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Browning's Career to 1841: The Theme of Time and the Problem of Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Lawrence Poston III
Lawrence Poston III
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska—Lincoln
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Extract

In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats describes how, in the moment of contemplation, the poet is conscious of his limitations as an earthbound creature, one of a generation which “old age shall … waste,” one who has felt the moment of “human passion … / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” By contrast, the urn suggests the power of art to prolong the moment, to render permanent what is transitory, to recreate endlessly for one generation after the next the passion of human love. But the urn itself may not last forever; it is a “sylvan historian” which is itself the product of the “slow time” of human history, an artifact which commemorates a moment in the life of its creator and emulates eternity without itself being eternal (“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity …”). It is a “still unravish'd bride of quietness,” but if we dwell on the ambiguous “still,” we sense that like the Elgin marbles, the urn may be subject to “the rude / Wasting of old Time,” a hint at the “magnitude of eternity” which impresses on the poet a sense of his mortality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 3 , Spring 1975 , pp. 79 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

NOTES

1. The Princess, III.306–13Google Scholar, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, Christopher (London: Longmans, 1969)Google Scholar. The doctrine is echoed much later in “The Ancient Sage”: “…We, thin minds, who creep from thought to thought / Break into ‘Thus’ and ‘Whens’ the Eternal Now / This double seeming of the single world!” (11. 103–05).

2. Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus, ed. Harrold, Charles Frederick (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937), p. 264.Google Scholar

3. On the Christian themes, see in particular Whitla, William, The Central Truth: The Incarnation in Robert Browning's Poetry (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Collins, Thomas J., Robert Browning's Moral-Aesthetic Theory, 1833–1855 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Harper, J. W., “‘Eternity Our Due’: Time in the Poetry of Robert Browning,” in Victorian Poetry, ed. Bradbury, Malcolm and Palmer, David [Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 15] (London: Edwin Arnold, 1972), pp. 59–87Google Scholar. Although Harper's focus on Browning's Evangelicalism seems to me more flexible than Whitla's insistence on the Incarnation in Browning's poetry, none of the foregoing writers gives much weight to the possible influence of the Romantics on Browning's ideas of time. It seems to me difficult to assert that every instance in Browning's poetry of the “infinite moment” ultimately refers to the Christian idea of the Incarnation. Collins' study, by proceeding chronologically, avoids some of the rigidities of Whitla's approach.

4. Letter of 10 Dec. 1855, from Paris, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook, E. T. and Wedderburn, Alexander (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), XXXVI, xxxiv.Google Scholar

5. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. de Selincourt, E. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), II, 412.Google Scholar

6. Sartor Resartus, p. 141.Google Scholar

7. Browning: Poetry and Prose, ed. Nowell-Smith, Simon (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 688.Google Scholar

8. Letter of 11 Feb. 1845, in The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845–1846, ed. Kintner, Elvan (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), I. 17.Google Scholar

9. In addition to those cited in note 3 above, see, for example, Chap. 7, “Time and Eternity,” in Duckworth, F. R. G., Browning: Background and Conflict (New York: Dutton, 1932), pp. 147–61Google Scholar; Chap. 1, “The Infinite Moment,” in Raymond, W. O., The Infinite Moment and Other Essays in Robert Browning, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1965), pp. 3–18Google Scholar; and Kumar, Shiv K., “The Moment in the Dramatic Monologues of Robert Browning,” in British Victorian Literature: Recent Revaluations, ed. Kumar, (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 91–103.Google Scholar

10. Cf. Whitla, , Chap. 1, passimGoogle Scholar, and Chell, Samuel L., “Browning and Bergson: A Time-Centered Approach to ‘Childe Roland,’” Wisconsin Studies in Literature, 6 (1969), 1–13.Google Scholar

11. All quotations are from the first three volumes of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. King, Roma A. Jr. (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1969– ).Google Scholar

12. Martineau, Harriet, Autobiography, ed. Chapman, M. W. (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1877), II, 325.Google Scholar

13. The bibliography on Pippa Passes is, of course, extensive; for the fullest treatment of the role played by human will in the poem, see Korg, Jacob, “A Reading of Pippa Passes,” Victorian Poetry, 6 (1968), 5–19.Google Scholar