Secret_Browning.docx

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Secret Browning
By Julian Scutts
Copyright Julian Scutts 2018
!SBN 978-0-244-43410-8

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preamble: An oblique approach to studies in Robert Browning’s poetry. 3
HOW A YOUNG POET FOUND HIS FEET
Did Isaac Nathan Provide a Channel of Influence Between Byron and Robert
Browning? 7
Incondita: Why did Browning want to destroy all traces of the first poems he
wrote? 12
Pauline 23
TELLING WORDS
The allegorical depth of ‘How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix’
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Questions concerning the inspirational source of Robert Browning’s ‘Saul’ 31
The twice-crossed bridge 47
Religious and solar symbolism implied by individual words and their
combined effects in Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin.’ 51
Observations on the recurrence and contextualization of words with a
possible religious resonance in poems considered above. 64
COLLATERAL 65
A Revised Version of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin as a Motif in European Poetry’ in Wascana
Review in 1985 65 - Are references to Golgotha and Calvary in Macbeth and the legend of the
Pied Piper, only Passing Allusions? 88 - 1829: Story of the Pied Piper in Chronique du Règne de
Charles IX by Prosper Mérimée. 96

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Preamble: An oblique approach to studies in
Robert Browning’s poetry.
It is not customary to begin an inquiry into a matter of literary
interest by indulging in anything akin to a trivial pursuit but I will
still pose this question. What connection pertains between the poet
Robert Browning and the tragic loss of the Titanic, or between
Browning and the Sydney Opera House? Add to these questions
this chaser. Who were Sarah Flower Adams and Sir Isaac Nathan?
To those who have no particularly close interest in Victorian
hymnology or the official history of Australian music, in other words
the vast majority of the human race, well read or otherwise, these
names may not mean much, and yet some of the effects of their
actions reach into well-known areas. Sarah Flower Adams, a friend
of Percy Bysshe Shelley, penned the words of the last hymn
reputedly sung as The Titanic was sinking: ‘Nearer my God, to
Thee.’ Nathan, the son of the cantor at the synagogue in
Canterbury, has two notable claims to fame. He prompted Lord
Byron to compose the Hebrew Melodies, a collection of poems that
includes such celebrated pieces as ‘The Destruction of
Sennacherib,’ ‘The Song of Saul before his last Battle’ and ‘The
Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept.’ In his later years he emigrated
to Australia where he laid the foundation of Australia’s
internationally recognized musical tradition. It is also an important,
albeit strangely overlooked, fact that Sir Isaac privately tutored
young Browning, then barely a teenager, in music and singing.1
One can well imagine them using some of the songs in Byron’s
Hebrew Melodies for practice exercises, these having been set by Sir
Isaac himself to tunes he deemed, wrongly as it happens, to have
1 Herbert Everith Greene, ‘Browning’s Knowledge of Music,’ PLMA, 62 (1947), 1095-1099.

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been those played in the Temple in Jerusalem. It is only thanks to
Sarah that we have any trace of Browning’s earliest poetry, which
he wrote under the heading of Incondita. She preserved two poems,
‘The Death of the First-born’ and ‘The Dance of Death.’ The former
evinces striking resemblances to ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’
even down to details of colour imagery in references to ‘gold’ and
‘purple.’ The youth’s morbid obsession with the death of children
may have been sublimated later into the apparently jaunty ‘The
Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ Browning’s most popular ‘child’s story,’ for
the legend became associated with memories of the Black Death
during the course of its evolution. In Hebrew Melodies three poems
take King Saul as their subject. It is therefore reasonable to
suppose that Browning recalled them when he wrote ‘Saul,’ a work
that the poet himself counted among his greatest. However, he only
mentioned Christopher Smart’s ‘Song to David’ as the source that
occasioned his desire to write a poem that demonstrated the power
of David’s song and music to quell the mental and spiritual
affliction of his king. In this as in other instances Browning was coy
about his indebtedness to Byron’s poetry.
There has been considerable debate on the question of Shelley’s
influence on the beginnings of Browning’s progress in the art of
poetry. By the age of fourteen Browning had adopted attitudes
indicating the power of Shelley’s influence on his mind, including a
brief espousal of an atheistic world view, adherence to
vegetarianism and a generally rebellious posture towards
establishmentarian and parental authority. His poem ‘The Death of
the First-Born’ implicitly questions the notion of divine justice.
Nevertheless, his radical convictions proved to be short-lived. His
first substantial work Pauline announced his rejection of radical
idealism of Shelley’s kind and his return to faith in Christianity,
albeit in a form tempered by a spirit of rigorous intellectual
inquiry. His admiration of his former hero never died and it seems
that he attempted to rehabilitate the ‘sun-treader’ by conjecturing

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in his ‘Essay on Shelley ’ that if Shelley had not died at so
tragically a young age, he might have lived on to become a great
Victorian poet much after Browning’s own heart. 2
In view of the traumatic mental strife with which he contended in
his teenage years it need not surprise us that throughout his life he
was left with a tense and self-defensive cast of mind or, to change
terms, with that ‘reticence’ to which the noted scholar Barbara
Melchiori referred in her monograph entitled Browning ‘s Poetry of
Reticence.’3 According to her analysis Browning was subject to two
conflicting impulses, the one inducing him to suppress emotions
and thoughts, the other prevailing on him to divulge them, together
producing the effect that the implications of individual words or
‘verbal clues,’ deconstructed the overt message of the sentences
they composed.
A close regard for the occurrence, frequency and distribution of
selected words reveal the emergence of pervasive pattern-forming
influences. Three possible ways to interpret them warrant
investigation: The first is posited on Melchiori’s theory based on the
notion of authorial self-repression combined with involuntary self-
exposure, the second on an arch desire to challenge readers to
discern cryptic messages and keep most of them fooled in the
process, and the third, on a post-Romantic trend to achieve
objectivity in reaction to the Romantic poets’ obsessive self-
consciousness. In his Essay on Shelley’s Letter, Browning stressed
the need to achieve ‘objectivity’ in modern poetry. Such a trend is
also discernable in French Symbolisme.
Any systematic attempt to study the effect of verbal clues of the
kind to which Barbara Melchiori referred will involve us in the need
2 Robert Browning, The Introductory Essay to the Letters Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the Four Ages
of Poetry, Ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith, Oxford, 1921, 66.
3 Barbara Melchiori, Browning’s Poetry of Reticence, London, 1968.

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to take account of theories concerned with the nature of poetic
language and of what the leading Russian Formalist Jurij Tynjanov
termed ‘the Word in Verse,’ as translated from the Russian title of
one of his seminal articles4. For the purposes of the present
discussion Tynjanov’s distinction between the context-bound
immediately obvious meaning of words in poetry and their context-
free openness is most fruitful. This point should become clear from
an analysis of Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ in subsequent
discussions.
4 Tynjanov, ''The Meaning of the Word in Verse,'' Readings in Russian, Poetics Formalist and
Structuralist Views (ed. Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska). Michigan Slavic Publications:
Ann Arbor. 1978. Original Russian Title: ''Znacenie slova v. stixe '' in Problema stixotvornogo
jazyke. 1924.

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HOW ROBERT BROWNING FOUND HIS
FEET
Did Isaac Nathan Provide a Channel of Influence
Between Byron and Robert Browning?
It is perhaps one of those quirks of literary history that the same
man who prevailed on Lord Byron to write the Hebrew Melodies
(1815) was later to become the music tutor of a great Victorian poet,
Robert Browning. Isaac Nathan, the son of the then cantor of the
Canterbury synagogue suggested to Lord Byron that he write a
number of lyrics to the accompaniment of certain Jewish melodies
purportedly dating from the days of the Temple in Jerusalem.
It is difficult to imagine that Nathan, never one given to false
modesty, did not recall in glowing terms his former association with
Byron to impress his pupil, then aged thirteen or fourteen. If, as
one has good reason to suppose, young Browning practised his
singing on some of the poems in the Hebrew Melodies, Byron’s
poetry might well have provided him with a powerful impulse to
write his own verses. If that was the case, why did Browning pay
almost no tribute to Byron as a source of inspiration although he as
a young man spoke and wrote with effusive praise about the genius
of Shelley?
At least in one passage of literary criticism we may find a hint
pointing to Byron’s possible influence on Browning’s poetry. In the
second section entitled ‘Byronic Lyrics for David’s Harp’ of his
monograph Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, Thomas L. Ashton refers to
‘Herod’s Lament to Mariamne’ as the precursor of [Robert
Browning’s] ‘Porphyria’s Lover.’ Thus, if only by way of a passing

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reference, a connection is discerned between Byron and Robert
Browning, who published what later became known as ‘Porphyria’s
Lover’ in 1836. Together with another poem, later entitled
‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ shared the title
of ‘Madhouse Cells’ I and II.
The absence of any admission by Browning of a debt to Byron’s
influence might at first suggest that there was none, but we have at
least one good reason for not jumping to this conclusion.
Experiencing what Harold Bloom describes as an ‘anxiety of
influence,’ Browning obliterated almost all traces of his Juvenilia
work Incondita, and the only two poems to survive the poet’s
destructive hand ‘The First- born of Egypt’ and ‘The Dance of Death’
betray a strongly Byronic tone, as I hope to demonstrate in the
ensuing paragraph.
The two surviving poems, which reveal Browning’s early almost
morbid obsession with death and the death of the young in
particular, contain echoes of lines and word patterns found in
Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib.’ This, like ‘The First-Born
of Egypt’ is based on themes and narratives in the Bible in which
the Angel of Death appears as a central motif. In both these poems
the colours of gold and purple repeatedly suggest the vainglorious
aspirations of oriental despots that are thwarted by the intervention
of the L-RD of Hosts. In themselves, this evidence and the
probability that Browning was strongly influenced by Byron’s verse
in his first period of artistic experimentation could well be
dismissed as matters of mere ‘academic’ interest unless pertinent
arguments can be adduced to support the proposition that Byron’s
early encounter with Byron’s verse through the mediation of Isaac
Nathan lent form and direction to propensities that should in time
pervade Browning’s entire poetic work. I argue that this was indeed
the case for the reasons stated in the following paragraphs.
I begin by drawing attention to three entwined motifs in Hebrew
Melodies, which I term for the sake of convenience: Hebraism, deep-
seated anguish and music. In ‘My Soul Is Dark,’ a dramatic

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monologue in which Saul implores the minstrel David to play his
harp and so free him from a mood of deep depression, all these
strands come together, for here music reveals its therapeutic power
in assuaging the evil spirit that befell the first king of Israel. In
Browning’s second version of ‘Saul,’ in Men and Women, the music
produced by David’s harp leads to an act of spiritual apprehension
that transcends the power of song and music altogether. Music
leads the aspiring human spirit beyond any reality describable by
words, an idea implied by the term ‘a psalm of ascent.’ Very much
the same notion comes to the fore in line 52 in ‘Abt Vogler’ – ‘that
out three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.’ Even in
so ‘trivial’ a poem as ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ the power of the all-
transcending powers of music are also implied by the fact that this
poem’s most lyrical passage demonstrates the effect the Piper’s
music had on the lame child who witnessed its sound yet remained
unable to follow the Piper to a `promised’ land.
Some poems in Melodies present the point of view of those
traumatized by deep mental anguish. Herod and Jephthah are
haunted by their remorse at having caused the death of either a
beloved wife or a beloved daughter. The psychological plight of these
victims of mental affliction finds a parallel in Browning’s poetry in
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess.’ The theme of the Jewish
exile from their spiritual homeland is a strong element in a number
of Browning’s poems that include ‘Holy-Cross Day,’ ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’
and even ‘Pisgah Sights I / II,’ depicting the deep sorrow of Moses at
the end of his life, when aware that he may only behold the
Promised Land in his life’s final vision without enjoying the privilege
of entering that land in person. Even in ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’
we hear an echo of this motif, for the lame child experiences a
millennial vision of the land which the Piper also promised him.
The presentation of a traumatized or erratic point of view
concerns poetic form as well as subject matter. Byron pioneered the
dramatic monologue, a genre combining the confessional element of
intensely lyrical poetry with the objectivity of a dramatic

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characterization. Browning developed, and arguably perfected, this
style of monologue in such poems as ‘My Last Duchess,’ ‘Rabbi Ben
Ezra’ and ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.’
An intimation that music is the great power for reconciliation at
any level. aesthetically as well as spiritually and psychologically,
resides in the very title of Hebrew Melodies. The inclusion of a
poem such as ‘She Walks in Beauty’ can hardly be justified in terms
of its obvious relevance to biblical or Hebrew themes. Byron
defended its inclusion by asserting that it was in keeping with the
overriding spirit of the Melodies – i.e. through an association of
feelings as experienced by those subject to the effects of great
music. Similarly, in Browning’s poetry the general title of Bells and
Pomegranates, which from 1841 until 1846 served as the heading of
a seemingly odd array of poems lacking a recognizable common
theme, suggests much the same assimilative power of association
and affinity to music. Here again a biblical allusion attests to
Browning’s deep-seated Hebraism. 5 The title refers to the golden
bells and ornaments’ in the shape of pomegranates that alternated
along the hem of the High Priest’s robe which he wore during his
service in the Holy Temple according to the Book of Exodus, 39.
28)..
It may be more than a mere coincidence that Byron, Nathan and
Browning themselves yielded to the wandering impulse so clearly
reflected in their poetry and music. All left England never to return.
Byron voiced his farewell to his homeland in the celebrated words
he ascribed to Childe Harold as he departed from Albion’s shores.
5 For Browning, the terms poet and prophet were virtually synonymous, a point
stressed in Judith Berlin-Lieberman's dissertation Browning and Hebraism
(Jerusalem / Zurich , 1934). On the question of the significance of the title
Bells and Pomegranates, she refers in her dissertation on page 20 to an
explanation that Brown gave to Elizabeth Barratt in a letter to her, dated
October 18, 1845): ”The Rabbis make “bells and pomegranates” symbolic of
Pleasure and Profit, the gay and the grave, the Poetry and the Prose, Singing
and Sermonizing – such a mixture of effects as in the original hour (that is a
quarter of an hour) of confidence and creation.”

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Browning vacillated between his periods of residence in England
and Italy, where he spent his happy married years after his wife’s
romantic elopement and release from virtual captivity under the
authority of her tyrannical Victorian father. After his wife’s death
Browning returned to England, but, as fate would have it, he died
in Venice surrounded by the works of art and architecture that had
so greatly fascinated him. Nathan left England for the Antipodes
and made a significant contribution to the establishment a distinct
national tradition of music in Australia. As artists, all three men, in
their various ways, identified themselves with people’s and nations
that were gaining a new awareness of their cultural heritage and
were sooner or later to assert their political sovereignty, whether we
speak of Greece with regard to Byron, Italy with regard to Browning
and Australia, and perhaps even Israel, in the case of Nathan. Until
well into the 1860s the poems in Byron’s Hebrew Melodies were
sung at concerts and performances to the accompaniment of
Nathan’s music and were particularly popular in Jewish circles,
strengthening nascent hopes for a return to the land of the Bible.

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Incondita: Why did Browning want to destroy all
traces of the first poems he wrote?
The two articles that follow pose a remarkable contrast in ways one
can interpret the figure of the Pied Piper, though each inspects
poems written by the same author, Robert Browning. A general
failure to recognize the profundity and gravity of his famous ‘child’s
story,’ even by scholarly specialists in the area of Victorian verse,
must have something to do with the tendency to shun anything
that resembles a religious point of view on great works of literature
If we understand sublimation as the process whereby the mind
converts the stuff of traumas, nightmares and thoughts of death
and horror into obverse appreciations of things acceptable and
pleasant, then Robert Browning's poem ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’
must be one of the most successful completions of this process -so
much so that few, even learned scholars, discern the profound and
possibly disturbing realities that underlie the poem.
In German the term Leseratte (combining the words meaning
‘read’ and ‘rat’) is a vibrant synonym for any avid reader of books.
Should it be that a rodent had the ability to read, I would not advise
this creature to read Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’
notwithstanding the fact that this poem is taken by most people to
be a jaunty and light-hearted ditty. Not being rats, we might seek
confirmation for the belief that poem has no unpleasant
connotations in the poem’s apparently innocent subtitle ‘A Child’s
Story.’ Indeed, a noted literary scholar Milton Millhauser, once
referred to the ‘innocent’ nature of Browning’s subject matter. 6 An
examination of the evolution of the Pied Piper legend does not bear
out Millhauser’s evaluation.
6 Milton Millhauser, "Poet and Burgher: A Comic Variation on a Serious Theme," Victorian
Poetry, 7 (1969), I63-168.

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The earliest sources of the legend make no mention of rats but
darkly report that a hundred and thirty children born in Hamelin
were ‘lost’ at a place called Calvary. 7 During the sixteenth century
such sinister undertones yielded to the outright declaration that
the Pied Piper was the Devil. It is now that rats enter the scene, and
rats were known to be the carriers of plague and deadly
contamination. Research has shown that the legend merged with
the motif of the Dance of Death, giving room to the conjecture of a
doctor that the lurid colours of the Piper’s coat were those of skin
discolorations on the bodies of those stricken by pestilence. 8 The
pervasive influence of the Pied Piper legend in association with the
Dance of Death might even have made its presence felt in Richard
the Third, an expert in Shakespeare studies has suggested.9 Such
facts could only be relevant to a discussion of Browning’s poem to
the extent that one establishes that Browning himself was
acquainted with them.
There is in fact evidence that suggests that Browning was aware
of the darker side of the legend’s import. According to Arthur Dixon
Browning had read a passage in Prosper Mérimée’s novel Chronique
du temps de Charles IX in which a gypsy girl recounts the tale of the
Pied Piper to mercenary soldiers on their way to Paris just before
77 The earliest known account of the Pied Piper incident can be translated from the Low German
as: “In the year 1284 on the day of John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin
were led away by a piper dressed in many-coloured clothes to Calvary close to the Koppen and
were there lost. “
8 D. Wolfers, "A Plaguey Piper," The Lancet, April 3 1965, 756-757.
9 A. P. Rossiter interprets Shakespeare's Richard III in the light of the Pied Piper's associations
with the medieval Dance of Death tradition. See: "Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard lll,"
in Shakespeare: The Histories, ed. Eugene M. Wraith (New York: Prentice Hall, 1965 ) 77. The
following quotation illuminates this point,:."the tune of the Dance of death to which all dance to
damnation is played by Margaret: and one aspect of the play is our watching the rats go into the
Weser, compelled by that fatal tune."

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the massacre of Protestants on the Eve of Saint Bartholomew. 10
The story of the Pied Piper clearly identified as the Devil proves to
be a portent of the massacre. According to Dixon Browning was
acquainted with a negative representation of the Pied Piper in one of
the early documentary sources of the legend.11
I base evidence pointing to Browning’s recognition of the
negative aspect of the Pied Piper story on a consideration of
Browning’s earliest poetic works and subtle implications of the
wording of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin.’ When still a youth, Browning
composed juvenilia works in a collection that bore the title
‘Incondita.’ Presumably to shield himself from adverse criticism, he
decided to destroy all traces of his earliest poetry, but he did not
fully succeed in this attempt, as two poems survived his drastic act
of self-censorship. They bore the titles ‘The Dance of Death’ and
‘The First-Born of Egypt.’ These are cited below.
‘The Dance of Death’ is the more horrific of these poems. It is
composed of monologues delivered by ghoulish personifications of
Death, Fever, Pestilence, Ague, Madness and Consumption, who vie
for the title of being the grisliest purveyor of death and destruction.
The ghastliness of Browning’s dark vision is tempered in ‘The First-
Born of Egypt’ only by an empathetic description of a father’s
feelings for his departed son in lines which Eliza Sarah Flower
Adams, an acquaintance of Browning, commended for their poetic
quality. 12
Did no more than a youth’s immature obsession with his
gruesome subject matter give rise to these poems? Did some
external prompt also play a role in this matter? After all, ‘The First-
10 Arthur Dixon, ”Browning’s Source for The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Studies in Philology,
Vol. XXIII, July 1926, No, 3,
11 Arthur Dixon, ”Browning’s Source for The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Studies in Philology,
Vol. XXIII, July 1926, No, 3,
12 See discussion of this comment in: Ian Jack, Browning’s Major Poetry (London,1973), 10.

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Born of Egypt’ takes its cue from the Book of Exodus, and yet does
not quite conform to the spirit of orthodox exposition of the kind
that typified a household in which Browning’s devout mother, an
adherent of strict evangelical views, wielded a dominant influence,
for in the poem we note an element of resentment against the
extreme severity and perceived injustice of divine chastisement.
I now introduce an item of biographic information often
overlooked in the domain of Browning scholarship. Browning, when
a boy of fourteen, received tuition in music and singing from Isaac
Nathan, the same person who prompted Lord Byron to compose the
Hebrew Melodies.13 In this ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’
graphically portrays an act of the divine vengeance in the form of
the plague that destroyed the invading Assyrian army under the
leadership of Sennacherib. There are also strikingly similar
linguistic features that signal possible connections between Byron’s
poem and the two surviving poems that formed a part of ‘Incondita.’
In the three poems under consideration we find much the same
contrast of the colours gold and purple. The First-Born of Egypt’
and ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ end on a similar note of awe
and dread at the contemplation of the destructive power of the God
of Israel.
The case I present rests on more than a reflection on one poem
written by Lord Byron. In the second section entitled ‘Byronic Lyrics
for David’s Harp’ of his monograph Byron’s Hebrew Melodies,
Thomas L. Ashton refers to ‘Herod’s Lament to Mariamne’ as the
precursor of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover,’ later joined by
‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ under the title ‘Madhouse Cells I
and II.’ 14 Ashton detects an affinity between ‘Herod’s Lament to
Mariamna’ and ‘Madhouse Cells’ on the basis a common concern to
reveal the distraught mentalities of those who kill a loved one.
13 Nathan Herbert E. Greene, ‘Browning’s Knowledge of Music,” PLMA, 62 (1947) 1095-1099.
14 Thomas L. Ashton, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, Austin (University of Texas Press) 1972.

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Similarities are not confined to items of subject for they also,
and perhaps more importantly, evince cognate modes of
presentation. Byron was a pioneer in the creation of the dramatic
monologue, a genre which Browning further developed and
perfected. Scholarship has focused on Browning’s adulation of
Shelley as guide and source of inspiration, but Shelley’s poetry left
no residual traces in Browning’s work that compare with the
aftermath of Byron’s influence. Browning disavowed Shelleyan
idealism in Pauline and developed his own strain of prophetic
Biblicism combined with a mode of realism that combined
evolutionary change with a high esteem of the virtue he ascribed to
‘the imperfect’ both in art and life. Ideals still had their place but
only as providers of motivation and the impetus to move forward, to
progress.
Browning never became a great dramatist despite his ambition
to become such in his earlier years. The Willy apostrophized at the
end of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ was the son of William Macready,
a noted theatre manager, and the admonition to keep promises was
probably a message to William Macready Senior, not to his son. The
composition of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ marked Browning’s
entry into the realm of popular verse, a welcome event in view of
Browning’s former reputation as an obscure and self-absorbed
writer, particularly after the mixed reception of the long poem
Sordello. Most of all, his success lay in transforming the Pied Piper
as the leader of the Dance of Death into a savior-artist figure. In
conformity with this introversion Calvary was no longer the gate of
Hell as seen in the Middle Ages but the opening to freedom and new
life. See arguments for this proposition in another essay.15
15
https://www.academia.edu/11132409/Solar_and_Religious_Symbolism_Embedded_in_the_Wor
ds_of_Robert_Brownings_The_Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin_

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The First-Born of Egypt
by Robert Browning
That night came on in Egypt with a step
So calmly stealing in the gorgeous train
Of sunset glories flooding the pale clouds
With liquid gold, until at length the glow
Sank to its shadowy impulse and soft sleep
Bent o'er the world to curtain it from life—
Vitality was hushed beneath her wing—
Pomp sought his couch of purple—care-worn grief
Flung slumber's mantle o'er him. At that hour
He in whose brain the burning fever fiend
Held revelry—his hot cheek turned awhile
Upon the cooler pillow. In his cell
The captive wrapped him in his squalid rags,
And sank amid his straw. Circean sleep!
Bathed in thine opiate dew, false hope vacates
Her seat in the sick soul, leaving awhile
Her dreamy fond imaginings—pale fear
His wild misgivings, and the warm life-springs
Flow in their wonted channels—and the train—
The harpy train of care, forsakes the heart.
Was it the passing sigh of the night wind
Or some lorn spirit's wail—that moaning cry
That struck the ear?—'tis hushed—no! it swells on
On—as the thunder peal when it essays
To wreck the summer sky—that fearful shriek
Still it increases—'tis the dolorous plaint,
The death cry of a nation—
It was a fearful thing—that hour of night—
I have seen many climes, but that dread hour
Hath left its burning impress on my soul
Never to be erased. Not the loud crash
When the shuddering forest swings to the red bolt,
Or march of the fell earthquake when it whelms
A city in its yawning gulf, could quell

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That deep voice of despair. Pharaoh arose
Startled from slumber, and in anger sought
The reason of the mighty rushing throng
At that dark hour around the palace gates,
—And then he dashed his golden crown away
And tore his hair in frenzy when he knew
That Egypt's heir was dead—From every house,
The marbled mansion of regality
To the damp dungeon's walls—gay pleasure's seat
And poverty's bare hut, that cry was heard,
As guided by the Seraph's vengeful arm
The hand of death held on its withering course,
Blighting the hopes of thousands.
I sought the street to gaze upon the grief
Of congregated Egypt—there the slave
Stood by him late his master, for that hour
Made vain the world's distinctions—for could wealth
Or power arrest the woe?—Some were blue
As sculptured marble from the quarry late
Of whom the foot first in the floating dance,
The glowing cheek hued with the deepening flush
In the night revel—told the young and gay.
No kindly moisture dewed their stony eye,
Or damped their ghastly glare—for they felt not.
The chain of torpor bound around the heart
Had stifled it for ever. Tears stole down
The furrowed channels of those withered cheeks
Whose fount had long been chilled, but that night's term
Had loosed the springs—for 'twas a fearful thing
To see a nation's hope so blasted. One
Pressed his dead child unto his heart—no spot
Of livid plague was nigh—no purple cloud
Of scathing fever—and he struck his brow
To rouse himself from that wild fantasy
Deeming it but a vision of the night.
I marked one old man with his only son
Lifeless within his arms—his withered hand
Wandering o'er the features of his child

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Bidding him wake from that long dreary sleep,
And lead his old blind father from the crowd
To the green meadows—but he answered not; 16
And then the terrible truth flashed on his brain,
And when the throng rolled on some bade him rise
And cling not so unto the dead one there,
Nor voice nor look made answer—he was gone.
But one thought chained the powers of each mind
Amid that night's felt horror—each one owned
In silence the dread majesty—the might
Of Israel's God, whose red hand had avenged
His servants' cause so fearfully—
The Dance of Death
by Robert Browning
FEVER
Bow to me, bow to me;
Follow me in my burning breath,
Which brings as the simoom destruction and death.
My spirit lives in the hectic glow
When I bid the life streams tainted flow
In the fervid sun's deep brooding beam
When seething vapours in volumes steam,
And they fall — the young, the gay — as the flower
'Neath the fiery wind's destructive power.
This day I have gotten a noble prize —
There was one who saw the morning rise,
And watched fair Cynthia's golden streak
Kiss the misty mountain peak,
But I was there, and my poisonous flood
Envenomed the gush of the youth's warm blood.
They hastily bore him to his bed,
But o'er him Death his swart pennons spread:
16 The lines in yellow highlighting received a favorable comment from Eliza Sarah Flower
Adams, a friend and confidante of Browning in his teenage years. Incidentally, it was she who
composed the hymn “Nearer my God to Thee.”

20
The skilled leech's art was vain,
Delirium revelled in each vein.
I marked each deathly change in him;
I watched each lustrous eye grow dim,
The purple cloud on his deep swollen brow,
The gathering death sweat's chilly flow,
The dull dense film obscure the eye,
Heard the last quick gasp and saw him die.
PESTILENCE
My spirit has passed on the lightning's wing
O'er city and land with its withering;
In the crowded street, in the flashing hall
My tramp has been heard: they are lonely all.
A nation has swept at my summons away
As mists before the glare of day.
See how proudly reigns my hand
In the blackening heaps on the surf-beat strand
Where the rank grass grows in deserted streets
Where the terrified stranger no passer meets
And all around the putrid air
Gleams lurid and red in Erinyes' stare
Where silence reigns, where late swelled the lute,
Thrilling lyre, mellifluous flute.
There if my prowess ye would know
Seek ye — and bow to your rival low.
AGUE
Bow to me, bow to me;
My influence is in the freezing deeps
Where the icy power of torpor sleeps,
Where the frigid waters flow
My marble chair is more cold below;
When the Grecian braved the Hellespont's flood
How did I curdle his fevered blood,
And sent his love in tumescent wave
To meet with her lover an early grave.
When Hellas' victor sought the rush

21
Of the river to lave in its cooling gush,
Did he not feel my iron clutch
When he fainted and sank at my algid touch?
These are the least of the trophies I claim —
Bow to me then, and own my fame.
MADNESS
Hear ye not the gloomy yelling
Or the tide of anguish swelling,
Hear ye the clank of fetter and chain,
Hear ye the wild cry of grief and pain,
Followed by the shuddering laugh
As when fiends the life-blood quaff?
See! see that band,
See how their bursting eyeballs gleam,
As the crocodiles' when crouched in the stream,
In India's sultry land.
Now they are seized in the rabies fell,
Hark! 'tis a shriek as from fiends of hell;
Now there is a plaining moan,
As the flow of the sullen river —
List! there is a hollow groan.
Doth it not make e'en you to shiver —
These are they struck of the barbs of my quiver.
Slaves before my haughty throne,
Bow then, bow to me alone.
CONSUMPTION
'Tis for me, 'tis for me;
Mine the prize of Death must be;
My spirit is o'er the young and gay
As on snowy wreaths in the bright noonday.
They wear a melting and vermeille flush
E'en while I bid their pulses hush,
Hueing o'er their dying brow
With the spring of health's best roseate glow
When the lover watches the full dark eye
Robed in tints of ianthine dye,
Beaming eloquent as to declare

22
The passions that deepen the glories there.
The frost in its tide of dazzling whiteness,
As Juno's brow of crystal brightness,
Such as the Grecian's hand could give
When he bade the sculptured marble ‘ live,’
The ruby suffusing the Hebe cheek,
The pulses that love and pleasure speak
Can his fond heart claim but another day,
And the loathsome worm on her form shall prey.
She is scathed as the tender flower,
When mildews o'er its chalice lour.
Tell me not of her balmy breath,
Its tide shall be shut in the fold of death;
Tell me not of her honied lip,
The reptile's fangs shall its fragrance sip.
Then will I say triumphantly
Bow to the deadliest — bow to me!

23
PAULINE
Yet thro' my wandering have I seen all shapes
Of strange delight, oft have I stood by thee,
Have I been keeping lonely watch with thee,
In the damp night by weeping Olivet,
Or leaning on thy bosom, proudly less--
Or dying with thee on the lonely cross—
Robert Browning, Pauline
848-854
1832 saw not only the beginning of Browning's literary career that
followed his writing of Pauline but also the death of Goethe. What
value could be found in treating this coincidence of apparently
unrelated events as a starting point for meaningful discussion?
Goethe and Browning are not exactly the most likely candidates for
a comparative study and yet this contrast promises to be instructive
for ;this reason German Romanticism received from Goethe the
initial impulse that gave rise to its coming into existence and
Browning began his literary career by shaking off what he had felt
to be Shelley’s overpowering influence on his mind and imagination.
Central to the question of the affinity of both poets to
Romanticism there is the issue of self-consciousness.
A burdensome self-conscious is reflected by works composed by
Goethe and Browning when they were men in their early twenties,
both seeking to define their personal identity and find their feet as
poets. In Goethe’s case, poems that played a part in exposing and
healing the malaise of self-consciousness gave great prominence to
the word ‘Wanderer,’ either by including the word in a poem’s title
or otherwise by placing it at a decisive juncture. In the lines cited at
the head of this page we note the importance of the words: ‘yet thro’
my wandering,’ for, as the rest of this passage reveals, wandering

24
means searching for a spiritual goal, perhaps even truth in a
religious sense. Words derived from the verb to wander appear
fourteen times in Pauline, usually in conjunction with references to
thought and dreaming.
Poets at the beginning of their literary career commonly adulate
some paragon of their choosing as a source of inspiration. For
Goethe this was Shakespeare, for Browning, Shelley. In a following
stage of development the young poets no longer needed some
model as their substitute muse and Pauline marks such a juncture
in Browning’s development. While he retained the highest regard for
Shelley’s poetic brilliance he repudiated the Sun-Treader’s alleged
atheism and ethereal idealism and turned towards Christianity in
a form that accorded with the rational and intuitive aspects of his
personality. According to Clyde de L. Ryals’ close study of Pauline
Browning was beset by two fears. The first lay in the doubt that
the figures of Shelley and Jesus in Pauline were grounded in any
external independent reality and hence in the suspicion that they
merely represented projections of himself. Alternatively, he feared
that these figures, if truly independent forces, could rob him of
his intellectual freedom.
As its subtitles states, Pauline is a ‘confession’ though it is one
dressed up in the formal guise of dramatic monologue. The author
introduces his poem with a dedicatory apostrophe to Pauline, a
young woman who combines the roles of muse, his actual or
prospective lover and the editor of the poem the title of which bears
her name. Her critique of his poem, in French, signals an attempt
on Browning’s part to tone down the poem’s lofty and effusive
declarations by rounding it off with an outsider’s seemingly
objective appraisal, possibly in the hope of blunting the edge of the
anticipated criticism the poem could well receive from real editors.
In fact, Pauline did indeed provoke harsh words from those who
reviewed it in 1833. The Literary Gazette of March 23, 1833, pulled
no any punches at all, calling Pauline ‘Somewhat mystical,
somewhat poetical, somewhat sensual, and not a little

25
unintelligible, -- this is a dreamy volume, without an object, and
unfit for publication.’. John Stuart Mill, in an otherwise relatively
positive review, claimed that the poem exhibited ‘a more intense
and morbid state of self-consciousness than I ever knew in any
sane being.’
A quarter of a century before the arrival of Romanticism Goethe
had already contended with the same problem of acute self-
consciousness that would face Romantic poets and then Browning.
To Goethe in 1771 the ‘Wanderer’ meant the genius of Shakespeare
but also a reference to his own person, which gave rise to a
confusion between the personal and impersonal elements that
composed his mind and character. In ‘Wandrers Sturmlied’ we see
Goethe’s endeavour to find emotional release by way of humour and
irony at his own expense in an account of his attempt to levitate his
way to the summit of Mount Parnassus only to stall and land
ingloriously in scree of mud. Goethe kept this poem out of the
limelight for forty years. However, he overcame his fear of self-
exposure by writing the verse dialogue bearing the title of Der
Wandrer. Being in the form of a dramatic dialogue, it objectified the
character of the wanderer so far as to dissociate it from any
autobiographical reference to Goethe himself.
Despite his early sorties into writing dramas for the theatre
Browning never became a great dramatist like Goethe, but he did
become the master of the dramatic monologue, a genre already well
established by Lord Byron, to my mind Browning’s true tutor in the
art of poetry. It is a fact much overlooked that Sir Isaac Nathan,
the same man who prompted Byron to compose the Hebrew
Melodies, was also the fourteen-year-old Browning’s private teacher
in music and song.
If Browning needed some kind of camouflage as a way to
combat self-consciousness, writing dramatic monologues was not
the only course open to him. Barbara Melchiori wrote in the first
chapter of her monograph Browning’s Poetry of Reticence.

26
Some of the tension, which lends strength to his work, arises
from the conflict between his wish to guard jealously his own
thoughts and feelings, and the pressing necessity he was
under to reveal them.
For my part I do not fully share the opinion that it was only a
need for self-protection that motivated Browning’s habitual
scattering of verbal clues throughout his works. The following
studies of ‘By the Fire-Side and ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ point to
what I see as Browning’s delight in making cryptic references with a
distinctly religious orientation. Scholars plunge into the depths of
Browning’s complex and even obscure works such as Sordello but
make little of the fact that ‘the Good News’ in the title of one of
Browning’s most celebrated poems points to a biblical message.
Scholars in the domain of literary criticism are far from being
obtuse but many in my view suffer from an acute anxiety that
prevents them from admitting that religious issues concerned
Browning and other great poets throughout history up to the
present.
The following essays pursue certain topics that I have touched
on. First we consider evidence that Byron was the poet who made
the deepest and longest lasting impression on Browning in ways
that are evident in the development of his poetry. A study of ‘By the
Fire-Side’ shows that Browning attained the emotional balance he
had sought in vain when writing Pauline, in great part thanks to the
harmony and spirit of reciprocity that came with his marriage to
Elisabeth Barratt. A short study examines the mysticism that
underlies ‘How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.’
Finally in the section devoted to Browning and his poetry attention
is turned to ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ on the surface perhaps a
beguilingly jaunty poem with an innocent theme but the verbal
clues this ditty contains point in a different direction. For the sake
of comparison with other treatments of the Pied Piper in literature I
extend my enquiries to other works that include Richard the Third

27
by Shakespeare and report on research findings in Hamelin and the
surrounding area. It is interesting to note that the earliest records
of the Pied Piper’s act of leading away children from Hamelin agree
that he made his way to Calvary, a fact to ponder in any discussion
of Browning’s poetic treatment of the tale.

28
TELLING WORDS
The Allegorical Depth of ‘How they Brought the
Good News from Ghent to Aix’
We will look at two poems by Browning -’How they Brought the
Good News from Ghent to Aix’ and ‘By the Fire-Side.’ The former
enjoys great popularity thanks to its vitality and riveting narrative
style, and may suffer as a result in much the same way that ‘The
Pied Piper of Hamelin’'s popularity belies its serious implications.
Horse rides depicted in poetry typically betoken the transience of
life and the imminence of death, a fact evident from reading
Goethe's ‘Schwager Chronos,’ ‘Der Erlkönig,’ August Bürger’s
‘Leonore’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Lord Tennyson.
An exception to this rule. is posed by John Gilpin's ride described
in a famous poem by William Cowper, but then Gilpin's excursion
on horseback was not guided by any intention to reach a certain
destination. Wandering also conveys a sense which connects
physical motion with things of the mind and spirit. As with ‘The
Pied piper of Hamelin,’ ‘How they brought the Good News from
Ghent to Aix’ sustains an interpretation based on a close regard for
religious symbolism. For example, the allusive mysticism of the
number three finds is apparent in the course of a race in which
only the third rider reaches Aix to bring ‘the good news’ of salvation
to its townspeople. ‘By the Fire-Side,’ recalling a time when
Browning and his wife enjoyed a walk in a mountainous region in
Italy, places emphasis on the vertical aspect of ascent with all its
religious and mystical connotations with heaven and the realm of
the Spirit. Wandering also has to do with the quest for firm

29
foundations. Gilgamesh, Ulysses and Aeneas were wanderers who
sought to establish a new order. Wordsworth and Goethe give
examples of wanderers who sought a new foundation, not so much
for a nation or state as for their poetry and poetic identity.
This poem, so well known to many English school children,
furnishes an example of a poem which rarely receives close critical
attention, doubtless because its riveting narrative excellence is so
eminently satisfying in itself. However, the following study of the
poem will take account of verbal clues that may deepen our
perception of the poem's symbolic and allegorical attributes that are
not apparent if the poem is considered only at the narrative or
literal level.
At Level 1, three messengers, Joris, Dirck and the speaker,
gallop on their horses through the night and the following morning
to ‘bring the news which alone could save Aix from her fate’ (line
46). The horses of Dirck and Joris die from exhaustion on the
journey but Roland, the speaker's horse, survives, all rigours
notwithstanding, and reaches Aix to be rewarded by the
acclamation of its jubilant inhabitants and by the riders' ‘last
measure of wine’ (line 58)- a strange beverage for a horse, when one
comes to think of it. Could ‘wine’ provide a verbal clue in view of its
obvious sacramental associations?
There is more than one reason for questioning whether the
poem could be treated only as a realistically treated story, however
gripping and well told. Browning himself commented that the story
had no historical foundation, and William Clyde Devane notes that
the route chosen by the riders was far from direct Was the path of
the riders dictated by the poet's need to synchronize earth-bound
incidents accompanying the ride with the position and visibility of
the sun, moon and stars in accordance with a symbolic framework?
At Level 2, the journey described in the poem reveals a
sustained metaphor based on the motif of a journey through life
and experience towards ever-higher states of progress, which
characterizes Browning's poetry generally. Browning skillfully

30
avoids foisting an overt allegorical frame on the poem but intimates
one by the use of expressions which ambivalently fulfill the reader'
expectations of what is plausible in terms of the story itself and still
point to other planes of significance. This ambivalence we discover
in Joris's words ‘Yet there is time!’ (line 18). On the one hand, they
can be taken to mean what one could paraphrase as ‘There's still
time, it isn't too late,’ which are fully consistent with the dramatic
situation of the riders. On the other, the words point to one of the
major questions the poem raises in wider metaphysical terms, the
nature of time itself. Further to this inquiry, let us now consider the
main events reported in the poem.
As in Browning's poetic drama Pippa Passes, the reported events
in ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ are framed
by the diurnal cycle starting from around midnight, as reported in
the first stanza, and ending not long after Joris and the narrator
sight Aix in the oppressive heat of the midday sun. We note a
marked contrast between ‘a great yellow star’ at the break of dawn
(see stanza III), probably evoking the star of Bethlehem in many
readers' minds, and the sun, which here carries negative
associations with soulless aridity and the remorseless progress of
time. These lines arouse such an impression:
The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,
'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff
(Stanza VII)
The death of two horses and the survival of Roland imply a
contrast of life and death in terms that transcend the specifics of
the story itself, even carrying a possible allusion to the third day of
the Resurrection reinforced by an allusion to wine and the
Eucharist, especially so in the light of a reference to ‘red blood.’
At level 3 we find further corroboration of the religious symbolic
framework we have already considered. The words ‘Good News’ in
the poem's title refer in the first instance to the contents of the

31
message which the three riders bring to the city of Aix. It is
surprising in some ways that the contents of this message itself are
never divulged to the reader, suggesting that only the idea of ‘the
good news’ is paramount, and of course, in a religious context, the
‘good news’ imports the Gospel, especially to someone like
Browning, with a staunch Nonconformist family background.
Another word of particular significance in evangelical circles
appears in the wording that Aix is ‘saved.’ This is not to say that the
poem is a cryptic religious tract, though there are strong reasons to
conclude that it is the product of a mind steeped in a Christian,
particularly a Nonconformist, attitude to life, irrespective of the fact
that Browning in his youth underwent a period of religious doubt
and even antireligious sentiment when the young poet was subject
to the powerful influence of Shelley's ‘Queen Mab.’

32
Questions concerning the inspirational source of
Browning’s ‘Saul’
Robert Browning placed ‘Saul; among his greatest poetic
achievements. The poem, the full text of which is found below,
reveals a work of great spiritual depth and emotional intensity
couched in language that is suitably rapturous and elevated.. The
speaker is David when still a ,youth who enjoys King Saul’s favour
and confidence, the more so for his ability to release Saul from the
pit of utter dejection and paralyzing depression by the soothing and
healing power of his songs and the attendant playing of his harp.
We receive a moment-to-moment account of events that begin with
David’s overdue arrival at the entrance of the royal tent and which
hence proceeds with a description of a terrible darkness that
engulfs the stricken monarch, indeed a ‘blackness’ that is not
simply the result of absent light. There is no known physical
force that binds Saul to the central ‘cross-support’ that sustains the
weight of the tent and yet he stands there in an upright position
with arms outstretched; This posture together with an apparently
accidental occurrence of ‘cross’ points to that most central of
religious motifs in the world, as a later reference to ‘Christ’ will
confirm beyond doubt.
The poem took shape in two principal stages. The stanzas 1 to
IX, originally composed of 124 lines, were penned in 1845 whereas
a further 10 strophes appeared along with the original nine in the
complete poem that appeared among others under the heading Men
and Women 1n186l.There is a widespread view, supported by
Devane, the author of a copious handbook devoted to Browning’s
poetry 17and attested by Browning himself, that Christopher
Smart’s poem David, cited below, provided Browning with the initial
17 William Clyde DeVane, A Browning Handbook, New York, 1955.

33
spur to write a poem devoted to the theme of David’s music and its
power to heal the troubled mind of King Saul. Even so, in terms of
genre, mood and its range of reference Smart’s poem and ‘Saul’
display great differences. The former is uniformly bucolic and
consistently lyrical in tone, the latter, while in part exultant in
praise of pastoral scenes, reveals the tension of a dramatic
monologue and gripping narrative. There could well be another
inspirational source of Browning’s ‘Saul’ that the author forgot, or
did not choose, to name. It is an interesting but often overlooked
fact that Browning during his boyhood, received music and singing
lessons from Isaac Nathan, the same person who had prompted
Lord Byron to compose the poems that belong together under the
title of Hebrew Melodies, in which three concern King Saul and a
fourth extols the healing power of David’s harp. The case I present
rests on more than a reflection on one poem written by Lord Byron.
In the second section entitled ‘Byronic Lyrics for David’s Harp’ of his
monograph Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, Thomas L. Ashton refers to
‘Herod’s Lament to Mariamne’ as the precursor of Robert
Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover,’ later joined by ‘Johannes Agricola in
Meditation’ under the title ‘Madhouse Cells I and II.’ 18
Furthermore, Browning destroyed almost all traces of his juvenilia
verses entitled Incondita, but those in this collection that did
happen to survive evince an unmistakably Byronic character.
Browning’s guarded attitude to his sources and, by extension,
to revelations of his inner personal secrets, evinced a further aspect
to which Barbara Melchiori, a noted Browning scholar, applied the
term ‘reticence.’ According to her analysis set forth in her
monologue Browning the Poet of Reticence, the great Victorian poet
was subject to two contrary impulses, one that urged him to
conceal his innermost feelings and the another that pressed him to
divulge them with the result that certain verbal clues ran counter to
the overt meaning of the sentences they composed. Alternatively,
18 Thomas L. Ashton, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, Austin (University of Texas Press) 1972.

34
Browning delighted in embedding cryptic messages within his
verses, which he challenged his readers to decipher. On this score I
have argued elsewhere that he succeeded concealed the deep
significance of the Pied Piper story from most of his readers,
including those within the field of literary scholarship.
Even though the Christological import of ‘Saul’ is undeniable,
some debate continues concerning the reason for which Browning
delayed over fifteen years before adding the final ten strophes.
Devane and others have argued that the first nine stanzas required
a further impulse rooted in Browning’s as yet lacking appreciation
of theological truth before he could resolve issues that he could
perceive but not properly confront. The final resolution he sought
shows itself to have been reached in the line:
XVI.
Then the truth came upon me. No harp more---no song more!
outbroke---
Both David’s harp and song have served their use. In terms of
modern technology they have boosted him and his words into a
celestial orbit. Words, or perhaps to put it more aptly, the Word, it
transpires, are the ultimate expression of truth attainable on this
earth. ’ Very much the same notion comes to the fore in line 52 in
‘Abt Vogler’ – ‘that out three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound,
but a star.’ . I personally doubt the theory that in 1845 Browning
had not established a sure foundation in his acceptance of
Christianity tailored to fit his background, personality and
intellectual outlook. This had gelled well before 1845 at the time of
his disavowal of Shelleyan idealism when writing Pauline. Perhaps
what he did find to be lacking in his mastery of poetry was an
ability to pitch language to the highest possible level of sublimity
and quasi-musical resonance, a feat he could claim to have

35
achieved in the completed version of ‘Saul’ with its highly inventive
and innovative verbal combinations.
SAUL by Robert Browning
With some keywords highlighted in yellow
I.
Said Abner, `Àt last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou speak,
``Kiss my cheek, wish me well!'' Then I wished it, and did kiss his cheek.
And he, ``Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance sent,
``Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent
``Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth yet,
``Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet.
``For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three days,
``Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer nor of praise,
``To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their strife,
`Ànd that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon life.
II.
``Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with his dew
`Òn thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue
``Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild beat
``Were now raging to torture the desert!''
III.
Then I, as was meet,
Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my feet,
And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was unlooped;
I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I stooped
Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered and gone,
That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on
Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I prayed,
And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid
But spoke, ``Here is David, thy servant!'' And no voice replied.
At the first I saw nought but the blackness but soon I descried
A something more black than the blackness---the vast, the upright
Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight
Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all.
Then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent-roof, showed Saul.
IV.

36
He stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms stretched out wide
On the great cross-support in the centre, that goes to each side;
He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught in his pangs
And waiting his change, the king-serpent all heavily hangs,
Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come
With the spring-time,---so agonized Saul, drear and stark, blind and dumb.
V.
Then I tuned my harp,---took off the lilies we twine round its chords
Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noon-tide---those sunbeams like swords!
And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one,
So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done.
They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed
Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's bed;
And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star
Into eve and the blue far above us,---so blue and so far!
VI.
---Then the tune, for which quails on the cornland will each leave his mate
To fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets elate
Till for boldness they fight one another: and then, what has weight
To set the quick jerboa<*1> amusing outside his sand house---
There are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half mouse!
God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear,
To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here.
VII.
Then I played the help-tune of our reapers, their wine-song, when hand
Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, and great hearts expand
And grow one in the sense of this world's life.---And then, the last song
When the dead man is praised on his journey---``Bear, bear him along
``With his few faults shut up like dead flowerets! Are balm-seeds not here
``To console us? The land has none left such as he on the bier.
``Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!''---And then, the glad chaunt
Of the marriage,---first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt
As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.---And then, the great march
Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch
Nought can break; who shall harm them, our friends?---Then, the chorus intoned
As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned.
But I stopped here: for here in the darkness Saul groaned.

37
VIII.
And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened apart;
And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered: and sparkles 'gan dart
From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once with a start,
All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart.
So the head: but the body still moved not, still hung there erect.
And I bent once again to my playing, pursued it unchecked,
As I sang,---
IX.
`Òh, our manhood's prime vigour! No spirit feels waste,
``Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.
`Òh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
``The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
`Òf the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear,
`Ànd the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
`Ànd the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,
`Ànd the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
`Ànd the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
``That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
``How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
`Àll the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!
``Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose sword thou didst guard
``When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious reward?
``Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as men sung
``The low song of the nearly-departed, and bear her faint tongue
``Joining in while it could to the witness, `Let one more attest,
`` Ì have lived, seen God's hand thro'a lifetime, and all was for best'?
``Then they sung thro' their tears in strong triumph, not much, but the rest.
`Ànd thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working whence grew
``Such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the spirit strained true:
`Ànd the friends of thy boyhood---that boyhood of wonder and hope,
``Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,---
``Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine;
`Ànd all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine!
`Òn one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage (like the throe
``That, a-work in the rock, helps its labour and lets the gold go)
``High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them,---all
``Brought to blaze on the head of one creature---King Saul!''
X.
And lo, with that leap of my spirit,---heart, hand, harp and voice,
Each lifting Saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding rejoice

38
Saul's fame in the light it was made for---as when, dare I say,
The Lord's army, in rapture of service, strains through its array,
And up soareth the cherubim-chariot---``Saul!'' cried I, and stopped,
And waited the thing that should follow. Then Saul, who hung propped
By the tent's cross-support in the centre, was struck by his name.
Have ye seen when Spring's arrowy summons goes right to the aim,
And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held (he alone,
While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad bust of stone
A year's snow bound about for a breastplate,---leaves grasp of the sheet?
Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet,
And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your mountain of old,
With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages untold---
Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and scar
Of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest---all hail, there they are!
---Now again to be softened with verdure, again hold the nest
Of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the green on his crest
For their food in the ardours of summer. One long shudder thrilled
All the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and was stilled
At the King's self left standing before me, released and aware.
What was gone, what remained? All to traverse, 'twixt hope and despair;
Death was past, life not come: so he waited. Awhile his right hand
Held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant forthwith to remand
To their place what new objects should enter: 'twas Saul as before.
I looked up and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt any more
Than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from the shore,
At their sad level gaze o'er the ocean---a sun's slow decline
Over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o'erlap and entwine
Base with base to knit strength more intensely: so, arm folded arm
O'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided.
XI.
What spell or what charm,
(For, awhile there was trouble within me) what next should I urge
To sustain him where song had restored him?---Song filled to the verge
His cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields
Of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty: beyond, on what fields,
Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye
And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they put by?
He saith, ``It is good;'' still he drinks not: he lets me praise life,
Gives assent, yet would die for his own part.
XII.
Then fancies grew rife
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep

39
Fed in silence---above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie
'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky:
And I laughed---``Since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks,
``Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,
``Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show
`Òf mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know!
``Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains,
`Ànd the prudence that keeps what men strive for.'' And now these old trains
Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more the string
Of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus---
XIII.
``Yea, my King,''
I began---``thou dost well in rejecting mere comforts that spring
``From the mere mortal life held in common by man and by brute:
`Ìn our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit.
``Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree,---how its stem trembled first
``Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler then safely outburst
``The fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these too, in turn
``Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect: yet more was to learn,
`È'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. Our dates shall we slight,
``When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight
`Òf the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? Not so! stem and branch
``Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall staunch
`Èvery wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee such wine.
``Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine!
``By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy
``More indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a boy.
``Crush that life, and behold its wine running! Each deed thou hast done
``Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e'en as the sun
``Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface,
``Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace
``The results of his past summer-prime'---so, each ray of thy will,
`Èvery flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill
``Thy whole people, the countless, with ardour, till they too give forth
`À like cheer to their sons, who in turn, fill the South and the North
``With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Carouse in the past!
``But the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last:
`Às the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her height
``So with man---so his power and his beauty for ever take flight.
``No! Again a long draught of my soul-wine! Look forth o'er the years!
``Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the seer's!
`Ìs Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb---bid arise
`À grey mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies,

40
``Let it mark where the great First King slumbers: whose fame would ye know?
`Ùp above see the rock's naked face, where the record shall go
`Ìn great characters cut by the scribe,---Such was Saul, so he did;
``With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid,---
``For not half, they'll affirm, is comprised there! Which fault to amend,
`Ìn the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend
``(See, in tablets 'tis level before them) their praise, and record
``With the gold of the graver, Saul's story,---the statesman's great word
``Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The river's a-wave
``With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave:
``So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part
`Ìn thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou art!''
XIV.
And behold while I sang ... but O Thou who didst grant me that day,
And before it not seldom hast granted thy help to essay,
Carry on and complete an adventure,---my shield and my sword
In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my word,---
Still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavour
And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hopeless as ever
On the new stretch of heaven above me---till, mighty to save,
Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance---God's throne from man's grave!
Let me tell out my tale to its ending---my voice to my heart
Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night I took part,
As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my sheep,
And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep!
For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron<*2> upheaves
The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron<*3> retrieves
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.
XV.
I say then,---my song
While I sang thus, assuring the monarch, and ever more strong
Made a proffer of good to console him---he slowly resumed
His old motions and habitudes kingly. The right-hand replumed
His black locks to their wonted composure, adjusted the swathes
Of his turban, and see---the huge sweat that his countenance bathes,
He wipes off with the robe; and he girds now his loins as of yore,
And feels slow for the armlets of price, with the clasp set before.
He is Saul, ye remember in glory,---ere error had bent
The broad brow from the daily communion; and still, though much spent
Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God did choose,
To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose.
So sank he along by the tent-prop till, stayed by the pile

41
Of his armour and war-cloak and garments, he leaned there awhile,
And sat out my singing,---one arm round the tent-prop, to raise
His bent head, and the other hung slack---till I touched on the praise
I foresaw from all men in all time, to the man patient there;
And thus ended, the harp falling forward. Then first I was 'ware
That he sat, as I say, with my head just above his vast knees
Which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak-roots which please
To encircle a lamb when it slumbers. I looked up to know
If the best I could do had brought solace: he spoke not, but slow
Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: thro' my hair
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my bead, with kind power---
All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower.
Thus held he me there with his great eyes that scrutinized mine---
And oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was the sign?
I yearned---``Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bliss,
`Ì would add, to that life of the past, both the future and this;
`Ì would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence,
`Às this moment,---had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense!''
XVI.
Then the truth came upon me. No harp more---no song more! outbroke---
XVII.
`Ì have gone the whole round of creation: I saw and I spoke:
`Ì, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my brain
`Ànd pronounced on the rest of his hand-work---returned him again
``His creation's approval or censure: I spoke as I saw:
`Ì report, as a man may of God's work---all's love, yet all's law.
``Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty tasked
``To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked.
``Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare.
``Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care!
``Do I task any faculty highest, to image success?
`Ì but open my eyes,---and perfection, no more and no less,
`Ìn the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God
`Ìn the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.
`Ànd thus looking within and around me, I ever renew
``(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too)
``The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete,
`Às by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet.
``Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known,
`Ì shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own.
``There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink,

42
`Ì am fain to keep still in abeyance, (I laugh as I think)
``Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst
`È'en the Giver in one gift.---Behold, I could love if I durst!
``But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake
``God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's sake.
``---What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small,
``Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appal?
`Ìn the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all?
``Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,
``That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift?
``Here, the creature surpass the Creator,---the end, what Began?
``Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man,
`Ànd dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can?
``Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power,
``To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower
`Òf the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul,
``Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole?
`Ànd doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest)
``These good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best?
`Ày, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the height
``This perfection,---succeed with life's day-spring, death's minute of night?
`Ìnterpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul the mistake,
``Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now,---and bid him awake
``From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set
``Clear and safe in new light and new life,---a new harmony yet
``To be run, and continued, and ended---who knows?---or endure!
``The man taught enough, by life's dream, of the rest to make sure;
``By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss,
`Ànd the next world's reward and repose, by the struggles in this.
XVIII.
`Ì believe it! 'Tis thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who receive:
`Ìn the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe.
`Àll's one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to my prayer
`Às I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the air.
``From thy will, stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread Sabaoth:
``_I_ will?---the mere atoms despise me! Why am I not loth
``To look that, even that in the face too? Why is it I dare
``Think but lightly of such impuissance? What stops my despair?
``This;---'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!
``See the King---I would help him but cannot, the wishes fall through.
``Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
``To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would---knowing which,
`Ì know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now!
``Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou---so wilt thou!

43
``So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown---
`Ànd thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down
`Òne spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath,
``Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death!
`Às thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved
``Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved!
``He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak.
``'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek
`Ìn the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be
`À Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,
``Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this hand
``Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!''
XIX.
I know not too well how I found my way home in the night.
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right,
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware:
I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there,
As a runner beset by the populace famished for news---
Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews;
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted not,
For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest,
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest.
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth---
Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day's tender birth;
In the gathered intensity brought to the grey of the hills;
In the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sudden wind-thrills;
In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling still
Though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and chill
That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid with awe:
E'en the serpent that slid away silent,---he felt the new law.
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers;
The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine-bowers:
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low,
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices---`È'en so, it is so!''

44
A Songto David
By Christopher Smart
(excerpt)
Sweet is the dew that falls betimes,
And drops upon the leafy limes;
Sweet Hermon's fragrant air:
Sweet is the lily's silver bell,
And sweet the wakeful tapers smell
That watch for early pray'r.
Sweet the young nurse with love intense,
Which smiles o'er sleeping innocence;
Sweet when the lost arrive:
Sweet the musician's ardour beats,
While his vague mind's in quest of sweets,
The choicest flow'rs to hive.
Sweeter in all the strains of love,
The language of thy turtle dove,
Pair'd to thy swelling chord;
Sweeter with ev'ry grace endu'd,
The glory of thy gratitude,
Respir'd unto the Lord.
Strong is the horse upon his speed;
Strong in pursuit the rapid glede,
Which makes at once his game:
Strong the tall ostrich on the ground;
Strong thro' the turbulent profound
Shoots xiphias to his aim.
Strong is the lion—like a coal
His eye-ball—likea bastion's mole
His chest against the foes:
Strong, the gier-eagle on his sail,
Strong against tide, th' enormous whale
Emerges as he goes.
But stronger still, in earth and air,
And in the sea, the man of pray'r;
And far beneath the tide;

45
And in the seat to faith assign'd,
Where ask is have, where seek is find,
Where knock is open wide.
Beauteous the fleet before the gale;
Beauteous the multitudes in mail,
Rank'd arms and crested heads:
Beauteous the garden's umbrage mild,
Walk, water, meditated wild,
And all the bloomy beds.
Beauteous the moon full on the lawn;
And beauteous, when the veil's withdrawn,
The virgin to her spouse:
Beauteous the temple deck'd and fill'd,
When to the heav'n of heav'ns they build
Their heart-directed vows.
Beauteous, yea beauteous more than these,
The shepherd king upon his knees,
For his momentous trust;
With wish of infinite conceit,
For man, beast, mute, the small and great,
And prostrate dust to dust.
Precious the bounteous widow's mite;
And precious, for extreme delight,
The largess from the churl:
Precious the ruby's blushing blaze,
And alba's blest imperial rays,
And pure cerulean pearl.
Precious the penitential tear;
And precious is the sigh sincere,
Acceptable to God:
And precious are the winning flow'rs,
In gladsome Israel's feast of bow'rs,
Bound on the hallow'd sod.
More precious that diviner part
Of David, ev'n the Lord's own heart,

46
Great, beautiful, and new:
In all things where it was intent,
In all extremes, in each event,
Proof—answ'ring true to true.
Glorious the sun in mid career;
Glorious th' assembled fires appear;
Glorious the comet's train:
Glorious the trumpet and alarm;
Glorious th' almighty stretch'd-out arm;
Glorious th' enraptur'd main:
Glorious the northern lights a-stream;
Glorious the song, when God's the theme;
Glorious the thunder's roar:
Glorious hosanna from the den;
Glorious the catholic amen;
Glorious the martyr's gore:
Glorious—more glorious is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down
By meekness, call'd thy Son;
Thou that stupendous truth believ'd,
And now the matchless deed's achiev'd,
Determin'd, dar'd, and done.

47
The twice-crossed bridge in Robert Browning’s ‘By
the Fire-Side’
The invocation of the Muses that introduced Homeric and other
classical epics was a convention which carried over into John
Milton’s Paradise Lost and left a trace in Wordsworth’s Prelude,
William Blake’s Milton and Lord Byron’s Dedication to Don Juan in a
manner that was variously gentle, bizarre or jocund in effect. In the
opening lines of The Prelude a ‘breeze’ replaces Milton’s ‘Holy Muse.’
In the case of the introduction of Blake’s Milton the Muses are
enjoined to conduct something akin to a surgical operation to inject
inspiration into the poet’s head via his hand and arm. The speaker
we encounter in The Dedication of Don Juan states that he wanders
in the company of ‘pedestrian muses’ while Robert Southey is
seen mounted on a winged steed in an allusion to the image of
Pegasus as a symbol of poetic inspiration that appears in Paradise
Lost. Even later, in Victorian poetry, we find a vestige of the
tradition of commencing a poetic work with a supplication to a
source of divine inspiration, be this vestige no more than the
dropping of the word ‘wind’ at or near the beginning of a poem, or of
the word ‘cross-wind’ in the following case for discussion: ‘By the
Fire-Side,’ which along with fifty other poems made up a collection
of verse that bore the general heading of Men and Women when it
was published in 1855. The second stanza of Robert Browning’s ‘By
the Fire-side’ runs:
I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age,,
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows
And I turn the page, and turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose.

48
In poetic tradition such words as wind, breeze and indeed fire
connote the power of inspiration but what about a cross-wind, a
rather technical cum nautical term after all? Only a few lines later
we read of children who wish to cut from a nearby hazel the
mainmast for their ship. Does this seemingly inconsequential
reference to things nautical, possibly strengthened later by the
reference to a bridge, imply that the poem is comparable to a
voyage? If so, the progress of this voyage involves a number of
significant tacks. The standpoint of the speaker is that of a man at
the prime of life who imagines what he will be doing one autumn
day when he has reached old age. Scarcely have we entered the cozy
interior of his home than the narrative sequence U-turns back to
the day, recalled in the speaker’s memory, when he as a young man
accompanied his wife Leanor on a walk to a ruined chapel situated
half way up an Italian mountain-side. Browning real wife’s name
was Elisabeth and no mention of ‘Leanor’ can disguise the
autobiographical nature of the poem’s import.
The lilting ABABA rhyming scheme that runs through the
poem's fifty-three stanzas is fully consonant with the mix of
contrasts and harmony that informs it. Few poems equal ‘By the
Fire-Side’ as poetry that conveys an overwhelming sense of the
communion of two souls bound by love and mutual understanding
in, quite literally, the marriage of true minds. Even in their
distinctly different kinds of poetry Robert and Elizabeth
complemented each other, not least through the contrast between
what Browning, in a letter to the then Elizabeth Barratt, called ‘the
pure white light’ emanating from her poetry as against the
prismatic hues of his own. When writing ‘By the Fire-Side’ he still
conceded to her the role of ‘leader’ (VI).
The walk involves a physical and spiritual ascent to a ruined
chapel but here spiritual uplift in no way obscures the
poet's perception of even minute and not particularly ‘poetic’ things
on the way, midges included. Like William Blake Browning did not

49
scotch grubs and insect life from his field of vision, an indication
perhaps that poets can relish life as it is, bugs and all.
The poem bears witness to Browning's full recovery with the
morbid self-consciousness and contentions against with the prison
of selfhood in Pauline, The lyrical ‘I’ yields in stages to other
pronouns, ‘you’ and ‘we’. The minds of husband and wife join in a
communion of spirit that overcomes all mental barriers that
separate them and leads them into a mystical realm beyond
mortality even, for strophe LXVII tells that ‘a bar was broken
between life and life.’ In general we note a progressive falling away
of dividing lines between one time and another, one mind and other
and between life and the hereafter, a transition intimated by the
temporal setting of the walk in the gently declining hours of a day
in November, the month celebrated for its mellowness, richness of
colour and the abundance of its late fruitfulness. Elsewhere an
eventide walk described in the Gospel of Luke tells of a sudden
revelation and the experience of communion.
The poem reaches its point of culmination in the epiphany which
elicits the words ’O moment one and infinite’ in strophe XXXVII. It
is surely no coincidence that this moment immediately follows the
crossing, or rather re-crossing, of the bridge that leads to the ruined
chapel, W. Whitla adduces the line as evidence supporting his
contention that ‘the central truth’ of the Incarnation underlies
Browning’s thought patterns as revealed in his poetry. F. R. G.
Duckworth understands ‘the moment one and infinite’ as a pointer
to an underlying tension between two ways of understanding time
that collided in Browning’s mind, one rooted in Hellenism and the
other in Jewish biblical culture. As a reading of Pauline reveals,
Browning renounced the Greek ideal of absolute perfection along
with his allegiance to Shelley and sought solace in the thought of
sharing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Historically
Christianity posed a merging of the Hellenist Greek world and
Hebraism of the kind that had deeply impressed Browning. His
commitment to Christianity of a personal kind involved no lack of

50
sympathy for the Jews of Rome who were forced to attend Christian
sermons as we can adjudge from ‘Holy-Cross Day.’ The word ‘cross’
also holds a significant place in ‘By the Fire-side,’ a fact anticipated
by the reference to a ‘cross-wind’ noted earlier. Let us look at these
lines which immediately precede the words ‘O moment one and
infinite.’
XXXV
Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,
And pity and praise the chapel sweet,
And care about the fresco's loss,
And wish for our souls a like retreat,
And wonder at the moss.
XXXV.
Stoop and kneel on the settle under,
Look through the window's grated square:
Nothing to see! For fear of plunder,
The cross is down and the altar bare,
As if thieves don't fear thunder.
XXXVI.
We stoop and look in through the grate,
See the little porch and rustic door,
Read duly the dead builder's date;
Then cross the bridge that we crossed before,
Take the path again---but wait!
The fourfold occurrence of the word cross either as a noun or
a verb within 15 lines is noticeable and the twofold occurrence
of the verb to cross in the same line is remarkable. In prose such
repetitions are felt to be awkward, even ugly. In poetry the case is
otherwise In his article ‘The Meaning of the word in Verse’ Jurij
Tynjanov explained why this is so. All the multiple meanings,
potential associations and other effects that reside in a word
come into play in poetry though only one meaning may be

51
immediately obvious. The word cross conveys both the sense of to
traverse and an object of church furniture and by extension all
that the cross symbolizes in terms of Christian theology and
belief. I shall discuss the rather odd sounding line in ‘The Pied
Piper of Hamelin’ which runs: ‘He never can cross that mighty
top’ in the light of all potential meanings of the word cross and
the underlying symbolism that informs the legend of the Pied
Piper itself.
Religious and solar symbolism implied by
jndividual words and their combined effects in
Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin.’
A word on the title of this section. What is all this about solar and
religious symbolism being embedded in the words of Robert
Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’? The first point to make here
is this: references to the sun and those to a text in the New
Testament, ‘the trump of doom’s tone’ and words with a decidedly
biblical ring are there to be read, whatever significance one may or
may not attach to them. The basic facts relating to the Pied Piper
point to the association of the figure with summer and the domain
of religion and mysticism. All accounts of the legend place the event
of the Piper’s appearance in Hamelin in the early or middle days of
summer, the season for dancing and musical diversion as Richard
III in the Shakespearean drama that bears his name well knew.
The sun according to the psychological theories of Jung and Freud
represents the libido in search of its feminine counterpart the
anima. Clearly the figure who goes by the name of Pied Piper in
English and der Rattenfänger in German (though the original

52
versions of the legend make no reference to rats) evinces enviable
powers of erotic allurement. Goethe had girls and women chase
after him, and not only children, in ‘Der Rattenfänger,’ and mulled
over placing him in the Witches’ Sabbath presented in a scene in
Faust Part I. However, in broader terms the libido represents more
than anything we could bracket off as explicitly sexual, for it also
stands for vigour, potency, the life force itself, which explains the
Piper’s appeal to children and youth in Browning’s ‘ditty’ as the
natural consequence of their shared affinities. On the other hand,
potency can lead to both good and evil ends, which makes the Pied
Piper a very ambivalent figure indeed, as literary representations of
him through the centuries, either as the devil or a Christ-like
saviour, indicate so clearly.
Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is quoted below in full with
certain lines followed by the marks (S) or (B) according to whether they point to an
aspect that connects them with the sun and the South, those in blue with matters to
do with religion and the Bible in some way. I am not the only one to have
discerned references to religious themes to be found in Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper
of Hamelin’ as the noted scholar in the field of depth psychology Iacob Levi found
in the three notes by which the Pied Piper began his music playing an allusion to
the Trinity. 19 Sometimes solar and biblical imagery merge as in the case of the
implication of the word ‘risen’ or that of the words ‘under the sun.’ Milton
Millhauser noted that the word ‘pottage’ recalled the biblical episode in which
Esau sold his birthright to Jacob thus sacrificing a spiritual blessing for the sake of
a material gratification. 20 There are however quite explicit pointers to biblical
passages in the poem such as those made to the Trump of Doom’s tone’ or the
warning of Jesus concerning the entrapment of riches. Otherwise individual words
19 See Iakov Levi, “”Il Pifferaio di Hamelin,” Feb. 2002:
http://www.reocities.com/psychohistory2001/Hamelin.html andò per le vie, ed emise appena
tre note [ il tre, numero sacro e simbolo della Santa Trinità]. Si udì un correre di piedini, scarpe
di legno risuonare sui ciottoli, battere di mani e vociare di piccoli. Tra calpestii e risa correvano
bambini e ragazzetti con le guance rosa, i riccioli biondi, gli occhi vispi e i denti come perle tra
labbra rosso rubino, tutti dietro al Pifferaio di Hamelino.
20 Milton Millhauser, "Poet and Burgher: A Comic Variation on a Serious Theme," Victorian
Poetry, 7 (1969) I63-168.

53
support the religious symbolism that pervades the poem despite the fact that their
primary meanings at the literal level bear no reference to religious matters. It is
simply the aggregation of their secondary meanings within their general lexical
range of meanings that underlines a central religious motif, such words being
‘cross’ with the primary sense of to traverse, passion, primarily a synonym of rage
or a fit of anger and the Mayor of Hamelin’s words ‘What’s dead can’t come to
life, think.’ Note here the contrast of words within a given context and words
unbounded by any context at all, a phenomenon noted by Jurij Tynjanov in his
article translated into Englishas ‘The Meaning of the Word in Verse.’ 21
Occurrences of the word ‘promise,’ either as a noun or a verb, underline appear
twice in the final line of the poem and in close proximity to ‘land’ evoke the
theme of the Exodus and the journey to the Promised Land.
The solar symbolism of the poem comes through in various ways, some
seemingly trivial as in the case of a reference to ‘Sunday hats,’ some imbued with
a mystical or religious association as in the case of the word ‘risen.’ As Arthur
Dixon argued in his article Browning was most probably acquainted with at least
one early version of the Pied Piper story, according to which the Piper led 130
children born in Hamelin to Calvary.22
With regard to Browning’s dissemination of verbal clues ‘The Pied Piper of
Hamelin is altogether typical and Barbara Melchiori noted the poet’s habitual
practice of concealing his deep concerns beneath the surface of beguiling
narratives. 23 Browning’s deep concern with the subject of the Resurrections shows
itself explicitly in his works written before and after 1842, the year in which he
composed ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin.’ 24 The poem was originally part of a
21 Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," in Readings in Russian Poetics /
Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska (Michigan
Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor, 1978) 136-145.
22 Arthur Dixon,”Browning’s Source for The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Studies inPhilology, Vol.
XXIII, July 1926, No, 3, See:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4171951?sid=21105471469621&uid=70&uid=4&uid=2&
uid=3738240&uid=2129
23 Barbara Melchiori, Browning's Poetry of Reticence (London, 1968), 1.
24 Viz. Pauline, 848-854 and “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of
Karshish, the Arab Physician.”

54
collection of poems under the general title of Bells and Pomegranates, which
recalls the hem of the garment worn by the High Priest in the Tabernacle described
in the Book of Exodus (Exodus 28.33), 25
THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN
I.
1 Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
2 By famous Hanover city;
3 The river Weser, deep and wide,
4 Washes its wall on the southern side; (S)
5 A pleasanter spotyou never spied;
6 But, when begins my ditty,
7 Almost five hundred years ago,
8 To see the townsfolk suffer so
9 From vermin, was a pity.
II.
10 Rats!
11 They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
12 And bit the babies in the cradles,
13 And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
14 And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,
15 Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
16 Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, (S)
17 And even spoiled the women's chats,
18 By drowning their speaking
19 With shrieking and squeaking
20 In fifty different sharps and flats.
25 Judith Berlin-Lieberman, Robert Browning and Hebraism, (Diss. Zurich; Jerusalem: Ariel
Press, 1934).Berlin-Lieberman cites the explanation browning gave to Elizabeth Barratt in a
letter dated October 18, 1845: “The Rabbis make Bells and Pomegranates symbolical of
Pleasure and Profit, the Gay and the Grave, the Poetry and the Prose, Singing and Sermonizing –
such a mixture of effects as in the original hour (that is a quarter of an hour) of confidence and
creation.”

55
III.
21 At last the people in a body
22 To the Town Hall came flocking:
23 ``Tis clear,'' cried they, `òur Mayor's a noddy;
24 `Ànd as for our Corporation -- shocking
25 ``To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
26 ``For dolts that can't or won't determine
27 ``What's bestto rid us of our vermin!
28 ``You hope, because you're old and obese,
29 ``To find in the furry civic robeease?
30 ``Rouse up, sirs! Give your brains a racking
31 ``To find the remedy we're lacking,
32 `Òr, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!''
33 At this the Mayor and Corporation
34 Quaked with a mighty consternation.
IV.
35 An hour they sat in council,
36 At length the Mayor broke silence:
37 ``For a guilder I'd my ermine gown sell;
38 `Ì wish I were a mile hence!
39 `Ìt's easy to bid one rack one's brain --
40 `Ì'm sure my poorhead aches again,
41 `Ì've scratched it so, and all in vain
42 `Òh for a trap, a trap, a trap!''
43 Just as he said this, what should hap
44 At the chamber doorbut a gentle tap?
45 ``Bless us,'' cried the Mayor, ``what's that?''
46 (With the Corporation as he sat,
47 Looking little though wondrous fat;
48 Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister
49 Than a too-long-opened oyster,
50 Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous
51 For a plate of turtle green and glutinous)
52 Ònly a scraping of shoes on the mat?
53 `Ànything like the sound of a rat
54 ``Makes my heart go pit-a-pat!''
V.
55 ``Come in!'' -- the Mayor cried, looking bigger

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