‘The Triumph of Life’ and Fifine at the Fair

Abstract

In elucidating Shelleyan influence on Browning, this chapter singles out Shelley’s last, unfinished poem, ‘The Triumph of Life’, as being comparable to Fifine on two grounds: the use of dream vision, and the underlying dramatic situation of being torn between passion for one’s wife and for another woman (with the former less obvious than the latter). Fifine is a statement about Romanticism as Browning had first encountered it through his immersion in Shelley’s works, which were then partly discarded but partly assimilated, as first argued by John Woolford. Browning acknowledges his debt to the Romantics, and in particular Shelley, regarding the visionary nature of his work, but also as a man with complicated emotional life, which Browning initially perhaps could not understand but came around to appreciating, as he was to undergo such experiences himself.