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593-606. Sordello threatens to flutter down like a magician's

tree.

Ll. 593-607.

Browning suddenly threatens to bring Sordello down about

our ears.

Now, do not despise too much my rhymes, which rise and hover over us like a band of angels. Or call my poem rather a miraculous plane-tree, which, growing up like that of an arch-magician seeking to please some young queen with a specimen of his art, shows first a silvery trunk, anon bright branches, next thick foliage, soon coloured buds, and then is all one mild flame like the light of the moon. At last there comes a pause; the tree bursts, and showers down over her ivory limbs in bits of bloom and fruit and leaf. The old wizard, decrepit and stiff, is not much interested, but watches her delight

593. 'that spring, dispread.' Cp. Bk. 1., l. 881.

603. 'flinders.' Small fragments. Cp. Bk. vI., 1. 100.

The Remainder of Book the Third.

After writing so much of Sordello, Browning, in 1838, went to Italy. The remainder of the Third Book is devoted to recording his meditation at Venice on what is to be the purpose of his poetry. He feels himself 'called,' like one of the prophets; and he is called

to be the poet of suffering humanity: he must write

to help man to live truly.

This makes him change his intention with regard to the rest of Sordello's story. What will finally lay hold of his hero's soul will be, not merely some interest outside of himself, whatever its moral quality, but what conscience tells him is a good cause.

God

“selects our yoke,

Sordello, as your poetship may find” (1. 782).

Ll. 607-615.

But Browning does not abandon his роет. He will, however,

pause a little to reflect.

not: only

pauses to

But no! I will not let my poem go to pieces here. 607-615. Only it were well I should pause and indulge in a little But it does personal meditation. Let me go to Venice. I bid myself Browning put aside my collection of characters-put a spell upon meditate on them, as a god may glide out of his world and quietly, his poetry. after what men reckon countless ages, enter into it again and set it working exactly where it left off. My puppets sleep, and I awake at Venice.

615. 'being at Venice.' See Mrs Sutherland Orr's Life and Letters of Robert Browning, ch. vii.

Ll. 615-675.

Some poets have fixed and final ideas, which represent all they can learn. Poets of true genius, on the other hand, are always greater than anything they express; so that neither need we look for complete autobiography in their songs, nor can we conclude that in the future they will not express something altogether different from what they have already given us.

615-639.

himself into

In such songs as those of, say, Eglamor, who lived entirely for his poetry and believed he achieved all A poet of genius never that could be achieved by a singer, you find complete- puts the ness: the man and his poetry are one. The be all whole of and end all of his life comes out in it, and it is the his poem, one thing for which he exists. But from works of true genius, like Sordello's (in which imagination has free play), there always escapes some little hint that the bard's own personal life lies below the life depicted in his songs, the latter being only a kind of sheath to the former. His individual experience and feeling are

G

639-651.

And lives on into new

thought and feeling,

652-675.

As a sailor is

bound to go sailing again.

deeper than anything he exhibits as belonging to his poetic characters. Of this you had evidence in some small irrelevancy, which showed a bit of Sordello's personal ideas jutting up through his lay. In his Charlemagne, for instance, a work splendidly conceived, there was the skit, or scoff, about the Emperor's daughters. It had no business there, and must be taken to imply something like this, as the bard might put it: "Not all my life is to be found in my poem, which is but one of its episodes. I lived before it, and shall continue to live when I cease to sing-never, perhaps, taking the trouble to set forth in song the deeper life, or dream-life, as I have done now. 'There is much in his life,' say you hearers, that he has not told us. When shall we read the lay on which, as that irrelevant flout betrays, he is already busythe better lay, because in it he will speak to us, not of man's life as he observes it in others, but of his own personal experience his own life's true business. We hope for that, although we understood he agreed to be always revealing through his poetry what life had taught him.'

"Alas! you may never hear that better lay. My promise to tell you all was like the promise of a Weather - bound sailor. I may try to give you all the gains of my life, but, whether I will or not, I am driven on into new ideas. The sailor promises to settle down and spend his days in telling of voyages that are past. 'Here,' we say, 'let us strike sail, pay out our cable, moor our bark, and firmly pitch our tent. It is noon, and about the bank of the river all is quiet save for the wave's crisp dash, or the buzz of humming-bird, or the tortoise's splash. Now let us unlade all the spoils we took as we sailed up the stream bend after bend. Let us admire each treasure and make it remind us of our voyage's history. This speaks of groves of giant rushes, growing like a demon's hair on end; this, of mountains

stretching lazily above us; this, of the forests that seemed suddenly to open out their sombre sides to yield us passage- May that beetle (shake it off your cap) mean that wind is springing from the west?'"

Why, sailor, do you ask? Because you cannot but be off again. You tell us your travel-tales to-day, but tomorrow we part company. Onward you go eastward on your voyage, and no other man can go with you or know what fate reserves for you in the land to which you fare.

The poet goes forward into new thoughts and feelings whither we cannot follow: will he tell us them in song, or be for ever silent?

635. 'the restiff daughters.' They were a bad lot.

642. 'o' the deeper life.' These words would naturally mean the same as 'the singer's proper life . . . 'neath the life his song exhibits' (1. 625), but an interpretation on this understanding is rendered impossible by all that follows. Another great difficulty is this: that, as the sailor (1. 651 f.) passes in review objects he has really collected, the poet of true genius should be understood to sing what comes out of his own past, whereas he gives a 'dream-performance.' The general interpretation, no doubt, is that of the text-that a genius cannot continue to live without conceiving new ideas. It is not in Sordello alone that Browning displays a satanic power of ambiguity.

Ll. 675-696.

Browning, as he perceives when he reaches Italy, has lived on into new thoughts and feelings: will he express them as far as poet can? 'Who,' he asks, will give me the fresh inspiration necessary for the completion of my poem?' Watching healthy peasant-girls at work and at play in Venice, he wonders which of them would best draw him out and quicken his powers.

So I meditate as I sit on a ruined palace-step at 676-696. Venice. And why should I not continue to muse Which and bring to completion this poem, begun in England? picturesque

healthy

907488A

peasant-girl will inspire Browning to continue Sordello?

Who is adorable enough to give fresh inspiration to my mind not, alas! a mind like Sordello's, that most wonderful of poets? Who will be queen to me, to draw forth devotion enough to create more verses? Will that girl from Bassano, who busies herself among her fruit-boats? Perhaps these from delicious Asolo, who are quick and pretty in their motions as pigeons above the portico, and are binding June lilies, soiled with their gold pollen, to deck the bridge-side chapel with ? Ah! but the one with brownest cheeks the one stooping beneath the arch—she might charm me for a month or so: shall I continue my story for her sake? Nay, a still better queen would be that Paduan girl who splashes with barer legs where a whirl of water in the dead black Giudecca shows that drifting seaweed has pulled down all but one of the blueturbaned posts for fastening gondolas to.

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693. 'Giudecca.' The Canal della Giudecca, an island of Venice.

696-738.

Browning ex

plains that

his poetry had originally intended to regard happiness as the natural condition of human life.

Ll. 696-783.

Suddenly a worn and sorrowful ghost, most unlike these healthy girls, makes her presence known. It is Suffering Humanity. Previous ideas of the poet's attitude to life are abandoned. Here is his true queen. He has not chosen her, but she has chosen him, and her claim is irresistible.

You sad, dishevelled ghost, who pluck at me and point at these peasant girls, do you know I am alive as I sit so quietly here? Let them alone with their happiness. (Let alone even that one disguised, now wearing jewels in her hair, which really prefers nothing to a coronet made from the field-buds and spikes of green wheat of her native land-who left behind her there the turmoil of the end of June, shook off pomp, except for a gem or two, as a lily shakes off its gold pollen, and came to join the peasants here.) You feel they look too happy

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