventurer rekindles the wasteland:
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.