[The Poetry Of Robert Browning by Stopford A. Brooke]@TWC D-Link bookThe Poetry Of Robert Browning CHAPTER II 17/41
Browning is distinct from them all in keeping her quite divided from man. But then he has observed that Nature is expressed in terms of man, and he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to explain this.
He does explain it in a passage in _Paracelsus_.
Man once descried, imprints for ever His presence on all lifeless things; the winds Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, Never a senseless gust now man is born. The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts A secret they assemble to discuss When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph Swims bearing high above her head: no bird Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above That let light in upon the gloomy woods, A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top, Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye. The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour. Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn Beneath a warm moon like a happy face: -- And this to fill us with regard for Man. He does not say, as the other poets do, that the pines really commune, or that the morn has enterprise, or that nymphs and satyrs live in the woods, but that this _seems_ to be, because man, as the crown of the natural world, throws back his soul and his soul's life on all the grades of inferior life which preceded him.
It is Browning's contradiction of any one who thinks that the pathetic fallacy exists in his poetry. Nature has then a life of her own, her own joys and sorrows, or rather, only joy.
Browning, indeed, with his intensity of imagination and his ineradicable desire of life, was not the man to conceive Nature as dead, as having no conscious being of any kind.
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