An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry, by Hiram Corson

A wonderfully effective expression, effective through its pathetic simplicity, of the peaceful spirit of a Christian, who has triumphed over persecution and death, and passed to his reward.

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.

The speaker in this monologue is a Spanish monk, whose jealousy toward a simple and unoffending brother has, in the seclusion of the cloister, developed into a festering malignity. If hate, he says, could kill a man, his hate would certainly kill Brother Laurence. He is watching this brother, from a window of the cloister, at work in the garden. He looks with contempt upon his honest toil; repeats mockingly to himself, his simple talk when at meals, about the weather and the crops; sneers at his neatness, and orderliness, and cleanliness; imputes to him his own libidinousness. He takes credit to himself in laying crosswise, in Jesu’s praise, his knife and fork, after refection, and in illustrating the Trinity, and frustrating the Arian, by drinking his watered orange-pulp in three sips, while Laurence drains his at one gulp. Now he notices Laurence’s tender care of the melons, of which it appears the good man has promised all the brethren a feast; “so nice!” He calls to him, from the window, “How go on your flowers? None double? Not one fruit-sort can you spy?” Laurence, it must be understood, kindly answers him in the negative, and then he chuckles to himself, “Strange!—and I, too, at such trouble, keep ‘em close-nipped on the sly!” He thinks of devising means of causing him to trip on a great text in Galatians, entailing “twenty-nine distinct damnations, one sure, if another fails”; or of slyly putting his “scrofulous French novel” in his way, which will make him “grovel hand and foot in Belial’s gripe”. In his malignity, he is ready to pledge his soul to Satan (leaving a flaw in the indenture), to see blasted that rose-acacia Laurence is so proud of. Here the vesper-bell interrupts his filthy and blasphemous eructations, and he turns up his eyes and folds his hands on his breast, mumbling “Plena gratia ave Virgo!” and right upon the prayer, his disgust breaks out, “Gr-r-r—you swine!”

This monologue affords a signal illustration of the poet’s skill in making a speaker, while directly revealing his own character, reflect very distinctly the character of another. This has been seen in ‘My Last Duchess’, given as an example of the constitution of this art-form, in the section of the Introduction on ‘Browning’s Obscurity’.

“The ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’, is a picture (ghastly in its evident truth) of superstition which has survived religion; of a heart which has abandoned the love of kindred and friends, only to lose itself in a wilderness of petty spite, terminating in an abyss of diabolical hatred. The ordinary providential helps to goodness have been rejected; the ill-provided adventurer has sought to scale the high snow-peaks of saintliness,—he has missed his footing,— and the black chasm which yawns beneath, has ingulfed him.” —E. J. H{asell}, in St. Paul’s Magazine, December, 1870.

An able writer in ‘The Contemporary Review’, Vol. IV., p. 140, justly remarks:—

“No living writer—and we do not know any one in the past who can be named, in this respect, in the same breath with him {Browning} —approaches his power of analyzing and reproducing the morbid forms, the corrupt semblances, the hypocrisies, formalisms, and fanaticisms of man’s religious life. The wildness of an Antinomian predestinarianism has never been so grandly painted as in ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’; the white heat of the persecutor glares on us, like a nightmare spectre, in ‘The Heretic’s Tragedy’. More subtle forms are drawn with greater elaboration. If ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, in many of its circumstances and touches, suggests the thought of actual portraiture, recalling a form and face once familiar to us, . . .it is also a picture of a class of minds which we meet with everywhere. Conservative scepticism that persuades itself that it believes, cynical acuteness in discerning the weak points either of mere secularism or dreaming mysticism, or passionate eagerness to reform, avoiding dangerous extremes, and taking things as they are because they are comfortable, and lead to wealth, enjoyment, reputation,—this, whether a true account or not of the theologian to whom we have referred. . .is yet to be found under many eloquent defences of the faith, many fervent and scornful denunciations of criticism and free thought. . . . In ‘Calaban upon Setebos’, if it is more than the product of Mr. Browning’s fondness for all abnormal forms of spiritual life, speculating among other things on the religious thoughts of a half brute-like savage, we must see a protest against the thought that man can rise by himself to true thoughts of God, and develop a pure theology out of his moral consciousness. So far it is a witness for the necessity of a revelation, either through the immediate action of the Light that lighteth every man, or that which has been given to mankind in spoken or written words, by The WORD that was in the beginning. In the ‘Death in the Desert’, in like manner, we have another school of thought analyzed with a corresponding subtlety. . . . The ‘Death in the Dessert’ is worth studying in its bearing upon the mythical school of interpretation, and as a protest, we would fain hope, from Mr. Browning’s own mind against the thought that because the love of God has been revealed in Christ, and has taught us the greatness of all true human love, therefore,

“‘We ourselves make the love, and Christ was not.’

“In one remarkable passage at the close of ‘The Legend of Pornic’, Mr. Browning, speaking apparently in his own person, proclaims his belief in one great Christian doctrine, which all pantheistic and atheistic systems formally repudiate, and which many semi-Christian thinkers implicitly reject:—

     “‘The candid incline to surmise of late
     That the Christian faith may be false, I find,
     For our ‘Essays and Reviews’ *1* debate
     Begins to tell on the public mind,
     And Colenso’s*2* words have weight.

     “‘I still, to suppose it true, for my part,
     See reasons and reasons: this, to begin—
     ‘Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
     At the head of a lie,—taught Original Sin,
     The Corruption of Man’s Heart.’”

    —
     *1* A volume which appeared in 1860, made up of essays and
     reviews, the several authors having “written in entire
     independence of each other, and without concert or
     comparison”. These essays and reviews offset the extreme
     high church doctrine of the Tracts for the Times.

     *2* John W. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, in South Africa; he
     published works questioning the inspiration and historical
     accuracy of certain parts of the Bible, among which was ‘The
     Pentateuch, and the Book of Joshua critically examined’.
    —

Holy-Cross Day.

The argument is sufficiently shown by what is prefixed to this poem. The ‘Diary by the Bishop’s Secretary, 1600’, is presumably imaginary.

Saul.

This is, in every respect, one of Browning’s grandest poems; and in all that is included in the idea of EXPRESSION, is quite perfect.

The portion of Scripture which is the germ of the poem, and it is only the germ, is contained in the First Book of Samuel 16:14-23.

To the present consolation which David administers to Saul, with harp and song, and the Scripture story does not go beyond this, is added the assurance of the transmission of his personality, and of the influence of his deeds; first, through those who have been quickened by them, and who will, in turn, transmit that quickening— “Each deed thou hast done, dies, revives, goes to work in the world: . . .each ray of thy will, every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth a like cheer to their sons: who, in turn, fill the South and the North with the radiance thy deed was the germ of”; and, then, through records that will give unborn generations their due and their part in his being.

The consolation is, moreover, carried beyond that afforded by earthly fame and influence. David’s yearnings to give Saul “new life altogether, as good, ages hence, as this moment,— had love but the warrant, love’s heart to dispense”, pass into a prophecy, based on his own loving desires, of the God-Man who shall throw open to Saul the gates of that new life.

With this prophecy, David leaves Saul. On his way home, in the night, he represents himself as attended by witnesses, cohorts to left and to right. At the dawn, all nature, the forests, the wind, beasts and birds, even the serpent that slid away silent, appear to him aware of the new law; the little brooks, witnessing, murmured with all but hushed voices, “E’en so, it is so!”

A Death in the Desert.

‘A Death in the Desert’ appears to have been inspired by the controversies in regard to the historical foundations of Christianity, and, more especially, in regard to the character and the authorship of the Fourth Gospel—controversies which received their first great impulse from the ‘Leben Jesu’ of David Friedrich Strauss, first published in 1835. An English translation of the fourth edition, 1840, by Marian Evans (George Eliot), was published in London, in 1846.

The immediate occasion of the composition of ‘A Death in the Desert’ was, perhaps, the publication, in 1863, of Joseph Ernest Renan’s ‘Vie de Jesus’. ‘A Death in the Desert’ was included in the poet’s ‘Dramatis Personae’, published in the following year.

“In style, the poem a little recalls ‘Cleon’; with less of harmonious grace and clear classic outline, it possesses a certain stilled sweetness, a meditative tenderness, all its own, and beautifully appropriate to the utterance of the ‘beloved disciple’.”—Arthur Symons.

During a persecution of the Christians, the aged John of Patmos has been secretly conveyed, by some faithful disciples, to a cave in the desert, where he is dying. Revived temporarily by the tender ministrations of his disciples, he is enabled to tell over his past labors in the service of his beloved Master, to refute the Antichrist already in the world, and to answer the questions which, with his far-reaching spiritual vision, he foresees will be raised in regard to Christ’s nature, life, doctrine, and miracles, as recorded in the Gospel he has written. These services he feels to be due from him, in his dying hour, as the sole survivor of Christ’s apostles and intimate companions.

This is the only composition in which Browning deals directly with historical Christianity; and its main purpose may, in brief, be said to be, to set forth the absoluteness of Christianity, which cannot be affected by any assaults made upon its external, historical character.

The doctrine of the trinal unity of man (the what Does, what Knows, what Is) ascribed to John (vv. 82-104), and upon which his discourse may be said to proceed, leads up the presentation of the final stage of the Christian life on earth—that stage when man has won his way to the kingdom of the “what Is” within himself, and when he no longer needs the outward supports to his faith which he needed before he passed from the “what Knows”. Christianity is a religion which is only secondarily a doctrine addressed to the “what Knows”. It is, first of all, a religion whose fountain-head is a Personality in whom all that is spiritually potential in man, was realized, and in responding to whom the soul of man is quickened and regenerated. And the Church, through the centuries, has been kept alive, not by the letter of the New Testament, for the letter killeth, but by a succession of quickened and regenerated spirits, “the noble Living and the noble Dead”, through whom the Christ has been awakened and developed in other souls.

POEMS.

Wanting is—What?

Wanting is—what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant,
—Where is the spot?
Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same,          {5}
—Framework which waits for a picture to frame:
What of the leafage, what of the flower?
Roses embowering with nought they embower!
Come then, complete incompletion, O Comer,
Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!     {10}
Breathe but one breath
Rose-beauty above,
And all that was death
Grows life, grows love,
Grows love!                                        {15}

9. O Comer: o’ e’rxo/menos, Matt. 3:11; 11:3; 21:9; 23:39; Luke 19:38; John 1:15; 3:31; 12:13. Without love, the Christ-spirit, the spirit of the Comer, man sees, at best, only dynamic action, blind force, in nature; but

            “love greatens and glorifies
       Till God’s a-glow, to the loving eyes,
       In what was mere earth before.”
                            James Lee’s Wife (Along the Beach).
—

My Star.

     All that I know
       Of a certain star
     Is, it can throw
       (Like the angled spar)
     Now a dart of red,                                            {5}
       Now a dart of blue;
     Till my friends have said
       They would fain see, too,
     My star that dartles the red and the blue!
     Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:      {10}
       They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
     What matter to me if their star is a world?
       Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

— 10. Then it stops like a bird: it beats no longer with emotion responsive to loving eyes, but stops, as a bird stops its song when disturbed. —

       1.

     You’re my friend:
     I was the man the Duke spoke to;
     I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too:
     So, here’s the tale from beginning to end,
     My friend!                                               {5}

       2.

     Ours is a great wild country:
     If you climb to our castle’s top,
     I don’t see where your eye can stop;
     For when you’ve passed the corn-field country,
     Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed,      {10}
     And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract,
     And cattle-tract to open-chase,
     And open-chase to the very base
     O’ the mountain where, at a funeral pace,
     Round about, solemn and slow,
     One by one, row after row,
     Up and up the pine-trees go,
     So, like black priests up, and so
     Down the other side again
     To another greater, wilder country,                {20}
     That’s one vast red drear burnt-up plain,
     Branched through and through with many a vein
     Whence iron’s dug, and copper’s dealt;
     Look right, look left, look straight before,—
     Beneath they mine, above they smelt,
     Copper-ore and iron-ore,
     And forge and furnace mould and melt,
     And so on, more and ever more,
     Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
     Comes the salt sand hoar of the great seashore,    {30}
   —And the whole is our Duke’s country.

       3.

     I was born the day this present Duke was—
     (And O, says the song, ere I was old!)
     In the castle where the other Duke was—
     (When I was happy and young, not old!)
     I in the kennel, he in the bower:
     We are of like age to an hour.
     My father was huntsman in that day:
     Who has not heard my father say,
     That, when a boar was brought to bay,              {40}
     Three times, four times out of five,
     With his huntspear he’d contrive
     To get the killing-place transfixed,
     And pin him true, both eyes betwixt?
     And that’s why the old Duke would rather
     He lost a salt-pit than my father,
     And loved to have him ever in call;
     That’s why my father stood in the hall
     When the old Duke brought his infant out
     To show the people, and while they passed          {50}
     The wondrous bantling round about,
     Was first to start at the outside blast
     As the Kaiser’s courier blew his horn,
     Just a month after the babe was born.
     “And,” quoth the Kaiser’s courier, “since
     The Duke has got an heir, our Prince
     Needs the Duke’s self at his side”:
     The Duke looked down and seemed to wince,
     But he thought of wars o’er the world wide,
     Castles a-fire, men on their march,                {60}
     The toppling tower, the crashing arch;
     And up he looked, and a while he eyed
     The row of crests and shields and banners
     Of all achievements after all manners,
     And “Ay”, said the Duke with a surly pride.
     The more was his comfort when he died
     At next year’s end, in a velvet suit,
     With a gilt glove on his hand, his foot
     In a silken shoe for a leather boot,
     Petticoated like a herald,                         {70}
     In a chamber next to an ante-room,
     Where he breathed the breath of page and groom,
     What he called stink, and they, perfume:
   —They should have set him on red Berold
     Mad with pride, like fire to manage!
     They should have got his cheek fresh tannage
     Such a day as to-day in the merry sunshine!
     Had they stuck on his fist a rough-foot merlin!
     (Hark, the wind’s on the heath at its game!
     Oh for a noble falcon-lanner                       {80}
     To flap each broad wing like a banner,
     And turn in the wind, and dance like flame!)
     Had they broached a cask of white beer from Berlin!
   —Or if you incline to prescribe mere wine,
     Put to his lips when they saw him pine,
     A cup of our own Moldavia fine,
     Cotnar for instance, green as May sorrel
     And ropy with sweet,—we shall not quarrel.

       4.

     So, at home, the sick tall yellow Duchess
     Was left with the infant in her clutches,     {90}
     She being the daughter of God knows who:
     And now was the time to revisit her tribe.
     Abroad and afar they went, the two,
     And let our people rail and gibe
     At the empty hall and extinguished fire,
     As loud as we liked, but ever in vain,
     Till after long years we had our desire,
     And back came the Duke and his mother again.

       5.

     And he came back the pertest little ape
     That ever affronted human shape;                       {100}
     Full of his travel, struck at himself.
     You’d say, he despised our bluff old ways?
   —Not he! For in Paris they told the elf
     That our rough North land was the Land of Lays,
     The one good thing left in evil days;
     Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time,
     And only in wild nooks like ours
     Could you taste of it yet as in its prime,
     And see true castles with proper towers,
     Young-hearted women, old-minded men,                   {110}
     And manners now as manners were then.
     So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
     This Duke would fain know he was, without being it;
     ‘Twas not for the joy’s self, but the joy of his showing it,
     Nor for the pride’s self, but the pride of our seeing it,
     He revived all usages thoroughly worn-out,
     The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out:
     And chief in the chase his neck he perilled,
     On a lathy horse, all legs and length,
     With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;           {120}
   —They should have set him on red Berold
     With the red eye slow consuming in fire,
     And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!

       6.

     Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard;
     And out of a convent, at the word,
     Came the lady, in time of spring.
   —Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling!
     That day, I know, with a dozen oaths
     I clad myself in thick hunting-clothes
     Fit for the chase of urox or buffle               {130}
     In winter-time when you need to muffle.
     But the Duke had a mind we should cut a figure,
     And so we saw the lady arrive:
     My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!
     She was the smallest lady alive,
     Made in a piece of nature’s madness,
     Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
     That over-filled her, as some hive
     Out of the bears’ reach on the high trees
     Is crowded with its safe merry bees:              {140}
     In truth, she was not hard to please!
     Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead,
     Straight at the castle, that’s best indeed
     To look at from outside the walls:
     As for us, styled the “serfs and thralls”,
     She as much thanked me as if she had said it,
     (With her eyes, do you understand?)
     Because I patted her horse while I led it;
     And Max, who rode on her other hand,
     Said, no bird flew past but she inquired          {150}
     What its true name was, nor ever seemed tired—
     If that was an eagle she saw hover,
     And the green and gray bird on the field was the plover,
     When suddenly appeared the Duke:
     And as down she sprung, the small foot pointed
     On to my hand,—as with a rebuke,
     And as if his backbone were not jointed,
     The Duke stepped rather aside than forward,
     And welcomed her with his grandest smile;
     And, mind you, his mother all the while           {160}
     Chilled in the rear, like a wind to nor’ward;
     And up, like a weary yawn, with its pulleys
     Went, in a shriek, the rusty portcullis;
     And, like a glad sky the north-wind sullies,
     The lady’s face stopped its play,
     As if her first hair had grown gray;
     For such things must begin some one day.

       7.

     In a day or two she was well again;
     As who should say, “You labor in vain!
     This is all a jest against God, who meant         {170}
     I should ever be, as I am, content
     And glad in his sight; therefore, glad I will be.”
      So, smiling as at first went she.

       8.

     She was active, stirring, all fire—
     Could not rest, could not tire—
     To a stone she might have given life!
     (I myself loved once, in my day)
   —For a shepherd’s, miner’s, huntsman’s wife,
     (I had a wife, I know what I say)
     Never in all the world such an one!               {180}
     And here was plenty to be done,
     And she that could do it, great or small,
     She was to do nothing at all.
     There was already this man in his post,
     This in his station, and that in his office,
     And the Duke’s plan admitted a wife, at most,
     To meet his eye, with the other trophies,
     Now outside the hall, now in it,
     To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen,
     At the proper place in the proper minute,         {190}
     And die away the life between.
     And it was amusing enough, each infraction
     Of rule—(but for after-sadness that came)
     To hear the consummate self-satisfaction
     With which the young Duke and the old dame
     Would let her advise, and criticise,
     And, being a fool, instruct the wise,
     And, childlike, parcel out praise or blame:
     They bore it all in complacent guise,
     As though an artificer, after contriving          {200}
     A wheel-work image as if it were living,
     Should find with delight it could motion to strike him!
     So found the Duke, and his mother like him:
     The lady hardly got a rebuff—
     That had not been contemptuous enough,
     With his cursed smirk, as he nodded applause,
     And kept off the old mother-cat’s claws.

       9.

     So, the little lady grew silent and thin,
     Paling and ever paling,
     As the way is with a hid chagrin;                 {210}
     And the Duke perceived that she was ailing,
     And said in his heart, “‘Tis done to spite me,
     But I shall find in my power to right me!”
      Don’t swear, friend! The old one, many a year,
     Is in hell; and the Duke’s self. . .you shall hear.

       10.

     Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning,
     When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,
     A drinking-hole out of the fresh tender ice,
     That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice,
     Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold,                     {220}
     And another and another, and faster and faster,
     Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled,
     Then it so chanced that the Duke our master
     Asked himself what were the pleasures in season,
     And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty,
     He should do the Middle Age no treason
     In resolving on a hunting-party,
     Always provided, old books showed the way of it!
     What meant old poets by their strictures?
     And when old poets had said their say of it,                {230}
     How taught old painters in their pictures?
     We must revert to the proper channels,
     Workings in tapestry, paintings on panels,
     And gather up woodcraft’s authentic traditions:
     Here was food for our various ambitions,
     As on each case, exactly stated—
     To encourage your dog, now, the properest chirrup,
     Or best prayer to St. Hubert on mounting your stirrup—
     We of the household took thought and debated.
     Blessed was he whose back ached with the jerkin             {240}
     His sire was wont to do forest-work in;
     Blesseder he who nobly sunk “ohs”
      And “ahs” while he tugged on his grandsire’s trunk-hose;
     What signified hats if they had no rims on,
     Each slouching before and behind like the scallop,
     And able to serve at sea for a shallop,
     Loaded with lacquer and looped with crimson?
     So that the deer now, to make a short rhyme on’t,
     What with our Venerers, Prickers, and Verderers,
     Might hope for real hunters at length and not murderers,    {250}
     And oh the Duke’s tailor, he had a hot time on’t!

249. Venerers, Prickers, and Verderers: huntsmen, light-horsemen, and guardians of the vert and venison in the Duke’s forest.

       11.

     Now you must know that when the first dizziness
     Of flap-hats and buff-coats and jack-boots subsided,
     The Duke put this question, “The Duke’s part provided,
     Had not the Duchess some share in the business?”
      For out of the mouth of two or three witnesses
     Did he establish all fit-or-unfitnesses;
     And, after much laying of heads together,
     Somebody’s cap got a notable feather
     By the announcement with proper unction                {260}
     That he had discovered the lady’s function;
     Since ancient authors gave this tenet,
     “When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,
     Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet,
     And with water to wash the hands of her liege
     In a clean ewer with a fair towelling,
     Let her preside at the disembowelling.”
      Now, my friend, if you had so little religion
     As to catch a hawk, some falcon-lanner,
     And thrust her broad wings like a banner               {270}
     Into a coop for a vulgar pigeon;
     And if day by day and week by week
     You cut her claws, and sealed her eyes,
     And clipped her wings, and tied her beak,
     Would it cause you any great surprise
     If, when you decided to give her an airing,
     You found she needed a little preparing?—
     I say, should you be such a curmudgeon,
     If she clung to the perch, as to take it in dudgeon?
     Yet when the Duke to his lady signified,               {280}
     Just a day before, as he judged most dignified,
     In what a pleasure she was to participate,—
     And, instead of leaping wide in flashes,
     Her eyes just lifted their long lashes,
     As if pressed by fatigue even he could not dissipate,
     And duly acknowledged the Duke’s forethought,
     But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught,
     Of the weight by day and the watch by night,
     And much wrong now that used to be right,
     So, thanking him, declined the hunting,—           {290}
     Was conduct ever more affronting?
     With all the ceremony settled—
     With the towel ready, and the sewer
     Polishing up his oldest ewer,
     And the jennet pitched upon, a piebald,
     Black-barred, cream-coated, and pink eye-balled,—
     No wonder if the Duke was nettled!
     And when she persisted nevertheless,—
     Well, I suppose here’s the time to confess
     That there ran half round our lady’s chamber           {300}
     A balcony none of the hardest to clamber;
     And that Jacynth the tire-woman, ready in waiting,
     Staid in call outside, what need of relating?
     And since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, a fervent
     Adorer of Jacynth of course was your servant;
     And if she had the habit to peep through the casement,
     How could I keep at any vast distance?
     And so, as I say, on the lady’s persistence,
     The Duke, dumb stricken with amazement,
     Stood for a while in a sultry smother,                 {310}
     And then, with a smile that partook of the awful,
     Turned her over to his yellow mother
     To learn what was decorous and lawful;
     And the mother smelt blood with a cat-like instinct,
     As her cheek quick whitened through all its quince-tinct.
     Oh, but the lady heard the whole truth at once!
     What meant she?—Who was she?—Her duty and station,
     The wisdom of age and the folly of youth, at once,
     Its decent regard and its fitting relation—
     In brief, my friends, set all the devils in hell free {320}
     And turn them out to carouse in a belfry
     And treat the priests to a fifty-part canon,
     And then you may guess how that tongue of hers ran on!
     Well, somehow or other it ended at last,
     And, licking her whiskers, out she passed;
     And after her,—making (he hoped) a face
     Like Emperor Nero or Sultan Saladin,
     Stalked the Duke’s self with the austere grace
     Of ancient hero or modern paladin,
     From door to staircase—oh, such a solemn            {330}
     Unbending of the vertebral column!

273. sealed: more properly spelt ‘seeled’, a term in falconry; Lat. ‘cilium’, an eyelid; ‘seel’, to close up the eyelids of a hawk, or other bird (Fr. ‘ciller les yeux’). “Come, seeling Night, Skarfe vp the tender Eye of pittiful Day.” ‘Macbeth’, III. II. 46.

322. fifty-part canon: “A canon, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated, in various keys: and being strictly obeyed in the repetition, becomes the ‘canon’—the imperative LAW—to what follows. Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal: to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician.”—From Poet’s Letter to the Editor.

       12.

     However, at sunrise our company mustered;
     And here was the huntsman bidding unkennel,
     And there ‘neath his bonnet the pricker blustered,
     With feather dank as a bough of wet fennel;
     For the court-yard walls were filled with fog
     You might cut as an axe chops a log—
     Like so much wool for color and bulkiness;
     And out rode the Duke in a perfect sulkiness,
     Since, before breakfast, a man feels but queasily,     {340}
     And a sinking at the lower abdomen
     Begins the day with indifferent omen.
     And lo! as he looked around uneasily,
     The sun ploughed the fog up and drove it asunder,
     This way and that, from the valley under;
     And, looking through the court-yard arch,
     Down in the valley, what should meet him
     But a troop of gypsies on their march?
     No doubt with the annual gifts to greet him.

         13.

     Now, in your land, gypsies reach you, only             {350}
     After reaching all lands beside;
     North they go, South they go, trooping or lonely,
     And still, as they travel far and wide,
     Catch they and keep now a trace here, a trace there,
     That puts you in mind of a place here, a place there.
     But with us, I believe they rise out of the ground,
     And nowhere else, I take it, are found
     With the earth-tint yet so freshly embrowned;
     Born, no doubt, like insects which breed on
     The very fruit they are meant to feed on.              {360}
     For the earth—not a use to which they don’t turn it,
     The ore that grows in the mountain’s womb,
     Or the sand in the pits like a honeycomb,
     They sift and soften it, bake it and burn it—
     Whether they weld you, for instance, a snaffle
     With side-bars never a brute can baffle;
     Or a lock that’s a puzzle of wards within wards;
     Or, if your colt’s fore foot inclines to curve inwards,
     Horseshoes they hammer which turn on a swivel
     And won’t allow the hoof to shrivel.                   {370}
     Then they cast bells like the shell of the winkle
     That keep a stout heart in the ram with their tinkle;
     But the sand—they pinch and pound it like otters;
     Commend me to gypsy glass-makers and potters!
     Glasses they’ll blow you, crystal-clear,
     Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,
     As if in pure water you dropped and let die
     A bruised black-blooded mulberry;
     And that other sort, their crowning pride,
     With long white threads distinct inside,               {380}
     Like the lake-flower’s fibrous roots which dangle
     Loose such a length and never tangle,
     Where the bold sword-lily cuts the clear waters,
     And the cup-lily couches with all the white daughters:
     Such are the works they put their hand to,
     The uses they turn and twist iron and sand to.
     And these made the troop, which our Duke saw sally
     Toward his castle from out of the valley,
     Men and women, like new-hatched spiders,
     Come out with the morning to greet our riders.         {390}
     And up they wound till they reached the ditch,
     Whereat all stopped save one, a witch
     That I knew, as she hobbled from the group,
     By her gait directly and her stoop,
     I, whom Jacynth was used to importune
     To let that same witch tell us our fortune.
     The oldest gypsy then above ground;
     And, sure as the autumn season came round,
     She paid us a visit for profit or pastime,
     And every time, as she swore, for the last time.       {400}
     And presently she was seen to sidle
     Up to the Duke till she touched his bridle,
     So that the horse of a sudden reared up
     As under its nose the old witch peered up
     With her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes,
     Of no use now but to gather brine,
     And began a kind of level whine
     Such as they used to sing to their viols
     When their ditties they go grinding
     Up and down with nobody minding;                       {410}
     And then, as of old, at the end of the humming
     Her usual presents were forthcoming
   —A dog-whistle blowing the fiercest of trebles
     (Just a seashore stone holding a dozen fine pebbles),
     Or a porcelain mouth-piece to screw on a pipe-end,—
     And so she awaited her annual stipend.
     But this time, the Duke would scarcely vouchsafe
     A word in reply; and in vain she felt
     With twitching fingers at her belt
     For the purse of sleek pine-martin pelt,               {420}
     Ready to put what he gave in her pouch safe,—
     Till, either to quicken his apprehension,
     Or possibly with an after-intention,
     She was come, she said, to pay her duty
     To the new Duchess, the youthful beauty.
     No sooner had she named his lady,
     Than a shine lit up the face so shady,
     And its smirk returned with a novel meaning—
     For it struck him, the babe just wanted weaning;
     If one gave her a taste of what life was and sorrow,   {430}
     She, foolish to-day, would be wiser to-morrow;
     And who so fit a teacher of trouble
     As this sordid crone bent well-nigh double?
     So, glancing at her wolf-skin vesture
     (If such it was, for they grow so hirsute
     That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit)
     He was contrasting, ‘twas plain from his gesture,
     The life of the lady so flower-like and delicate
     With the loathsome squalor of this helicat.
     I, in brief, was the man the Duke beckoned             {440}
     From out of the throng; and while I drew near
     He told the crone—as I since have reckoned
     By the way he bent and spoke into her ear
     With circumspection and mystery—
     The main of the lady’s history,
     Her frowardness and ingratitude;
     And for all the crone’s submissive attitude
     I could see round her mouth the loose plaits tightening,
     And her brow with assenting intelligence brightening,
     As though she engaged with hearty good will            {450}
     Whatever he now might enjoin to fulfil,
     And promised the lady a thorough frightening.
     And so, just giving her a glimpse
     Of a purse, with the air of a man who imps
     The wing of the hawk that shall fetch the hernshaw,
     He bade me take the gypsy mother
     And set her telling some story or other
     Of hill and dale, oak-wood or fernshaw,
     To while away a weary hour
     For the lady left alone in her bower,                  {460}
     Whose mind and body craved exertion
     And yet shrank from all better diversion.

454. imps: repairs a wing by inserting feathers; ‘impen’ or ‘ympen’, in O. E., means to ingraft. “It often falls out that a hawk breaks her wing and train-feathers, so that others must be set in their steads, which is termed ‘ymping’ them.”—The Gentleman’s Recreation, Part 2, Hawking, 1686.

       14.

     Then clapping heel to his horse, the mere curveter,
     Out rode the Duke, and after his hollo
     Horses and hounds swept, huntsman and servitor,
     And back I turned and bade the crone follow.
     And what makes me confident what’s to be told you
     Had all along been of this crone’s devising,
     Is, that, on looking round sharply, behold you,
     There was a novelty quick as surprising:          {470}
     For first, she had shot up a full head in stature,
     And her step kept pace with mine nor faltered,
     As if age had foregone its usurpature,
     And the ignoble mien was wholly altered,
     And the face looked quite of another nature,
     And the change reached too, whatever the change meant,
     Her shaggy wolf-skin cloak’s arrangment:
     For where its tatters hung loose like sedges,
     Gold coins were glittering on the edges,
     Like the band-roll strung with tomans             {480}
     Which proves the veil a Persian woman’s:
     And under her brow, like a snail’s horns newly
     Come out as after the rain he paces,
     Two unmistakable eye-points duly
     Live and aware looked out of their places.
     So, we went and found Jacynth at the entry
     Of the lady’s chamber standing sentry;
     I told the command and produced my companion,
     And Jacynth rejoiced to admit any one,
     For since last night, by the same token,          {490}
     Not a single word had the lady spoken:
     They went in both to the presence together,
     While I in the balcony watched the weather.