Pomegranates from an English Garden: A selection from the poems of Robert BrowningBrowning, Robert
General
Pomegranates from an English Garden: A selection from the poems of Robert Browning
Browning, Robert
English poetry
Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.
Having given specimen poems dealing with the arts of poetry, painting,
and sculpture, we add one on the subject of music, which, though
difficult to understand fully, has beauties which are apparent even to
those who do not enter into its deepest thought. Vogler is not known as
a composer of the first rank, having left no works behind him which
entitle him to a place among the great masters; but, for this very
reason, he is better suited for the poet’s purpose, which is to deal
with music, not as represented by printed notes, but as existing for the
moment in all its perfection, and at once melting away into silence and
apparent nothingness. It is as extemporizer, not as author, he is
chosen, and as Abbé (_Ger._ Abt) he appropriately thinks of those deep
spiritual truths on which the loftier hopes of the latter part of the
poem are founded.
The musician “has been extemporizing,”—pouring out his whole soul
through the keys of his organ, and from that state of ecstasy he
suddenly awakes and cries out, “Would that the structure brave, the
manifold music I build ... might tarry!” It has been no mere “volume,”
but a “palace” of sound. As Solomon (according to the well-known legend)
summoned all spirits from above and from below, and all creatures of the
earth, to build him a palace at once, so by a touch, “calling the keys
to their work,” he has summoned demons of the bass, angels of the
treble, earth creatures of the middle tones, who, by eager and
tumultuous and yet harmoniously united efforts, have caused “the
pinnacled glory” to “rush into sight” (stanzas 1-3).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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