Browning as a Poet of Love

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame."

These words of another poet may be said to sum up for us in a nutshell the end and aim of Browning's poems.

Of all the fields of human experience portrayed by Browning in his poetry, that into which his imagination most fully entered and that which presents to us the most vital and compelling side of his genius is Love. It is indeed remarkable that Browning, of all poets the most masculine and intellectual, should be so predominantly a poet of Love. This passion forms the motive power of his verse just as he believed it to be the guiding inspiration and harmoniser of the Universe. He dramatised Love in all its manifestations, from baseness and folly to the noblest heights of self-renunciation; he differs from other poets in being able to express the love not only of his own heart, but of the hearts of all. One might say of him that never was another poet in whom there was so much of the obsession of Love and so little of the obsession of Sex.

Commonly speaking, the term ‘Love Poems’ does not mean poems concerning absolute love, or the love of ideas such as Truth or Beauty, or the loves belonging to home, or the love of friends, or even married love–unless it be specially bound up with ante-nuptial love–but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex for the other chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those of youth. They generally celebrate the joys and sorrows, the rapture and despair, the changes and chances, the moods and fancies, the ‘quips and cranks and wanton wiles’ of that passion which is half of the sense and half of the spirit. According to Browning, Love, the manifestation of a man's or woman's nature in the highest and most intimate relationship possible, is the test and crisis of one's life; love and sacrifice for God and for man form the sole channel through which Humanity can reach the Deity; they constitute the highest opportunities for mental and spiritual growth. His prophetic belief that Life does not cease with what we know as Death, but continues thenceforth to exist in some changed form, was not so much the result of blind unthinking faith as logical reasoning based on the mainspring of his life, Love. He could not explain, but yet felt the need of loving and of being loved, and it is from this strong religion of love that his world-wide sympathies spring and derive their strength. They are not derived from any mere scientific interest of a psychologist but from a genuine belief that all men are brothers and form with him the great family of God. Thus Love is an essential element of his theology; it converts what would otherwise be a pure theism into a mystical Christianity; its removal from his themes would be the removal of his most original as well as his most solid contribution to Literature; it would have left the poet himself a man without a purpose, in a universe without a meaning.

Consequently it is no wonder that Browning comes to regard the union of soul with soul as the capital achievement of life and also as affording one of its chief proofs; as a supreme power in itself and also as a revelation of infinite things which lie beyond it; as an evidence of character and even as a pledge of perpetual advance in the life of the spirit. When it has taken possession of a soul that is complex, affluents and tributaries, from many and various faculties run into the main stream. "With Browning passion is indeed a regal power, but intellect, imagination and fancy are its office bearers for a time; then in a moment it takes all authority into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is complex into the singleness of joy or pain; fuses all that is manifold into the unity of its own life and being." In Rudel to Lady Tripoli, Love which cometh by the hearing, is a pure imaginative devotion; in Count Gismond, Love is the deliverer in Cristina, Love is the Interpreter of Life.

In short, the faintest and most fugitive signs of Love–a word, a glance, the impalpable music of a romantic name–came not merely to kindle and subdue, but permanently fortify and Secure. With all its insurgent and emancipating vehemence, Love was for Browning the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, the energy of integration which makes a cosmos of the sum of things, the element of permanence, of law. In a life thrilled into being by Love, Heaven was already at hand on earth; and Eternity itself could but continue what Time had begun. Browning may thus be seen to be the last and assuredly not the least in the line which handed on the torch of Plato.

Having dwelt so far on the general tone and temper of Browning’s philosophy of Love, it remains to be seen when and where and how these impressions are conveyed to us. On forming all his poems into groups, one easily perceives that it falls in the main into two divisions: those which tell of attainment and those which tell of defeat. In either case, however, that passion does not go beyond this life and even in this life takes up the whole brain of the lover, seeming absolutely the best and the only thing he can possess without reference to anyone except himself; but in its consuming selfishness it exalts itself over all other phenomena; while those to whom love is an intellectual idea find in success or failure more use than in actual present enjoyment.

It is indeed curious how little the passionate love poem with its strong personal touch exists in Browning's poetry. His own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in many who are not poets. The reason for this is, of course, that such poems naturally demand a sweet melody in verse, and Browning's genius was not essentially lyrical, nor could he inevitably command a melodious treatment in verse. Yet no English poet of his century, and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful–though he habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of thwarting conditions. One love of a personal nature, however, he possessed, fully and intensely, and this was his love for his wife. And three poems embody it. The first is By the Fire-side, a meditative poem of recollective tenderness wandering through the past–a finished piece of art, with its quiet thought, profound feeling, and sweet memory, which like a sunlit atmosphere soften the aspect of the room, the image of his wife and the emotions and scenes described. It is Browning's most perfect rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, of a rapturous love. The outer world is drawn into the inner by taking its hue and becoming the confidant and executant of its will.

One Word More is full, and full to the brim, with the long experience of peaceful joy in married love. And last1y comes Prospice, composed in the autumn following his wife's death which expresses his triumphant certainty of meeting her, and breaks forth at last into so great a cry of pure passion, that ear and heart alike seem to rejoice. We thrill, when we are told that all the gloom and terror which beset man in life's fitful fever

"Shall change, shall change, first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
Oh, thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest."

His impersonal poems in Love are poems of Love not in its simplicities, but in its subtlest moments, moments Browning always loved to analyse. Love Among the Ruins is an exquisite poem of re-union in love, and depicts a pastoral solitude in which are buried the remains of an ancient city, once fabulous in magnificence, wealth and strength. It is a scene in the Roman Campagna in twilight. Into this landscape of the wreck of ages and the scattered memorials of a forgotten metropolis is projected the idyll of a lover going to meet his mistress, a golden-haired girl with eager eyes of love, and the emotion evoked by the meeting is emphasised by the contrast of the surroundings. He muses on the changes and wonders of the world; and this sad reflecting contemplator of the past learns by the glance of her eye, and her look and embrace which extinguish sight and speech, that splendour of arms, triumph of wealth, centuries of glory and pride, folly, noise and sin, are nothing comparable to Love which, sharing as it does the destiny of finite things, is yet triumphant over time and death and is the highest element in Human Life-"Love is best!"

We may pass on to The Last Ride together, one of the loveliest of love lyrics, in which thought, emotion and melody are mingled in perfect measure; which has the lyrical cry and objectiveness of the drama. Poets have often sung of unrequited love, and filled the mouth of the disappointed lover with dainty blasphemies of the heartless fickleness of love in women and of the result of the dismissal to the lover's own soul development; but here there is nothing out a manly and dignified resignation. A man who has spent years in passion for a young girl by mistaking her camaraderie for a deeper feeling just realises his error when he is told that he can hope no more. Possessed of that strength which emanates under failure in a strong cheerful fatalism, he has courage enough to crush the rising despair in him, and requests for a last ride with her. The secure faith of Evelyn's lover that "God creates the love to reward the love" is not his; his mistress will never "awake and remember and understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the rapture of that phantom companionship, passion and thought slowly transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life, which art and poetry grope after in vain:

"And so you sculptor, so you gave
A score of years to art, her slave,
And that is your Venus, whence we turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn."

He, on the other hand, has been able to possess that supreme moment of earth, which prolonged is Heaven:

Ride, ride together, and for ever ride!

He had achieved his heart's desire through his faith in Love as the healing balm of Life's many unhappy worries, of Life's many little interludes.

In conclusion, as the poet himself has it:

"All that thou dost enumerate
Of power and beauty in the world
The mightiness of Love was curled
Inextricably round about."

It is only Love can rule the noise of Life to heavenly quiet. It is the wonder of all wonders, the object of our very existence; it is the culmination in a series in which Knowledge is the last stage but one and the condition of our reaching the highest. It is the star that blazes through an ever-present Eternity; it is the most perfect human entity which when labour and pain are at an end, when lonely midnight walks and raging noonday battles have drawn to a close, when the division and duality of ages are forgotten, takes its throne at the foot of God himself.

If we love,
Although death shall break and bray our flesh,
The joy of love that thrilled in it shall fly
Past his destruction, subtle as fragrance, strong
And uncontrollable as fire, to dwell
In the careering onward of man's life,
Increasing it with passion and with sweetness.
Duty is on us therefore that we love
And be loved."

It is too vast to be circumscribed in a lyric, represented in a drama, bound up in a long story of spiritual endeavour like Paracelsus; it moves in dignity, splendour, and passion through all that he deeply conceived and nobly wrought; its triumphant immortality in his work is never for a moment clouded with doubt or subject to death. This is the supreme thing in his work: Love is conqueror and Love is God. "Love is All" might have served as a text for the whole volume of his poetry; but the text is wrought with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are not Love.

One may find a more delicate grace in Tennyson, a more voloptuous intensity in Rossetti, an easier sweep in Byron, a more ideal beauty in Shelley, but in no poet is there a more complete fusion of all these elements than in Browning, the dramatic and passionate singer of Love.

"Life with all its yields of joy and woe,
And hopes and fears,
Is just our chance of the prize of learning Love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and IS."