If ever you've tried to impress some girl with a bit of Byron or Shelley, odds are you've come across the Poetry Foundation. The bastard child of Harriet Monroe's seminal publication, the Foundation was established in 2003 with the stated goal of ‘amplify[ing] poetry and celebrat[ing] poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry.’ Noble enough, but after reviewing the website's entry on Robert Browning, I can’t escape the lingering feeling that perhaps, despite their best efforts, the current editors aren't up to the task.
Robert Browning (1812-1889) was one of the titans of Victorian poetry. In his day he ranked with men like Tennyson, Arnold and Swinburne, and as a dramatic poet he surpassed them. He was daring, both in matter and manner, and ran afoul of the reviewers more than once, but most notably with the publication of Sordello. Written after the early success of other long poems like Pauline and Paracelsus, it was dismissed out of hand by the critics. With the surprising exception of Thomas Carlyle, who was a friend of Browning's and admired the work, England's leading lights thought it woefully obscure. Tennyson said of the poem:
"There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, 'Who will may hear Sordello's story told,' and 'Who would has heard Sordello's story told!'“
Hard words, but reading the poem we can understand them. Browning's work has none of the easy rhythm and broad accessibility of Tennyson or Kipling, and in Sordello he pushed his style to the limit. Events, places and voices come and go with alarming rapidity, and such a store of learning is displayed that the reader will need all of his concentration if he wishes to keep up. Take, for instance, the opening lines:
Who will, may hear Sordello's story told: His story? Who believes me shall behold The man, pursue his fortunes to the end, Like me: for as the friendless-people's friend Spied from his hill-top once, despite the din And dust of multitudes, Pentapolin Named o' the Naked Arm, I single out Sordello, compassed murkily about With ravage of six long sad hundred years. Only believe me. Ye believe?
Not exactly ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’ Here, the iambic couplets strain to encompass the utmost complexity and rhythm of thought, and we are immediately assailed with an obscure reference to Don Quixote. ‘Pentapolin’ is the name of a chieftain whom Don Quixote, the ‘friendless-people's friend,’ points out on the battlefield to Sancho Panza. In effect, Browning is comparing his selection of Sordello (a real medieval troubadour) as the subject for his poem, with Don Quixote's marking Pentapolin. To Browning, history is a battlefield and a chaos.
The poem goes on, in six books, to describe the escapades of Sordello the troubadour. His life is set against the backdrop of perhaps the greatest controversy of the Middle Ages: the struggle between the Pope and Emperor for control of Christendom. Browning was astonishingly well read, having had access to his father's extensive library from earliest childhood, and he exhibits his learning in many lengthy asides. Again, from Book I:
Six hundred years ago! Such the time's aspect and peculiar woe (Yourselves may spell it yet in chronicles, Albeit the worm, our busy brother, drills His sprawling path through letters anciently Made fine and large to suit some abbot's eye) When the new Hohenstauffen dropped the mask, Flung John of Brienne's favour from his casque, Forswore crusading, had no mind to leave Saint Peter's proxy leisure to retrieve Losses to Otho and to Barbaross, Or make the Alps less easy to recross; And, thus confirming Pope Honorius' fear, Was excommunicate that very year. "The triple-bearded Teuton come to life!" Groaned the Great League; and, arming for the strife, Wide Lombardy, on tiptoe to begin, Took up, as it was Guelf or Ghibellin, Its cry: what cry? "The Emperor to come!" His crowd of feudatories, all and some, That leapt down with a crash of swords, spears, shields, One fighter on his fellow, to our fields, Scattered anon, took station here and there, And carried it, till now, with little care— Cannot but cry for him; how else rebut Us longer?—cliffs, an earthquake suffered jut In the mid-sea, each domineering crest Which nought save such another throe can wrest From out (conceive) a certain chokeweed grown Since o'er the waters, twine and tangle thrown Too thick, too fast accumulating round, Too sure to over-riot and confound Ere long each brilliant islet with itself, Unless a second shock save shoal and shelf, Whirling the sea-drift wide: alas, the bruised And sullen wreck! Sunlight to be diffused For that!—sunlight, 'neath which, a scum at first, The million fibres of our chokeweed nurst Dispread themselves, mantling the troubled main, And, shattered by those rocks, took hold again, So kindly blazed it—that same blaze to brood O'er every cluster of the multitude Still hazarding new clasps, ties, filaments, An emulous exchange of pulses, vents Of nature into nature; till some growth Unfancied yet, exuberantly clothe A surface solid now, continuous, one: "The Pope, for us the People, who begun "The People, carries on the People thus, "To keep that Kaiser off and dwell with us!" See you?
Like Shelley, who was Browning's idol, he combines passionate descriptions of nature with the sublimest thoughts on the greatest political causes. In this case, the struggle in Italy between the landed aristocrats and the people of the towns, who sided with the Emperor and the Pope respectively, and which gave birth in course of time to another, greater earthquake (The Renaissance). At least that's how I take it; the beauty of Browning is his depth and complexity, and one can read the same poem by him time and again and always come away with something new.
You can imagine, then, my shock and displeasure when I came to peruse his entry on the Poetry Foundation website. No analysis of Pauline, or Paracelsus, or Sordello, or his later masterpiece The Ring and the Book. No study, even, of his shorter adult works like Porphyria’ Lover. Instead, we get some lines on a poem he wrote for an ailing child about the Pied Piper (charming in itself) and a brief discussion of How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. The magazine that published Eliot and Pound (who was fascinated by Browning and studied him relentlessly in his youth) could surely do better.
A job for the Carlyle Foundation?