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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 24: DEAF AND DUMB.
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.

DEAF AND DUMB.

A GROUP BY WOOLNER.
Only the prism’s obstruction shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white;
So may a glory from defect arise:
Only by Deafness may the vexed love wreak
Its insuppressive sense on brow and cheek,
Only by Dumbness adequately speak
As favoured mouth could never, through the eyes.

This is a “gem of purest ray.” In order to understand it fully, it is necessary to know that the “group by Woolner” is of two deaf and dumb children—the one as if speaking, the other in the attitude of listening. The speech denied passage through the lips, breaks out in rarer beauty from the eyes; and for the hearing denied entrance by the ears, there is, instead, a subtle responsiveness of brow and cheek to the spirit utterance from the soul of the other; so that love, though “vexed,” is not suppressed.

The exquisite beauty of the illustration of “the prism’s obstruction,” and the tender pathos of the thought, will be manifest to every reader.