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“The Jewelled Bow”: A Study in Browning's Imagery and Humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William O. Raymond
William O. Raymond*
Affiliation:
Bishop's University, Lennoxville, Quebec
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Extract

In Browning's second letter to Elizabeth Barrett he uses the imagery of “white light” versus “prismatic hues” to represent the contrast between the full and direct reflection of her personality in lyric utterance, and the partial and oblique refraction of his own personality in the medium of the dramatic monologue. A little later, he reveals his consciousness of the limitations of his poetry through a kindred image: “these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you …” In response, Elizabeth Barrett, while deprecating the merit of her own poetry and paying tribute to the worth of Browning's, acknowledges the justice of his self-criticism: “and in fact, you have not written the R. B. poem yet—your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. I see you only in your moon” (i, 22). In one of her letters, though referring to “the glory of dramatic art,” she urges: “Yet I am conscious of wishing you to take the other crown besides—and after having made your own creatures speak in clear human voices, to speak yourself out of that personality which God made, and with the voice which he tuned into such power and sweetness of speech” (ii, 182).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , March 1955 , pp. 115 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

1 Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i, 17.

2 The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1909), xxxvi, xxxiv.

3 See in this connection Ch. 9, “Browning's Conception of Love as Represented in Paracelsus,” in my book, The Infinite Moment and Other Essays in Robert Browning (Toronto, 1950).

4 See his Introd. in Miss E. H. Hickey's edition of Strafford (London, 1840).

5 The Life of Browning, Everyman's Library ed. (London, 1915), p. 111.

6 Cf. ll. 31–39 in “Plot-Culture”:

“Thou wouldst not stand
Distinctly Man,“—Ferishtah made reply,
“Not the mere creature, did no limit-line
Round thee about, apportion thee thy place
Clean-cut from out and off the illimitable,—
Minuteness severed from immensity.
All of thee for the Maker,—for thyself.
Workings inside the circle that evolve
Thine all,—the product of thy cultured plot.“

7 A similar idea is expressed in ll. 652–655 of Bishop Blougram's Apology:

Naked belief in God the Omnipotent,
Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much
The sense of conscious creatures to be borne.
It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare.

8 Cf. the imagery of the use of “an optic glass” in A Death in the Desert. This is symbolic of the way in which, through the Incarnation of Christ, the truth of God's nature is adapted to man's apprehension by being “reduced to plain historic fact” and “diminished into clearness.”

9 Robert Browning: A Portrait (London, 1952), pp. 259–261. I agree that Browning's statement to Furnivall, “I had no particular woman in mind,” does not preclude an autobiographical element in Numpholeptos. The poet was frequently evasive in answering questions of members of the Browning Society, especially when they seemed to pry into the privacy of his personal life. Moreover, the autobiographical reference is, as I have said, indirect and glancing, confined to the point of contrast between the nymph's idealism and her lover's humanism.

10 A Browning Handbook (New York, 1935), p. 410.

11 Robert Browning (Edinburgh and London, 1905).

12 Life and Letters of Robert Browning (London, 1891), p. 20.

13 Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, Life of Jowett, i, 400–401.

14 Letter of 25 April 1856.