Browning’s Bodies and the Body of Criticism

Abstract

That's last duchess painted on wall Gr-r-r--there go, heart's abhorence! Just for a handful of silver he left us Vanity, saith Preacher, vanity! That second time they hunted me No more wine? Then we'll push back chairs and talk. My first thought was, he lied in every word Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find! do not let us quarrel any more I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave Karshish, picker-up of learning's crumbs Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak! Let us begin and up this corpse ['Will sprawl, now heat of day is best Stop, let me have truth of that! Now, don't sir! Don't expose me! Just this once! (1) Gentle readers, you've by now caught drift. This issue of Victorian Poetry celebrates bicentenary of Robert Browning's birth. better way to commemorate Browning's beginning than with beginnings of his poems? The list above, first lines might emerge easily from memory, creates a panoply of voices-abrupt, colloquial, direct or seemingly so, demanding. Most of these lines begin monologues published in Men and Women. Though familiarity might dull their freshness, since a seasoned reader almost always recalls next line, taken as group they still have power to arrest. To amuse. To baffle. Who would begin a poem with a bracket and an apostrophe? With a line stopped by three exclamation marks? With an unknown person enjoining us to carry up this corpse? The examples multiply. How strange to commence a poetic career with a long passage from Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, first two words of which are Non dubito. How strange to begin an epic with a question. And yet Browning's beginnings often have a brilliance beyond arresting and strange, since they commonly arrive in a syntactic rush, compelling us forward into next line, next idea. But do not let us quarrel anymore impels us directly into next negative, No, Lucrezia, which in turn compels us toward further negative, our later recognition is both too much Andrea's my Lucrezia and not his at all. The liar--or was he in Childe Roland?--fast becomes that hoary cripple with malicious eye. Karshish, who's already filled our mouth or minds with coinages, plunges on to call himself, in a negative mouthful, the not incurious in God's handiwork. Or take beginning of The Ring and Book: Do you see this Ring? (2) We are supposed of course to answer yes, but, of course, our answer is no. We don't see ring, not really. It isn't described directly, appearing only through a historical narrative of its pedigree (and pedigree of its pedigree and possible circumstances of its manufacture). The poet follows his question with an onslaught of qualifiers and famous--or infamous--knotty metaphor of repristination, with its barely concealed baggage of religious controversy. The verse paragraph begins, Do you see this Ring, ends with a second question, almost offhand: What of it? 'Tis a figure, a symbol, say; / A thing's sign: now for signified. In next verse paragraph, thing signified actually comes as a question too: Do you see this square old yellow Book? Editorial Edifices Browning's poetry, as Herbert Tucker remarked years ago, is radically introductory. It carries with it almost always a sense of inauguration. (3) Or as Tucker more recently said of The Ring and Book, it makes fresh starts. (4) On original publication of Men and Women, John Ruskin called Browning's multiple beginnings ellipses, alluding to semantic gaps, and to meter, rhyme, syntax and punctuation all at once. In his famous letter to poet about a volume caused him considerable struggle, he pronounced Browning's ellipses quite Unconscionable. Before one can get through ten lines, one has to patch you up in twenty places (Selected Poems, p. …