Robert Browning
Robert Browning
Robert Browning
ROBERT BROWNING
Robert Browning (7 May 1812 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright
whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the
foremost Victorian poets.
Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, England, and his education mostly took place
among his fathers 6,000-book library. As a writer, Browning was regarded as a failure
for many years, living in the shadow of his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. However,
late in life Brownings brilliant use of dramatic monologue made him a literary icon.
Today, his most widely read work is Men and Women, a collection of dramatic
monologues dedicated to his wife.
Brownings fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not
only convey setting and action but also reveal the speakers character. Unlike a soliloquy,
the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals
but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the process of rationalizing past
actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem. Rather than
thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defence which the reader, as "juror," is
challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of the most debased, extreme and
even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the challenge of building a
sympathetic case for a character who doesn't deserve one and to cause the reader to
squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a homicidal psychopath. One
of his more sensational dramatic monologues is Porphyria's Lover.
Yet it is by carefully reading the far more sophisticated and cultivated rhetoric of the
aristocratic and civilized Duke of My Last Duchess, perhaps the most frequently cited
example of the poet's dramatic monologue form, that the attentive reader discovers the
most horrific example of a mind totally mad despite its eloquence in expressing itself. In
other monologues, such as Fra Lippo Lippi, Browning takes an ostensibly unsavory or
immoral character and challenges us to discover the goodness, or life-affirming qualities,
that often put the speaker's contemporaneous judges to shame. In The Ring and the Book
Browning writes an epic-length poem in which he justifies the ways of God to humanity
through twelve extended blank verse monologues spoken by the principals in a trial about
a murder. These monologues greatly influenced many later poets, including T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound, the latter singling out in his Cantos Browning's convoluted
psychological poem Sordello about a frustrated 13-century troubadour, as the poem he
must work to distance himself from.
Ironically, Brownings style, which seemed modern and experimental to Victorian
readers, owes much to his love of the seventeenth century poems of John Donne with
their abrupt openings, colloquial phrasing and irregular rhythms. But he remains too
much the prophet-poet and descendant of Percy Shelley to settle for the conceits, puns,
and verbal play of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His is a modern
sensibility, all too aware of the arguments against the vulnerable position of one of his
simple characters, who recites: "God's in His Heaven; All's right with the world."
Browning endorses such a position because he sees an immanent deity that, far from
remaining in a transcendent heaven, is indivisible from temporal process, assuring that in
the fullness of theological time there is ample cause for celebrating life.
A Face
If one could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold,
Such as the Tuscans early art prefers!
No shade encroaching on the matchless mould
Of those two lips, which should be opening soft
In the pure profile; not as when she laughs,
For that spoils all: but rather as if aloft
Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staffs
Burthen of honey-coloured buds to kiss
And capture twixt the lips apart for this.
Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround,
How it should waver on the pale gold ground,
Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts!
I know, Correggio loves to mass, in rifts
Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb
Breaking its outline, burning shades absorb:
But these are only massed there, I should think,
Waiting to see some wonder momently
Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky
(Thats the pale ground youd see this sweet face by),
All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye
Which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink.
Love in a Life
I
Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her
Next time, herself!not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew:
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.
II
Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest,who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see,with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!
S-ncetm, Iubire,
Lupta, chinul Ca-n trecut, Iubire,
Somnul, linul...
Ce nebuni cuvnt?
Eu i tu.
Psri ce se-nfrunt,
oimi, pustiu.
Dorurilor tale
S le ies n cale,
Trup punnd i suflet
n minile tale.
Adevrul minte?
Minte te rnete.
Unde-a-nfipt un dinte
arpele - ferete!
Mine va fi asta,
Ast-noapte nu!
Jalea se cuvine
n adnc s-o iu.