A Centenary Selection from Robert Browning's Poetry (ed. Michael Meredith) The Browning Institute, and Constable. 196 pp.
Robert Browning: Selected Poetry (ed. Daniel Karlin) 340pp. Penguin
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Robert Browning died on December 12th 1889. The Browning Institute in America in conjunction with Constable, has chosen to publish this centenary volume of poetry edited by Michael Meredith. He acknowledges 'help and encouragement' from friends in the Browning Society in England as well as the Institute in America: 'From first to last it has been a combined Anglo-American venture.' A Centenary Selection is really a kind of shared family celebration, a present to themselves by people wholly committed to Browning's poetry. The poems are divided clearly into four sections - Narrative, Love, Dramatic Monologue, Personal. There are 29 illustrations, one to a page: the poet at different ages of his life, places mentioned in the poems or of biographical interest, works of art inspired by the poems, and works - like Andrea Del Sarto's Portrait of the Artist and his Wife - that were themselves the inspiration. There is a biographical chronology, and background notes to each poem. Cream paper, clear print, plenty of margin space: a pleasant book to handle, one that should satisfy the members on either side of the Atlantic, and make an attractive present for non-members too.
The Penguin anthology, with its smaller print and page, gives twice the amount
at 300 pages of text. Twenty three poems are common to both anthologies, and can act as a reasonable check list for someone who hasn't read Browning and might want to try him out. Under Meredith's categories these are: Narrative Poetry - 'How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix', 'Apparent Failure', 'Gold Hair,' 'The Statue and the Bust;' Love Poetry - 'Now,' 'Love Among the Ruins,' 'Two in the Campagna,' 'Confessions,' 'A Serenade at the Villa;' Dramatic Monologues - 'My Last Duchess,' 'Porphyria's Lover,' 'Soliloquoy of the Spanish Cloister,' 'A Toccata of Galuppi's,' 'The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church,' 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Andrea Del Sarto, 'A Grammarian's Funeral,' 'Up at a Villa - Down in the City,' 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came;' Personal Poetry - 'House,' 'How it Strikes a Contemporary,' 'Memorabilia,' and 'Never the Time and the Place.'
Both editors mention their reluctance to quote bits from long poems which are not quotably episodic. The Centenary anthology though does have one excerpt from The Ring and the Book, the passage towards the close of Book One where Browning steps to the side and addresses his late wife:-
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand -
That still, despite the distance and the dark
What was, again may be
Even this loses in being wrenched from context, where it comes as a surprise in the reading, the one private moment in the construction of the poem.It might be appropriate here in this Glasgow newspaper to mention how one Glasgow schoolteacher, Alexander Haddow, tried to get his pupils to read the 21,000-line The Ring and the Book 75 years ago. In the introduction to his guide to the poem, The Ring and the Book as a Connected Narrative (Blackie, 1924) Haddow tells how after the Christmas exams were over he looked for something to keep his sixth year occupied, so he decided to try them with Book Six, 'Guiseppe Caponsacchi'. Apparently his pupils enjoyed it enough for them to form a reading club to finish it, which was partly why Haddow's book came into existence.
One way of approaching Browning's longer poems is to be aware of three basic tools of Browning's trade - the question-mark, the parenthetical dash, and the exclamation mark. Take a collection of the poetry, open it at any page, hold it up, imagine that these punctuation marks I mention were coloured red. There would hardly be a double page without its sprinkling of red marks. He uses them for different effects - dramatic, analytic, musical. They enhance the sense of presence of a speaker and listener, of modulation in voice, of expectant silence. In sequence, they are the ever-recurring foundation of two elements he loved to combine: play and analysis. So many of his speakers, in their arguments, constantly as it were ask the listener to guess which thimble the sixpence of their argument currently is under. This one? - pause - Wrong again!
Browning is for me at his least attractive when I sense that such thimbles are assumed to be transparent to reader and author, though opaque to the narrator. This I sense sometimes especially in certain characters looking at Christianity from the outside. As to how best to comemmorate the centenary: both these anthologies are fine in their different ways. But the best anthology of Browning's poetry ever published was his own Men and Women of 1855. I'll say a few words about it as my own centenary tribute.
Men and Women is a sequence, each poem is meant to define the other. There are fifty poems - including some of Browning's best-known - with a postscript to Elizabeth Barrett Browning reflecting on what the poems are trying to achieve. The sequence is about religion, art, and men-women relationships. There are
people looking forward to appointments with their lovers, and people who have been jilted or otherwise disappointed; people who fancied each other but never got round to it ('The Statue and the Bust'), people who got round to it as often as they could ('Fra Lippo Lippi') and people who didn't get round to it at all, like the grammarian of 'A Grammarian's Funeral'. There's the words of someone waiting to be executed, and the words of watchers at an execution; a second speaks before a duel in one poem, the victor speaks in the poem following. There's an artist telling a king not to envy the immortality of art, as the artist hates growing old and losing his powers, and there's David cheering King Saul up with a description of the wonders of the earth, the immortality of the king's achievements, and another immortality to come. There's Fra Lippo Lippi seen as an enjoyer of life, Del Sarto as a failed artist in a failed marriage. There's poems about duplicity and uncertainty in relationships, love poems about faithfulness and trust.
All this 'about', all this subject matter. And it works, there are so many fine achievements: I haven't even mentioned the great 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', unfortunately in neither of the anthologies newly issued. But what I find most exhilarating about Men and Women is the scale of Browning's formal achievement. Of the fifty one poems in the book, not a single poem duplicates precisely the form of any other. Nine of the poems employ 'blank verse', and the 42 poems that rhyme have 24 different rhyme schemes. Where two poems have the same rhyming pattern, they have different line lengths, or different metre.
This about metre: there is a lingering fallacy that the opposite of free verse is an antient system based on lines called iambic pentameters which made poetry sound like something that went dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM. But as a musical dictionary usually points out, there is a difference between beat and accent; carrying this musical analogy further, there is a difference between using the pedal of inflexion and hitting a note harder. It is no accident that Browning was almost an exact contemporary of Liszt: it has often been remarked that Men and Women was published in the same year as Whitman's Leaves of Grass. It seems to me more relevant that it was published in the same year as Liszt's revised Annee de Pelerinage. In Men and Women, from the lingering three notes of each alternate line in the verses of the first poem
Where the quite-coloured end of evening smiles
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half asleep
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop -
through the longer monologues with their constantly shifting modulations of tone and stress, to the brilliant, formally daring miniatures like 'My Star' or 'Life in a Love', Browning's sequence can without incongruity be described as a virtuoso extended classical piano suite. No wonder one of the most memorable performances is the musical conversation in 'A Toccata of Galuppi's':
'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!
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.'