The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Browning · a book of fifty-one poems in two volumes · Chapman and Hall, London, 1855 · from “Love Among the Ruins” to the dedication to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “One Word More” · scored as one book, the first edition and not the thirteen-poem group kept under the title in 1863, “Saul” in its completed form and “In a Balcony” within it · read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Book of poems: the dramatic monologue in blank verse and in stanza, set among love lyrics, songs, a dramatic scene and a dedication
Mythos
The quest to a tower across a waste land; the man raised from the dead seen by a doubting physician and a Greek who will not hear; the shepherd who heals a mad king and sees an incarnation; the lovers who never act
Phase
Renaissance Florence, the first century, a frivolous Venice, a Roman ghetto and the Victorian church, each caught in a single evening, a single letter or a single argument
Presentation
Fifty-one poems in two volumes, from “Love Among the Ruins” to “One Word More”; the long monologues in blank verse beside lyrics in many stanzas; “Saul” completed from its first nine sections of 1845; the dramatic scene “In a Balcony” set within
Register
Colloquial speech in verse, broken by interruption, digression and the listener’s unheard replies; rough when the speaker is rough, lifted when the speaker rises, and sometimes merely clotted
Scale
One voice at a time; art, faith and love held through persons, from a friar to a knight to a wife
Governing Proposition
A friar-painter caught by the watch, a painter who could paint without fault and chose not to reach, a bishop defending his comfortable faith to a journalist, an Arab physician who cannot stop writing about a man raised from the dead, a Greek poet-king who has every accomplishment and no hope, a knight who comes at last to the tower he has sought, and a husband and lover at the hinge of a marriage: each speaks in his own voice, under pressure, and says more than he means to. The wager is that a mind speaking in its own defence tells the truth about itself chiefly by what it does not mean to say, and that this one law can hold art, faith and love across fifty-one poems; the cost is a miscellany in which perhaps a dozen poems could go without loss, and a book its author himself later broke up.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The friar is arrested at night, and answers for himself: “I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!” The verse is as rough as the speaker. It breaks for interruption, digresses, answers replies the reader never hears, and carries a joke, a scuffle and a meditation in one paragraph of blank verse that sounds like a man talking fast.
What he talks his way into is an argument about flesh and spirit. He tells how he was taken in by the monks, and how the Prior demanded that he paint the soul rather than the body; he tells of a picture promised for Sant’ Ambrogio, with himself hiding in its corner. Each turn of the story turns the argument a notch further, and nothing in the poem is idle: the painter who loves the world as it looks is defending, under arrest, the right to paint it.
“Fra Lippo Lippi” stands first among the monologues of Men and Women, Robert Browning’s book of fifty-one poems in two volumes, published by Chapman and Hall in London in 1855 and closed by a dedication to his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It gives the book its law. A single voice speaks under pressure, in art, in faith or in love, and says more than it means to; the reader learns the speaker from what he does not mean to say.
Movement II
“Andrea del Sarto” is tighter still: one evening’s talk between a painter and his wife, Lucrezia. He could paint without fault, and his talk circles what that faultlessness has cost him. Every concession is a self-sentence: “Well, less is more, Lucrezia”. The phrase has left the poem for the language, and in the poem it is a man consoling himself for the size of his ambition.
Then he says the line the book is remembered by: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” It sounds like consolation and is a judgment he passes on himself. In his excuses he shows that he chose his limitation, and blames his wife for it. The reader convicts him out of his own mouth while feeling the pull of what he says.
That is the knowledge the form carries. Told in the third person, the same story would be a narrator’s verdict on a weak man. In the monologue the self-deception is enacted, and the verdict is the reader’s own, reached against the speaker’s charm. The book’s two painters, Lippi and del Sarto, are its argument about art and its moral costs, and they remain its standard texts.
Movement III
Faith is held at its crises, one voice for each. Bishop Blougram makes his apology to the journalist Gigadibs, and the poem depends on that auditor: the casuistry is made for the man who hears it. “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things”, he says, and lays bare the comfortable unbelief of an age that keeps the forms of faith. The poem is longer than its argument, and in places its syntax knots; it is reread still, as religion, as rhetoric, and as Browning’s own double voice.
Karshish, an Arab physician of the first century, writes a letter about herbs and about a man called Lazarus, whom he has diagnosed and dismissed. He cannot stop returning to him: herbs, then Lazarus, then herbs, then Lazarus, the order of his topics betraying the fascination his scruples deny. Cleon, a Greek poet-king, has every accomplishment of the Greek mind and no hope, and dismisses Paul in a postscript. The gospel stands at the edge of both poems, met and not taken.
“Saul”, completed for this book from the nine sections printed in 1845, builds the shepherd who heals the mad king into a prophecy: David, singing before Saul, rises to a vision of incarnation. “Holy-Cross Day” sets faith in the Roman ghetto. Across these poems the book holds belief at three historical crises, and in each it is held through a person speaking.
Movement IV
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” is made out of a line from King Lear. A knight crosses a waste land toward a tower, past the failed company of knights, through thirty-four six-line stanzas on a single rhyme pattern, abbaab. The rhymes return like the knight’s tread, and the form makes the waste land inescapable: there is no stanza in the poem that is not the same road.
The grandeur is dreadful and sickened, and it is sustained to the end, which is not an arrival but an act: “Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, / And blew”. Here the book builds myth rather than evoking it, a quest, a waste land and a tower made into a structure that carries the poem. It has been read for a century and a half as an allegory of faith, of the artist, of failure, of Browning’s own method, and none of the readings exhausts it. Stephen King built his Dark Tower cycle on it.
Elsewhere the book rises in other keys. “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”, in triplets that mimic the toccata, turns Venetian frivolity into cold mortality: “Dear dead women, with such hair, too”. “A Grammarian’s Funeral”, in dimeter and trimeter, climbs the mountain with the scholar’s corpse borne on the shoulders of those who mourn him. “The Statue and the Bust” turns a Florentine anecdote into a parable of the unlived life.
Movement V
In the love poems the disclosure is of a marriage at its hinge. “By the Fire-Side” sets the measure: “Oh, the little more, and how much it is! / And the little less, and what worlds away!” “Two in the Campagna” records a failed fusion of two lovers, ending on “Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn”. “Love Among the Ruins”, which opens the book, sets long-lined, dying-fall couplets against short ones.
Around these stand the book’s weaker matter: “The Twins”, “Protus”, “Women and Roses”, “Misconceptions”, the pair “Before” and “After”, “In Three Days”, the paired ways of love, the fine but slight “Love in a Life” and “Life in a Love”. They are songs rather than voices, and perhaps a dozen of the fifty-one could go without loss. “In a Balcony”, a dramatic scene, sits among monologues and lyrics and carries less than its length. Where the roughness is merely congested it costs without paying back, as in the riddling close of “Popularity”: “Who fished the murex up? / What porridge had John Keats?”
The book closes on “One Word More”, its dedication to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in unrhymed trochaic pentameter: the form as dedication. It sold badly. In 1863 Browning broke it up, keeping thirteen poems under its title and sending the rest to “Dramatic Lyrics” and “Dramatic Romances”, and the volume of 1855 is less read as a book than its poems are read alone. Necessity is in the parts and assembly in the whole; but the parts have lasted, and through Pound and Eliot the voice that speaks out of its own mouth became a form of the century that followed.
Act III · The Twelve
Inside the great monologues almost nothing is idle. In “Fra Lippo Lippi” the night arrest, the friar’s account of being taken in by the monks, the Prior’s demand that he paint the soul, and the promised Sant’ Ambrogio picture with Lippo hiding in its corner each turn the argument about flesh and spirit a notch further. “Andrea del Sarto” is tighter still, one evening’s talk in which every concession (“Well, less is more, Lucrezia”) is a self-sentence. But the unit is the book, and the subtractive test bites. Perhaps a dozen of the fifty-one could go without loss to what the book knows: “The Twins”, “Protus”, “Women and Roses”, “Misconceptions”, “Before” and “After”, “In Three Days”, the pair “One Way of Love” and “Another Way of Love”. “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” is longer than its argument, and “In a Balcony”, a dramatic scene set among monologues and lyrics, carries less than its length. Necessity in the parts, assembly in the whole: that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a mind speaking in its own defence tells the truth about itself chiefly by what it does not mean to say. Andrea, the painter without fault, shows in his excuses that he chose his limitation and blames his wife for it; “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” is a judgment he passes on himself while seeming to console. Blougram’s casuistry, “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things”, lays bare the comfortable unbelief of an age that keeps the forms of faith. Karshish cannot stop returning to the Lazarus he has diagnosed and dismissed; Cleon has every accomplishment of the Greek mind and no hope. In the love poems the disclosure is of a marriage at its hinge. A meaning, not a mood, across art, faith and love; held below the top because some lyrics disclose a moment rather than a condition.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation recurs, and in several keys. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” sustains a dreadful, sickened grandeur for thirty-four stanzas and ends on the blast of the horn: “Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, / And blew”. “Saul” rises to David’s prophetic vision. “A Grammarian’s Funeral” climbs the mountain with the scholar’s corpse borne on the shoulders of those who mourn him. “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” turns Venetian frivolity into cold mortality: “Dear dead women, with such hair, too”. “Two in the Campagna” ends on “Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn”. The frequency is high. But much of the book, Lippo and Blougram above all, works by wit and argument rather than height, which is right for it and keeps the figure from the top band.
Score: 8.7 / 10
“Childe Roland” is myth built, not evoked: the quest, the waste land, the tower, the failed company of knights who went before, made out of a line from King Lear into a structure that carries the poem, and read ever since as an archetype of the vocation that ends in its own testing. Karshish meets the raised Lazarus, and “Cleon” meets the gospel at its edge. “Saul” builds the shepherd who heals the mad king into a prophecy of incarnation. “The Statue and the Bust” turns a Florentine anecdote into a parable of the unlived life. Elsewhere the archetype is lighter or absent: the Renaissance painters are historical particulars made typical rather than mythic, and many lyrics carry no deep pattern. One poem at the top of the axis, several strong beside it, the book as a whole below it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance was the Romantic lyric of the poet’s own feeling. The swerve is to the poem of another’s voice, in colloquial syntax broken by interruption, digression and the listener’s unheard replies, in a verse that will be rough when the speaker is rough: “I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!” It cost. The book sold badly, and Browning’s standing lagged Tennyson’s for a decade; his reputation was made over the following years, with Dramatis Personae (1864) and The Ring and the Book (1868 to 1869). What holds it below the top: the dramatic monologue was already Browning’s own in 1842 and 1845, in “My Last Duchess” and “The Bishop Orders His Tomb”, so this book is the full arrival of a turn already taken, not the turn itself. It is the swerve made large, and made to hold a whole book’s range.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Here the form is the knowledge. Turn “Andrea del Sarto” into a third-person account and the self-deception becomes a narrator’s verdict; in the monologue it is enacted, and the reader convicts Andrea out of his own mouth while feeling the pull of his excuse. Blougram’s apology depends on its auditor, the journalist Gigadibs. Karshish’s letter lets the physician’s scruples betray his fascination in their very order of topics: herbs, then Lazarus, then herbs, then Lazarus. The single six-line stanza of “Childe Roland”, its rhymes returning like the knight’s tread, makes the waste land inescapable. “One Word More”, in unrhymed trochaic pentameter, is the form as dedication. Held below 9.0 because the book’s own form, a miscellany ordered without a strong design, adds little to what the poems know singly; the dispersal of 1863 shows how loosely the whole was held.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence, not promise. “Childe Roland” has drawn readings for a century and a half, as an allegory of faith, of the artist, of failure, of Browning’s own method, and none exhausts it; Stephen King built his Dark Tower cycle on it. “Andrea del Sarto” and “Fra Lippo Lippi” remain the standard texts for art and its moral costs. “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” is reread as religion, as rhetoric, and as Browning’s own double voice. “Two in the Campagna” yields more on each return. Against this: the lighter lyrics yield little on return, and the book’s yield is concentrated in perhaps a dozen poems. Those have been mined for generations and are not spent; the rest have not been, and that keeps the figure below 9.0.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century and after. The intrinsic force: the book makes the dramatic monologue a form able to carry history, theology, aesthetics and marriage, and makes difficulty and colloquial roughness available to English verse. This book and Dramatis Personae carry that line more than any other Victorian book. Held below 9.0 because the turn began in the earlier books, and part of the credit is theirs. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pound took the persona method from Browning, in Personae, and opened the second Canto with the debt, “Hang it all, Robert Browning, / there can be but the one ‘Sordello’”, though the poem he names is not this one; Eliot’s “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady” descend from the monologue of the self-betraying speaker; Hardy, Frost’s dramatic narratives and Robert Lowell follow, and the persona poem runs on to the present.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One hundred and seventy-one years, the text whole and read without break. Presence is real: “Andrea del Sarto”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “Childe Roland”, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Two in the Campagna” stand in every anthology and syllabus of Victorian poetry, and “less is more” and “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp” have left the book for the language. Three charges hold the figure at the lower end of its step. The book as a book is read less than its anthologised pieces. It was broken up by its author in 1863, when he kept thirteen poems under the title and sent the rest to “Dramatic Lyrics” and “Dramatic Romances”, so the volume of 1855 is not the arrangement most readers meet. And Browning is now read mainly in the academy.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the verse. Command is wide: the conversational blank verse of Lippo and Andrea, flexible enough to carry a joke, a scuffle and a meditation in one paragraph; the triplets of “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” with their mimicry of the toccata; the run of rhymes in “Childe Roland”, thirty-four stanzas on the one pattern, abbaab; the long-lined, dying-fall couplets of “Love Among the Ruins” set against short ones; the dimeter and trimeter of “A Grammarian’s Funeral”. Against it: the roughness is sometimes not dramatic but merely congested, syntax wrenched for rhyme, elliptical knots that cost the reader without paying back, in parts of “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”, in “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”, and in the riddling close of “Popularity”: “Who fished the murex up? / What porridge had John Keats?” Load-bearing at its best, clotted at its worst.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs most of the book: a single human voice under pressure, in love, art or faith, saying more than it means to. It holds across the widest range: a Renaissance friar, a Greek poet-king, an Arab physician, a Victorian bishop, a knight in a waste land, a wife, a lover in the Campagna. Take the two most distant elements, “Childe Roland” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”: both obey it, and so do “Love Among the Ruins” and “Holy-Cross Day”. What breaks the law: “In a Balcony”, a dramatic scene among monologues, and the slightest lyrics, which are songs rather than voices. The redistribution of 1863 suggests that Browning himself felt the book’s frame was weak. A law strong in the poems and loose in the frame holds the axis here.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as a book of short and middle-length poems, the range held is wide, and it is integrated through the speaking self. The history of painting runs from Lippi to del Sarto, and of music through Galuppi and Hugues. Faith is held at its crises: David before Saul, the first century in Karshish and Cleon, the Victorian unbelief of Blougram, the Roman ghetto of “Holy-Cross Day”. Love and marriage are held in their stages; politics in “The Patriot” and “Instans Tyrannus”; scholarship in “A Grammarian’s Funeral”; the natural world chiefly as a landscape of the mind, in the waste land of “Childe Roland” and the Campagna. What it does not hold: labour, the state in its working, the family beyond the couple. Held, not listed, because each order is held through a person.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0; The Unconcealment, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 8.9. Poems in continuous use for one hundred and seventy-one years, whose phrases have left the book for the language; a disclosure that holds across art, faith and love, of minds betraying themselves in their own defence; and a monologue form in which the knowledge is enacted rather than told, which carried the persona poem into the century that followed.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0: the great monologues pass the subtractive test, but the unit is the book, and perhaps a dozen of its fifty-one poems could go without loss, with “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” longer than its argument and “In a Balcony” carrying less than its length. Next above it, The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 8.6: one law holds most of the book, but its slightest songs and its dramatic scene break it, and labour, the state and the family beyond the couple are absent.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the book is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.7, and chiefly by The Inevitable at 8.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Robert Browning’s Men and Women, scored as one book: the first edition in two volumes, Chapman and Hall, London, 1855, fifty-one poems from “Love Among the Ruins” to the dedication to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “One Word More”. The unit is the book as published in 1855, not the thirteen-poem group Browning kept under the title in the Poetical Works of 1863, when the rest went to “Dramatic Lyrics” and “Dramatic Romances”; that redistribution is weighed only for the book’s frame and survival. “Saul” is scored in its completed form of 1855 (its first nine sections had appeared in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845), and “In a Balcony”, a dramatic scene, is weighed within the book. Weighed most: “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “Andrea del Sarto”, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”, “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician”, “Cleon”, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”, “By the Fire-Side”, “Two in the Campagna”, “A Grammarian’s Funeral”, “Saul”, “The Statue and the Bust”, “Love Among the Ruins”, “Memorabilia” and “One Word More”. The major monologues and the best-known lyrics are known closely, the middle of the book well, and the slightest lyrics only in outline; where an argument rests on them it is held with a wider margin. No text was in hand; nothing was measured, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly, and cited by poem; other lines are paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the day of publication, the line counts of the long monologues, and the reception of the book by its first reviewers.