Browning – The Poems

He was, said Chesterton, ‘the poet of desire’. John Bayley agrees. Indeed, Bayley believes that even Proust, had he come across it, would have been ‘enchanted . . . by the astonishing concentration of desire’ in Browning’s ‘Meeting at Night’. The ‘desire’ in that poem resolves itself delightfully in Blakeian satisfaction. However, as Browning knew, desire can be perverted. He understood ‘the Corruption of Man’s Heart’. In his sinister masterpiece ‘My Last Duchess’ and in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, each narrator is a cold-blooded murderer. The cliché cold-blooded understates the case. They are icy in their cruelty. They are unforgettable.

The poet, according to C. Day Lewis, ‘listens in to his universe’. Another memorable voice in Browning’s auditory universe is that of Andrea del Sarto – ‘the Faultless Painter’. His ‘Madonna of the Harpies’ hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, in a room dedicated to his work. As Browning ponders in this monologue whether faultlessness is in itself a fault in art he muses also on the price of love. Love, Vasari implies in Lives of the Painters, cost del Sarto his position at the French court. Del Sarto, on receipt of a letter from his wife Lucrezia, speedily left the court. Did she hint at infidelity? Hers? We do not know. Neither do we know who the ‘cousin’ is who waits for her, as del Sarto paints. The tension between love and art is examined by Browning in this wondrous masterpiece, a subtle web of questions to which the answers may be dangerous.

‘The Lost Leader’ is not subtle. Browning came to regret the ferocity of his condemnation of political betrayal, in this case of Wordsworth, who’d abandoned the Liberal cause. However, as a poem of disillusionment with a hero, it is lacerating. ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us / Just for a riband to stick in his coat.’ ‘The Patriot’, with its equally memorable opening line, ‘It was roses, roses, all the way’, tells
of the savage reversal of fortune which can change today’s hero into the criminal on his way to the gallows. It’s an old story and an old warning. ‘Memorabilia’ catches beautifully the poet’s delight as he
looks in wonderment at the man who may once have seen ‘Shelley plain’. Heroism, this time of the horse (Browning was an animal lover and a member of the Anti-Vivisection Society), triumphs in the
galloping ‘“How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”’, its technically dazzling rhythms reminiscent of Auden’s ‘Night Train’. Browning once wrote, ‘Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to
be.’ His beloved Elizabeth did not grow old with him. However in one of his last poems, ‘Prospice’, he challenges death and proclaims, ‘For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave . . . Then a light,
then thy breast, / O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, / And with God be the rest!’ One hopes

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