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				<title>Imagery in Browning's Poetry</title>
				<author>C. Willard Smith</author>
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				<publisher>Bucknell University Press</publisher>
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				<bibl><publisher>TRP document creator: dkj004@bucknell.edu</publisher></bibl>
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<head>IMAGERY IN BROWNING’S POETRY</head>
				<byline>C. WILLARD SMITH: Associate Professor of English, Bucknell
					University</byline>
				No matter what the nature of his investigation may be, the purpose of every
					student of literature is to enlarge his understanding of the poetry or prose
					which attracts his attention. If he succeeds in this purpose, he believes he can
					speak with greater assurance, even with a contagious emphasis, about the
					literature he has examined. 
				 His investigations in many instances lead him to the past; so that his
					intellectual position in the contemporary world may seem, at first glance,
					rather awkward. But he takes this position deliberately, with the notion that an
					interpretation of the present is possible only when it is based upon an
					understanding of something that can be used as a fixed point of reference.
					Furthermore, if we stop to think of it, none of us has ever read a book which is
					actually contemporary, for such books are only those now in the process of being
					made. 
				 The forms of literary study are various; they may be biographical, textual,
					historical, philosophical, linguistic, aesthetic, grammatical, corrective,
					editorial, or scientific. Of all the forms the scientific is perhaps the most
					difficult for the student of literature to carry on successfully, unless it be
					employed in the field of linguistic study. In recent years, however, the
					development of the science of psychology has seemed to set up a technique and a
					discipline which have appealed to some literary investigators as a method to be
					well used or flagrantly abused. 
				 Among the various forms of literary study, the aesthetic has seemed to me very
					interesting. It is this method of investigation which requires the investigator
					to keep the fact in mind at all times that he is bent upon the examination of
					works of art, and that the creative personality behind these works is
					essentially an artist who uses words as his medium of expression. To be sure,
					there are certain forms of prose, and even poetry, which may be said to be more
					nearly the work of philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, historians,
					or critics, than the work of artists. The aesthetic method is indeed only one of
					several proper forms of literary study. Were it the only method to be employed,
					such conclusions as it might produce would lack the corrective inferences of
					other forms of analysis. 
				 The poetry of Robert Browning has been examined by all the methods of literary
					scholarship and also by the "methods" which were employed by the Browning
					Societies of London, of Boston, and, for a time, of almost every other American
					community whose inhabitants sought to create an atmosphere of gentility. 
				 Among Browning’s contemporaries there were two men who understood his poetry
					better than anyone else. It is interesting to note that their critical
					admiration for his work was based very largely upon aesthetic analysis. These
					men were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter, and Algernon Charles
					Swinburne, poet and verbal musician. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the very
					few men who realized the significance of Browning’s <title level="m">Sordello</title>, who through reading that strange poem sensed in it the
					artistic qualities that distinguished Browning from all other English poets. One
					day after he had been reading <title level="m">Sordello</title>, Rossetti found
					a book in the library of the British Museum. There was no name on the title-page
					save the title of the poem and the publisher's imprint. The poem was called
						<title level="m">Pauline</title>. Rossetti was impressed by the literary
					style of the poem; it reminded him of <title level="m">Sordello</title>. He
					wrote to Browning and learned that his aesthetic judgment had been, indeed,
					correct. <title level="m">Pauline</title>, save for a few incidental pieces
					printed in periodicals of the day, was Robert Browning's first published poem. 
				 When the muddle over the meaning of Browning’s <title level="m">Sordello</title>
					was at its height, when on every hand the conventional critics were charging
					Browning with complete obscurity, it was Algernon Charles Swinburne who arose to
					the defense. This is what he said : 
				<quote> The difference between [the really obscure writer and Browning] is the
					difference between smoke and lightning, and it is far more difficult to pitch
					the tone of your thought in harmony with that of a foggy thinker than that of
					one whose thought is electric in its motion. Only random thinking and random
					writing produce obscurity. We find no obscurity in the lightning, whether it
					play about the heights of metaphysical speculation or the depths of character
					and motive. And thanks to this very quality of vivid spiritual illumination we
					are able to see with his eyes, or with the eyes of the living mask which he
					assumes for his momentary impersonation of saint or sophist, philosopher or
					malefactor; without accepting one conclusion, conceding one point, or condoning
					one crime. It is evident that to produce any such effect requires above all
					things brightness and de- cision as well as subtlety and pliancy of genius; and
					this is the supreme gift and distinctive faculty of Mr. Browning's mind. If
					indeed there be ever any likelihood of error in his exquisite analysis, he will
					doubtless be found to err rather through excess of light than through any touch
					of darkness.<ref n="1">1</ref>
				</quote>
				 Following this suggestion of Swinburne I have examined this element of
					illumination, or of light, in Browning's poetry, fixing my attention
					particularly upon Browning's use of images of light; such as the sun, the stars,
					and those properties of nature which tend to break the white light of the sun
					into its various colors. In his youthful poem, <title level="m">Pauline</title>,
					it is apparent that Browning had used these images to emphasize some of the most
					important points in the argument that he sought to present. He deliberately
					asso- ciated the personality of <title level="m">Pauline</title>, the spirit of
					poetry, with an image of the star, and he called Shelley, with whose poetry he
					was then greatly enamoured, a "sun-treader”; he referred to the laws of God as a
					"lode star."
				The more detailed the analysis of these images became, the more patently emerged
					the design of their structural relationship to the whole of <title level="m">Pauline</title>, the more tantalizingly appeared the complexity of their
					interfusion with other images whose importance was often as great. Ordinarily,
					we are accustomed to say that Browning’s <title level="m">Pauline</title> lacks
					even a fair degree of structural organization, that it is a confused,
					disorganized piece of work. But when we consider the evidence suggested by his
					deliberate use of these images, we can point, I think, to Browning's having
					either consciously or subconsciously assigned to these images a definitely
					structural function. We cannot explain away the unequal poetic quality of <title level="m">Pauline</title>, but we can be certain that a fundamental design
					for the poem existed in Robert Browning's mind, however imperfectly he may have
					realized the merits of its artistic design in final composition. It is a design
					of images. We safely may conclude, therefore, that the unity of <title level="m">Pauline</title>, such as it is, may be found more readily by an examination
					which assumes its imagery, rather than its logical division, to contain the
					elements of poetical structure and form. 
				 We are accustomed, in working out the construction of a poem, to make logical
					order the criterion of our analysis. Usually there is enough of logical plan in
					a poem to make our task agreeable and our findings satisfactory, but, in the
					critical method which we thus employ, there is little that differentiates the
					process from the type of analysis we should apply to the scientific essay, in
					which we have every right to anticipate an abundance of logical "unity,
					coherence, and emphasis." It is quite possible that the discovery of the
					"outline” of a poem like <title level="m">Pauline</title> might be accomplished
					more successfully in a manner similar to the one we should require for the
					examination of a painting or a piece of music, especially when the author
					happened to be a young man who, through inheritance and training, had already
					acquired a taste for, and a degree of proficiency in, drawing and musical
					composition. 
				 The justification for the use of this method of analysis, if it is not proved by
					what has been said about <title level="m">Pauline</title>, is that it is perhaps
					the only method of examination that shows Browning's <title level="m">Sordello</title> to be actually intelligible. However, let us not become
					involved in <title level="m">Sordello</title> at this moment, but move at once
					to a con&amp;gt;sideration of one of Browning’s most finished achievements, his poem,
						<title level="m">Abt Vogler</title>. 
				
					<title level="m">Abt Vogler</title>, published in <title level="j">Dramatis
						Personae</title> in 1864, is generally recognized as one of Browning's
					finest poems. It is unique in that its style is the harmony of several modes and
					manners of expression. It is argumentative, lyric, dramatic, religious,
					mystical, and metaphysical, but, withal, predominantly contemplative. It aims to
					persuade the reader that music is superior to all other forms of artistic
					expression. Painting and poetry, great as they may be, are "but art in obedience
					to laws,” while music transcends the laws of art to become one with the laws of
					God: 
				<lg>
					<l>But here [in music] is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,</l>
					<l>Existent behind all laws that made them and, lo, they are!</l>
				</lg>
				 The lyric tone of <title level="m">Abt Vogler</title> is produced by carefully
					wrought stanzas and verses. The poem is marked dramatically by Browning's having
					sought to identify his thesis with the character of a great musician, and by his
					having ostensibly written in accord- ance with the scheme of the dramatic
					monologue.
				The religious temper of <title level="m">Abt Vogler</title> is manifest in the
					virtual identification of religion and music, or, in a larger sense, of religion
					and art. Abt Vogler, as he is here represented, like St. John in <title level="m">A Death in the Desert</title>, attains to truth and beauty only
					through humbling himself in love before God and thus seeing ever more clearly
					the light of heaven: 
				<lg>
					<l>And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,</l>
					<l>As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:</l>
					<l>Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine, ..</l>
				</lg>
				 There is no difficulty in interpreting lines such as these as an expression of
					the religious attitudes of the mystic, for the mystic, above all else, yearns
					for the dissolution of his own personality into unity with God. But there is a
					certain conscious reluctance in the character of Abt Vogler that checks his
					mystical enthusiasm just short of a complete self-effacement. Even in the lines
					quoted above the suggestion that heaven yearns downward to meet Abt Vogler’s
					passion "to scale the sky, together with the insistence on the word "mine,” is
					the sign of a personality which retains its individual integrity in spite of its
					moments of genuine humility. Abt Vogler, like Robert Browning, is a
					philosophical artist. He can withdraw from the excitement of his own
					argumentative, lyrical, and dramatic themes, or from the ardor of his religious
					and mystical beliefs, to consider and to meditate with metaphysical detachment.
					He can examine the effects of his musical improvisation upon himself; he can
					contemplate the probable impact of his art upon society. Finally, he can
					formulate certain philosophical opinions which give intellectual meaning to his
					experience: 
				<lg>
					<l>There shall never be one lost good! What was, shallvlive as before;</l>
					<l>The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;</l>
					<l>What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;</l>
					<l>On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.</l>
					<l>The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,</l>
					<l>The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,</l>
					<l>Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;</l>
					<l>Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.</l>
				</lg>
				 This philosophical mood is by no means confined to the lines just quoted; it is
					present throughout the poem. It is the unifying mood of the poem, for it
					produces a harmony of many moods into an "enveloping” tone of contemplative
					serenity. No less complex than its characteristic "tone” is the design of <title level="m">Abt Vogler</title>.- Its several structural phenomena are
					difficult to specify. Its logical divisions merge with an imagistic pattern
					equally important to the turn of the argument, and, while the poem rises with
					the cumulative insistence of the formal fugue, the impression of the freedom of
					improvisation remains. In the last section of the poem the lyric stanza-form,
					though strictly maintained, does not limit the broad sweep of philosophical
					conclusions. Even the lineaments of a chronological outline are faintly visible
					in the narrative of Abt Vogler’s experience. There is every reason to assume,
					therefore, that the twelve stanzas of <title level="m">Abt Vogler</title>, as
					well as any single poem that Browning has written, combine and concentrate the
					many stylistic modes, and the several most characteristic themes of Browning’s
					poetry. 
				 Looking back for the moment to the intense struggles of <title level="m">Sordello</title>, and comparing them with the quiet contemplation of <title level="m">Abt Vogler</title>, it is possible to see at least the
					philosophical answer to a former problem. The youth who wrote <title level="m">Sordello</title> was oppressed with the fundamental conflict between
					artistic compression and spiritual expansion; the man who wrote <title level="m">Abt Vogler</title>, and perhaps no other poem quite its equal in composure,
					has resolved the conflict and given it a philosophical solution: 
				<lg>
					<l>Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,</l>
					<l>Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes,</l>
					<l>And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,</l>
					<l>Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;</l>
					<l>Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,</l>
					<l>The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.</l>
				</lg>
				 The importance of <title level="m">Abt Vogler</title> is implied in the
					statements of the paragraphs just concluded, but its relationships to the
					examination of Browning's use of images of light is even more specific. The poem
					as a whole is a significant image of Browning’s conception of the artist’s
					creative experience. Aesthetically considered, this poem is a statement of many
					of Browning's most cherished opinions. It states his conception of the
					superiority of music to all other forms of art, and in a larger sense it implies
					that music is but the symbol of all great artistic achievement, as distinguished
					from the nearly great or imitative.
				In his analysis of Abt Vogler’s methods of improvisation, Browning has expressed
					his idea of the process of creation. The artist begins with a conception of
					structure (the temple, or the palace of the first part of the poem) and proceeds
					to marshal the "keys” of his imagination to build ("Bidding my organ obey,
					calling its keys to their work”). When the foundations have been laid and the
					substantial outlines of his structure (or genre) have been established, the
					artist becomes preoccupied with the injecton of life and light into a form as
					yet inert. 
				<lg>
					<l>Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.</l>
					<l>In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man's birth,</l>
					<l>Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;</l>
					<l>And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,</l>
					<l>As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:</l>
					<l>Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,</l>
					<l>Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star;</l>
					<l>Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,</l>
					<l>For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.</l>
				</lg>
				 This is the element of creation which is called "inspiration.” It is the result,
					according to Browning, of the artist's effort to reach heaven, an "emulous
					heaven” which yearns down to "reach the earth"; so that no peak of the artist's
					aspiration but finds and transfixes "its wandering star. 
				 Finally comes realization—the achievement of total form at its best, a form
					which is responsive to the laws of God, rather than to the laws of man; to
					universal law, rather than to the conventions of art; the achievement of the
					soul, as distinct from the achievement of the mind. 
				<lg>
					<head>VI</head>
					<l>All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,</l>
					<l>All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,</l>
					<l>All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,</l>
					<l>Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth:</l>
					<l>Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause,</l>
					<l>Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;</l>
					<l>It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,</l>
					<l>Painter and poet are proud in the artist—liest enrolled:</l>
				</lg>
				<lg>
					<head>VII</head>
					<l>But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,</l>
					<l>Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!</l>
					<l>And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,</l>
					<l>That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.</l>
					<l>Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;</l>
					<l>It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said:</l>
					<l>Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:</l>
					<l>And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!</l>
				</lg>

The "painter and the poet are proud" of their achievements, proud of their
					abilities to master the laws of triumphant art; the musician is humble,
					"consider and bow the head," for he has been mastered by the law of God,
					privileged beyond all other artists to discover the origin of beauty and truth. 
				 It is hardly necessary to note that both the musician's resolution to inform his
					conception of structure with light and life, and the realization of his
					achievement of perfect, consummate form have been marked by the images of light,
					particularly by the image of the star. No ideas in Browning’s poetry have been
					more consistently represented by the image of the star, his favorite image of
					light, than these: spiritual resolution, and the attainment of perfection. Other
					ideas which have been so marked have been, indeed, aspects of these two, or
					their opposites, transfixed by the false, the mythological, the fanciful, and
					the eclipsed stars of unclarified, or, unworthy presumption. 
				 The selection by Browning of the experience of improvisation as the clearest
					pattern of the process of artistic creation is a stroke of genius. Improvisation
					is the act of composing, rather than the act of recording the finished
					composition. Improvisation is expression in its purest form, untrammeled by the
					laws of popular appeal, unrestricted by the canons of criticism, unthwarted by
					notions of sale and exchange, totally free from preconceived ideas of artistic
					form. It is an affair which concerns only the artist and the source of all truth
					and beauty; it is Man and God becoming one and the same personality: 
				<lg>
					<l>But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;</l>
					<l>The rest may reason and welcome: ’tis we musicians know.</l>
				</lg>
				 It is the mystical and the mysterious experience of creation which Browning
					seeks to emphasize as the distinguishing ability of every great artist. The rest
					is the intellectual and the technical labor of modulating experiences of this
					kind into the "C Major of this life": 
				<lg>
					<l>Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,</l>
					<l>Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes,</l>
					<l>And I blunt it into the ninth. and I stand on alien ground,</l>
					<l>Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;</l>
					<l>Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,</l>
					<l>The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.</l>
				</lg>
				 The evidence before us constitutes an interesting pattern of aesthetic practice,
					and its statement in the most philosophically and emotionally composed poem that
					Browning has written warrants our assuming it to be the design for poetry which
					he considered noblest and best. 
				 Browning’s favorite image of light, the star, like his suns, moons, meteors, and
					rainbows, is profoundly associated with the dominant motives of Browning's
					genius. When the uses of the star are compared with the uses of other images of
					light, it becomes clear that the source of all Browning's imagery of light was a
					spiritual, rather than a realistic vision of the white light of eternal truth.
					It was this vision which sprang naturally, but with severe effort, from a mind
					which was preoccupied with the quest of ultimate reality. In his poetry it broke
					into a thousand heavenly forms of stars, suns, moons, rainbows, and meteors; and
					when it reached the earth, into reflections upon the face of the waters, into
					all the colors of the spectrum, upon plant and rock, animal and insect. All
					Nature, heaven and earth, was seen in the poet’s imagination to partake of the
					great white light beyond. Therefore, not only light, but the clouds, the mists,
					and the fogs of earth became important to the poet's description, for in them he
					saw the vision of forces which fought to obscure the white light of heaven.
					Furthermore, he saw in the powerfully clear colors of Nature a vision of the
					enticing loveliness which often distracted man's attention from the God beyond
					Nature. He did not deny their beauty, he almost adored it, but he strove to
					remember always that it was the pure white light that he was seeking. Even the
					clear points of the distant stars, he thought, might frequently delude man’s
					thinking, because of the misleading clarity implicit in their remoteness. 
				 It is clear that the vision of white light is something that Browning saw only
					in his imagination. Nature gave him hints and suggestions which he transformed
					into the conviction that beyond stars and sun existed the eternal light of
					truth. Nature might reflect the light of truth, but only because Nature had been
					created by the power of God, whence came all original beauty. Of itself Nature
					is careless of man’s welfare, disinterested, impersonal. Nature affects man's
					actions only when man wills to see in Nature a reflection of ultimate truth and
					power. The star itself is not an influence upon the poet, except as he may have
					the power to see the star in its relationship to the white light of his
					imagination: 
				<lg>
					<l>.... light had birth ere moons and suns,</l>
					<l>Flowing through space a river alone,</l>
					<l>Till chaos burst and blank the spheres were strown</l>
					<l>Hither and thither, foundering and blind:</l>
					<l>When into each of them rushed light—</l>
				</lg>
				 It was a poet’s rather than a scientist’s attitude towards nature which made
					Browning feel that here in the vast world, spreading out at man’s feet or
					sweeping above him in the heavens, were the perfect images, the metaphors, the
					pictures of the mind of man; its pleasant streams of sparkling conversation, its
					luxuriant foliage of imagination, its secret caves of hidden forces, its
					terrifying cataracts of despair, its grotesque monsters of troubled thought, its
					supreme rainbows of hope, its suns of overwhelming generosity, its sudden
					meteors of momentary realization; its fixed stars of intellectual decision—a
					poet’s world, a sidelong look at the picturesque universe which never turned the
					heart to stone or loaded the mind with cold, unimaginative fact. 
				 For Browning Nature is an ever-present though incomplete manifestation of
					ultimate beauty, ultimate perfection, ultimate unity, truth, and wisdom. In the
					poet's imagination the objects of Nature are images of this conviction. As they
					are used in his poetry, the sun and stars become effective images only because
					Browning has willed to see beyond their physical radiance. They are thus loaded
					with the fact of his imagination; each has been made over, transformed from a
					physical object into a sign of spiritual reality, and charged with the energy of
					a deep conviction. 
			</div>
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		<back>
			<listBibl>
				<bibl>1. Algernon Charles Swinburne. "Essay on the Poetical Works of George Chapman,
						<title level="m">The Works of George Chapman</title> (London, 1875).</bibl>
			</listBibl>
		</back>
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