"One Word More," to E. B. B. ("Men and Women." 1855.)
"Prospice." ("Dramatis Personæ." 1864.)
"Numpholeptos." }
"Prologue." } "Pacchiarotto and other Poems."
"Natural Magic." } 1876.
"Magical Nature." }
"Introduction." } "The Two Poets of Croisic."
"A Tale." } 1878.
"ONE WORD MORE" is a message of love, as direct as it is beautiful; but
as such it also expresses an idea which makes it a fitting object of
study. Most men and women lay their highest gift at the feet of him or
of her they love, and with it such honour as the world may render it.
They value both, as making them more worthy of those they love, and for
their sake rejoice in the possession. Mr. Browning feels otherwise.
According to him the gifts by which we are known to the world have lost
graciousness through its contact. Their exercise is marred by its
remembered churlishness and ingratitude. Every artist, he declares,
longs "once" and for "one only," to utter himself in a language distinct
from his art; to "gain" in this manner, "the man's joy," while escaping
"the artist's sorrow." So Raphael, the painter, wrote a volume of
sonnets to be seen only by one. Dante, poet of the "Inferno," drew an
angel in memory of the one (of Beatrice). He--Mr. Browning--has only his
verse to offer. But as the fresco painter steals a camel's hair brush to
paint flowerets on his lady's missal--as he who blows through bronze may
also breathe through silver for the purpose of a serenade, so may _he_
lend his talent to a different use. He has completed his volume of "Men"
and "Women." He dedicates it to her to whom this poem is addressed. But
his special offering to her is not the book itself, in which he speaks
with the mouth of fifty other persons, but the word of dedication--the
"One Word More"--in which he speaks to her from his own. The dramatic
turns lyric poet for the _one only_.
And what he says of himself, he in some degree thinks of her. The moon,
he reminds her, presents always the same surface to the world: whether
new-born, waxing, or waning; whether, as they late saw her, radiant
above the hills of Florence; or, as she now appears to them, palely
hurrying to her death over London house-tops. But for the "moonstruck
mortal" she holds another side, glorious or terrible as the case may
be--unknown alike to herdsman and huntsman, philosopher and poet, among
the rest of mankind. So she, who is his moon of poets, has also her
world's side, which he can see and praise with the rest;
"But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence." (vol. iv. p. 305.)
"PROSPICE" (look forward) is a challenge to spiritual conflict, exultant
with the certainty of victory, glowing with the prospective joy of
re-union with one whom death has sent before. We cannot doubt that this
poem, like the preceding, came from the depths of the poet's own heart.
"NUMPHOLEPTOS" (caught by a nymph) is passionately earnest in tone, and
must rank as lyrical in spite of the dramatic, at least fantastic,
circumstance in which the feeling is clothed. It is the almost
despairing cry of a human love, devoted to a being of superhuman purity;
and who does not reject the love, but accepts it on an impossible
condition: that the lover shall complete himself as a man by acquiring
the fullest knowledge of life, and shall emerge unsullied from its
experiences. This woman, more or less than mortal, belongs rather to the
"fairyland of science" than to the realm of mythology. She stands, in
passionless repose, at the starting-point of the various paths of
earthly existence. These radiate from her, many-hued with passion and
adventure, as light rays scattered by a prism; and, in the mocking hopes
with which she invests their course, she seems herself the cold white
light, of which their glow is born, and into which it will also die. She
bids her worshipper travel down each red and yellow ray, bathe in its
hues, and return to her "jewelled," but not smirched; and each time he
returns, not jewelled, but smirched; always to appear monstrous in her
sight; always to be dismissed with the same sad smile: so pitying that
it promises love, so fixed that it bars its possibility. He rebels at
last, but the rebellion is momentary. He renews his hopeless quest.
"PROLOGUE" is a fanciful expression of the ideas of impediment visible
and invisible, which may be raised by the aspect of a brick wall; such a
one, perhaps, as projects at a right angle to the window of Mr.
Browning's study, and was before him when he wrote.
"NATURAL MAGIC" attests the power of love to bring, as by enchantment,
summer with its warmth and blossoms, into a barren life.
"MAGICAL NATURE" is a tribute to the beauty of countenance which
proceeds from the soul, and has therefore a charmed existence defying
the hand of time.
The INTRODUCTION to the "TWO POETS OF CROISIC," (reprinted under the
title of "Apparitions,") recalls the sentiment of "Natural Magic." The
"TALE" with which it concludes is inspired by the same feeling. Its
circumstance is ancient, and the reader is allowed to imagine that it
exists in Latin or Greek; but it is simply a poetic and profound
illustration of what love can do always and everywhere. A famous poet
was singing to his lyre. One of its strings snapped. The melody would
have been lost, had not a cricket (properly, cicada) flown on to the
lyre and chirped the missing note. The note, thus sounded, was more
beautiful than as produced by the instrument itself, and, to the song's
end, the cricket remained to do the work of the broken string. The poet,
in his gratitude, had a statue of himself made with the lyre in his
hand, and the cricket perched on the point of it. They were thus
immortalized together: she, whom he had enthroned, he, whom she had
crowned.
Love is the cricket which repairs the broken harmonies of life.
The dramatic setting of the majority of the Love poems serves, as I have
said, to bring out the vitality of Mr. Browning's conception of love;
and though anything like labelling a poet's work brings with it a sense
of anomaly, we shall only carry out the spirit of this particular group
by connecting each member of it with the condition of thought or feeling
it is made to illustrate.
It will be seen that the dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances, which
supply so many of the poems of the following and other groups, had been
largely recruited from the first collection of "Men and Women;" having
first, in several instances, contributed to that work.