The poetry of Robert BrowningBrooke, Stopford A. (Stopford Augustus)
General
The poetry of Robert Browning
Brooke, Stopford A. (Stopford Augustus)
Browning, Robert, 1812-1889 -- Criticism and interpretation
Having thus shaped the form, the imagination passed on to make the
ornament. It creates that far-off image of Solomon and his spirits
building their palace for the Queen of Sheba which exalts the whole
conception and enlarges the reader's imagination through all the legends
of the great King--and then it makes, for fresh adornment, the splendid
piling up of the sounds into walls of gold, pinnacles, splendours and
meteor moons; and lastly, with upward sweeping of its wings, bids the
sky to fall in love with the glory of the palace, and the mighty forms
of the noble Dead to walk in it. This is the imagination at play with
its conception, adorning, glorifying, heightening the full impression,
but keeping every imaged ornament misty, impalpable, as in a dream--for
so the conception demanded.
And then, to fill the conception with the spirit of humanity, the
personal passion of the poet rises and falls through the description, as
the music rises and falls. We feel his breast beating against ours;
till the time comes when, like a sudden change in a great song, his
emotion changes into ecstasy in the outburst of the 9th verse:
Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
It almost brings tears into the eyes. This is art-creation--this is what
imagination, intense emotion, and individuality have made of the
material of thought--poetry, not prose.
Even at the close, the conception, the imagination, and the personal
passion keep their art. The rush upwards of the imaginative feeling dies
slowly away; it is as evanescent as the Vision of the Palace, but it
dies into another picture of humanity which even more deeply engages the
human heart. Browning sees the organ-loft now silent and dark, and the
silent figure in it, alone and bowed over the keys. The church is still,
but aware of what has been. The golden pipes of the organ are lost in
the twilight and the music is over--all the double vision of the third
heaven into which he has been caught has vanished away. The form of the
thing rightly fits the idea. Then, when the form is shaped, the poet
fills it with the deep emotion of the musician's soul, and then with his
own emotion; and close as the air to the earth are the sorrow and
exultation of Abt Vogler and Browning to the human heart--sorrow for the
vanishing and the failure, exultant joy because what has been is but an
image of the infinite beauty they will have in God. In the joy they do
not sorrow for the failure. It is nothing but an omen of success. Their
soul, greater than the vision, takes up common life with patience and
silent hope. We hear them sigh and strike the chord of C.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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