Two Interpolated Speeches in Robert Browning's A Death in the Desert

Abstract

AOBERT BROWNING'S A DEATH IN THE DESERT, WHICH FIRST APPEARED IN THE collection Dramatis Personae, published in May 1864, is a poem of exceptional interest, intimately related to the intellectual life of its time. The date of composition is uncertain. Relatively long at 687 lines, the blank-verse poem consists largely of the spiritual last testament of the dying St. John, the evangelist and last surviving apostle. St. John's speech, intellectually dense and often extremely concentrated, almost elliptical in expression—together with introductory and concluding narrative passages in the person of the narrator-witness (who is probably, though not certainly, Pamphylax)—is presented as the contents of an ancient Greek parchment manuscript: the elaborate framing device is introduced in the opening parenthetical interpolation (ll. 1-12), enclosed in square brackets, in the person of the manuscript's early Christian owner. In A Death in the Desert Browning engages urgently, though always implicitly, with modern questions of religious belief and doubt—as contemporary readers and reviewers immediately recognized. The poem needs to be read in the context of the profound crisis of religious belief of the early 1860s, in which both the Essays and Reviews controversy 1 and the deeply disturbing intellectual influence of modern, mainly German, Biblical criticism played an important part. Browning attempts to "take on"—the phrasal verb, with its suggestion of energetic combativeness, seems peculiarly apt—and answer the various insistent, questioning voices of modern doubt and skepticism, including the Biblical critics, by reaffirming the inner spiritual truth of Christianity, the primacy of the individual spiritual life actively lived, and the essential "acknowledgment of God in Christ" (l. 474). 2 In the later partof his speech, with surprising severity, the apostle admonishes his followers of the terrible spiritual death that is the inevitable consequence of the intellectual rejection of God and God's love, a theme later picked up by the impersonal narrator in the last half-line of the concluding parenthetical interpolation, "But 't was Cerinthus that is lost" (l. 687). [End Page 333]