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Pomegranates from an English Garden / A selection from the poems of Robert Browning cover

Pomegranates from an English Garden / A selection from the poems of Robert Browning

Chapter 15: RUDEL TO THE LADY OF TRIPOLI
By Robert Browning
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British LiteraturePoetry

About This Book

A selection of poems by Robert Browning gathers lyrical and dramatic pieces that probe the inner life, moral choice, and imaginative response to love, loss, faith, and art. The poems alternate intimate domestic reveries, vivid narrative moments, and philosophical meditations, often voiced through distinctive dramatic speakers; they combine concise, sometimes rugged diction with dense allusion. Recurring concerns include the development of individual character, the presence of the divine in experience, encounters with mortality, and the duties of memory and courage. Varied meters and tonal shifts reward close reading and emphasize psychological intensity over neat resolution.

RUDEL TO THE LADY OF TRIPOLI

I.
I know a Mount, the gracious Sun perceives
First, when he visits, last, too, when he leaves
The world; and, vainly favoured, it repays
The day-long glory of his steadfast gaze
By no change of its large calm front of snow.
And, underneath the Mount, a Flower I know,
He cannot have perceived, that changes ever
At his approach; and, in the lost endeavour
To live his life, has parted, one by one,
With all a flower’s true graces, for the grace
Of being but a foolish mimic sun,
With ray-like florets round a disk-like face.
Men nobly call by many a name the Mount
As over many a land of theirs its large
Calm front of snow like a triumphal targe
Is reared, and still with old names, fresh names vie,
Each to its proper praise and own account:
Men call the Flower, the Sunflower, sportively.
II.
Oh, Angel of the East, one, one gold look
Across the waters to this twilight nook,
—The far sad waters, Angel, to this nook!
III.
Dear Pilgrim, art thou for the East indeed?
Go!—saying ever as thou dost proceed,
That I, French Rudel, choose for my device
A sunflower outspread like a sacrifice
Before its idol. See! These inexpert
And hurried fingers could not fail to hurt
The woven picture; ’tis a woman’s skill
Indeed; but nothing baffled me, so, ill
Or well, the work is finished. Say, men feed
On songs I sing, and therefore bask the bees
On my flower’s breast as on a platform broad:
But, as the flower’s concern is not for these
But solely for the sun, so men applaud
In vain this Rudel, he not looking here
But to the East—the East! Go, say this, Pilgrim dear!

This poem was first published in “Bells and Pomegranates” under the head of “Queen Worship.” How exquisite the plea of the unnoticed Flower, with no pretence to vie with the Mountain in its claim upon the Sun’s attention, except this, that the great unchanging Mountain is “vainly favoured,” while the Flower yields itself up in ceaseless and self-forgetting devotion to an imitation, however feeble and foolish, of the great Sun Life.

The second stanza is very rich. There is no mention in it of Sun or Mountain or Flower; but as the Flower looks up to the Sun from its nook at the Mountain’s base, so Rudel yearns for “one gold look” from his Sun, the “Angel of the East.”

The meaning of the third stanza will be apparent when it is remembered that “French Rudel” was a troubadour of the 12th century—the days of the Crusades, and of the romance of chivalry. In those days the best way to communicate with the East would be through some pilgrim passing thither: and nothing would be more natural than such a reference to the “device” which he had patiently, and in spite of difficulty, worked so as to wear it as her “favour:” and once more, it is eminently natural to represent the troubadour, not as sending a written message, but as finding a sympathetic pilgrim to burden his memory with it—charging him to keep it fresh by repetition till it had been duly delivered.