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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 7: HELEN’S TOWER.
By Robert Browning
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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.

HELEN’S TOWER.

Ἑλένη ἐπὶ πύργῳ
Who hears of Helen’s Tower, may dream perchance,
How the Greek Beauty from the Scæan Gate
Gazed on old friends unanimous in hate,
Death-doom’d because of her fair countenance.
Hearts would leap otherwise, at thy advance,
Lady, to whom this Tower is consecrate:
Like hers, thy face once made all eyes elate,
Yet, unlike hers, was bless’d by every glance.
The Tower of Hate is outworn, far and strange:
A transitory shame of long ago,
It dies into the sand from which it sprang:
But thine, Love’s rock-built Tower, shall fear no change:
God’s self laid stable Earth’s foundations so,
When all the morning-stars together sang.

The tower is one built by Lord Dufferin, in memory of his mother Helen, Countess of Gifford, on one of his estates in Ireland. “The Greek Beauty” is, of course, Helen of Troy, and the reference in the alternative heading is apparently to that fine passage in the third book of the “Iliad,” where Helen meets the Trojan chiefs at the Scæan Gate (see line 154, which speaks of “Helen at the Tower”).

On the last two lines, founded of course on the well-known passage in Job (xxxviii. 4-7), compare Dante:

“E il sol montava in su con quelle stelle
Ch’eran con lui, quando l’Amor Divino
Mosse da prima quelle cose belle.”
“Aloft the sun ascended with those stars
That with him rose, when Love Divine first moved
Those its fair works.”
—Inferno I. 38-40.