B.A. (Hons.

) English – Semester IV Core Course

Paper X : British Literature : 19th Century Study Material

Unit-4
(a) Alfred Tennyson
(b) Robert Browning
(c) Christina Rossetti
(d) Mathew Arnold

Department of English

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

University of Delhi
 Paper X – British Literature : 19th Century

Unit-4
(a) Alfred Tennyson
(b) Robert Browning
(c) Christina Rossetti
(d) Mathew Arnold

Prepared by:

Nalini Prabhakar Usha Anand

School of Open Learning School of Open Learning
University of Delhi University of Delhi
Delhi-110007 Delhi-110007

S.K. Mukherjee K. Ojha

School of Open Learning School of Open Learning
University of Delhi University of Delhi
Delhi-110007 Delhi-110007

 
SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING
UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
 Paper X – British Literature : 19th Century
Unit-4

Contents

S. No. Title Prepared by Pg. No.

a. Alfred Tennyson 01
(i) The Lady of Shalott Nalini Prabhakar 04
(ii) Ulysses Nalini Prabhakar 10
(iii) The Defence of Lucknow Nalini Prabhakar 15
b. Robert Browning 19
(i) My Last Duchess Usha Anand 22
(ii) Fra Lippo Lippi Usha Anand 37
c. Christina Rossetti 84
Goblin Market S.K. Mukherjee 85
d. Mathew Arnold 102
Dover Beach K. Ojha 102

 
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 Unit-4(a)
I. General Introduction
Nalini Prabhakar

1.1. The Nineteenth Century England

The Nineteenth Century was a period of momentous change. The whole structure of society
was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution. As the industries attracted labour, there
was a massive migration from the country to the towns. For the first time in the history of
England, by 1851, more than half the population was living in urban areas. The horrors of
town life-inadequate housing, sanitation water supplies-resulted due to this large scale
migration. Working conditions were equally bad-long hours and minimal wages and the
constant threat of being sacked. Industrial Revolution created a society in which the middle
classes profited exceedingly and the working classes were reduced to extreme poverty. The
situation however, gradually improved due to two main types of thought-Evangelical and
Utilitarian.
The Evangelical movement tried to persuade the under-privileged into thinking their
miseries were divinely ordained, yet at the same time they urged the privileged classes to take
practical steps for the relief of their fellow-men and encouraged humanitarian reform. The
Factory Acts, were largely responsible from 1833 onwards, for the improvement in working
conditions. This improvement was however woefully inadequate.
Utilitarianism was a rational approach to the same problem and was first profounded by
Bentham, and developed by James Mill and John Stuart Mill. The Principle underlying this
philosophy was “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. This Philosophy resulted in a
long series of reforms which gradually transformed the social, political system based on
tradition and privilege into something of a democracy.
The call for Parliamentary Reform came first from the Industrialists and was taken up by
the working classes. The demand for Representation and franchise lead to widespread riots.
After 15 months of violent agitation the first Reform Act was passed in 1832.
England witnessed sensational advances in technology. In 1830 the Liverpool and
Manchester Railway had opened. The Railways was a symbol of the progress being made. It
accelerated commercial activity and turned England into the richest country in the world.
Certain other inventions like the telegraph and photography was beginning to change the
character of everyday life.
The accession of Queen Victoria (1837) brought in a new social Ethic of respectability
and domesticity. This new social ethic laid a lot of emphasis on moral behavior, resulting in a
horror of sex and extreme prudishness in all aspects related to the body and flesh.
The Victorian age also witnessed some very radical and revolutionary thought which
made its impact not only in the later part of 19th century but also in the 20th century. The

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terrible living conditions of the working class vividly recounted in Engels “The condition of
the working class in England in 1844”. In “The Communist Manifesto” Marx prescribed
revolution as the only solution. The first serious statement for the emancipation of women
came from J.S. Mill in “The Subjection of women” (1869). Lyell’s “Principles of Geology”
(1830-33) made it impossible to accept the account of the Creation in Genesis. It was
Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ packed with scientific evidence, which conclusively
debunked the theory of Creation in Genesis. Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection replaced
the Biblical Providence by a series of accidents. This led to a general crisis of Faith and
started the religion Vs. science debated.
In 1867 when the Reform Act gave the vote to the working classes in towns notable
thinkers of the time, Carlyle, Mathew Arnold felt apprehensive about the transfer of power to
uneducated masses. In 1884 Gladstone’s Reform Act gave the vote to the working classes in
rural districts.
This account of the nineteenth century England is by no means exhaustive. An attempt
has been made to introduce you to the socio-political, technological and intellectual
development of the age.

1.2. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892): A Brief Biographical Sketch

Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809, fourth son of George Clayton Tennyson and his wife
Elizabeth Tennyson, at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire. His childhood and adolescence
was not a happy one. His father, though a learned cultured man was given in to drunkenness
and violence (probably because he was disinherited by his father). The atmosphere at home
was one of bitterness, and genteel poverty and madness. At the age of six, he went to the
school at Louth. He was utterly miserable in school and after four years of school life, he
returned home to be tutored by his father.
He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1827 with financial help from his aunt Mrs.
Russel. It is here that he met Arthur Hallam and Apostles. In June 1828, he won the
Chancellors gold medal for the poem Timbuctoo. Soon after winning this honour in 1829 he
published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. The death of his father in 1830 forced him to return home
without taking his degree.
The sudden death of Arthur Hallam in 1833 left a deep impression on Tennyson and
inspired the most philosophical of Tennyson’s poems in Memoriam. Around 1838 for a while
he was engaged to Emit Sellwood. The engagement was broken. In 1841, Tennyson of after a
long silence published Poems, and in 1847, the Princess in 1849, he published in memoriam
on which he had worked close to sixteen years. In the same year he married Emily Sellwood
and was appointed Poet Laureate in November after the death of Wordsworth. By the 1850’s
Tennyson was famous, secure and the poet Laureate.
The remaining forty years of his life, he lived like Wordsworth in the stillness of a great
peace. In 1869 he built himself as large pseudo-Gothic mansion named Aldworth in Surrey

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which he thought would be less accessible to visitors and tourists than his earlier home at
Farringdon. He published steadily until his death in 1892.
Tennyson and his age
Barring the first and the last decades, Tennyson’s life spans the whole of 19th century. We
have in an earlier section seen how 19th century England was an explosive mixture of
poverty, Commercial exploitation, popular discontent, progressive ideas and reforming zeal.
Let us now examine Tennyson’s attitude towards various issues confronting 19th century. A
highly incisive insight, though not very complimentary insight into Tennyson as a Victorian
poet is offered by Hippolyte. A Taine, He writes “Without being a pedant, he is moral, he
may be read in the family circle by night; he does not rebel against society and life; he speaks
of god and the soul, nobly, tenderly without ecclesiastical prejudice; there is no need t
reproach him like Lord Byron; he has no violent and abrupt words, excessive and scandalous
sentiments; he will pervert nobody … He has not rudely trenched upon truth and passion. He
has risen to the height off noble and tender sentiments. He has gleaned from all nature and all
history what was most lofty and amiable. It (Tennyson’s poetry) seems made expressly for
these wealthy, cultivated, free businessmen, heirs of the ancient nobility, new leaders of a
New England. It is part of their luxury as of their morality; it is an eloquent continuation of
their principles, and a precious article of their drawing room furniture.”
Taine’s estimate of Tennyson made around 1863, holds Tennyson as sympathetic to the
sensibilities of the middle and ruling classes. Let us briefly examine how much truth there is
in this estimate.
Tennyson and the Reform Acts
He was deeply apprehensive at the transfer of political power to the uneducated masses in
this case the industrial and agricultural workers. As member of the house of Lords, it was
with great reluctance fearing an impending revolution that he gave assent to the 1884
Gladstone’s Reform Act which gave vote to the working classes in rural districts in
“Freedom” (1854) he warned Gladstone not to give in to “brass mouths and iron lungs”
demanding “All things in a hour”.
Tennyson and the conservative social ethic
Tennyson never doubted the soundness of the Victorian ethic of respectability, domesticity
and moral behavior. This he expressed with great conviction in his poetry. His longest work
Idylls of the King (1859-85) shows sexual irregularity (the adultery of Lancelot and
Guinevere) leading to the downfall of a civilization. The theme of domesticity is shown to
good advantage in Enoch Arden (1864).
Tennyson and the Question of Faith
Inspite of scientific evidence to the contrary Tennyson retained his faith in a personal God an
in an after-life. “In Memoriam” Tennyson suggests that the subjective religious feelings are

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more conclusive evidence to the existence of God. This solution however is grossly
inadequate to explain away the greatest problem faced by the period.
Tennyson and the British Imperialism
“Fifty years of ever-broadening Commerce!
Fifty years of every- brightening science!
Fifty years of ever widening Empire!
Tennyson at his patriotic best. However the larger ethical question involved in the “ever-
widening Empire” do not seem to have bothered Tennyson. It is not surprising therefore that
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the Defense of Lucknow only incorporated the
Imperialist point of view and not that of the freedom fighters.
When E.J. Eyre, the Governor of Jamaica savagely hanged 600 people in 1865 to
suppress a rebellion, his behavior was denounced by the likes of Gladstone, Huxley ext.
Tennyson however thought otherwise. He not only subscribed to a fund for Eyre’s defense
but also seems to have said “Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers”.

II. Poems
1. The Lady of Shalott

Introduction
This poem was first published in 1832 an extensively revised in 1842. In our analysis we
shall use the 1842 version. In the Glossary of each section, you will however find the earlier
1832 version as well. This poem has for its source an Italian novella “Donna di Scallota¸
(1321) Tennyson acknowledging the source wrote “I met the story first in some Italian
novella but the web, mirror, island etc., were my own. Indeed I doubt whether I should ever
have put it in that shape if I had been then aware of the Maid of Astolat in Mort d’ Arthur.
Tennyson claimed that he had not read Malory’s Mort d’ Arthur at the time of composing this
poem.
The Poem however is very different from its source. Tennyson changed the “Sc” in the
Scallota to the softer sound “Sh”. He placed his Lady in solitary confinement in a grey tower
and gave her the two chores of singing and weaving. He also put her under a curse. These
additions make the poem an original work and not a poor piece of imitation.
The lady of Shallot is a poem in four parts. We shall first deal with each part separately
and then critically analyze the poem in its entirety.

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 Part-I
Study Notes
Wold: Open upland Countryside
Camelot: The Legendary city of King Arthur. In the Italian source the city is by the sea-
shore.
Blow: Bloom
Lines 6-9 1832 version:
They yellow leaved waterlily
The green sheathed daffodil
Tremble in the water chilly
Round about Shalott.
Willows whiten: The underside of the leaves of willow trees is white. When the wind
blows, the leaves turn exposing their white underside.
Lines 11-12 1832 version:
The sunbeam showers break an quiver
In the stream that runneth ever.
Imbowers: enfolds and shelters
Lines 19-21 1832 version
The little isle is all in railed with a rose-fence, and overtrailed with roses, by the marge
unhailed.
Shallop: A small light open boat.
Lines 24-26 1832 version’s
A pearl garland winds her head
She leaneth on a velvet bed
Full royally appareled.
Lines 28-34 1832 version:
Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Link an angel sighing clearly,
O’er the stream of Camelot,

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 Piling the sheaves in furrow’s airy,
Beneath the moon the reaper weary.
Bearded barley – The bristles on the ear of the barley plant.
Summary
Part I presents the world’s idea of the fairy lady, an unseen presence. Most of Part I is
taken up with the description of the landscape. The river cuts through the long fields of barley
and rye and through these fields runs the road to the city of Camelot. People going up and
down the road gaze upon the island of the Shalott in the middle of the river. The island and
the tower are well hidden from the direct view of people because of the various kinds of trees
and plants “willows”, “aspens”, “lilies” and a “space of flowers”. In the tower of “four gray
walls” and “four gay towers” lives the lady of Shalott.
In Part I the emphasis is on the lady’s anonymity. She is well protected from the gaze of
the outside world. Her presence is known because of her song which is heard only by the
reapers, reaping early or late by the moon light. The song of the lady echoes “cheerly” and
therefore one can safely assume that her life is one of contentment and happiness. The song
also relates her to Shelly’s Skylark “Link a poet hidden in the light of thought, singing hymns
unbidden… Like a high born maiden in a palace tower, soothing her love laden soul in Secret
hour with music”. Part I ends with the reaper’s whisper.
Part-II
Study Notes
Lines 37-40 1832 Version:
No time hath she to sport and play;
A charmed web she weaves always.
A curse is on her, if she stay
Her weaving either night or day.
Eddy: Small Whirlpool
Ambling pad: part of double harness to which girths are attached.
Lines 69-70 1832 version:
At morning often journeyed
Two deep eyed lovers, lately wed.
Summary
The gazing, listening and whispering of part I is transformed into a strange actuality in
part II. In Part II we enter the mysterious world of the lady. She weaves by “day and night a
magic web with colors gay” This she does because she is under a curse which forbids her to

6
look towards Camelot. She knows next to nothing about the curse, what shape it might take
or what retribution might be expected in case of disobedience. In the “magic web” she copies
reflections of the outside world seen in a mirror. In a sense all her artistic Endeavour is twice
removed from reality. The web and the mirror immediately bring to mind Socrates definition
of art and poetry as “twice removed from reality”, as recounted by Plato in Republic Book X.
The emphasis in Part II is not so much on the magic web as on the mirror’s magic sight” and
“Shadows” of the stream of human life and existence – “village churls”, “market girls”
“damsels glad” “abbot” “shepherd-lad” “knights riding two and two”, “funeral” “two young
lovers”. These sights evoke in the Lady a strange see-saw of emotions. She “delights” to
weave but is also by moments “half-sick of shadows”. These contradicting emotions of
pleasure and revulsion affirm and undermine the “cheerly” song of Part I and prepare us for
what follows next in the poem. Part II ends with the Lady repining “ I am half-sick of
shadows”.
Part-III
Study Notes
Greaves: Armour to guard skin
Baldric: Richly ornamented shoulder belt.
Meteor: reference here to any bright dazzling but transient object.
From the Bank… Crystal mirror: A double image lf Lancelot
1) A reflection from the bank
2) A reflection of the reflection in the river.
Summary
The lovers at the end of Part II anticipate the appearance of Sir Lancelot in Part III. In
part I and II the outside world, and the lady’s world, despite their awareness of each other
through song an mirror reflections maintain their distance. In part III the outer world breaks
in on the lady in the form of Sir Lancelot. Sir Lancelot all colour and light, bright and
littering is reflected doubly “From the bank and from the river”, and the lady cannot be
satisfied with just the shadow. The lady now is possessed by a passion beyond her control.
And so she looks away from shadows to reality and invites her destiny.
In “Memoir Vol. I.” Tennyson writes of the lady “The new born love for something, for
someone in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the
region of shadows into that of realities”. The Lady’s sexual frustration is faintly underlined
by making Lancelot at her first sight of him sing “Tirra Lirra”. This song is taken from a song
in “The Winter’s Tale” where Autolycus thinks of “tumbling in the hay” with his “aunts”
(Whores).

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 Part-IV
Study Notes
Line 126 1832 version:
A cloud white crown of pearl she dight,
All raimented in snowy white
That loosely flew, (her zone in sights,
Clasped with one binding diamond bright)
Her wide eyes fixed on Camelot,
Though the Squally east wind keenly
Blew, with folded arms serenely
By the water stood the queenly Lady of Shalott.
Line 127 1832 version:
With a steady stony glance
Line 136-41 1832 version:
As when the sailors while they roam,
By creeks and outfalls far from home,
Rising and dropping with the foam,
From dying swans wild warbling come,
Blown shore wards; so to Camelot
Lines 163-71 1832 version:
They crossed themselves, their stars they blessed
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire and guest
There lay a parchment on her breast
That puzzled more than all the rest,
The well fed wits at Camelot,
‘The web was woven curiously
The charm is broken utterly,
Draw near and fear not this is I,
The lady of Shalott.’
Summary
In Part IV the Lady enters the public world. The move from the private tower to the
public world involves death. We now know the nature of the curse. The lady will suffer the
fate of all mortals, that is, death. The lady’s initial act of transgression is however short lived.

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She makes preparations for her death, passively without a whimper. All her actions
henceforth seem to have a trance-like quality. Her surrender is absolute and complete. As she
“flows” into the great world of Camelot, the reapers hear her sing her last song not “Cheerly”
but mournfully.
Thus singing she dies before reaching the first house by the water-side. Her entry into
Camelot is “Silent”, “Dead-pale” nonetheless a “gleaming shape”. The gaze of the entire
town is now focused upon the lady. Here it is interesting to note the reversal of roles. Earlier,
it was the lady who had gazed upon the world and its people, secure in her invisibility and
anonymity. Lancelot’s musings at the end of the poem serve as a compassionate epitaph, but
his understanding of the entire situation is as limited as that of the others. The lady of Shalott
in her death does not influence but merely puzzles her unimaginative on lookers.
Critical Analysis
This poem, in terms of scenic description and lyrical quality must be ranked very highly.
The visual sensuousness is evident in the expert handling of colour and light, which makes
each scene and object described definite and distinct from the other scenes and objects. The
rhythm of the poem too varies, at times it lingers and at times it quickly flashes by.
Although a simple reading of the poem as a fairy tale with supernatural overtones is
rewarding in itself, it would nonetheless be interesting to see what other readings this poem
lends itself to.
The lady of Shalott, almost always has been seen as (1) A critique of the isolated artist
cut off from life, retreating into the aesthetic world of infinite regression designated by the
weaving which reproduces the mirror reflections which represent the world. (2) The lady is
locked into rigid oppositions, between the rural and the urban, an older order of labour by
hand and mercantilism and trade, an organic integrated world and a fragmented commercial
world, between isolation and community, between passivity and action, female and male, the
aesthetic and the “real”. Unable to mediate these oppositions she is condemned to passivity
and death. These readings though valid merely reduce the entire poem into rigid oppositions
and a tame acceptance of these oppositions.
There is yet another reading possible which dissolves and interrogates the fixed positions
and opposition of the above readings. This reading is possible in both the 1832 & 1842
versions, but the later exposes the problematic nature of the lady’s position more
emphatically. The lady of Shallot is a conflation of a number of mythic structure—the myths
of the weaving lady from Arachne to Penelope, and the myths of reflection of Narcissus and
Echo. This is a poem of longing for sexual love, change and transformation which is denied
change. The Lady is a doomed victim and dies sacrificial death failing to come into sexuality.
This poem seems to explore the status of myth and the relation between myth and power.
One condition of the curse is the ceaseless labour of weaving the web, a labour without
escape and without pleasure. There is an alignment between the labour of the lady and the
labour of the reapers. The lady weaving her web could also be a representation of the starving
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handloom weavers displaced by new industrial processes. The possibility of change is
explored through the lady psyche, as she becomes a representation of alienation and work.
The appearance of the lover forces upon her the realization that her world is mere
representation—“Shadows” when Lancelot bursts upon the scene with his powerful sexuality,
her sense of inadequacy forces her into action. Earlier what was lacking was this sense of
inadequacy. She was secure in the myth of seclusion and domesticity. The curse is the myth
of power, a representation which kept the lady subject. The irony here is that the curse comes
true on her realization of estrangement and oppression. Her life is doomed the moment she
dares to redefine her life. The recognition that her life is “not-complete” is the first
precondition for action. Once the myth is recognized as a myth, which enables action, there is
possibility of change, of construction of a new myth. Thus the death of the lady is sacrificial
and not passive submission. The situation at the end of the poem is revolutionary without
revolution.
Note: The 1842 reconstruction of mythic representation could be owing to Tennyson’s
familiarity with Keightley’s book The Fairy Mythology. Keightley in this book talks
of:
1) Myths as part of a primal, indigenous peasant culture where the imaginative life of a
nation resides, an intuitive form of thought which possesses an organic wholeness
prior to though, and in particular to artificial society.
2) Myths as instruments of power and ideology used by a ruling class to coerce the ruled
and frequently changing with a change of power.
3) Myths as a “Poetic fiction” and “all the ancient systems of heathen religion were
devised by philosophers for the instruction of rude tribes.
2. Ulysses
Introduction
Arthur Hallam’s sudden death from cerebral hemorrhage was a terrible shock for
Tennyson. It also meant a withdrawal of support and practical help on which Tennyson, his
sister and his whole family relied on in so many ways. It was at this time in 1833 that
Tennyson composed “Ulysses”. “There is more of myself in Ulysses” Tennyson told James
Knowles, “which was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still
life must be fought out to the end.”
“Ulysses” Present on old man’s determination to make the most of what little future
remains to him. It is in the form of a dramatic monologue. The speaker Ulysses is urging his
old comrades to embark upon a final voyage with him. The main sources are The Odyssey
(XI) and Dante’s Inferno (xxvi). In the first, Odysseus is told by Teiresias that, when he had
dealt with the suitors, he must set off again with on oar and that a “gentle death” will come to
him “from the sea”, when the people around him are prosperous and he is worn out with a
comfortable old age.” This Perhaps suggested to Tennyson a picture of a man used to danger

10
and heroic adventure who finds normal life boring. Dante in his Inferno puts Ulysses in hell
for the sin of fraud (Trojan horse). It is here that Ulysses relates the story of his death at sea
on a last voyage, undertaken because his passion for companions “not to refuse Experience of
the uninhabited world behind the sun” and to follow “manly virtue and knowledge.”
Tennyson’s Ulysses is a combination of Homer’s and Dante’s. He is “worn out” by
domestic comfort and would forever seek new experience.
Lines 1-5
Study Notes
Aged wife: Penelope is not aged in Homer.
Savage race: homer’s Ithaca bears no resemblance to Tennyson’s savage Ithaca
Unequal: Unjust, discriminatory, a primitive state of law.
Sleep and feed: To do nothing but “sleep and feed” is to be “a beast, no more”. Hamlet (IV,
iv) Dante’s Ulysses had told his men “You were not made to live like
brutes”.
Summary
There is a clipped impatience in these five opening lines. There is also a contempt barely
hidden in the “barren Crags” leading from the “idle King” and leading into the “aged wife”.
Savage Ithaca with its primitive state of law holds no attraction for Ulysses.
Lines 6-8
Study Notes
Lees: Dregs, the last drop.
Scudding Drifts: Clouds & rain before a storm
Hyades: A cluster of stars whose rising was said to foretell a storm.
Summary
The impatience of the opening lines is followed by an affirmation of life. Ulysses cannot
settle down to a life by the hearth. He yearns to travel. These lines express Ulysses zest for
life that stress the Homeric aspect of his character by paraphrasing the opening lines of the
Odyssey and incorporating two phrases from the Iliad “delight of battle” and “windy Troy”.
{The Opening lines of Odyssey “Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he
learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea”} Ulysses has become a
name, a legend, after battling on the plains of windy Troy for ten years, and wandering on the
high seas for another ten.
Lines 19-32
Study Notes
Where thro: Through which
Three suns: It was predicated that Ulysses would live for another three years.

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Summary
This part of the poem begins by adapting Aeneas remarks, (I am a part of all that I’ve
met), when asked to relate the fall of Troy in which he himself had played a large part.
Although Ulysses like Aeneas has merged with his experiences and his experiences have
been tremendous indeed, nonetheless the world of experience is unlimited. It is like an arch
through which the vast untraveled world of experience beckons, and the closer one tries to
get; the further the margins disappear recede. To exhaust the limits of knowledge and
experience one single life time is inadequate. Ulysses bemoans the fact that he merely has
three years left in the one life that is given to him. He does not wish to gather rust like the
metal which has long been in dis-use. He would rather follow knowledge like the “sinking
star” and reach for that which is beyond the realm of human thought and experience.
Lines 33-43
Study Notes
Common duties: Duty to the community
Decent: Behaving properly
Blameless: A regular Homeric epithet for Heroes’ e.g.: Nestor’s phrase “my dear son,
mighty and blame-less” in Odyssey.
Summary
These lines are wooden and prosaic rather than dramatically revealing. This is probably
because of Tennyson’s own shadowing experiences with reference to his father. Although
Ulysses has chosen to defy old age and to challenge the limits of human Endeavour, he does
not abandon his people. He describes Telemachus as ideally qualified to implement the kind
of political policy in which Tennyson himself believed: the gradual civilization of “rugged
people”. The point of this passage is that Ulysses is now free to leave home without fear of
anarchy arising out of his absence. Ulysses does not wish to carry out the process of
civilization himself because he is temperamentally unsuited and more important he has not
much time left for such a slow process.
Lines 44-70
Study Notes
Sounding furrow: Roaring waves
Western stars: Western horizon in which all the stars seem to sink.
Happy isles: In Greek mythology happy isles are a version of paradise, located in the
Atlantic on the west coast of Africa.
Achilles: The greatest hero of the Trojan war.
Summary
These lines evidence the contradictory nature of the purpose of the last voyage, of
Ulysses. Tennyson’s Ulysses like Dante’s speaks of following knowledge but his voyage
inexorably moves towards death.

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 On the one hand Ulysses exhorts his mariners to “strive” and “seek”. He praises them for
their courage by which they opposed “free hearts, free foreheads”. But that was when they
were young. They are old now and Ulysses tries to convince them that “old age hath yet his
honor and his toil’. They are after all men at “strove with Gods”. Their flesh might be weak
but their spirit is strong. It is the spirit of heroic hearts that before death will perform some
deed of noble note.
On the other hand, undercutting the resolute heroic words, there are mournful cadences:-
The long day wanes….many voices” that alert us to the possibility that voyage is meant to
offer a human challenge to the imminent eternal silence. The voices of the deep are those of
the past and the dead. The greatest future envisaged by Ulysses is “to see the great Achilles,
whom we knew”: Ulysses broods over what has been: a lost companionship, the days of
greatness. Mentally he turns back and remembers much and this voyage is perhaps as real as
or more real than the one he proposes to undertake. The last line “to Strive… yield” which
echoes in rhythm the fifth line “that hoard… not me” suggests a noble escape from that which
disgusts him. This line also echoes Satan in Paradise lot “And courage never to submit or
yield”. The irony is all too, obvious. More simply the last three words could allude to Nestor
who “did not yield to wretched old age” (Iliad X)
Critical Analysis
Ulysses monologue can be broadly divided into three sections– 1) that which is his
present of which he is contemptuous 2) That which is his past-which he yearns for 3) That
which is his motivation for the last voyage and what he hopes to achieve in the little future
left to him.
For us the first section poses no problem. Ulysses clearly is tired of domestic comfort.
The barren landscape, the aged wife, the still hearth and the savage race which only knows
how to “hoard and sleep and feed” and more important “know not me,” have no attraction for
him. More over his installed his son to attend to the day to day affairs. According to Ulysses,
Telemachus is temperamentally more suited to the task of administration that he himself is.
It is the second and third sections which are problematic. Is Ulysses past just that, or
does it intrude too much into his present? Is the voyage which he proposes to undertake a
voyage into the future or merely an old man’s fond hope of reliving his past? Which voyage
is more real for Ulysses, the figurative voyage into his past or the literal voyage into the
future?
That Ulysses’ past intrudes into his present is very obvious. The dominant mood in the
poem is of ennui: Ulysses broods over what has been, the day of greatness. When Ulysses
says “I am become a name: /For always roaming with a hungry heart. /Much have I seen and
known…./, or and drunk delight of battle with my peers./Far on the ringing plains of windy
Troy, “his nostalgia and longing is tangible. After Hallam’s Death, Tennyson’s own “sense of
loss and all that had gone by” seems to have pervaded the entire monologue. Tennyson’s
Ulysses has not yet embarked upon his voyage. According to Goldwin Smith “he roams

13
aimlessly-we should rather say, he intends to roam, but stands forever a listless and
melancholy figure on the shore”. Tennyson’s Ulysses then is standing forever on the shore
and these needs to be coupled with the known outcome of the original story. Ulysses’ last
voyage is hinted at in the Odyssey but it is related in Dante’s Inferno – “To the dawn/ our
poop we turned” and only ten lines later a whirl-wind strikes and sinks the ship “Over us the
booming billow closed” Ulysses’ future may be real but it is desperately brief. The voyage
then seems to be a token challenge to the “eternal silence” but nonetheless moving inexorably
towards it. The last line “To strive, to seek to find and not to yield” by echoing Satan in
Paradise Lost shows that the words are just bravado.
If Tennyson’s Ulysses is forever standing on the shore, how does one account for the
other dominant mood in the monologue, which is that of heroic Endeavour? The most oft
quoted lines of Tennyson fall into this category- “I will drink life to the lees”, “Yet all
experience is an arch where thro/Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades. Forever
and forever when I more”, “To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost
bound of human thought.” “Thus much is taken, much abides” and finally “To strive, to seek,
to find and not to yield.”
In “Ulysses” Tennyson sought to meet Hallam’s death by seeking an assurance of the
courage of life- “but that still life must be fought out to the end”. No matter how grand and
heroic the impulse that prompts the above- mentioned lines, they are nonetheless not very
convincing in the context of the poem. At best these lines seem to be the outcome of
excitement by which old age convinces itself that there is a future yet to come. Ulysses
yearns to believe that his life is not just a past that it still has future. But this is a yearning and
not a confident assurance. Towards the end of the monologue Ulysses’ future prospects are
governed not by certainties but by probability and the operative tense is “may” – “It may be
that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great
Achilles, whom we know”.
Tennyson tires hard to convey “that still life must be fought out to the end” but is
overburdened by “the sense of loss and all that had gone by”.
Another interesting interpretation can be made if we dissociate this monologue from
Arthur Hallam’s death and Tennyson’s own admission with reference to the composing of
this monologue. The Homeric aspect of Heroism and Dantesque aspect of following virtue
and knowledge are effectively combined by Tennyson in the figure of Ulysses to convey the
colonizing spirit of Victorian age. For the colonizer courage, virtue and knowledge meant
seeking a “newer world” with the professed intention to “make mild/ A rugged people, and
thro’ soft degrees subdue them to the useful and the good”.

14
 3. The Defence of Lucknow
Introduction
This poem was written in March 1879 and published April 1879. The main source of the
poem was Outram’s account and Colonel Inglis’s records. Inglis led the garrison of Lucknow
while Outram led the forces of relief.
A.C. Swinburne commenting on this poem writes “It has the shrill unmistakable accent,
not of a provincial deputy, but of a provincial school-boy”. Tennyson doesn’t address himself
to the larger ethical questions underlying European Imperialism, instead gives in to typical
Victorian imperialist sentiments. For Tennyson’s views in this matter look up Tennyson and
Imperialism in your General Introduction.
For us, Indian readers this poem is of special interest. It has for its subject matter an
important event in our recent history- the 1857 first war of Independence-which was referred
to for a long time not only by the British but also by Indian historians as the “sepoy mutiny”.
In our analysis of the poem we shall look at the colonizer’s point of view and also make this
point of departure to look at the politics underlying this point of view.
Part-I
Study Notes
Halyard: Rope, tackle for raising or lowering sail.
Summary
Part I introduces us to the subject matter of this narrative poem- as to how a small
number of British soldiers defended the garrison of Lucknow, during the siege of Lucknow
and kept the banner of England flying on the topmost roof. The tone here as elsewhere in the
poem is both celebratory and reverential. The flying banner here is symbolic of the glory of
the nation and also the courage of the soldiers. The courage of the soldiers is highlighted by
emphasizing on the “ghastliness of the siege”.
Part-II
Lawrence: Sir Henry Lawrence (died 4th July 1857)
Girdles: encircle, surround
Mule: a small burrowing mammal with dark velvety fur, a long muzzle, and very small eyes.
Summary
The works defending the garrison were very frail and at first estimate, it seemed that the
garrison could not be held for more than fifteen or twenty days. It was the sheer courage of
not only the soldiers but also their wives and children, that they defended it for more than
three months. Mention here is made of Sir Henry Lawrence and his orders “Never surrender,
I charge you, but every man die at his poet. “Most of part II in a highly dramatic style

15
emphasizes the presence of “death” all around. The word “Death” occurs as many as eleven
times, and each time seems to invade and occupy more and more of the living space of the
soldiers defending the garrison.
A clean dichotomy emerges in this section of “us” and “they”. The “us” are the “brave”
English soldiers an “they” the Indians referred to as “spies” “rebels” “murderous more” and
“dark pioneer”. The larger ethical question-what claim do the British an alien people have on
the Indian soil? – is not addressed either here or elsewhere in the entire poem. The “they” are
denied identity as patriots and their courage is rubbished and denigrated as that of “spies were
among us, their marksmen were told of our best” The Colonial double speck is evident here
in the classification of Indians as murdering rebels”, thereby conveniently effacing the entire
issue of the illegitimacy of British rule.
Part-III
Study Notes
Grape: Small cast iron balls joined together as charge for cannon.
Summary
This part of the poem graphically illustrates one particular encounter between “us” and
“they”, the “foe” blasted a mine underground and then thousands of them penetrated the
garrison and fiercely attacked from all corners. The description of the “foes” clearly echoes
Milton’s description of Lucifer and his legion of fiends in paradise Lost. Lines of distinction
are clearly drawn, the “us” – good, on the side of God-and “they” –evil, on the side of
Lucifer. They were thousand of them, like the ocean, but unlike the British soldiers they were
not bold enough and at the end the waves and waves of ‘myriad’ enemy were driven back by
a handful of British soldiers.
Part-IV & V
Summary
These two parts are mostly repetitive. The success of the British soldiers in the face of
overwhelming odds is attributed to the quality of “Englishness”. This “Englishness” is a
racial characteristic constituted in the strength to “Command, to obey, to endure”.
“Englishness” therefore becomes a superior racial quality and carries with it ideas of cultural,
mental, physical and moral superiority, which was so essential for the colonial enterprise.
This section has some repetitive battle details of the self-congratulatory back thumping kind.
As it were the women and children are not lacking in “Englishness” for there was a whisper
that if the worst were to happen “and the foe may outlive us at last./ Better to fall by the
hands that they love, then to fall into theirs.”
At the end of part V, there are three lines devoted to the praise of “faithful Indian
brothers” who fought with the “bravest among them.” The irony for an Indian reader is all too
apparent. By a strange inversion of logic peculiar to the colonizer, the traitor becomes the
“Kindly Indian brother” and the patriot becomes the traitor.
16
 Part-VI
Summary
The first line “Men will forget what we suffer and not what we do” informs the subject
matter of this part. It illustrates what the British soldiers have suffered. The labour of fifty
done by five due to their dwindling numbers, hurried coffin less burials of the dead and the
horror and trauma of living amidst death and disease and not having the time to grieve for the
dead. The “us” and “they” distinction in this part is carried on to the landscape. As against the
beauty of English “breezes of may blowing over an English field” we have the Indian
landscape with “Heat like the mouth of a hell, or a deluge of cataract skies/ stench of old offal
decaying, and infinite torment of flies.”
Part-VII
Study Note
Pibroch: a form of music for bagpipes involving elaborate variations on a theme typically
of a martial or funerary character.
Summary
The relief forces arrive led by Outram and Havelock. The valour of Havelock finds
special mention here. The poem ends with the familiar refrain “and ever aloft on the palace
roof the old banner of England blew”.
Critical Analysis
This narrative poem is a commendation in verse of the courage of a handful of British
soldiers who defended the garrison of Lucknow during the “Ghastly siege” of Lucknow. The
question here is not the courage (for whichever way one looks at it, it is indeed
commendable) but more importantly why should the British be defending something which is
not theirs in the first place? This question of course is never asked, for the European
Imperialist was convinces of the “rightness” of his being there. They considered themselves
as the enlightened race and the “white man’s burden to civilize the dark “savages”. The
colonial enterprise going by their logic was for the good of the “natives” it is this logic no
matter how lopsided and convoluted that informs the point of view of the British soldiers in
the poem. The courage of the British soldiers is attributed to the quality of Englishness. The
Indians lacking this special quality are not bold enough. The Indians are seen as “rebels”
“spies” and murderess for daring to question the grand civilizing enterprise of the colonizers
and claiming what is rightfully theirs.
In the description of the ‘rebels’ as “fiends” from hell, one can hear distinct echoes of
Milton’s description of Satan and his legion in Paradise Lost. This description by linking the
rebels to “fiends” brings into focus the moral issue of right/wrong, good/ evil and more
important obedience/ disobedience. In these paired oppositions it is not very difficult to see
who occupies the privileged position.

17
 What one sees at work here is a world view that polarizes the colonizer as white/
subject/center/superior/ good and the colonized always the other dark/peripheral/evil/inferior.
This polarization does not have any rational basis instead relies completely on values
arbitrarily to physical differences of color and facial characteristics. Fanon in his book “Black
Skin White Masks” rightly points out that the colonial discourse also recognized the essential
functionality of the value attributed to these characteristics. This can be seen in the numerous
instances wherein an assimilated colonized black could be easily persuaded to don a “white”
mask of culture and privilege. Hence the praise in part V of the “Kindly” Indian brothers who
betrayed their country are praised for their loyalty and courage.
In the ultimate analysis, it is not surprising that this rather tediously long narrative poem
does not figure in most anthologies of Tennyson. Most critics have not bothered to critically
engage with this poem probably because it is too embarrassingly colonial and not of much
literary merit. For us, however, the colonial rhetoric in the poem offers a chance to explore
and lay bare the prejudices and lies of the colonial rhetoric and re-present this event in our
history from our own perspective.

18
 Unit-4(b)
Unit-1

Robert Browning
(May 7, 1812 - Dec. 12, 1888)
Usha Anand

Introduction
Robert Browning was a major English poet of the Victorian Age. He was three years junior
of Tennyson, the other great name in Victorian poetry, Browning is known for his mastery of
dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. His most noted work was The Ring and
the Book, (1868-69); it is the story of a Roman murder trial in twelve books.
A Brief Life-Sketch
Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, London, on May 7, 1812. His father, also named
Robert Browning, was a clerk in the Bank of England and his mother Sarah Anna
Wiedemann, was of half-German half-Scottish descent. The poet’s father was a banker by
profession only; at heart he was an artist, a scholar and a collector of pictures and books. His
mother was a pious woman, an enthusiastic musician and a lover of arts. She was also a
member of the Congregational Church of York Street, and attended the church regularly with
her children. Browning inherited the avid reading habit of books of all types and on a variety
of subjects from his father and love of flowers and music from his mother. He also imbibed
evangelical Christian piety from her.
Robert Browning did not have proper formal education and was educated mostly at
home. His school room was his father’s library. His parents were different from the typical
Victorian parents. Theirs was a small family-Robert and his sister. They were encouraging,
tolerant and broad minded. His father never interfered with Browning’s reading and learning;
rather he permitted his son to read whatever he liked and also helped him to learn Greek,
Latin, French and Italian.
Browning was deeply attached to his home, parents and sister and could not stay away
from them for a long time. He gave up University education since he could not bear
separation from his parents. He left his parents only after his marriage.
Browning grew up into a self-centered youngster, did not bother about taking a job to
earn his livelihood. He was financially dependent on his father for a long time. He was
inclined to writing poems and in his earlier years he was fascinated by the works and ideas of
Shelley and the lyrics of Donne. He began to write poems and plays at a very early age and
his father financed the publication of his works. In the beginning he published his works
without giving his name to them.

19
 Browning’s first published work. PAULINE: A FRAGMENT OF A CONFESSION,
appeared in 1833. It was formally a dramatic monologue but it ‘embodied many of the poet’s
‘adolescent passions and anxieties’. John Stuart Mill criticised the author for exposing and
exploiting personal emotions and condemned his ‘intense and morbid self-consciousness’.
The poem reveals the impact of Shelley on young Browning. Mill’s criticism affected
Browning’s thinking and he resolved not to confess his own emotions in his poems and to
write as far as possible objectively that is the author’s personality would be ‘hidden’ ‘behind
the scene’.
PAULINE was followed by PARCELSUS (1835) and SORDELLO (1840). Both the
poems dealt with ‘men of great ability striving to reconcile the demands of their own
personalities with those of the world’. Although PARCELSUS was well-received,
SODRELLO was universally declared obscure and incomprehensible.
Under the influence of Charles Macready, the actor, Browning, wrote verse drama, a
form that he had already adopted for STRAFFORD (1837). During the period from 1841 to
1846 he published seven more verse plays. All his works were published under the general
title BELLS AND POMEGRANATES and printed at his family’s expenses. Some of the
notable works were PIPPA PASSES (1841), A BLOT IN SCUTCHEON (1843) and LURIA
(1846). Browning soon realised that his genius was not suited for the stage and his strength
lay in depicting “Action in Character rather than Character in Action” (from Browning’s
Preface to SORDELLO).
Some critics believe that the first phase of Browning’s life was near its end by 1845, the
year he met Elizabeth Barret. It was while Robert Browning was in Italy in the autumn of
1844, that he came upon a volume of poems by Elizabeth Barret, who was about six years his
senior in age and a poet of some repute. He was charmed by her poems and had fallen in love
with her before he actually met her. They met for the first time on May 20, 1845. They fell in
love immediately and got married secretly because of the hostile attitude of Mr. Barret
towards Browning. The Brownings settled in Italy and often visited England. Browning’s
married life was a happy one inspite of the fact they had to face financial problems and
Elizabeth did not enjoy good health. But the climate of Italy suited her, her health gradually
improved and the Brownings had a son, Pen. Browning enjoyed his stay in Italy, his friend’s
circle widened and he liked socialising and travelling.
Browning produced comparatively little poetry during his married life. Apart from a
collected edition in 1849, he published CHRISTMAS EVE AND EASTER DAY (1850).
This work critically examines different attitudes towards Christianity, perhaps having its
immediate origin in the death of his mother in 1849’. He also wrote an introductory essay
(1852) to some ‘spurious’ letters of Shelley. This essay is his only considerable work in prose
and his only piece of critical writing. In 1855 MEN AND WOMEN was published. It was a
collection of fifty poems and included (a) dramatic lyrics such ‘A Toccata of Galuppis’ (b)
the great monologues such as ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, “How It Strike A Contemporary’ and
‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ and (c) a few poems in which implicitly (‘By the Fire Side’)
20
or explicitly (‘One Word More’) he spoke of himself and his love for his wife thus breaking
the earlier vow ‘not to write about his feelings’.
MEN AND WOMEN was neither well received nor well-reviewed. The fact was ‘by the
time MEN AND WOMEN was published in 1855 Browning’s poetic achievement was
acknowledged, privately by many of the famous names in Victorian literature; publicly, they
remained silent.’ Browning was disappointed by the cold reception of his work and to get
over his despair he devoted himself to sketching and clay modelling by day and to enjoying
the company of his friends at night. Mrs. Browning’s health, which had remarkably improved
after her marriage, began to deteriorate and on June 29, 1861, she died in her husband’s arms.
In the autumn Browning returned to London with his son.
The third phase of Browning’s life began after his wife’s death. Mrs. Browning’s
indifferent health and the hostile attitude of her father had to a great extent compelled Robert
Browning to settle down in Italy. The climate of Italy had suited his wife and he had also felt
contented to be amidst natural and historical surroundings. But his heart always yearned for
his parental home, his parents and friends, although the Brownings did visit England
frequently. Browning felt relieved to be back to England.
On his return he prepared his wife’s LAST POEMS for the press and applied himself to
the education of his son and generally avoided socializing. Gradually he came out of the shell
and began to move in society. Another collection of his poems appeared in 1863 but it did not
include PAULINE. His next book of poems DRAMATIS PERSONNE (1864) became a
success—at last he had won a measure of popular recognition. This collection included ‘Abt
Vogler’, ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ and ‘Sludge The Medium’.
His greatest work, THE RING AND THE BOOK, published in 1868-69, was based on
the proceedings in a murder trial in Rome in 1868. It was grand both in plan and execution
and was received with great enthusiasm. Browning became one of the most important literary
figures of the day and was the most sought after literary person not only in London but also in
France, Scotland, Switzerland and Italy where his friends lived and invited him.
In his last years Browning wrote with great fluency on contemporary themes. The most
important works were either long narrative or dramatic poems. Between 1888-89 his
POETICAL WORKS appeared in sixteen volumes, the last edition was supervised by
Browning himself. Browning spent his last days in Venice in Italy and died on December 12,
1888. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
×××

21
 Unit-2
My Last Duchess
(The Poem)
FERRARA
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now : Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there: so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ‘twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek : perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps
Over my Lady’s wrist too much”, of “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat”; such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart–how shall I say?–too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The drooping of the daylight in the West,
22
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,-good; but thanked
Somehow–I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; there you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”-and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
–E’en then would be some stooping, and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, Sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile ? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise ? We’ll meet T
he company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your Master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

23
 (a) A Discussion on The Poem

Contents
 Introduction
 Study Notes
 A Detailed Study of the Poem
 Summing up
 On My Last Duchess

Introduction
My Last Duchess was first published with the contrasting poem Count Gismond, under the
caption Italy and France. Later it was included in Browning’s collection of poems entitled
Dramatic Lyrics (1842). In this dramatic monologue the Duke of Ferrara is the speaker.
Browning’s Duke is created from the poet’s study of a number of noble Italian characters but
he, closely resembles Alfonso II, fifth and last Duke of Ferrara (1533-99) and the last of the
main branch of the powerful Este family, whose history Browning had studied while
compiling material for his long poem about Italy entitled Sordello (1840). In 1558, Alfonso
married Lucrezia, fourteen year old daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, duke of Florence.
Lucrezia died in 1861 under mysterious circumstances.
The poem reveals the character of the speaker as well as that of the last Duchess. It opens
in a dramatic way—as if we are watching a play being staged. The Duke draws the curtain of
the portrait of his last Duchess and introduces the listener to the Duchess, who looks ‘as if
alive’ in the portrait. He talks about the artist’s talent and the beauty of the painting. He then
discusses the character—the behaviour and nature of his last Duchess and tries to impress
upon the envoy that she deserved to be killed. After he has described, indirectly, his
relationship with his last Duchess, he tells the envoy what he expects from the count whose
daughter he wishes to marry. By the time his speech ends, we known that the Duke and the
envoy have gone down to meet the company and the painting which we saw in the beginning
is a special possession of the Duke painted on the wall of the hall or a room in the first storey.
Read the poem before you read the comments in this lesson. Observe (1) how the poem
begins (2) how does the Duke address the envoy or the listener (3) why does he narrate the
story of the Duchess (4) why does he get her killed, (5) was he justified in killing her and (6)
what is the significance of the statue of ‘Neptune taming the seahorse’?
Who do you like more the Duchess or the Duke? Why?
Study Notes
on the wall : The portrait was made on the wall and covered with a curtain.

24
Fra Pandolf : Fra means brother, that is, a monk. In Renaissance many monks belonging to
various Churches or Christian sects were often great painters and artists also.
The Duke does not reveal the name of the real painter. He deliberately gives
a fictitious name—the painter was a monk also. Being a possessive and
jealous person the Duke could not have allowed any other painter except a
monk to observe the beauty of his last Duchess and paint her portrait.
a wonder : The portrait is a wonderful or marvelous piece of art. The Duke is admiring
and praising the artist’s extraordinary skill. He could paint such a lovely
portrait in which the Duchess appears as if alive-life-like picture it is.
by design : deliberately; purposely.
the pictured countenance : painted face.
The depth and passion of its earnest glance : The expressive eyes, which revealed her
profound feelings and strong emotions—both her joy and shyness.
since none puts...but I : The Duke boasts of his superiority and his authority. None is
permitted to draw the certain only he can do it. The portrait is his exclusive
possession. His arrogance, egoism and jealous possessiveness are
highlighted.
durst : dared.
The Duke’s words reveal that the envoy was overwhelmed by ‘the depth and passion of
its earnest glance’ and was curious to know how such a glance came there. The Duke here
faithfully makes an effort to manipulate the envoy. First he shows him the portrait, then he
very politely requests him to sit down and look at her. He himself decides what the envoy is
supposed to observe in her—and when the envoy seems to be inquisitive, he supplies the
answer.
The envoy has already been over powered by the Duke—he is a privileged person,
because the Duke has drawn the curtain for him, and then he is treated with respect *please
you sit and at the same time he is warned— he is not the first to ask’ and none has dared to
ask him. The Duke anticipates the question and supplies the answer. The listener in the poem
is a mute observer, who is being closely watched and weighed by the speaker.
It was not her.....cheek : Is the Duke complaining or appreciating his wife?
“Her mantle...too much.” Her wrist is too beautiful to be hidden; a compliment to the
Duchess.
Paint : Paint is personified here. It also means the painter.
“Paint...threat.” The painter admits that he cannot find suitable colours to capture or
reproduce the half flush on her cheek and neck.
Half-flush : Mild and delicate redness caused by a momentary blush.

25
perhaps...spot of joy : Even a chance compliment or remark made by the painter about her
dress or the beauty of her face was enough to invite a blushing response from the
Duchess.
it was all one! What was all one?
officious fool : a stupid fellow who offers his services where they are neither wanted or
asked. A remark of contempt.
ranked : classed.
My gift...name : Lucrezia’s family, the Medici, were comparative upstarts; the name being
only a few generations old at the time. The Duke is proud of his family and his
ancestors. He treats his last Duchess with contempt. Don’t you observe that the
Duke here once again shows his superiority and arrogance. The envoy must be
grateful to him for the Duke has allowed him to see the portrait, similarly his last
Duchess should have shown her gratitude to him because by marrying her (whose
family were comparative upstarts) he had raised her to very high status. But
unfortunately she did not do so. And so the Duke was annoyed with her.
Who’d stoop...trifling? : In normal circumstances we expect a husband to be frank and open
with his wife. The Duke could have easily told his wife what he expected of her and
perhaps she would have changed herself. But to the autocrat this gesture would have
been a mark of degradation. It was below his dignity to tell her where and when she
was behaving ‘foolishly’.
had you...in speech : The Duke’s hypocrisy is underlined. The monologue highlights the
speaker’s sophistication and skilful use of words and phrases to put across his ideas.
But the speaker does not want to admit that he is a skilful orator.
disgusts : annoys or irritates. lessoned: tutored Her wits to yours: She would have listened to
him quietly, without arguing. In the days Duke, (in Italy) women and wives were
treated as chattels or slaves by their husbands. They had no right to speak in self-
defense, argue or disagree. The Duke did not tell her what she should do because it
would have been ‘stooping’–some sort of surrendering to his wife.
This grew : The Duchess did not discriminate between her husband and others–treated
everyone alike, mixed with them freely, was always cheerful and friendly, admired
what ever she saw. Her smiles, glances, blushes were not the ‘exclusive’
possessions of the Duke.
I gave commands : a very ambiguous statement. The Duke is deliberately ‘concise’ and
‘secretive’. Much later Browning said, “The commands were that she should be put
to death”, then added, “or he might have had her shut up in convent.”
all smiles stopped all together : We can easily now interpret the meaning of commands. The
Duke got her killed. This comes as a ‘shock’ to us and jolts us. The Duke who, as a
polite and gentle person (who requests the envoy to observe the portrait) and has
26
 tried to highlight the goodness, generosity, simplicity and innocence of his wife, in
order to condemn her–rather ‘damn’ her and to justify his reaction to her behaviour–
emerges as a sinister person here. His possessiveness, jealousy and arrogance so
much over-whelm him that he gets her murdered. A coldblooded murderer he is.
Imagine the plight of the listener—the envoy after listening to the words of the
Duke. He is almost ‘killed here by the Duke. He will never be able to communicate
to anyone what the Duke has told him. He has been “tamed” now as the Duke tamed
his last Duchess by murdering her. The Duke shows no repentance nor any feeling
of guilt—very calmly he commands the envoy “will’t please you rise?”
There she stands...alive : These lines echo lines two and four. Earlier the lines meant that the
portrait of the Duchess was so skillfully and beautifully made that she ‘looks a
living person’ in it and we are made to believe that the Duke perhaps loved his wife.
But by the time we reach these lines we realise that our first impression was a
wrong one. The Duke’s ego is satisfied that the living wife—whom he could not
possess—has been reduced to a portrait–a rare piece of art. Do you think that the
Duke has really subued her? No, the Duke is very much conscious of his failure, his
helplessness. In spite of his superior authority, he could not subdue the free and
cheerful spirit of his last Duchess and even now in the portrait she appears as if
alive’–the only consolation is that her portrait none can see without his permission.
We pity him for his self-deception and admire him for his superb skill in
manipulating the envoy. The purpose is served, he expects the new Duchess to
behave properly, and so the Duke requests the envoy to go with him downstairs to
meet the company below’.
munificence : generosity
warrant : guarantee.
pretence : claim
avowed : promised
object : aim
I repeat...my object : In these lines Browning reveals the identity of the listener and the
purpose of his visit. We also discover that this fabulously rich Italian Renaissance
Duke is a greedy person. He expects a handsome dowry.
Notice : observe, while getting down he draws the attention of the envoy to the statue of
Neptune.
Neptune : Old Italian deity, identified with the Greek sea-god Poseidon, creator of the horse.
a sea-horse : Fabulous beast, half-fish and half-horse.
a rarity : a rare piece of sculpture.

27
Claus of Innsbruck: an imaginary sculptor. The mention of Innsbruck, the seat of the
Tyroleon Count, is calculated to flatter.
Taming : a very significant word, suggestive of the temperament and attitude of the Duke.
The Duke, although a patron and lover of painting and sculpture, is an inhuman
character, he has no love for anyone, except perhaps for his own self and his family
name. He treats people with contempt and enjoys reducing them to non-entity—
taming them. He tried to tame his last Duchess but failed, he expects to tame the
new Duchess and has already captivated the envoy. He is fiercely possessive.
Do you think the envoy will be able to narrate the whole story to his count and his
daughter? Why can’t he tell?
The Development of Thought
(1) In the first thirteen lines the Duke shows the painting of the Duchess, made by Fra
Pandolf, calls it a ‘wonder’. Then he makes the envoy sit down and observe ‘the
pictured countenance’. ‘The depth and passion of its earnest glance!’ He indirectly
intimidates the listener, he dare not ask questions. The painting is a treasured possession
of the Duke and none can see it without his permission.
(2) In Lines 13-22 we learn what caused the glance—why that half-blush, or half flush and
smile on the face is there.
(3) Then the Duke in lines 22-5 talks about the nature and behaviour of the Duchess. She
was easily impressed, looked at and appreciated everything, did not distinguish between
the Duke’s gift and a fool’s gift, blushed easily, smiled at everyone, thanked people
‘somehow’, what he disliked in her was that she did not show any respect to his nine-
hundred-years-old name.
(4) In lines 35-47 we are told that the Duke would not stoop to blame her for her
“shortcomings’ and so he gave commands and all her smiles stopped forever. In a few
words he describes his ‘act’, shows no regrets.
(5) After justifying his act, the Duke commands the envoy to rise and go with him ‘down’ to
meet the company. He also talks about his marriage and dowry. And he does not forget
to draw the attention of the envoy to the rare piece of artefact ‘the statue of Neptune
taming the sea-horse.’ The Duke is the Neptune who earlier tamed the seahorse—the
last Duchess by getting her killed and now has tamed the envoy.
A Detailed Study of the Poem
The monologue My Last Duchess begins in a dramatic way. The Duke removes the
curtain of the portrait of the last Duchess painted on the wall and by design tells him (the
envoy) to look at her ‘as if she is were alive’. Immediately he informs him that it is a
wonderful piece of art, painted by Fra Pandolf—implying that this marvelous painting has
been made by a painter-monk, not by an ordinary artist, since he (the Duke) would not allow
any stranger to see the pictured countenance, so how could any stranger except a painter-
28
monk have been allowed to see the living woman. This pictured face with its deeply
passionate and earnest glance is the Duke’s treasured possession now. Only the Duke himself
can remove the curtain, which he has drawn for him. The Duke thus makes the listener realise
that he is confronting an egoist (but I), an autocrat.
It seems the inquisitive look on the face of the listener makes the Duke comment that he
(the listener) is not the first to turn towards him in order to know why or how such a glance
came there. Every one who has seen the portrait is curious to know about the beautiful
expression on the face of the Duchess, but none has dared to ask the Duke. The envoy does
not speak. The Duke is trying to give a new meaning to the portrait.
Then the Duke explains what caused the glance? He concedes that the Duchess did blush
whenever he was with her. But his presence was not the only cause of the spot of joy. He
further tells what could possibly have made her blush. ‘Perhaps the word indicates that he
himself is not very sure about the reason, may be the causes mentioned here are mere
guesses. Is he telling the truth? Or does he mean to say that the Duchess was not a good
woman? Does it reveal the Duke’s ignorance about the Duchess’s character? Certainly not.
He thinks that probably the painter told the Duchess that her wrist was too beautiful to be
hidden under her cloak or he was unable to reproduce the half-flush dying along her throat in
proper colours—such casual remarks she took to be a gesture of courtesy and she blushed.
We observe in the first twenty lines that the Duke first draws the attention of the envoy
to the artistic beauty of the painting, then he highlights the depth and passion of her earnest
glance which seem to bewitch the onlookers and compel them to know what might be its
cause. The Duke is performing two tasks at the same time. He is not only explaining why the
spot of joy is there on the pictured countenance but also manipulating the envoy by
reminding him that he is not the first person to whom the Duke is showing the portrait nor is
he the first to ask him ‘thus’ rather he is one of the strangers’, who dare not ask him. Thus the
Duke subdues (the curiosity of the envoy) and silences him. The envoy must accept the
explanation he supplies. The Duke’s politeness is a show. He appears to be a hypocrite, when
he expresses his inability to describe the nature and character of his last Duchess.
She had
A heart...how shall I say?...too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whatever
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Is he appreciating or disapproving her cheerfulness, her friendliness and her innocence?
He does not pass any judgement, rather leaves the judgement on the listener and the reader.
Immediately after presenting her gregariousness he utters ‘Sir’ t was all one!’ The
curiosity of the listener is aroused—what was all one? Then we learn that his Duchess did not
discriminate between a gift (a necklace perhaps) given to her by the Duke and the bough of
cherries offered to her by some officious fool. The light of the setting sun and riding a mule

29
made her as happy as did the Duke’s gift. She approved of or blushed at each and everything
without any discrimination. The Duke then admits that he did not mind her thanking people
but her way of showing her gratitude made him feel that she ranked his gift of nine-hundred-
years-old name with anyone’s gift. Is the Duke complaining or showing his resentment here?
The Duke is very skillfully trying to prove that the Duchess was not a suitable partner and is
also establishing his authority.
The Duke describes the Duchess’s behaviour—not showing due respect to him and his
status—as a sort of trifling. Do you think he is revealing his true feelings? The Duke felt
below his dignity to tell the Duchess what he did not like in her and where she exceeded or
fell short of accepted norms befitting a Duke’s wife. Even if a person endowed with the
power of skilful speech had tried to tutor or lesson her, she would not have argued or
defended herself. The Duke did not possess the skill in speech. He did not want to stoop and
will never stoop. When he found her behaviour unbearable he gave commands and all her
smiles stopped for ever. The Duke here has risen in stature—he is all powerful—a deity now.
He has bracketed her smiles and as her smile has been captured in the portrait, he is
relieved of all his tension. The real Duchess is dead but the Duchess in portrait appears alive
and she is an extraordinary piece of art–his exclusive possession. It is interesting to observe
that the painting was made when the Duchess was alive and the Duke, after getting her killed,
tries to manipulate the painting—a new meaning and significance to the smile of the painted
countenance is being given here.
The statement—‘I gave commands. Then all smiles stopped together’—is one of the
subtlest concentrated ‘utterances’ of Browning. Very skillfully the Duke informs the envoy
why he got rid of the Duchess, but how, he needn’t explain. Once again he says ‘There she
stands /As if alive’. The living Duchess could not be possessed she was a free soul but the
Duchess in the portrait is a captured being. The envoy has learned from the Duke about the
nature and character of the Duchess, what he expected of her, how his desires remained
unfulfilled, why he could not communicate with her, and what led to her death. Like the
envoy, Browning expects the reader, to understand what exactly the Duke desires to convey,
and see the scene as he (the speaker) wants the envoy to see. What the reader must appreciate
is the way the Duke manipulates the envoy, who has come with the marriage proposal of his
master’s—(the count’s)—daughter. The envoy as well as the reader should judge the Duchess
as the Duke wants them to do.
The conversational style of the poem, with pauses, brackets and hyphens, unfolds the
character of the speaker as well as that of his last Duchess. The Duke’s attempt at justifying
his action to the envoy is successful—he does win over his confidence, because the listener
does not dare to ask him how he got the Duchess killed. By the time the Duke completes the
story of the Duchess, the listener must have been completely subdued. In the fate of the
Duchess he might have seen his own fate, if he surrender himself to this superior person,
what would happen to him?

30
 By and by the Duke succeeds in establishing his superiority over the Duchess as well as
the envoy. He has skillfully or by design over-powered them.
Being convinced that he has succeeded in (a) winning over the confidence of the envoy,
who will not now dare to create problems in his marriage and (b) justifying his action to him,
the Duke once again repeats in a triumphant note that there she stands as if alive as a
treasured possession of the Duke. He feels flattered to realise that although he could not
bracket the smiles of his living Duchess for himself alone, by getting her killed and having
her blush and smile captured in the painting he has bracketed them for his pleasure. He boasts
to the envoy how he gave commands and all her smiles stopped for ever—(all her misplaced
smiles were put to an end) and so now her smiling portrait is his wonderful possession. By
reducing her to a portrait he has framed her, snatched away all her freedom. She is now an
object—a thing, a piece of art.
He politely requests the envoy to rise and go along with him downstairs to meet the
company who are waiting for him. Before they go down together he does not forget to
mention that his just pretence of dowry, he is confident, will not be disallowed since he is
well aware of his count’s munificence. He has not only avowed to marry the count’s daughter
but he also expects a handsome dowry. His greed is revealed here.
What shocks the reader is the complacent way the Duke, immediately after talking about
the death of his Duchess, deliberates upon his marriage and dowry.
As they are going down, to prove once again his authority and superiority, the Duke
draws the attention of the envoy to a rare piece of art—a statue of Neptune taming a sea-
horse—made for him by Claus of Innsbruck. The marble statue of Neptune taming a sea-
horse is not merely an artefact decorating the Duke’s palace in the poem but has also
symbolic implication. The Duke is a Neptune who tamed the sea-horse ‘the dead Duchess’—
he is an autocrat and dictator who enjoys taming people reducing them to mere commodity.
In a way the statue of Neptune taming the sea-horse sums up the character of the Duke, who
has always considered himself to be a deity-a God to be worshipped, a powerful master to be
obeyed by all.
Browning’s My Last Duchess is a masterpiece—a concise and perfect dramatic
monologue. It is a short poem, where the Duke’s and the Duchess’s character are skillfully
revealed. In an effort to malign the character of his last Duchess, the Duke unwittingly or
unknowingly perhaps reveals his own character, he emerges as a foil to his Duchess. The
reader may sympathise with him for he belongs to that Italian period when women were
treated as slaves and they had to slave upon their husbands. Consequently being a product of
his own age the autocrat Duke could not appreciate the cheerful friendly disposition of the
Duchess. She was an emblem of innocence, without any false sense of prestige. She
appreciated everything and responded to everyone.
The Duchess’s friendly nature, which failed to discriminate between the status of the
Duke and that of an officious fool really annoyed and hurt him, although he does not admit it.

31
He very much knew that she loved him, valued his gift and smiled and blushed at him
whenever she saw him. But that was not enough. What irritated him was that she was a free
being who was pleased with everyone and everything. Naturally, when he was fully
convinced that she could not be dominated upon and it would be stooping if he tried to tell
her her weaknesses, he decided to punish her. His strong egoism, his sense of superiority, his
obsessive possessiveness and his pride in his family overruled him and he gave commands to
stop all smiles. Even after getting her killed, he can’t have peace of mind. He has her smiling
portrait in his special room where no one can enter and see it without his permission. He
believes in taming people, his last Duchess could not be tamed so she was killed.
What could be the purpose of the Duke in showing the portrait and talking about his
relationship with her—discussing her spot of joy and smiles to the envoy? Like The
Porphyria’s Lover the Duke seems to be filled with a sense of guilt-although none of them
admit this truth. The Duke is a Freudian character—an obsessive character—who enjoys re-
enacting a family drama and a crime, in order to convince the audience and the spectator as
well as himself that he is innocent.
By setting the stage and making the envoy see the portrait and hear the story of the
Duchess the Duke tries to relive his domestic life—his life with the dead Duchess. This must
have been a painful experience for the Duke for in real life he has not been able to subdue the
Duchess—his domestic life must have been an unhappy one. By showing his superiority in
this poem the Duke is perhaps trying to get over his despair. In a few appropriate words the
poem reveals the setting of the Duke’s palace, the artefacts which decorate the walls and the
house. By making the envoy sit, rise and go down together, the poem enables us to visualise
the whole scene with its actions.
Apart from being a lover of art—Duke is also a clever manipulator. He manipulates the
envoy very cleverly without his realising it and tames him in the end. It is obvious the envoy
is made to see ‘a play’ with a purpose—the purpose is (a) to warn the new Duchess about
what the Duke expects of her (b) to justify to him that the speaker (the Duke the dramatist
and producer) is innocent and the Duchess deserved the ‘end’, and (c) to tame the envoy so
that he helps the Duke to marry the count’s daughter. In order to win over the envoy the Duke
pretends to be courteous to him, he makes him feel that he is a privileged visitor since he (the
Duke) has given him a golden opportunity to see the portrait of the smiling Duchess, a rare
piece of art.
The silent listener is a spectator also—the Duke’s gesture of threat implied in words like
“as they would ask we, if they durst” and “I gave commands/Then all smiles stopped
together” must have intimidated him. Once Duke is assured that the envoy has been
‘captured’, he changes the tone of his speech. The drama is over and now they must go down
together. The producer and the director of this play—showing the portrait—is a commentator
also.

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 The words ‘I repeat’ and ‘as avowed’ are very meaningful in the poem. The words at
once draw our attention to what was happening before the Duke showed the portrait of the
Duchess. The envoy had come to negotiate the marriage of the count’s daughter with the
Duke. And the display of the portrait is a very important aspect of that negotiation. The Duke
has successfully established his superiority and emphatically asserted his status. By revealing
the portrait of the Duchess and talking about her the Duke has won the confidence of the
envoy and thus assured the count’s daughter and the dowry in marriage as well as the blind
obedience of his new wife.
The poem compels the reader not only to understand the motive of the speaker, but also
evaluate him, how far he is able to judge himself. This dramatic monologue is an attempt at
self-justification, the Duke is justifying his action not only to the listener and the reader, but
also to himself. He is able to self-convince himself that the Duck deserved the death and he
can marry again. He is not guilty. He is all powerful–a God Neptune
We pity the Duke because he fails to realise what a cold blooded murderer he is. In spite
of his being a great appreciator of art, a man of authority, he is a base person, possessive,
greedy, jealous, vain, proud, arrogant, autocrat and boastful, while the Duchess was innocent,
cheerful, friendly and simple minded. Perhaps he has no human feelings—he gets her killed.
He is a skillfully created detestable character, like Porphyria’s lover.
In My Last Duchess we also observe that the male protagonist is the manipulator in so far
as he has provided the portrait with a meaning that it did not maintain at the time that it was
painted. In this sense, the Duke asserts power. However, he demonstrates his weaknesses as
he addresses the portrait, confusing the once-living woman with her painted image. His
animation of the Duchess reflects his own anxiety of dealing with the changing identity he
can’t control’.
In Porphyrias’ Lover and My Last Duchess ‘women function as tools which the male
constituents utilise in an attempt to feel more whole. She is presented as the reason for his
downfall, a hindrance to his success, because he is enthralled by her. If, in actuality, the
female is responsible for the action taking place, in essence, isn’t she powerful? On the other
hand, since Browning, the author, is a man manipulating the course of events, does
masculinity still maintain the assertive position?” These are some of the queries which seem
to trouble modern critics when they tend to take the two poems essentially depicting the
power struggle between man and woman. Is Browning trying to justify the actions of
Porphyria’s lover and the Duke, or is he simply giving us an insight into the psychology of
the two criminals?
Whatever may have been the intention of the poet, the two poems are wonderful study of
the psychology of the abnormal persons—obsessive persons, who always elude themselves
by believing whatever they think and do is right.
A dramatic monologue presupposes, that the reader must approach the speaker
sympathetically, so that he is able to adopt his view point as his entry into the poem and the

33
aim of the monologue is to give him “facts from within”. And what makes this monologue a
perfect piece is the logical way the speaker tries to build up his case, how skillfully he makes
the listener and the reader see the whole drama from his angle and without giving expression
to his inner most feeling of disappointment in his last marriage, he establishes the Duchess
‘as a villain’ responsible for his sinister action. And then this lover of art, after reducing the
Duchess to a portrait, appreciates her beauty depicted in it.
According to Robert Langbaum My Last Duchess illustrates “the working of sympathy,
just because the duke’s egregious villainy makes especially apparent the split between moral
judgement and our actual feeling for him. The poem carries to the limit an effect peculiarly
the genius of the dramatic monologue—I mean the effect created by the tension between
sympathy and moral judgement. Although we seldom meet again such as unmitigated villain
as the Duke, it is safe to say that most successful dramatic monologues deal with speakers
who are in some way reprehensible”.
Summing up
My Last Duchess is one of the greatest and most representative dramatic monologues
written by Browning. It is a spell-bounding psychological dramatic monologue. The poet
skillfully analyses the Duke’s character in the fifty-six lines. The Duke is a typical
Renaissance character with Machiavellian traits. He attempts to malign the character of the
Duchess, but unfortunately we begin to like her for her friendliness, innocence, childlike
disposition and cheerfulness. The Duke has an exaggerated sense of dignity. He fails to
appreciate her modesty, simplicity and fidelity. He is an obsessive character, jealous and
possessive, self-centered and high-opinionated. He can’t tolerate his wife smiling at others
and accepting gifts from them. Inspite of his ‘politeness’ towards the envoy, he appears to be
a hypocrite—he establishes his superiority over the envoy from the very beginning by
ordering him to sit down and observe the painting, intimidating him that none dare ask him
how that spot of joy came on the painted face. He contemptuously looks at the person who
offers a gift to the Duchess, and he has slight regard for the last Duchess. He is avaricious
also. He treated the last Duchess with contempt that is why he would not stoop’ to blame her
and lesson her. The free friendly nature of his wife annoyed him and he got her killed. He is
one of the great reprehensible characters created by Browning.
The poem is written in heroic-couplet. The words and phrases used by the Duke befit his
character and stature—polished, and sophisticated is his style—apt words are used to stress
his views—pictured countenance’, ‘her mantle laps over my lady’s wrist too much’ ‘spot of
joy’, ‘my favour at her breast’ are clear word pictures presented with compactness. The
setting, the Duke’s palace, its furnishings, artefacts are beautifully presented in a few
words—with a hint here and a hint there.
“The scene and the actors in this little Italian drama stand out before us with the utmost
natural clearness.”

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On My Last Duchess as a Poem
My Last Duchess is a dramatic monologue. “The essence and advantage of the dramatic
monologue” according to Roy. E. Gridley, “as Browning came to practise it, was that the
words of a single speaker (who was not the poet) could convey to the reader the setting, a
present action, and a sense of who was listening to the speaker. The act of speech itself, then,
reveals to the reader the speaker’s character... The action in the dramatic monologue is
mental, psychological, and verbal.”
Browning wrote Porphyria’s Lover, My Last Duchess and the Bishop Orders this Tomb
at St. Praxed’s Church between 1834 and 1845. Porphyria’s Lover is technically a soliloquy
rather than a dramatic monologue, because there is no listener present in the poem.
Roy E. Gridley writes, “My Last Duchess (1842) represents a definite advance towards
dramatic monologues which convey a clearer and more convincing illusion of objective
reality. The setting is more precise, the Duke’s motive for speaking is more definite, the
language is more natural and the person to whom the Duke speaks is more openly and
dramatically indicated. The device of including someone within the poem, someone to the
utterance, perhaps more than any other single element, accounts for the greater sense of
reality. The speech of Portphyria’s Lover has its own mad logic, but then it need not be too
clear. In contrast, the Duke uses his speech as a keen instrument of policy: he wishes to relay
certain information to a particular man whom he confidently hopes to manipulate. He is a
man talking to another man. The heightened language, the regular cadences, and insistent
rhyme of Porphyria’s Lover give way to a less artificial, more conversational style:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder now: “Fra Pandolf’s” hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
The listener is asked to ‘sit and look at her’ while the Duke describes the painting and the
character of the Duchess. As the poem closes the listener will be asked politely to rise from
the chair and walk side-by-side with the Duke down the stairs, pausing for a moment to
notice a bronze statue. In a few brief but vivid phrases Browning has described the physical
action of the poem and suggested both the floor plan and the furnishings of the Duke’s
palace. He has also displayed the Duke’s confident superiority over the man to whom he is
speaking.
The listener is an envoy from the count, whose daughter will be the next Duchess. So,
the Duke carefully tailors his speech to lay down a code of behaviour for the new Duchess by
describing the flaws in the character of the previous one. He speech is filled with calculated
pauses and even with a mock-humility about his power as a rhetorician.
She thanked men,—good, but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
35
 My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such, and say...
As so often in Browning’s monologues, here the Duke can carry on a kind of dialogue
with his listener by anticipating the questions or responses of the listener. “Who’d stoop to
blame this sort of trifling?” It is a concise and economical device for gaining the advantage of
dialogue while retaining the advantage of a single speaker. Gesture and setting exhibit a
similar economy. The Bronze statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse, which the envoy is asked
to notice, supplies a detail of stage setting, acts as a reminder that the Duke intends to ‘tame’
the new Duchess, and underscores the Duke’s pride in possession. In the course of his short
utterance, the Duke has revealed himself to the envoy and to the reader; his pride in station
and possession has led him to treat people as possessions, objects, things. The last Duchess
becomes a mere art-object and the envoy a tool to be used. At the same time, by sketching out
the Duchess’ warm and almost democratic sentiments, the Duke has created for the reader a
standard, a foil against which his own character can be judged. The fact that he is an
aristocrat of the Italian Renaissance, accustomed to autocratic power, may mitigate the
harshness of the reader’s judgement. But the Duke is also a representative of the
dehumanizing forces at work in 1840s; My Last Duchess is an oblique version of Emerson’s
open complaint of 1847: “Things are in the saddle/And ride mankind’.
(from Roy E. Gridley’s Browning published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in association
with Blackie, India)

36
 Unit-3

Fra Lippo Lippi

(The Poem)
I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave !
You need not clap your torches to my face,
Zooks, what’s to blame? You think you see a monk !
What, it’s past midnight, and you go the rounds,
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar ?
The Carmine’s my cloister: hunt it up,
Do,—harry out, if you must show your zeal,
Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole,
And nips each softling of a wee white mouse.
Weke, weke, that’s crept to keep him company !
Aha, you know your betters? Then, you’ll take
Your hand away that’s fiddling on my throat,
And please to know me likewise. Who am I?
Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend
Three streets off–he’s a certain...how d’ye call ?
Troll Master-a...Cosimo of the Medici,
In this house that caps the corner. oh! you were best!
Remember and tell me, the day you’re hanged,
How you affected such a gullet’s-gripe !
But you, sir, it concerns you your knaves
Pick up a manner nor discredit you.
Zooks, are we pilchards, that they sweep the streets
And count fair prize what comes into their net?
He’s Judas to a tittle, that man is!
Just such a face ! why, sir, you make amends.
Lord, I’m not angry! Bid your hangdogs go
Drink out this quarter-florin to the health
37
Of the munificent House that harbours me
(And many more beside, lads ! More beside !)
And all’s come square again. I’d like his face—
His, elbowing on his comrade in the door
With the pike and lantern,—for the slave that holds
John Baptist’s head a-dangle by the hair
With one hand (*look you, now,’ as who should say)
And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped !
It’s not your chance to have a bit of chalk,
A wood-coal or the like ? Or you should see !
Yes, I’m the painter, since you style me so.
What, brother Lippo’s doings, up and down,
You know them and they take you ? like enough!
I saw the proper twinkle in your eye—
‘Tell you, I liked your looks at very first.
Let’s sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch.
Here’s spring come on the nights one makes up bands
To roam the town and sing out carnival,
And I’ve’ been three weeks shut within my mew,
A-painting for the great man, saints and saints it no
And saints again. I could not paint all night—
Ouf ! I leaned out of window for fresh air.
There came a hurry of feet and little feet,
A sweep of lute-strings, laughs and whifts of song,—
Flower o’ the broom,
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb !
Flower o’ the quince,
I let Lisa go, and what good’s in life since ?
Flower o’ the thyme—and so on. Round they went
Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter

38
Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight—three slim shapes—
And a face that looked up...zooks, sir, flesh and blood,
That’s all I’m made of ! Into shreds it went,
Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,
All the bed-furniture—a dozen knots
There was a ladder ! Down I let myself,
Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped.
And after them. I came up with the fun
Hard by Saint Laurence, hail fellow, well met,—
Flower o’ the rose,
If I’ve been merry, what matter who knows?
And so as I was stealing back again
To get to bed and have a bit of sleep
Ere I rise up to-morrow and go work
On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast
With his great round stone to subdue the flesh,
You snap me of the sudden. Ah, I see !
Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your head—
Mine’s shaved,—a monk, you say—the sting’s in that !
If Master Cosimo announced himself,
Mum’s the word naturally; but a monk !
Come, what an I a beast for ? tell us, now !
I was a baby when my mother died
And father died and left me in the street.
I starved there, God-knows how, a year or two
On fig skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks,
Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day
My stomach being empty as your hat,
The wind doubled me up and down I went,
Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,

39
(Its fellow was a stringer as I knew)
And so along the wall, over the bridge,
By the straight cut to the convent. Six words, there,
While I stood munching my first bread that month :
“So, boy, you’re minded,’ quoth the good fat father
Wiping his own mouth, ’twas refection-time,—
‘To quit this very miserable world ?
Will you renounce’... ‘The mouthful of bread?’ thought I,
By no means ! ‘Brief, they made a monk of me;
I did renounce the world, its pride and greed,
Palace, farm, villa, shop and banking-house,
Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici
Have given their hearts to all at eight years old.
Well, sir, I found in time, you may be sure,
‘Twas not for nothing-the good bellyful,
The warm serge and the rope that goes all round,
And day-long blessed idleness beside !
‘Let’s see what the urchin’s fit for that came next
Not overmuch their way, I must confess.
Such a to-do ! they tried me with their books.
Lord, they’d have taught me Latin in pure waste !
Flower o’ the clove.
All the Latin I construe is, ‘amo’ I love !
But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets
Eight years together, as my fortune was,
Watching folk’s faces to know who will fling
The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires,
And who will curse or kick him for his pains—
Which gentleman processional and fine,
Holding a candle to the Sacrament,

40
Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch
The droppings of the wax to sell again,
Or holla for the Eight and have him whipped,—
How say I ?-nay, which dog bites, which lets drop
His bone from the heap of offal in the street,—
Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,
He learns the look or things and none the less
For admonitions from the hunger-pinch.
I had a store of such remarks, be sure,
Which, after I found leisure, turned to use:
I drew men’s faces on my copy-books,
Scrawled them within the antiphonary’s marge,
Joined legs and arms to the long music-notes,
Found eyes and nose and chin for A.s and B.s,
And made a string of pictures of the world
Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun,
On the wall, the bench, the door. The monks looked black.
‘Nay.’ quoth the Prior, ‘turn him out, d’ye say ?
In no wise. Lose a crow and catch a lark.
What if at last we get our man of parts,
We Carmelites, like those Camaldolese
And Preaching Friars, to do our church,
And put the front on it that ought to be!
And hereupon they bade me daub away,
Thank you ! my head being crammed, their walls a blank,
Never was such prompt disemburdening.
First, every sort of monk, the black and white,
I drew them, fat and lean; then, folks at church,
From good old gossips waiting to confess
Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends—

41
To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim’s son
Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,
Signing himself with the other because of Chirst
(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this
After the passion of a thousand years)
Till some poor girl, her apron o’er her head
(Which the intense eyes looked through), came at eve
On tip-toe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,
Her pair of earnings and a bunch of flowers
(The brute took growling), prayed, and then was gone.
I painted all, then cried “tis ask and have—
Choose, for more’s ready!”—laid the ladder flat
And showed my covered bit of cloister-wall.
The monks closed in a circle and praised loud
Till checked, taught what to see and not to see,
Being simple bodies,—“that’s the very man !
Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog !
That woman’s like the Prior’s niece who comes
To care about his asthma; it’s the life !”
But there my triumph’s straw-fire flared and funked—
Their betters took their turn to see and say
The Prior and the learned pulled a face
And stopped all that in no time. “How ? what’s here?
Quite from the mark of paining, bless us all !
Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true
As much as pea and pea ! it’s devil’s-game !

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Your business is not to catch men with show,
With homage to the perishable clay,
But lift them over it, ignore it all,
Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.
Your business is to paint the souls of men—
Man’s soul, and it’s fire, smoks...no it’s not...
It’s vapour done up like a new-born babe
(In that shape when you die it leaves your month)
It’s...well, what matters talking, it’s the soul !
Give us no more of body than shows soul !
Here’s Giotto, with his Saint a-praising God,
That sets you praising, why not stop with him ?
Why put all thoughts of praise out of our heads
With wonder at lines, colours, and what not ?
Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms !
Rub all out, try at it a second time.
Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts,
She’s just my niece...Herodias, I would say,—
Who went and danced and got men’s heads cut off—
Have it all out !” Now, is this sense, I ask ?
A fine way to paint soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can’t stop there, must go further
And can’t fare worse ! Thus, yellow does for white
When what you put for yellow’s simply black,
And any sort of meaning looks intense
When all beside itself means and looks nought.
Why can’t a painter lift each foot in turn,
Left foot and right foot, go a double step,
Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,
Both in their order ? Take the prettiest face,

43
The Prior’s niece...patron-saint-is it so pretty
You can’t discover if it means hope, fear,
Sorrow or joy? won’t beauty go with these ?
Suppose I’ve made her eyes all right and blue,
Can’t I take breath and try to add life’s flesh,
And then add soul and heighten them threefold?
Or say there’s beauty with no soul at all
(I never saw it-put the case the same—)
If you get simply beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents,—
That’s somewhat. And you’ll find the soul you have missed.
Within yourself when you return Him thanks,
“Rub all out !” Well, well, there’s my life, in short.
And so the thing has gone on ever since.
I’m grown a man no doubt, I’ve broken bounds—
You should not take a fellow eight years old
And make him swear to never kiss the girls.
I’m my own master, paint now as I please—
Having a friend, you see, in the Corner-house
Lord, it’s fast holding by the rings in front—
Those great rings serve more purposes than just
To plant a flag in, or tie up a horse !
And yet the old schooling sticks, the old grave eyes
Are peeping o’er my shoulder as I work,
The heads shake still— ‘It’s art’s decline, my son !
‘You’re not of the true painters, great and old;
‘Brother Angelico’s the man, you’ll find;
‘Brother Lorenzo stands his single peer:
‘Fag on at flesh, you’ll never make the third !
Flower o’ the pine,

44
You keep your mistr... manners, and I’ll stick to mine !
I’m not the third, then: bless us, they must know !
Don’t you think they’re the likeliest to know,
They with their Latin? So, I swallow my rage,
Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
To please them—sometimes do and sometimes don’t;
For, doing most, there’s pretty sure to come
A turn, some warm eve finds me at my saints—
A laugh, a cry, the business of the world—
(Flower o’ the peach,
Death for us all, and his own life for each !)
And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over,
The world and life’s too big to pass for a dream,
And I do these wild things in sheer despite,
And play the fooleries you catch me at,
In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass
After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so,
Although the miller does not preach to him
The only good of grass is to make chaff.
What would men have ? Do they like grass or no—
May they or mayn’t they ? all I want’s the thing
Settled for ever one way. As it is,
You tell too many lies and hurt yourself :
You don’t like what you only like too much,
You do like what, if given you at your word
You find abundantly detestable.
For me, I think I speak as I was taught;
I always see the garden and God there
A-making man’s wife : and, my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh,

45
I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.
You understand me: I’m a beast, I know,
But see, now-why, I see as certainly
As that the morning star’s about to shine,
What will hap some day. We’ve a youngster here
Comes to our convent, studies what I do,
Slouches and stares and lets no atom drop:
His name is Guidi—he’ll not mind the monks—
They call him Hulking Tom, he lets them talk—
He picks my practice up-he’ll paint apace,
I hope so—though I never live so long,
I know what’s sure to follow. You be judge !
You speak no Latin more than I, belike;
However, you’re my man, you’ve seen the world
—The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises, —and God made it all!
—For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to ? What’s it all about ?
To be passed over, despised ? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at ? oh, this last of course !—you say.
But why not do as well as say, —paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God’s works-paint anyone, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, ‘His works
‘Are here already ; nature is complete :
‘Suppose you reproduce her—(which you can’t)

46
‘There’s no advantage ! you must beat her; then.’
For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted-better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now,
Your cullion’s hanging face ? A bit of chalk,
And trust me but you should, though ! How much more,
If I drew higher things with the same truth !
That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,
Interpret God to all of you ! Oh, oh,
It makes me mad to see what men shall do
And we in our graves! This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good :
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
‘Ay, but you don’t so instigate to prayer !’
Strikes in the Prior: ‘when your meaning’s plain
‘It does not say to folk-remember matins,
‘Or, mind you fast next Friday !’ Why, for this
What need of art at all? A skull and bones,
Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what’s best
A bell to chime the hour with, does as well.
I painted a Saint Laurence six months since
At Prato, splashed the fresco in fine style :
‘How looks my painting, now the scaffold’s down?’
I ask a brother: ‘Hugely,’ he returns—
‘Already not one phiz of your three slaves
‘Who turn the Deacon off his toasted side,
But’s scratched and prodded to our heart’s content,
‘The pious people have so eased their own
47
‘With coming to say prayers there in a rage !
‘We get on fast to see the bricks beneath.
Expect another job this time next year,
‘For pity and religion grow I’ the crowd—
‘Your painting serves its purpose !’ Hang the fools !
That is—you’ll not mistake an idle word
Spoke in a huff by a poor monk. God wol,
Tasting the air this spicy night which turns
The unaccustomed head like Chianti wine !
Oh, the church knows ! don’t misreport me, now !
It’s natural a poor monk out of bounds
Should have his apt word to excuse himself:
And hearken how I plot to make amends!
I have bethought me : I shall paint a piece
... There’s for you ! Give me six months, then go, see
Something in Sant’ Ambrogio’s ! Bless the nuns !
They want a cast o’ my office. I shall paint
God in the midst, Madonna and her babe,
Ringed by a bowery flowery angel-brood,
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root
When ladies crowd to Church at midsummer.
And then i’ the front, of course a saint or two—
Saint John, because he saves the Florentines,
Saint Ambrose, who puts down in black and white
The convent’s friends and gives them a long day,
And Job, I must have him there past mistake,
The man of Uz (and Us without the z,
Painters who need his patience). Well, all these
Secured at their devotion, up shall come
Out of a corner when you least expect,
As one by a dark stair into a great light,
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Music and talking, who but Lippo ! I !—
Mazed, motionless and moonstruck—I’m the man !
Back I shrink-what is this I see and hear ?
I, caught up with my monk’s-things by mistake,
My old serge gown and rope that goes all round,
I, in this presence, this pure company!
Where’s a hole, where’s a corner for escape ?
Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing
Forward, puts out a soft palm— Not so fast!’
—Addresses the celestial presence, ‘nay—
‘He made you and devised you, after all,
‘Though he’s none of you ! Could Saint John there draw—
‘His camel-hair make up a painting-brush ?
‘We come to brother Lippo for all that,
‘Iste prefecit opus !’ So, all smile—
I shuffle sideways with my blushing face
Under the cover of a hundred wings
Thrown like a spread of kirtles when you’re gay
And play hot cockles, all the doors being shut,
Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops
The hothead husband ! Thus I scuttle off
To some safe bench behind, not letting go
The palm of her, the lily thing
That spoke the good word for me in the nick,
Like the Prior’s niece... Saint Lucy, I would say.
And so all’s saved for me, and for the church
A pretty picture gained. Go, six months hence !
Your hand, sir, and good-bye: no lights, no lights !
The street’s hushed, and I know my own way back,
Don’t fear me! There’s the grey beginning. Zooks!

49
 (a) A Discussion on the Poem
Contents
 Introduction
 Study Notes
 A Detailed Study of the Poem
 On Fra Lippo Lippi
Introduction
Fra Lippo Lippi first appeared in Browning’s collection of poems, Men and Women
(1855). It is a monologue. Fra Lippo Lippi is the speaker. In this poem Browning makes use
of the account of Lippi in Vasari’s Lives of The Painters.
According to Vasari Fra Filippo di Tommase Lippi (1412-1469) was a Carmelite monk.
“He was born at Florence in a byestreet called Ardiglione, under the Canto alla Cuculia and
behind the convent of the Carmelites. By the death of his father he was left a friendless
orphan at the age of two years, his mother having died shortly after his birth. His childhood
was spent for sometime under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the sister of his
father, who brought him up with very great difficulty, till he had attained his eighth year,
when, being no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in the
above named convent of the Carmelites.” Here the eight year old child Filippo showed no
interest in and aptitude for letters and learning of any kind. But “he showed himself dexterous
and ingenious in all works performed by hand,” in place of studying, “he never did anything
but daub his own books, and those of other boys, with caricature”, so the prior decided “to
give him all means and every opportunity for learning to draw.”
Vasari writes, “The Chapel of the Carmine had been newly painted by Mosaccio, and
this being exceedingly beautiful, pleased Filippo greatly, wherefore he frequented it daily for
his recreation, and continually practising there, in company youths, who were constantly
drawing in that place, he surpassed all the other by very much in dexterity and knowledge.”
Filippo so much closely followed the manner of Mosaccio and his work displayed so much
similarity to those of the latter, that many affirmed that the Spirit of Mosaccio had entered the
body of Fra Filippo.
“It is said that Fra Filippo was much addicted to the pleasures of senses, in so much that
he would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever inclination might at the
moment be predominant... It was known that, while occupied in the pursuit of pleasures, the
works undertaken by him received little or none of his attention, for which reason Cosimo de’
Medici, wishing him to execute a work in his own palace, shut him up, that he might not
waste his time in running about, but having endured his confinement for two days, he then
made ropes with sheets of his bed, which he cut to pieces for that purpose, and so having let
himself down from a window, escaped, and for several days gave himself upto his
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amusements. When Cosimo found that the painter had disappeared, he caused him to be
sought, and Fra Filippo at last returned to his work, but from that time forward Cosimo gave
him liberty to go in and out at his pleasure, repenting greatly of having previously shut him
up, when he considered what danger Fra Filippo had incurred by his folly in ascending from
the window, and ever afterwards labouring to keep him to his work by kindness only he was
by this means much more promptly and effectively served by the painter, and was wont to
say that the excellencies of rare genius were as forms of light and not beasts of burden.”
“Fra Lippo Lippi is a lively monologue supposed to be uttered by the friar himself on the
occasion, a night frolic. Finding the confinement in the house of Cosimo de’ Medici
unbearable, he escaped with the help of sheet rope and ran after a girlish face and was about
to return from equivocal neighbourhood, when his monkish dress caught the attention of the
guard and he was captured and called to account. He proceeds to give a sketch of his life and
opinion (about life, art, their relationship) which supplies a fair excuse for the escapade. The
facts he relates, including this one, are historically true.”
The poem begins dramatically in the characteristic manner of Browning’s monologue
and the reader’s attention is at once captured. We observe Fra Lippo Lippi arguing with a
group of watchmen (guards/policemen) who have captured him loitering in a prohibited or
disreputable area at midnight. He argues with them so that they set him free and he is able to
return to the house of Cosimo de’ Medici. The time of the action the location (of the setting)
and the main characters of the dramatic monologue are introduced in the first twenty-lines.
The speaker is Fra Lippo Lippi.
Study Notes
fra: friar, monk.
poor brother Lippo: Lippo is a poor monk.
by your leave: by your permission.
clap your torches to my face: the police men (or guards) have captured him in a disreputable
place, consequently they are examining his face by throwing torch light on it. They are
trying to identify him. Lippo tells them not to throw light directly on his face because it
dazzles his eyes and causes great pain to him. He is annoyed with them.
Zooks: (Gadzooks) a mild oath.
You think you see a monk! The guards are shocked and amused to see a monk in the area
where prostitutes live. Lippo tries to reassure them that they needn’t be surprised,
appearances are often deceptive and this is the way of the world.
alley: a narrow lane.
sportive ladies: a polite and humorous way of referring to women of disreputable character.
whatever rat...to keep him company: Lippo advises the guards to search the monastery
thoroughly and find out how many monks have gone out of it to seek pleasure and if
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 they find monks (rats) going to the wrong place (the prohibited area) for pleasure
seeking, and if they (the monks) are found with disreputable women (fair mice) who
leave their doors open to welcome clients, they should arrest them.
rat: here rat is used for the monk, who seeks pleasure.
hops on his wrong hole: happens to leave the monastry (his real home) and visit the
prohibited places.
nip: arrest.
softling: fair and delicate women.
White mouse is used for the women of disreputable character.
weke weke: Lippo mimics the sound made by a rat as it creeps along.
Lippo is exposing monks, who vow to keep themselves away from worldly pleasures but
in reality visit disreputable places. He is also ridiculing the policemen (guards) who catch
hold of a poor friar, or an innocent person but do not arrest the real culprits.
Aha, you know your betters ! The policemen must realise that he (Lippo) is superior to them
in rank since he is a monk. Therefore they should properly behave with him.
fiddling: a sarcastic but humorous remark. Playing.
Who am I? The policeman (guard), who is holding him by his throat, does not release him
and does not seem to be convinced with his arguments that he is a Carmelite monk, a
respectable person. Lippo discloses his identity here.
Master—a...Cosimo of the Medici: Cosimo the Elder (1389-1464) was a Florentine banker, a
virtual ruler of the city, and a patron of art and literature. Lippo attempts to influence
the policemen by talking about his patron Cosimo of the Medici, about his high
connections.
Three streets off...caps the corner. He is indicating the location of Cosimo’s house, which
towers high over other houses at the corner of the street.
Boh: an exclamation of contempt and annoyance.
You were best! Lippo is reprimanding the policeman who has been holding him by his
throat—has been harsh and inhuman to him. If he does not mend his ways, he will be
severely punished by Cosimo for ill-treating Lippo.
... The day you are hanged...grips: It is a warning to the policeman. He will be severely
punished (hanged) for misbehaving with Lippo. The day he would be hanged, he would
realise what an unpardonable mistake he had committed by holding Lippo by his throat.
But you, sir. Now he is addressing the police officer or the captain of the guard.
it concerns you...discredit you: The officer will be held responsible for all the atrocities
committed by his subordinates. It is his duty to teach them how to behave with people.

52
 Consequently, their irresponsible and rude behaviour will reflect on the efficiency of the
officer. It they don’t behave properly, it will bring disgrace to him, and he will be
blamed for it.
Knaves: used for subordinates/subordinate guards or watchmen or policemen.
pilchards: a kind of fish; a worthless fish.
Judas was one of the twelve disciples of Christ. He betrayed Christ to his enemies for a
handful of silver. Judas stands for a treacherous person.
Judas to a tittle. Lippo closely observes the face and expression (on it) of the policeman who
is holding him. He finds a close resemblance between him and Judas. In every detail, in
every one of his features he is like Judas.
Lippo, we learn in the later part of the poem, was a close observer of human faces, their
expression and their behaviour and in his paintings he tried to recapture those faces and
people. Here, by observing one of the policemen, he gets an idea that he would paint Judas in
future.
Why, sir, you make amends. Once again he addresses the officer, who is not as cruel, and
mean, as his subordinate is. It may also imply that his subordinate’s face has inspired
his imagination and will be of great help to him in painting Judas, so Lippo does not
mind his rudeness.
Lad, I’m not angry. Lippo’s sarcastic remarks on the policeman’s face and on the officer
might have hurt the officer-perhaps he felt that Lippo was angry but Lippo denied the
charge.
hangdogs: sarcastic remark. It refers to the subordinate guards (watchmen/policemen).
quarter florin a small coin of Italy.
munificent: generous
munificent House: the family of Cosimo of the Medici with whom Lippo was staying.
munificent House...beside !: Lippo offers a Florentine coin to the policemen so that they
leave him, go out and have a drink. They should drink to the health of rich Cosimo, who
not only shelters many poor monks but also many others (even those who are not
monks).
that harbours me: where Lippo stays
I’d like his face: Lippo once again talks about the face of the policeman, whom he has earlier
compared with Judas.
All’s come square again. Once the subordinate policemen have left him, Lippo tries to
befriend the officer. He is no longer angry with him and tries to reasure him that once
again they are friends and he has no grudge against him. Is he flattering him?

53
 Note Lippo has already condemned the police department for their inefficiency and
corrupt ways. They capture and arrest the innocent people and treat them shabbily as if they
were mere ‘pilchards’. Now he is trying to woo the officer in order to get himself freed.
with the pikes and lanterns: in those days watchmen carried pikes and lanterns when they
were on duty.
pike: a type of spear. I’d like his face...yet unwiped!
Lippo, being an artist and a painter, tries to recapture the expression on the face of the
watchman (policeman) who had been holding him by his throat and had kept his other hand
on the shoulder of his fellow guard, who held a pike and a lantern. The sight reminds him of
the slave, who is often shown in medieval paintings and pictures, holding the blood dripping
head of John, the Baptist, by hair in one hand and in the other holding the blood stained
weapon with which the head was cut. Here we have a very realistic and vivid picturization of
the scene.
John Baptist: John was the first person to administer baptism and it was he who had baptised
Jesus. He was killed by King Herod.
John Baptist’s head: the dancing of Queen Herodia’s daughter Salome (the step daughter of
King Herod) so pleased the king that he promised her whatever she wished; upon
Herodia’s instruction (Herodia disliked John) she demanded the head of the Baptist.
King Herod got him beheaded.
It’s not your chance...the like? Lippo tells the officer that he could have drawn the picture or
the scene (mentioned here) if he had a bit of chalk or wood or coal or something of the
sort. He would have depicted how the face of the watchman resembled that of the slave.
Yes I’m the painter: Perhaps the officer asked him if he was a painter. This is Lippo’s reply.
Style: call, name.
What...you? Till now the officer did not know his name. He only knew that he was a
Carmine monk who stayed with Cosimo of the Medici. Now he knows that he is a
painter also.
Here Lippo completely identifies himself. He believes that the officer might have heard about
Fra Lippo’s feats and also of the stories of his doings. Perhaps he (the officer) was
fascinated by the stories of Lippo’s escapades. He says, that he himself is the same
person-brother Lippo. (Lippo was known for his pleasure-seeking).
take you. fascinate you.
I saw the proper twinkle in your eye: Perhaps Lippo has observed a friendly twinkle in s of
the officer. He is glad to have won his confidence. Here is a person who has a fine sense
of humour, who is likely to be interested in his story, may understand him and be
helpful.

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hip to launch: ‘We will sit closely, touching each other’s thighs’ an indication of closeness
or intimacy.
Here’s spring come...again: Lippo explains why he escaped from Cosimo’s house. It was the
spring season—a season of festivals and merry making. At night people went in groups
and wandered through the streets singing joyous songs. (The carnival season is
celebrated before Lent). But Lippi was confined in the house of his master; he for days
together had been painting only saints and saints. He was thus denied all joys and
pleasures of the spring season, there was nothing to amuse him. Feeling bored,
suffocated and caged, he looked out of the room to see the view outside and have fresh
air.
sing out carnival: In Italy it was customary to go out in gay groups, singing songs of joy. It
was called the carnival season of fasting in Lent. Today carnival means any season of
merry-making.
mew: a cage, place of confinement, the house where Lippo lived.
A-painting: he went on constantly painting one picture after the other, and all the pictures
were those of saints.
A sweep of lute strings: music played upon the strings of a lute.
whifts of songs: snatches of songs.
There came...song. As he looked out of the window for fresh air he observed young men and
women dancing, singing and playing on their musical instruments in ecstasy.
Flower the broom... Flower O’the thyme: The interspersed songs are imitation of stornelli
(also known as flower songs); three lined Italian folk songs containing the name of a
flower in the first line. The other two usually introduce the love-theme.
three slim shapes: Lippo observed three delicate slim young girls.
And a face that looked up. One of the girls looked up and Lippo was attracted towards her.
flesh and blood...made of: Lippo confesses that he is a man of flesh and blood, not a gel. He
could not resist the temptation and was charmed by the young girl.
I came up with the fun: He followed the girls and soon overtook them.
Hard by Saint Laurence: near the church of St. Laurence, now famous for the tombs of the
Medici; it is the work of Michael Angelo.
Hail fellow, well met: He was happy to meet them.
Flower O’the rose...who knows? He was satisfied to meet the girl in this disreputable area. It
hardly matters to him if people come to know about his merry-making.
Go work/On Jerome!: begin painting the picture of St Jerome.

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Jerome: One of the Christian fathers, translated the Bible into Latin. He led the life of
extreme asceticism. Jerome is one of Lippo’s more incongruous subjects.
On Jerome...flesh: St. Jerome was represented in Lippo’s painting as beating his breast with
a huge round stone and thus inflicting pain on his flesh in order to free himself from
temptation.
And so as I was...of the sudden: After spending sometime with the girl, Lippo was returning
to his master’s house to sleep and relax, when he was seen by the watchmen and
arrested. It is generally believed that a monk will always lead the life of asceticism like
St. Jerome. Is it not ironical that a painter who was assigned to make a picture of St.
Jerome (known for his asceticism and self-inflicting penance) indulged in worldly
pleasures?
You shake your head: The officer showed his disapproval for Lippo was a monk himself and
yet gave himself up to temptations. Here Lippo observes the reaction of the officer.
Mine’s shaved: the crowns of the monk’s heads were shaved to betoken the vows of chastity,
poverty and obedience. Observe the sense of humour. First he talks about the shaking of
the head of the policeman and then refers to his own head.
the sting’s in that: His shaved head betrayed his identity that he was a monk, who had taken
a vow of celibacy, and should not indulge in pleasure-seeking.
Browning has very skillfully shown the contradiction between the physical image of the
monk and his moral turgidity.
If Master Cosimo...but a monk: If a rich and important person, like Master Cosimo, visited
the prohibited area, none would condemn him, even the watchmen and the officer
would ignore the whole incident. But when a monk was tempted, he was canonised
(arrested and punished). A monk is not treated as an ordinary human being.
Lippo here admits that he is first a man of flesh and blood, then only a monk.
By frankly admitting his weakness for worldly pleasures, Lippo wins the sympathy of
the listener and makes him accept his point of view. Once again he tries to persuade the
officer to set him free, by narrating the tale of his childhood. But he is not seeking his pity.
Lippo is not a monk by choice but by compulsion. He has been forced by circumstances
to become a monk. He is a helpless victim of his circumstances. St. Jerome’s beating his
breast with a heavy stone revives his memory of his difficult childhood.
what I’m a beast for: The officer might consider him a beastly person, but once he listened
to Lippo’s sad story, he would be convinced that the latter was innocent.
I was a baby...convent: Lippo narrates his story.
shucks: husks.

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The wind doubled...I went: Lippo suffered from acute pain because of starvation and fell
down almost unconscious.
trussed me: caught hold of Lippo.
Its fellow was...I know: With her other hand she gave Lippo stinging blows. A very
humorous remark.
By the straight...convent. His aunt took him to the convent by the shortest route.
Six words there: Six words (a few words) spoken to Lippo by the father of the convent were
“So, boy you’re minded to quit the very miserable world.”
minded: determined.
munching: eating refection time: meal time; time for refreshment by food or drink.
quoth the good fat father...refection time: Lippo’s sense of humour is revealed. Since it was
refection time, even the fat old father’s mouth watered (at the sight of food) and he had
to wipe it.
will you renounce: The father wanted to know if Lippo was determined to renounce the
miserable world, but the little boy of eight thought that he was being asked to renounce
the mouthful of bread. A subtle sense of humour is evident here.
Brief, they made a monk of me: ...at eight years old he became a monk because he could not
bear starvation any more.
At the age of eight only, the poor orphan Lippo was compelled by adverse circumstances
to become a monk and take a vow to renounce, the world, ‘its pride, and greed, palace, farm,
villas, shop and banking house’, —everything was considered a trash for the monk. But the
irony is that these very things, (trash) which a monk is supposed renounce, are coveted by
rich persons like Cosimo of the Medici. According to the hurch precepts ‘the rich’ are ‘poor
devils’ who should be avoided, but these very devils do take care of monks, convents and
others. What a paradox it is!
trash: At the age of eight Lippo was told that all worldly wealth and property (such as
possessed by Medici) was worthless and of no value. The words spoken by Lippo are
ironical.
‘T was not for nothing: Lippo realised that it was good that he had renounced the trash
because now he could lead a comfortable life. Till the age of eight this orphan child had
been starving and living in poverty.
the good bellyful: He got enough food to satisfy hunger.
warm surge: woollen clothes to protect oneself from cold.
the rope that goes all round: the rope which is worn round the gown.
warm surge and the rope were part of the official dress of a monk.

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the day long...beside. The idleness and double standards of life within the covent is referred
to.
Let’s...what the urchin’s fit for: The priests in the convent who took care of young monks
(children) decided to find out what Lippo could do as a monk. The senior monks treated
the poor monks as ‘urchins’.
Not over much their way...confess: They discovered that Lippo was not religiously inclined
nor interested in studies.
Such a to-do? They had to take pains to curb his animal spirits, and make a monk of him.
Latin in pure waste: Their efforts to teach him-Latin was sheer waste of time and energy.
Flower o’the clove...I love: A humorous way of expressing his inability to learn Latin. If
Lippo did learn any Latin word, it was ‘amo’ meaning love
mind you: Lippo is telling the officer.
fortune: misfortune.
But mind you...whipped: Lippo could not forget the bitter experiences of his childhood. As a
boy he had starved in the streets for eight years. His hardships had made him conscious
of the ways of the world, he could read faces and characters, judge them and know who
was generous and who was mean and cunning. Being a starving child, a parentless
child, he used to look around for people who might give him something to eat. He had
developed an uncanny sense of knowing who would give poor children grapes to eat
and who would scold and kick them.
As he watched well-dressed gentlemen each holding a candle in his hand going in a
procession to the sacrament (a holy, religious ceremony), he knew which ones would
allow the poor children to collect the falling wax of the candles in their trays so that
they could sell it and buy food and which ones would report against them to the
magistrates who would scold and punish the children.
the Eight: A body of magistrates who kept order.
offal: rubbish.
admonition: suffering.
hunger pinch: acute suffering caused by hunger.
why, soul...hunger pinch: The senses of a person who suffers from acute hunger and cold are
sharpened. Lippo could discriminate between one face and another. He developed a
strong power of observation and a sharp memory. Later he could use” his knowledge in
his paintings.
such remarks: observations, experiences.
turned to use: used his observation, and experiences in his paintings.

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antiphony: the service book, a hymn book.
marge: margin.
joined legs...to music notes: transformed the music notes into the semblance of human beings
by adding arms and legs.
found...B’s: changed different letters of alphabet into human faces by adding eyes and noses
to their shapes.
Betwist... noun: As he read Latin grammar he drew many scenes from life on the books.
The monks looked black: The monks were angry with Lippo.
Prior: the head-monk.
In no wise: not at all.
Lose a crow...lark: Lippo might not become a good monk but he would make a good painter.
So they could not turn him out of the convent.
Our man of parts: our artist. Camaldolese: Order of monks housed at the convent of
Camaldoli, near Florence.
Preaching Friars: the Dominicians, officially named “order of Friar Preachers” founded in
1215.
do our church fine: decorate the walls of the church by his paintings.
And put...to be: Lippo would make the front of the church as splendid and magnificent as it
should be.
daub: paint.
And thereupon...away. In order to hide the avarice, cunningness and corruption of the
church, the prior ordered Lippo to paint the walls of the church. Lippo readily agreed to
do so. The paintings on the church ware used as a cover for hiding the depths of
corruption. “Browning’s comments on the church afford an interesting insight into his
growing dissatisfaction with institutional religion.”
my head...disemburdening: Lippo’s mind was full of all sorts of ideas and pictures and the
walls were without any decoration. Here was an opportunity to present the imagined
beings in paintings. So he quickly started painting the walls with various scenes and
sights to unburden his mind of the load of ideas.
the black and white: colours worn by Dominicians and Carmelites respectively.
old gossips: old people. cribs: petty thefts of food and candle-ends.
barrel-droppings: dropped from the barrels in which food items like fish, bread, were carried.
candle ends: burnt out bits of candles.

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 Old people stole bits of food dropped from the barrels or burnt out bits of candles. Such
were the sins poor old people were guilty of, and they were represented by Lippo as coming
to the priest to confess them?
First every sort of monk...gone: Lippo describes in detail what pictures and scenes he
painted on the walls of the church.
the breathless fellow...half: In the Middle ages churches and monasteries gave asylum to
criminals of all sorts and thus protected them from the law—from punishment.
Sometimes the guilty became monks to evade the forces of the law.
Here Lippo painted a murderer, who came running into the church, he was breathless
because he was being hotly chased by the victim’s son and sat safely near the Altar-foot.
Little children sat around him watching him with admiration for his long beard and his
audacity (he was sitting unmoved by the threats of the victim’s son). The little Shildren did
not realise that he had committed a heineous crime.
igning himself...of Christ: The victim’s son (the murdered person’s son) had chased the
murderer to the gates of the church, but as soon he reached the gates, he felt helpless
and guilty, the murderer was inside sitting safely from punishment, the chaser could do
nothing as he was in a holy place. He signed to the cross as a token of submission to
Christ.
whose sadface...years: The image of Christ on the cross looked very melancholy. The face of
Christ was extremely sad because of the fact that even after more than a thousand years
of Christianity men have been so cruel hearted that they have been committing murders.
Jesus sacrificed himself to make the world a place of love and peace, but unfortunately
men have not changed.
Till some poor girls...gone: Perhaps a poor peasant girl who loved the murderer. She comes
in the dusk of the evening, covering her head with her apron. She com silently and
stealthily (tiptoe) and drops a loaf into the hand of the murderer, al gives her petty-
earrings (so that he can sell them and thus escape from the tow! and some flowers. The
murderer with a growl ‘accepts the things offered. The poor girl prays in silence for
murderer’s safety and leaves the church.
The touching scene is portrayed beautifully and realistically. Though the girl h covered
her head and face in order to hide her identity and to show her respect to Go and Christ, the
on-lookers ‘eyes, ‘looked through’. A very significant remark on the hypocrisy of the
worshippers.
“The detailed description of the paintings reveal Lippo’s superb power observation, his
penetration into the mind of various characters, his understanding human nature and his
critical assessment of human beings, their traits, characteristics He is critical of the ways of
the church where criminals get shelter. He feels unhappy realise that Jesus’s redemption has

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ironically been in vain, for the passion of a thousand years has brought nothing but
suffering.” \
covered bit of cloister-wall: the part of the wall covered with paintings.
Till checked: till stopped by the head-monk.
Being simple bodies: the young monks were simple minded, innocent and frank.
“That’s the way...the life”: Lippo is dramatising the reactions of the monks. They pointed to
various persons and found resemblances with the persons whom they knew. They found
one woman ‘like the Prior’s mistress ‘(niece) who used to t care of him on the pretext
that he suffered from asthma. It is evident here that head monk was not a chaste person.
He had a mistress. The monks were fascinated by the portraits, because they were life-
like.
But there...flunked: “Lippo’s happiness and sense of triumph soon ended in smoke, a fire
made out of straw.”
pulled a face: The senior monks were annoyed with Lippo for his like-life paintings.
Quite from the mark of painting: They found his painting absolutely different from the
accepted traditional painting style. They were entirely opposed to the conventional
ones.
Faces, arms... devil’s game: The senior monks condemned Lippo’s paintings for their
realism. The paintings portrayed human beings so realistically or naturally and thus
failed to idealise them.
The simple young and inexperienced monks appreciated and admired the painted scenes.
They found similarities between the characters of the painting and the characters in real life.
Lippo’s efforts became futile when the prior and his learned monks considered his
naturalistic paintings as devil's game. They disapproved his works on the ground that they did
not conform to the monastic ideal of painting—the mode of Fra Angelico and Lorenzo
Monaco. In fact, the monastic ideal of painting was later supplanted by the natural style of
Lippo and his contemporaries.
Lippo painted life—real life, human bodies in action, its sweat and blood, its hardships
and pangs, its joys and pains but the prior and senior monks rejected his art for it did not
reveal the soul—to them the body had no existence—soul was all in all.
“Lippo belonged to the naturalistic school which developed among the Florentines.
These showed a greater attention to natural form and beauty, as opposed to the conventional
school who were men under the influence of earlier artists and inherited an ascetic timidity, in
the representation of material things.”
show: external appearance or beauty.
homage to the perishable clay: glorification of the body which is mortal.

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But lift...all: true art should paint the soul and not the body.
Man’s soul...your mouth: The prior fails to describe what the human soul is like. He likens it
to fire, then to smoke, then to vapour, and the vapour according to him assumes the
form of a new born baby. And then in the shape of vapour the soul goes out of a man’s
body, at the time of his death, from his month. A person’s mouth opens at the time of
death.
shows soul: it is necessary to express the soul in painting.
Giotto: (1267-1337) the earliest of the greater Florentine painter, he was a friend of Dante.
Why put...what not: Painting, according to the prior should inspire the onlookers to worship
God. Lippo’s paintings unfortunately made them appreciate human bodies, forgetting
the soul.
Rub all out: rub out all the paintings. Lippo is pained by the tyranny of the different schools
of art that grant no space for an artist’s originality.
She’s just my niece: The prior observes the young woman in the painting who resembles his
mistress (niece) then he checks himself and compares her with Herodias.
Herodias: Rather Herodia’s daughter Salome. The error is Vasari’s as well as the prior’s.
Lippo soon corrects the prior’s self-betraying identification calling the niece, the patron
saint’ (Line 209). It was Salome not Herodias who was an excellent dancer.
Now, is this sense, I ask? Lippo is angry.
A fine way...fare worse: Here perhaps Lippo has forgotten that he is talking with a police
officer. He is expressing his views on art and the relationship of art to life. He does not
agree with the prior that the artist should always present the soul, ignoring the human
body.
It is an ironical remark. He does not believe by painting an ugly body one can compel the
onlooker to think of the soul.
Thus yellow...black: He argues that those who believe the soul to be all in all, would, perhaps
like the artist to use wrong colours and thus paint an ugly picture. Perhaps they think
such a picture will express the soul better.
And any...intense: In this way, they suppose, the portrait would acquire the intensity of
feeling.
all beside itself: the details of the body, everything except the soul.
means and looks nought: It is meaningless. Lippo’s plea is for realism in painting.
Why can’t...order: Lippo once again justifies his way of painting. We can’t walk without the
two legs. A painter should be allowed to put the body and the soul together. To ask a
painter to paint the soul only is as ridiculous as is asking a person to walk on one leg
only.
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Prior’s niece...three fold: Lippo is elucidating his view. The portrait of the young woman
whom others consider to be the prior’s niece stands for the patron saint of the
monastery. Can’t one easily make out if the beautiful face of the saint expresses an
emotion like hope, fear, sorrow or joy. It is possible to combine beauty with emotion.
One can make a picture beautiful and life-like and then add to it soul or the expression
of emotions. In this way the beauty of the picture is enhanced.
put the case the same: let us suppose for the sake of argument.
nought else: without the expression of emotion.
say...thanks: Lippo cannot conceive of beauty without soul. Even if there is beauty without
the soul in a painting for the sake of supposition, that in itself is something remarkable,
because it is an expression of the Beauty created by God. Even such a painting is of
immense value. One is thankful to God for the creation of beautiful men and women.
By admiring His creation one can find one’s own soul, one should not search for ‘soul
in a piece of art but in one’s own self.
Rub all out: The repetition reveals the agony of the artist. ‘They ordered, me to rub out the
painting I had done.’
There’s...short: that in brief is the story of his life.
I’ve broken bounds: Self-confession. He has broken all laws governing the conduct of monks
and also aesthetic laws (conventional laws) of painting.
in my own Master: Why did he defy all laws? He wanted to feel life closely, experience it
himself so that he could reproduce it on his canvas.
Having a friend...the corner house: Refers to Cosimo.
Lord...horse: “Large metal rings were fixed to the front of the house for tying up horses or
putting up flags on the festival days. For Lippo they were the means by which he could
climb down from above for his night’ adventures and then also climb up.”
Yet the old schooling sticks...thirds: Lippo has left the cloister and is staying with Cosimo,
he enjoys ‘freedom’ there, he can go out and have fun, return at his will and then paint
when he desires. Yet he is not completely free. Cosmio also belongs to the old
traditional painting school, and he does not always approve of his paintings. He seems
to tell him that his art is decadent. He (Lippo) will never be classed among the great
masters of painting (brother Angelico and brother Lorenzo) as he continues to paint
merely the body. He will never be able to equal them.
Yet the old schooling sticks: the education which was imparted to him (Cosimo) is deeply
rooted in his mind.
Flower of the pine...none: Lippo’s song expresses his annoyance with the monks and
Cosimo. Let them stick to their idea of art he will stick to his.

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I’m not... Latin: He is condemning the monks and Cosimo. A sarcastic remark. His
contemptuous attitude is highlighted. They may be erudite but they don’t understand
life.
Brother Angelico: Fra Angelico (1387-1455) Angelico is the monastic name of Giovanni de
Fiesole, perhaps the chief painter of the late medieval period, whose style influenced
Lippo’s work of 1440s. It is said that he was so devout that he painted while kneeling.
Lorenzo: Lorenzo Monaco (1370-1425), a Camaldolese friar who painted in Florence.
Lorenzo exerted an important influence on Lippi’s early work.
they must know: the words are ironical. How can the monks know who is a great artist and
what is the best way of painting, they are only supposed to be concerned with religious
studies and preachings?
they with their Latin: the monks who teach religion in Latin language. A sarcastic remark.
So swallow my rage...pure rage: Lippo is irritated and annoyed. All his life he has been
tortured and criticised. None has encouraged him nor has appreciated his work. Yet he
does not revolt and fight back. He suffers patiently, swallows his anger, clenches his
teeth, sucks his lips but does not protest openly. He does pain sometimes to please
others and sometimes not to but he is never disappointed—there always comes a chance
or an opportunity when he can have what his hear wants the most—he is free to enjoy
life, its beauty, its pain, its mobility etc. He is aware that death is inevitable, so he wants
to have all that he can have in life. Out of sheer anger he indulges in so called foolish
activities. He is not bothered about what others think or say.
a turn: a diversion.
business of the world: the pleasures of the world.
Death...for each? Death is inevitable ‘Each man should enjoy himself according to his bent
while he is passing through this life.’
my whole soul revolves: when he hears the song, his soul rebels.
the cup runs over: He is full of thoughts about worldly pleasures.
The world...dream: the worldly pleasures cannot be treated as dreams.
Grass: stands for the pleasures of life. Should a man enjoy pleasures of life or not?
You tell too many...detestable: Lippo is condemning the religious and moral hypocrisy of the
monks. Lippo wants the conflict between enjoyment of life and its renunciation be
resolved once for all. He knows church-dignitaries tell lies about what they like and
what they do not like.
if given you all your world: if God granted your prayer.
you find abundantly detestable: which you would detest-telling lies or telling truth.

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I always see the garden...wife: Lippo argues that even religion has taught him the lesson of
worldly pleasures. God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden and gave him Eve as his
wife, so in the world also a man should follow the example of Adam and enjoy himself.
You understand me: He is addressing the officer.
I’m a beast, I know: He is a beast according to the church rules. He knows he is not so. He
sees the truth.
the morning star’s about to shine: Lippo has been arguing all through the night. Now it is
going to be dawn, when the morning-star (Venus) is sighted.
Guidi: Tomanaso Guidi: (1401-ca 1428) better known as Mosaccio (which means ‘hulking’)
‘because’ says Vasari, of his excessive negligence and regard of himself”. He was the
teacher—not, as here represented, the pupil of Filippo Lippi. Here Browning has erred.
picks my practice up: follows my methods.
You’re seen the world...God made it all: Lippo is asking the police officer, who is not a
monk but an ordinary person what he knows about the world. Being not highly educated
and learned and not confined to the convent and its high moral precepts, the officer has
seen and understood the world its beauty and ugliness, its weaknesses and strengths, he
has observed variety all around him-in nature—“the beauty, the wonder and the power,
the shapes of things, their colours, lights, shades, changes, surprises are created by
God.” Then why should one renounce them and think of the soul only? Lippo is in fact
trying to convince the officer and the reader of the importance of naturalism in art.
Lippo raises pertinent questions—For what has God created the world? Should one
ignore natural surroundings and God’s creations?
the fair town’s face: natural scenes in the city.
these are the frame to: the objects of nature—the river line, the mountain surrounding it, the
sky form the background for human beings (men, women and children), for their
activities.
To be passed over, despised: Should the whole creation of God with all its loving beings,
particularly human-beings be ignored and hated?
this last of course: the religious priests preach people to despise all those things which
concern human beings—they want that an artist should paint everything except real
human figures. But Lippo knows that common men and women know that the beauty
created by God must be loved and praised.
Careless what comes of it: Lippo would like the artist to paint even human figures without
caring for criticism or appreciation.
count it crime...truth slip: an artist should be criticised or blamed or called a criminal only
when he fails to capture any detail or aspect of reality.

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Beat her: excel her.
We’re made...things: God intends us to love His creation. Very often we do not observe and
often ignore the variety of life, beauty, and wonder that surrounds us. But the artist
reproduces them in his paintings and thus forces us to observe and admire what we have
so far missed to notice. By focusing our attention to natural things, the artist makes us
aware of God’s mercifulness and goodness.
Lending our minds out: “The painter by his skill heightens the interest and beauty of the
shapes and objects painted by him. In this way our attention is captured by the painting
though the reality might have failed to attract us. Thus even the realistic painter
performs very valuable service.”
Here through Lippo Browning presents his own view on art. He favoured realism in
painting. He himself dealt with men and women of all sorts, from various climes and
countries, and exposed them as they were in reality in his dramatic monologues.
Your cullion’s hanging face: Lippo once again reminds the officer of his subordinate, who
had earlier held him (Lippo) by his throat. He wants to know if he did observe the
villainous look on the face of the subordinate, which Lippo could observe.
How much more...God to all of you: Lippo believes that the noble figures drawn realistically
will be more effective than the Prior’s serious sermons from the pulpit.
“Here, again Browning insists on to the high function of art, which elevates the moral
and spiritual stature of those who see noble works of art, thus performing a religious
function.”
blot: something evil or disgraceful.
blank: without any significance.
to find its...drink: Lippo’s aim in life is to comprehend the significance and purpose of God’s
creation and then to interpret it to others through his paintings.
so: in this way, by his art.
instigate to prayer: The prior condemns Lippo’s paintings because they do not inspire
devotion in the hearts of those who admire his paintings.
Matins: morning prayers.
Why, for this...at all? Lippo disagrees with the prior. There is no need for a painting to
remind people about their morning prayers or observing fast on Fridays. Art is not
required to compel people to follow religion ritualistically—even a display of real
skeleton on a cross or a bell chiming hourly is enough to remind people of their prayer
times.

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Saint Laurence was a martyred deacon of Pope Sixtus II, who according to legend was
broiled to death on a grindiron (ca 258) and he is said to have told his persecutors to
turn him over since he was done on one side.
fresco: painting on fresh plaster.
phiz: physiognomy, or face (a slang).
pity: piety.
How looks my... its purpose: The painting of Lippo (Saint Lawrence) pleased brother monks
because it provided solace to those who came with discontented, dejected heart. The
patient suffering of the saint consoled the tormented hearts and thus the church now
appreciated Lippo’s work—”it increases people’s piety.” But Lippo was not impressed
by his work, and pleased with their appreciations.
Hang the fools: Lippo’s irritation is revealed. He condemns the worshippers who come for
solace.
an idle word: Lippo realises that he has used a frivolous word, not suitable for a monk.
huff: anger.
a poor monk: refers to himself.
wot: knows.
turns: intoxicates.
you’ll not... wine: He blames the nightly adventure for his abusive language.
I plot to make amends: What he plans to atone for the ‘sin’ he has committed (he had visited
the prohibited area and used inappropriate expression at times, unsuitable for a monk).
Something in Sant Ambrogio: A new picture in the convent church at St. Ambrogio, Lippo
is going to paint.
St. Ambrogio: St. Ambrose.
a cast of my office: a piece of Lippo’s art.
You in the midst Madonna and her babe: Lippo intends to paint God in the middle of saints
along with Mother Mary and baby Christ.
Ringed...midsummer: The picture will be surrounded by a group of angels, overhanging the
central figures, like a bower of flowers and the dresses of these angels will be adorned
with lilies, sweet and fragrant, like the perfumes used by fashionable ladies at church in
midsummer.
Saint John: He is the patron saint of Florence. John the Baptist was also known as St. John.
Saint Ambrose: He is the patron saint of the particular convent of nuns and keeps a record of
the friends and benefactors of the convent. He also blesses them with a long life.

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Job: Job in the Bible is a model of patience. He patiently suffered all sorts of trials and
tribulations in his life.
UZ: Lippo puns upon the word Uz: it means Uz the place to which Job belonged and also us,
the painters as a class.
Who but Lippo: After presenting all the saints in their devotional attitude, Lippo will present
himself in the picture—he will be shown coming from some corner of the picture, like a
person suddenly appearing out of the dark into light and noise and music.
Mazed, motionless and moontruck: he will appear amazed, still and almost mad with
astonishment.
this pure company: Lippo, the monk in his uniform, in the presence of saints, angels, God,
Mother Mary and Christ. By presenting himself in the picture, he will become a part of
the holy company of angels and saints.
Where’s a hole...escape: The amazed Lippo in the picture will be looking for an escape from
the holy company. He will be shown perplexed and confused.
sweet angelic slip of a thing: a sweet little female angel.
Addresses the celestial presence: The little female angel will plead for Lippo, who has
painted them, and he is thus their creator.
camel-hair, the monks were made to wear coarse shirts.
His camel hair...painting brush: Can St. John paint like Lippo?
Isle perfect opus: It is Lippo who could paint such a perfect picture.
Lippo is imagining what he will try to paint. He is thus justifying his work and his
activities. He may be considered a beast by others but he is also a holy person.
kirtles: petticoats.
play hot cockles: flirting with the wife of another person.
Like the Prior’s niece: the female angel will be portrayed like St Lucy whom he had painted
after the Prior’s niece. He had been blamed for this earlier. The officer releases Lippo,
who thanks him.
The grey beginning: dawn. He does not need any light, he can go back home alone.
Lines 346 onwards Browning proceeds to put into Fra Lippo’s mouth a description of
what is considered his masterpiece—a coronation of the Virgin—which he painted for the
nuns of Sant Ambrogio. Browning, following Vasari, believes that the painter put a self-
portrait in the lower corner of the picture. Recent research has shown that the figure is a
portrait, not of Fra Lippo, but of the benefactor who ordered the picture for the church. In this
case. Perfect opus means “caused the work to be made,” not as Browning takes it,
“completed the work himself.”

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A Detailed Study of the Poem
In Fra Lippo Lippi (taken from the volume Men And Women-1855) Browning ‘fused
painting, history and religion into a demonstration of, and argument for, realism in art... The
story of the licentious painter-monk is set in Florentine life of the early fifteen century but as
the monologue progresses we observe the poet focusses his attention more on the man’s life
and attitudes, formed and shaped by personal and historical circumstance. Lippo is a man of
robust and vital individuality’, who is forced to face a variety of hostile situations—loses his
parents early in life, leads a life of abject poverty (impoverished and starved), till the age of
eight, later he discovers the hypocritical asceticism of the church and chafes against ‘the
sterile and stylised tradition in painting’ and ‘the burgher patronage’ of Cosimo of the
Medici. His vitality, vigour and humour ‘like that of the Renaissance in which he lives are
finally irrepressible’.
As the poem opens we discover Lippo arguing with the guards who have arrested him.
The poem begins dramatically in the typical Browning’s way and the attention of the reader
is focussed on the narrator-Fra Lippo. The first few lines set the scene and give us
information. Brother in the first line indicates that the brother is a monk, and this is confirmed
in line three. Torches in line two suggests that it is night and in line four we know for certain
that it is midnight. Who are the people who are clapping their torches on the monk’s face?
The fourth line itself explains that it is a group of people ‘going on the rounds’—actually they
are the guards or watchmen. Why have they arrested him and why do they scrutinise his face?
Obviously, Lippo has been found at an alley’s end, where the women of ill-repute keep their
doors ajar to entertain their customers. The guards are amazed to find a monk near the
prohibited area. Lippo is angry with them, they have no business to fiddle on his throat and
clap torches on his face. He is not ashamed, rather he threatens the guard who holds him by
his throat.
Remember and tell me, the day you’re hanged,
How you affected such a gullet’ gripe!
After all, Lippo is not merely a Carmine monk, he is also a friend of famous Cosimo of
the Medici.
Lippo observes the face of the guard closely and for the time being stops abusing him.
He finds something of interest in the face-it reminds him of Judas Iscariot, who betrayed
Christ and got him crucified.
He’s Judas to a tittle, that man is!
Just such a face.
Here is a face which will appear in some future painting.
What is remarkable about Lippo is that instead of apologizing to the police (guards and
their captain) for his ‘wrong’ act—(Visiting the prohibited area, against the precepts of the
church—a monk has to be a strict ascetic), ‘he very cleverly tries to extricate himself from
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the embarrassing circumstance by calculated indignation and by and by dropping the name of
his patron Cosimo of the Medici. He chides the police officer for not giving proper training to
his subordinates they do not know how to behave with a monk who belongs to a cloister and
stays with Cosimo and also exposes the hypocrisy and inefficiency of the police who arrest
the innocent and fail to capture the real criminals, and then suddenly he talks about Juda’s
face. This must have perplexed the officer.
Lippo tactfully gets rid of the guards by giving them a few coins to have a drink and sits
down Whip to haunch’ with the officer. Like many other monologues of Browning. the poem
Fra Lippo Lippi, is ‘an exercise in self-justification—the speaker justifying to the listener, a
certain course of action, a set of beliefs and even his entire life. “Much of the richness and
much of the psychological reality of Fra Lippo Lippi grows out of his various reasons for
talking, for giving voice to his frustration, his anger, his love of sensual pleasures, his idea on
art, his slight sense of guilt at his unmonkish behaviour.”
“When Lippo sits down to talk with the officer he has already used his considerable
rhetorical powers to rout the police constabulary”. The officer has by now learnt that Lippo is
a painter-monk. And observing the proper twinkle in his eye, Lippo is convinced that the
officer knows about his earlier escapades and exploits this friendly gesture to his advantage.
He gives a lively account of how during the carnival season he reached the area, where
sportive ladies lived, instead of staying at the Medici house painting saints and saints and
saints for days together and completing the portrait of St Jerome ‘knocking at his poor old
breast/With his great round stone to subdue the flesh’. If he had not been captured, he would
have quietly returned to the house and finished the painting. He digs at degraded social
standards. If Cosimo himself had visited this forbidden area, none would have even talked
about it, but all the uproar is because a monk has been found passing by the place; a monk
whose head has been shaved as a reminder of the chaste life he is expected to lead. This is an
ironical situation.
St. Jerome beating his breast with a great round stone refreshes the memory of Lippo—
he is reminded of the hardships in his childhood. He painfully recollects the torments of the
flesh he had known as an orphan child in the streets of Florence.
I starved there, God knows how, a year or two
On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks,
Refuse and rubbish.
When he was eight years old, his aunt, a nun, took him to the Carmine church, where
they made a monk of him. Little did the starving child know, when the good fat father asked
him ‘will you renounce that he would be compelled to renounce
...the world, its pride and greed,
Palace, farm, villa, shop and banking house,
Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici
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 Have given their hearts to—all at eight years old.
He felt contented that at least he had
...the good bellyful
The warm serge and the rope that goes all round
And day long blessed idleness beside!
It may appear from the description of his childhood beset with poverty and starvation
that Lippo is trying to win the sympathy of the officer or the reader. But this is not so. There
is no indication of self-pity. In fact he describes his life with too much humorous gusto and
sarcasm. Observe the description of the priest.
“So boy, you’re minded”, quoth the good fat father
Wiping his own mouth, it was refrection time.
and the reaction of the eight year old Lippo
“Will you renounce”...“the mouthful of bread,” thought I
and also his verdict on the priest’s life:
“And day-long blessed idleness beside!
Lippo drew two lessons from his early experiences:
You should not take a fellow eight years old,
And make him swear to never kiss the girls.
And:
...mind you when a boy starves in streets
Eight year’s together, as my fortune was,
Watching folks faces to know who will fling
The bit of half-stripped grape bunch he desires,
And who will curse and kick him for his pains
...
... which dog bites, which lets drop
His bone from the heap of offal in the street,—
Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,
He learns the look of things.
Lippo was hardened by his experiences on the street, and it was these experiences that
nurtured his artistic expression. He was least interested in learning. The senior monks tried to

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teach him with their books but failed and they taught Latin ‘in pure waste’. He humorously
writes:
Flower o’ the clove.
All the Latin construe is ‘amo’ I love.
Thus he could only learn one Latin word ‘amo’ meaning ‘I love’. Instead he drew figures
everywhere—on copy books, on the ‘antiphonary marge’, among the musical notes and
alphabets, ins and outs of grammar and on the wall, the bench and the doors— figures drawn
from his memory, figures of people he had known, observed, and interacted with.
Recognising the talent of this young monk, the Prior ordered him to paint the outer walls of
the convent. Once again Lippo’s sense of humour and sarcasm is revealed in his description.
“Nay”, quoth the Prior “turn him out, d’ye say?
In no wise. Lose a crow and catch a lark,
What of at last we get our man of parts,
We Carmelites, like those Camaldolese,
And Preaching Friars, to do our church fine
And put the front on it that ought to be!”
The church rivalries and the corruption in various monasteries are hinted at here. In order
to hide their ‘sins’ the exterior of the churches were decorated with paintings of saints, angels
etc.
When Lippo transferred his sense of reality to art by including recognisable human faces
in his paintings, the ‘simple bodies’—the young monks praised him, but their betters—the
prior and the learned—pulled a face. Lippo’s triumph’s straw-fire flared and funked. Instead
of appreciation and praise for his realistic paintings, he received admonition—he was told to
follow the more stylised and didactic examples of Giotto and Fra Angelico. “His business is
not to pay homage to the perishable clay but to paint the souls of men,” he was told.
The Prior’s views reflect the attitude of the authorities to new ideas and ways in Lippo’s
time. Lippo in detail discusses what a painting should depict. He does not accep the
traditional view that the artist should only present the ‘soul’ and not the real men and women.
We observe a sudden change in the tone of Lippo when he narrates the conservative reception
of his realistic paintings. He is irritated with narrow-minded, convention-loving ecclesiastics
who have always condemned his painting for realistically reproducing human beings of flesh
and body.
Now, is this sense, I ask?
A fine way to paint soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can’t stop, these must go further

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 And can’t fare worse!
‘Does the beauty of visible appearance or the representation of that beauty, prevent the
artist from putting “soul” into his painting an well? Why can’t we have both,’ asks the
speaker. He himself supplies the answer.
If you get simple beauty and not else,
You get about the best thing God invents
That’s somewhat. And you’ll find the soul you have missed,
Within yourself when you return His thanks!
Lippo now tells the officer that he has left the convent and is staying with Cosimo of the
Medici He is his own master. He paints when he likes and does not paint if he does not wish.
He is ‘free’ to a great extent and Cosimo doesn’t mind if he spends time in fun and frolic. But
he is not ‘free’ to paint what he likes or desires. “The old school still sticks’—the old monks,
their reactions and thoughts inhibit him even now when he paints for Cosimo. Even Cosimo
is critical of his naturalistic paintings. The old grey eyes seem to be peeping over his
shoulders and shaking still at his paintings. They seem to curse him:
‘Fag on at flesh, you’ll never make the third.’
Lippo expresses his resentment. He is annoyed with these Latin educated priests and
persons and also with himself for compromising his realistic vision of ‘the value and
significance of the flesh.’
I swallow my rage
Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint,
To please them.
And when he is too much disgusted, he lets himself enjoy the business of the world’
without any qualms:
And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over
The world and life’s too big to pass for a dream,
And I do these wild, things in sheer despite,
And play the fooleries you catch me at,
In pure rage!
Lippo vents his anger at those priests who preach morality but do not follow the moral
precepts themselves. He believes that others may lie about their feelings but he himself is an
honest worshipper of God.
...I think I speak as I was taught.
I always see the garden and God there’
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 A-making man’s wife, and my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh
I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.
Lippo has moved far away from merely excusing himself for his midnight adventures
among the ladies on the carnival days; his anger, despair, frustration warmed by the bitter
memories of his childhood, his agonising experiences in the Carmelite Cloister, compel him
to reveal what he himself is, his love of the physical world, the nature and the objective of his
realistic art.
He may be considered to be ‘a beast’, not a real monk, by the world but Lippo does not
care like Rabbi Ben Ezra for the verdicts of the world about his life and character. “His
sensuality is not just a lovable weakness in a licentious monk but is itself a profoundly
religious attitude towards the beauty of God’s world.”
...you’ve seen the world
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades,
Changes and surprises—and God made it all
For what! ...what’s it all about!
To be passed over, despised? Or dwelt upon;
Wondered at?
Lippo’s role as a realistic painter is to bring other men to a love of this world:
...don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love.
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, printed...
... Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.
“After this eloquent testimony, Lippo’s speech moves to a lower plane, he shows his
anger at those who misunderstand his art, apologises for having spoken so strongly and so
unmonk-like, and reveals his plan to make amends for his nightly escapes by painting
something for the nuns at St. Ambriogio.” He proposes to paint God in the mids of Madonna
and her babe—Jesus Christ surrounded by ‘a bowery, flowery anget brood,’ and show in the
painting himself a man amazed, mad and confused to find himself in the midst of holy
company, looking for an escape, being held by a tender female angel who will plead for him
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for a place among the sacred gathering for it is the artist, Lippo, who has created all those
figures in the painting.
Lippo may seem to be apologetic but he remains rebellion till the end. “His rebellion has
been strengthened by the act of talking it out’ to himself and to the officer He tries to
vindicate himself when he tells the officer that he intends to put himself in the painting—the
artist holding hands with a beautiful woman right in the presence of God.”
What he has asserted earlier, he repeats at the end:
Flower o’ the pine.
You keep your mist...manners and I’ll stick to mine
and
I always see the garden and God there
A-making man’s life
He will continue to paint realistically and enjoy worldly pleasures.
He bids fare well to the officer, who has been convinced by the painter-monk and goes
back to his home.
I know my way back
Don’t fear me!
In Fra Lippo Lippi the speaker establishes the truth that
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank—it means intensely, and means good
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
“The world is good because God has made it so. In recognising its goodness, we
recognise, His goodness.”
The artist helps in the process of recognition because he constantly looks for the beauty
that is the evidence of God’s existence in the world and his work makes the rest of us aware
of greatness and glory of God.” (Mark Roberts)
In Fra Lippo Lippi Browning has created a character who is an energetic frank person, a
keen observer, a talented artist, a convincing speaker and above all a rebel, who had a very
difficult childhood, who was compelled to become a monk at the age of eight but could not
accept the rigorous laws of the church. He is a man of flesh and blood and can't resist
temptation. Yet he is religiously devoted to realistic painting, finds the goodness of God
spilled in all His creations—all the objects of nature, including living beings-reflect the image
of God, so they are to be loved, admired and praised.

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 “The style of the poem is simple, colloquial and lucid. Although there are a few allusions
and references to Italian painters, saints, arts and the religious controversies rather
controversies among various Christian sects, the poem is remarkable for its clarity of
expression. Lippo’s narration of his life and life’s relationship with art or painting is
enlivened by flashes of humour. He repeatedly uses Italian flower songs to reveal his views
and campare them with others. There are a number of suggestive similes and expressions in
the monologue for example in the beginning he compares the monk who leaves his cloister
and secretly visits the prohibited area to a rat and the woman of illrepute to a mouse. Humour
is created by the use of a quaint comparison when he tells the officer that he indulges in
fooleries in order to relieve himself from the strain of having to paint devotional pictures:”
The old mill horse, out at grass
After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so,
Although the miller does not preach him
The only good of grass is to make chaff
An equally interesting and suggestive erotic simile is used when he describe himself
shuffling sideways with his blushing face ‘under the cover of a hundred wine thrown.’
Like a spread of kirtles when you’re gay
And play hot cockles, all the doors being shut,
Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops
The hot-headed husband.
The simile is suggestive of the sensuality of Lippo. His comparisons and expression are
interesting. For example:
(a) You’ll not mistake an idle word
Spoke in a huff by a poor monk,
Tasting the air this spicy night which turns
The unaccustomed head like chianti wine!
(b) And Job, I must have him there past mistake
The man of UZ (and us without the Z
Painters who need his patience.)
“The poem is admirable for its undercurrent of humour, its impressionistic descriptions,
its imaginative insight into the complex character of the monk-painter. TI speech of Lippo is
interspersed with lines of exceptionally beautiful poetry for examp the following lines which
sum up the theme of the poem.”
For me, I think I speak as I was taught;

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 I always see the garden and God there
A-making man’s wife, and, my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh
I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.
and
For, don’t you mark? We’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see,
And so they are better painted, better to us,
Which is something. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other, so,
Lending our minds out.
According to a critic “Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi is an interesting poem because takes
on questions of identity, artistic expression, institution of religion, the connection between
mind and body, obedience, and on going search for the meaning of life and escapism (granted
they are all inter-related). From the very start of the poem, Browning presents the narrator as
a man in search of his identity for the monk questions “who am I?” The monk did not choose
the life, for it was his aunt, a nun, who found him as a homeless child and brought him to the
convent. The narrator was hardened by his experiences on the street, and it was these
experiences which nurtured his artistic voression. He was reproached by his fellow-monks
(senior) for his portrayal of humans for the narrator presented the intimate details of human
action and body—the monks merely wanted the narrator to present the human soul on canvas.
They did not understand the connection between body and soul; they basically mistook
external beauty being representative of human emotion—‘Take the prettiest face...you can’t
discover if it means hope, fear, sorrow or joy? Won’t beauty go with these?” (Lines 208-
211)”.
Fra Lippo Lippi seems to criticise the hypocrisy of religion, and the senior monks,
perhaps makes an effort to establish that the institution of religion is concerned with the
surface details of the soul’ and not ‘with delving into the souls of human in order to be the
guide to the soul’, Lippo defends not only style of his painting, and its close link with the
universe created by God and to life, also his escapades. “He finds some sort of escape from
the world around him through his affairs with women, through ‘sin’—the last few lines of the
poem imply as long as he is not caught, it is all good.’ Lippo thinks that the church and other
institutions are concerned with appearances, and not with harsh realities of life.
Fra Lippo Lippi was a personal favourite of Browning. William De Vane, a great
Browning scholar, finds a close relationship of Fra Lippo to his creator. Browning, he says

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 could not have chosen a better poem with which to challenge the orthodox conception
of poetry in mid-nineteeth century, or one that better expresses the new elements in
poetry which he was to introduce. Browning found in the Renaissance painter a very
sympathetic character like himself highly individualistic, suffering from the tyranny of
artistic convention, and like himself energetic and instinct with seemingly well thought
out aesthetic and religious opinions which chimed with Browning’s own.
On Fra Lippo Lippi
The greatest artists are those whose sense and intuitions work together in harmonious
unison. The great enemy of man’s intuitional nature, as we have seen, is the intellect; and in
artistic enterprises the intellect’s weapon of attack against the freshness and immediacy of
sensory impressions is tradition. Therefore, the artists whom Browning holds up for
admiration are, like his lovers and men of action, non-conformists, rebels and individualistic
on instinct. The fullest expression of the poet’s aesthetic philosophy is to be found in ‘Fra
Lippo Lippi’. The circumstances under which we encounter Fra Lippo are significant in
themselves; for he has just been apprehended as a potential law breaker. We learn that he has
fled the confinement of his patron’s house because it carnival time and he is unable to resist
the lure of the streets. The irrepressible gaiety of life is implicit in the jigging refrain that
keeps running through the painter’s mind:
Flower o’ the broom,
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
With this preparation, it is not surprising to find that Fra Era Lippo has rejected the
institutional repression of the Church, and especially that he has thrown over traditional
forms of ecclesiastical art as exemplified in the work of such artists as Fra Angelico and
Lorenzo Monaco. Fra Lippo is one of Browning’s incorruptible innocents. He paints by
instinct; and what he paints is the world of his perceptions, not an intellectualised abstraction
of it: ‘The world and life’s too big to pass for a dream.’ But underlying the intensity of his
response to human experience is the innate perception of a higher reality made manifest, if at
all, through the appearances of this world. The artist cannot do better than reproduce with as
great fidelity as possible his individual sense of the observed fact; in so doing he records his
own gratitude for the privilege of living, and in the process opens the eyes of others to the
meaning of life:
However, you’re my man, you’ve seen the world
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises—and God made it all!
For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town’s face, younder river’s line,

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 The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What’s it all about?
To be passed over, despised? Or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? Oh, this last of course! you say,
But why not do as well as say, — paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God’s works--paint any one, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, ‘His works
‘Are here already; nature is complete:
‘Suppose you reproduce her—which you can’t)
‘There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then.’
For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted—better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now,
Your cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk,
And trust me but you should, though! How much more,
If I drew higher things with the same truth!
That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,
Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh,
It makes me mad to be what men shall do
And we in our graves! This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
In the appeal which his paintings make to the emotions of an unsophisticated populace
Fra Lippo finds the ultimate vindication of his artistic theories. But while Browning believed
that great art would always communicate so long as the sensibilities of its audience had not
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been deadened by tradition or materialised by social pressures, the half-hearted reception of
his own early work inclined him to emphasize the creator’s individual integrity rather than his
influence. After Sordello, worldly prestige is never invoked as a consideration relevant to
artistic success. Almost invariably, the artists in his poetry are somewhat alien figures, either
neglected or misprized by the society in which they live. Even Fra Lippo shows a defensive
attitude in challenging the tradition ridden prejudices of his age.
From The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Princeton NJ 1952)

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 Unit-4

The Role of the Listener, The Reader and the Portrait in “My
Last Duchess”
The dramatic monologue form was “certainly taken up and fully exploited for the first
time” by nineteenth century poets, particularly Robert Browning. The central spotlight is
often focused upon the figure of the speaker and the critics have studied in detail how ‘a
typically eloquent rhetorician’ manipulates his auditor, “...the typical speaker of Browning’s
monologue is aggressive, often threatening, nearly always superior, socially and/or
intentionally, to the auditor”. The auditor is compelled rather forced to hear, and act as “an
absolutely silent, a passive receptor of a verbal tour de force that leaves him no opportunity
for response”.
The auditor’s silence is “a silence of intimidation”. By silencing the listener “the speaker
accomplishes his own typically narcissistic self-delineation, puts himself in the spotlight” and
turns the body of the listener into ‘a shadow’. Through aggression and rhetorical power the
speaker achieves the effacement of the listener and presents his self-portrait convincingly.
The listener may not speak, may remain silent, but his presence is very crucial in a
dramatic monologue, he is necessary for the speaker’s self-delineation. Moreover, inspite of
the absence of the speech, the auditor is very much a living part of the whole drama. In fact
the second person’s ‘silence’ in monologues “highlights the tension between consensus and
resistance”. This tension is “central characteristic” of a dramatic monologue - the reader is
able to see and understand the speaker through the shadowy figure of the auditor. The reader
is often silent’ in the beginning, but as the utterance progresses, he begins to interpret the
speech and the relationship between the speaker and the listener and their interaction and thus
the reader establishes his superiority over both the speaker and the auditor.
Robert Langbaum in his article on ‘Dramatic Monologue — Sympathy vs. Judgement’
explores the tensions between sympathy and judgement in all dramatic monologues. “The
reader’s own response to the speaker swings between a sympathetic identification with him,
no matter how strange or disturbed that speaker may be and a more objective, distanced
judgement.” Many critics are concerned with the speaker’s “verbal delineation” how the
speaker is able to force himself upon the listener and the real reader by luring them into his
verbal webs; and also with the irony that “springs the verbal traps that have been set”.
The reader does sympathise with the speaker to a great extent, but he is also aware of the
role of the silent auditor. The reader realises that the poem’s listener ‘you’ is intentionally
overwhelmed by the speaker, whose only aim is “an often narcissistic self-delineation.” The
Duke of My Last Duchess and the christmatic title scoundrel of Fra Lippo Lippi are the
greatest narcissists created by Browning.
Is the auditor in a dramatic monologue always non-communicative ? No, the auditor may
not ‘speak a word’ but he can express his consent or disagreement by some non-verbal

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means, like facial expression or body gestures. We observe these gestures when the
speaker— the Duke or Lippo — corrects or modifies his remarks in evident response.
“The listener in the typical Browning monologue recognises the speaker’s position of
power, given the latter’s aggressive, sometimes even menacing nature, the apparent passivity
of the silent listener seems at once more remarkable, and yet the more understandable.” We
are not surprised at the silence of the envoy in My Last Duchess. The Duke is superior to him
in rank and then his intimidating generosity is more frightening,
The reader is able to penetrate the imposed silence of the envoy. This code of silence is
grounded in fear. Because of fear the intimidated auditor is compelled to keep quiet and not
to express his feelings in any way — through facial expression or some gesture. It does not
necessarily imply “consent’ and yet hostile circumstances make him lose his identity. “The
silence of the addressee is perceptibly an offensive one, particularly as by generic definition
he is unable to break the situational silence, whether in agreement or disagreement, whether
in comprehension or misunderstanding”. Since the reader has no ‘clearly discernible response
from the textual auditor he has to turn toward the speaker—his self-portraiture.
“The very silence of the passive, listening figure’ induces the reader to interpretation.
This is what Browning expected from ‘an ideal reader,’ he said ‘a work like mine depends
more immediately (than an acted drama) on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for
its success—indeed were my scenes stars it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying
all charm, shall connect the scattered lights into a constellation—a lyre or a Crown. “So many
of Browning’s monologues are self reflexively about art itself, the poems are pointing as
precisely towards the paradigmatic structure of their own ‘correct’ interpretation”.
“The hierarchy set up by the speaker himself is undermined by the poem’s own status as
the text; in that which it would be difficult in some poems to know that anything had been
communicated to the auditor at all.” The speaker gains or loses at the same time by silencing
the listener, he tries to fulfill his demand for identity’ but this demand is “accomplished at his
own expenses” and his history is “undermined by something or someone not in his control”,
the subjectivity of the reader.
Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett in 1845. “A dramatic poet has to make you love or
admire his men and women - they must do or say all that you are to see and hear - really do it
in your face, say into your ears, and it is wholly for you, in your power to blame what is so
said and done.”
Thus Browning insists on the reader’s awareness of himself or herself as a figure both as
a subjective self and as a trope.”
The imposed silence of the painted figure of the last Duchess (in My Last Duchess) does
not coincide with oblivious’—she is both silent and dead. She is literally oblivious but
figuratively she is not, for who knows for certain that her death may not have been
exaggerated. She looks ‘as if she were alive (line 2) and then ‘never read/Strangers like you
that pictured countenance without (seeming) to want to ask if you they durst/How such a
glance came there’ (6-12). The Duke is irritated to realise that the portrait has so beautifully
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captured through the ‘half-flush’ the essential generosity of the Duchess’s spirit—and this
generosity has been a source of annoyance when she was alive and it is still troubling him
after her death.
The portrait presents the Duchess so strikingly alive and yet so ‘silent’ in her very
presence. Her image tells a story which the strangers read. The Duke must control the
interpretation of the visual text since he knows the viewer’s interpretation must already have
begun. The Duke, who is a possessor of property and person, is “finally possessed” by the
life-like figure of the Duchess “with its immortalised glance’ over which he has no more
control now than he did before, the sympathetic glance that ‘went every where’ (L.24). and
the blush that favoured all continue to do so. The resistance to the Duke’s narcissistic
dalliance, to put it in another way, comes from the “liveliness of the painting itself, her life-
in-death’ haunts him and provokes him to acknowledge “the beauty and candour of her
painted face, epitomised by the heightened colour of her blushing cheek”, his behaviour
“belies his story of her supposed betrayal of the Duke himself”.
The image of the Duchess enables the reader to probe the character of the Duke “The
glance that sees the joy of the world, and the spot of joy’ that marks the spirit that animated
her countenance undermine the ‘authoritative version’ which intends to reduce her from
subject to object, a mere piece of art. The portrait is both the subject and the object of the
story, “Far from being effaced the Duchess is time and time again brought back to life by the
Duke’s pathological sensitivity to an unguided and therefore, free reading of the text”—the
portrait of his last Duchess.
The portrait is an ironical figuration of the actual reader-the Duchess in the portrait is a
living presence as she is beyond the control of the Duke’s attempted rhetorical, similarly the
reader is at once inside and outside the frame of the Duke’s self portrait. The Duke’s demand
for self identity, and his effort to change the Duchess into an object are resisted by the
Duchess’s presence in the portrait—Stands as if alive’, her ‘spot of joy’ “half-flush’, ‘her
passionate glance’, ‘her smiles all seem to point to the Duke’s failure to tame her. And the
reader’s objective study of the Duke’s manner of utterance asserts his supremacy over the
Duke—the Duke thus becomes both the subject and object of his study, the Duchess tropes
into the reader’s interpretation.
Browning’s poems are akin to Whitman’s. Their poems highlight the rhetorical or
persuasive nature of literature. The I of the listener may appear to be effaced in the dramatic
monologue, but the you used for the listener by the speaker is never effaced / you the reader is
more powerful than I the speaker.
(Reference ‘The Pragmatics of Silence and the Figuration of the Reader’ by Jennifer
A. Wagner – Lawlor).

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 Unit-4(c)
Christina Rossetti: A General Introduction
S.K. Mukherjee

Christina wrote of bleak, desolate landscapes and moods which owed their colour to
her religious creed which had turned her spirit somewhat ascetic and astringent, but which
otherwise yearned for sunshine and the warmth of human relationship. The dominant strain of
her poetry was the lack or want of something. The Pre -Raphaelite brotherhood expected her
to write on the beauties of nature but she wrote about her real experiences of life as she had
felt them, – loneliness, betrayal, despair, sickness and death. She also wrote of joy, joy of
love and the spiritual ecstasy of the soul, seeing in one, the reflection of the other. Christina
always maintained her individual characteristics even amidst extremely different
environment. Surrounded by unconventional Italian emigrants and the extraordinary Pre-
Raphaelite brotherhood, she remained sternly conventional like here mother or sister. But
inside the conventional exterior, was a soul full of daring passion and anger, and she wrote
poetry, whose sensuality was often startling.
It is not easy to find and portray the real and exact Christina, that she was. A large
variety of papers materials, letters and other evidences have been destroyed by Christina
herself, and on her request by friends and relatives to protect a saintly image that was
nourished by the public, and given over to the posterity to cherish. Her brother Dante Gabriel
Rossetti created the saintly image of Christina through such paintings as the Girlhood of
Mary virgin carefully maintained by the respectful memoir of her other brother William
Rossetti, all of which present the perfect picture of a pious and dutiful daughter, sister and
friend, patient beyond limits and without the least traces of any sort of taint or blemish
whatsoever. Even Christina would have been appalled by the projection of such an artificial
picture of hers and she once objected to her brother Gabriel for showing her as “too dreamily
sweet.”
Christina wrote to a friend that her poems were artistic creations as a result of efforts
being made to articulate her thoughts and emotions in artistically pleasing pictures and
images for every such joyful moments of imagination and sensation. They were not only the
“fruits of effort” but also the “record of sensation, fancy, etc.” Her poems were a true record
of her subjective emotions. In her manuscripts she noted down the different moods that came
to her on moments, her fears and dreams, at other moments, and wove them later in beautiful
artistic patterns. Some of them were so subjective and personal, that they were not published,
there were about three hundred such poems. However her poetry is not her autobiography.
The artist presents the finished product of art to one’s readers and it involves many changes
in fact. Therefore a close interpretation of the poems through the facts of life, or trying to
know or ascertain her life using the poems as touchstone, may be misleading and erroneous.
One should take into account of what Christina herself called the capacity of “The poet mind”
to create unknown quantities.”

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 Christina Rossetti was born on 5 December 1830. Christina was both Italian and
English. Christina’s father, Gabriel Rossetti was a political refugee, who had come to
England in 1824, after a dramatic escape from Naples. He married in 1826, Frances Polidori,
who was half-English, daughter of Gaetano Polidori, another Italian exile, and his English
wife Anna.

Goblin Market - A Study in Text

We know nothing of how Goblin Market was written but one day there it is - April 27,
1859 to be precise. It is the best known poem of Christina, and people have read it with a
great deal of attention and interest. As per Christina’s own assertion, that she intended it to be
simply a fairy tale, most readers are not satisfied by this simple explanation.
From the very beginning we enter suddenly into a strange vivid world.
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpacked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches
Swart headed mulberries
Wild freeborn cranberries
There are no men in this world, no heroes apart from the fearful maleness of the
goblins. There is a slight hint at some kind of pastoral homework of Laura and Lizzie, but we
cannot also sense a social structure beyond it. The poem however has its own atmosphere and
logic. Children find it very enjoyable and fascinat-ing but even they find some thing lacking,
as if they have entered abruptly into a world somewhere in the middle and much has been
kept away from them. This is an odd magic world, filled with strange animals, but this
oddness owe their origin to a similar oddness in Christina’s nature which thrived along with
her conflicting religious devotion. Her brother describes this peculiar trait of her character as
“the odd freakishness which flecked the extreme and almost excessive seriousness of her
thought”. Her tender love and sense of charm for animals was there from the very beginning
of her life. She derived a lot of delight and wonder by those animals, and often visited the zoo
for consolation and refreshment, for calm reflection and deep meditation. For ex-ample, she
first drew Gabriel’s attention to the absurd charm of wombats. A letter written in August

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1858, describes one such visit to the zoo, and how she was fascinated by the animals “Lizards
are in strong force, tortoises active, alligators looking up. The weasel-headed armadillo as
usual evaded us. A tree frog came to light, the exact image of a tin toy to follow a magnet in a
slop-basin. The blind wombat and neighboring porcupine broke forth into short-lived
hostilities, but apparently without permanent results. The young puma begins to bite”. She
loved and handled fearlessly even those animals and insects which most detest and find
repulsive. The young daughter of a house where she was visiting recalls “I used to wonder at
and admire the way in which she would take up and hold in the hollow of her hand, cold little
frogs and clammy toads or furry many legged caterpillars with a fearless love that we country
children could never emulate”. Christina always had a love for the grotesque - and bizarre,
and as the goblins first tumble helter-skelter on the page, it is this odd world of strange-
looking animals that opens before us: These animals who are quaint creatures at this stage of
the story, assume sinister forms later, as the story advances. This is the odd and bizarre world
of the goblins:
One had a cat’s face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry
One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.
It is clear that Christina had observed the small grotesque creatures meticulously —
the rat like tramp, the obtuse prowl. These creatures are watched by the two maidens-Laura
and Lizzie, “golden head by golden head”, one sensible one willful and romantic.
Laura bowed her heard to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes.
Lizzie blushes because she understand the fearful consequences of accepting what the
goblins are offering and tells her sister, clearly that it is forbidden to succumb to the sinister
temptation of the goblins.
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?

But Laura is overpowered by the alluring spectacle of the cavalcade of the goblins and their
sweet and tempt-ing wares.

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Look Lizzie, look Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men,
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds weight,
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes
Though Lizzie’s virtuous common sense is extolled, it is Laura’s passion which is
described with all its grandeur and details showing how the poet is identifying herself with
her feelings. The contrast between the twin sister brings out the intensity of the weaknesses of
Laura to a brighter focus of our attention and study. Laura hesitates before “the fall” and is
still pure when her position is described in an accumulating series of images, white and silver
in colour.
Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch
When its last restraint is gone.
Soon she enters into the realm of a joyful orgy of sensual gratification, paying the price with
a golden curl and a “tear more rare than pearl”.
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red :,
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She sucked until her lips were sore;
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Then flung the emptied rinds away
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone
The resonance of the poem’s imagery is close to joy followed by bitter dearth, which
Christina had known in her childhood.
The lines show an intimate link between eating and sensual gratification which
Christina had in her mind from her reading of the Eve of St. Agnes in Man’s Everyday Book-
a favorite with Rossetti children. This was the famous scene in which Prophyro, prior to
seducing Madeline, lays out a banquet, which is a magical feast produced by him from
nowhere.
Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd
With jellies soother than the creamy curd
And lucent syrups tinct with cinnaman.
Another book, beloved of the Rossetti Children, was Keightley’s Fairy Mythology,
(The writer was a friend of the family). Many stories from this book, present a primitive
connection between food and enchant-ment. For example, a farmer’s boy was offered to eat
something by an elf-maid, - “ but when he had done as she had desired, he no longer had any
command of himself, so that she has no difficulty in enticing him with her.” The boy returns
home, and declines to eat any food whatsoever, saying “he knew now where he could get
better food.” After his angry parents force him to eat, he falls asleep and never recovers the
use of his reason.
A 20th century reader reads Goblin Market, with a degree of sexual awareness which
was not at all obvious to Victorian readers. Few today would react like a reviewer of 1887,
that “Goblin Market is surely the most naive and childlike poem in our language.” Christina’s
own knowledge of the sexual process must have been very little, as the women of that time
were kept innocent of the facts, more so in case of her as she was educated at home and did
not encounter some other source of enlightenment. The religious restrictions and rigidities of
the Anglican church to which she belonged quashed her curiosity in this regard. Many
Victorian women deprived of full sexual knowledge and understanding lived their erotic lives
at a pre-adolescent level. Their desires and emotions surged in a kind of turbid brew without
ever quite surfacing: Victiorian women specially single ones turned to intense friendships
with other women with attachments which remained per-petually vague and unfocussed.
Some turned to church and to an intense love of Christ or fell in love with His Vicar as
substitute.
Deprived of equality women went for some kind of adolescent dependence. Due to
such peculiar circumstances of these times the sexual feelings of many women remained

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unfocused, unfulfilled and turbulent. They did not know what to make of their sexual
feelings. Thus the sexual imagery of Goblin Market has to be understood at this level, for it
operates at this level in the poem. Adolescent feeling is very strong in the poem. That is why
the poem still has the power to move us, for it perpetually recreates the adolescent intensity
of feeling in its readers. Through such dark, vague and unrealized yet intense feelings of
sexual urge. Christina envisions Laura eating the forbidden fruit and entering a trance–like
state, the state between life and death,–“the twilight that does not rise nor set”. The sleepers
in “Sleep at Sea” are in such a trance. Many other poems of the period, specially some that
Christina did not publish describe this state.
I grow so weary : is it death
This awful woeful weariness
It is a weight to heave my breath,
A weight to wake, a weight to sleep;
I have no heart to work or weep.
This is the “living death” of depression like Laura’s entranced state. First her reaction
is one of violent passion and anger, and then she cries in grief.
Then sat up in a passionate yearning
And gashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept
As if her heart would break.
Then she grew lazy and inactive, unconcerned, and disinclined to work.
Nothing moved her, nothing, interested her, a state that Christina describes in the poem
quoted earlier—Sleep at Sea.
“She no more swept the house,,
Tended the fowls or cows,
Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat
Brought water from the brook:
But sat down listless in the chimney nook
And would not eat
Jeanie succumbed to the same temptation and never recovered from her trance,
Christina makes an explicit sexual suggestion, the only place in the poem where this is so
made, that Jeanie had to undergo a terrible loss, the greatest and one that is forbidden to be
made – “the crucial loss of virginity” – “ for joys brides hope to have.”
She thought of Jeanic in her grave,
Who should have been a bride?

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But who for joys brides hope to have
Fall six and died.
Jeanie has suffered a kind of curse, that is perpetual for the wrong that she had
committed. The blight lasts even after her death.
While to this day no grass will grow
Where she lies low:
I planted daisies there a year ago
That never blow.
The fate of the kernel stone shows that Laura is moving towards the same doom,
when the poem develops another level of imagery or to the next realm of experience -that of
redemption through sacrifice. It is the love, sympathy, wisdom and consideration of Lizzie
which saves her from her terrible morass of destruc-tion. She goes to the goblins alone, and
stands her ground even amidst unlimited torture which is similar to rape.
They trod and hustled her
Elbowed and jostled her
Clawed with their nails
Barking mewing hissing mocking
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking
Twitched her hair out by the roots
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat
Through her own examples, Lizzie shows how the temptation which had overpowered
Laura, Could be resisted successfully. She courageously withstood all her suffering and set an
example for all weak people to overcome their sorrow and difficulties. Her courage to fight
evil weaknesses, and her resolute firmness and determination to stand her ground against all
odds can infuse the same sprit mothers, and pull them out of their trance of dilemma and
lethargy and put them to the path of joy and vigor. Lizzie’s gallantry is described thus. Alone,
she stemmed the assaults of the goblin and held their attacks at bay: Like a lily in a flood
Like a rock of blue-veined stone
Lashed by tides obstreperously,
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,

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Sending up a golden fire,
Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree
White with blossoms honey sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee.
It is firmness and fortitude such as this, which is essential to encounter the evil
temptations of the dreadful Goblins with their fascinating fruits. The image is of tormented
Christ undergoing all the tortures and sufferings to redeem humanity, as Lizzie sought to
revive and redeem her weaker sister, through such a glorious path of strength and courage.
Laura’s downfall was caused through sucking the juicy fruits “She sucked and sucked and
sucked the more/Fruits which that unknown orchard bore/She sucked until her lips were
sore”. Her redemption is brought about through the same process. She asks Laura to kiss her
and suck her juices “of juice that syruped all her face”.
“Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men”
It sounds like Christ asking people to abjure the path of sin and temptation and seek
Him through virtue and righteousness. Her words are almost those of Christ” “ Take ye and
eat…. “It is at this level of meaning that we are to find the emotional heart of the poem as
Georgina Battiscombe says : “the religious interpretation of Goblin Market is much nearer to
her own way of thought than the sexual one”. Christina was not con-sciously writing a
religious poem (it would be blasphemous to use goblins and magic in such a poem), but she
had been steeped since childhood into the story of Fall into sin caused by eating forbidden
fruit, followed by an age of grief, which was finally resolved through Christ’s love and
sacrifice. Nowadays people look on Goblin Market as a story of temptation and sin, to
Christina and her contemporaries it was a story of redemp-tion through sacrifice. The ending
of the poem skips ten years after this incident, when Laura and Lizzie are safely married and
have children of their own, “Their lives bound up in tender lives”. They would gather the
little ones and recall their early days when they met the “wicked and quaint fruit-merchant”
goblins - their tempting fruits which were sweet in taste like “honey to the throat/But poison
in the blood”. She would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good
And win the fiery antidote
The last lines of the poem acknowledge with feelings of pride and gratefulness the
affectionate and rescuing role that her sister Lizzie had played in saving her from the
traumatic ill-effects of her encounter with the goblins and their deadly fruits. The words of
praise are showered equally on Lizzie as in general on one’s dear and near sister, and recalls
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Christina’s own long and close association with her sister Maria Francesca Rossetti to whom
the first edition of the poem published in 1862 was dedicated.
For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.
It appears that these lines had some special personal significance for Christina.
William Rossetti wrote in the notes to his edition of 1904: “Christina, I have no doubt, had
same particular occurrence in her mind, but what it was I know not.” He later wrote to
Mackenzie Bell, Christina’s first biographer “.....the lines at the close indicate something:
apparently Christina considered herself to be chargeable with some sort of spiritual
backsliding, against which Maria’s influence had been exercised beneficially”. The “spiritual
backsliding” might not have been serious, except by the strict standards the sisters set
themselves.
The two poems that immediately precede Goblin Market L.E.L. ‘and Ash
Wednesday’ show that Christina was in a state of deep melancholy and self-reproach during
this period. Ash Wednesday is filled with a consciousness of sin. L.E.L. is a sad poem which
veils the personal feelings of sadness of Christina.
All love, are loved, save only I; their hearts
Beat warm with love and joy, beat full there of:
They cannot guess, who play the pleasant parts
My heart is breaking for a little love.
......
I deck myself with silks and jewelry,
I plume myself like any mated dove,
They praise my rustling show, and never see,
My heart is breaking for a little love.
Before the writing of Gobllin Market in 1859, Christina underwent some sort of a
crisis in 1857-58. Due to the destruction of all evidences that may throw some light on
Christina’s personal life, by herself and her family members, it is not possible to know how
what it was. Perhaps she heard of some incident like Collinson’s marriage and the long ago
relationship assumed unrealistic proportions in her mind. She had, delusions and depressions
with a sense of worthlessness and despair. She was cared for in the asylum of the Albany
Street House. She was helped back to sanity by her mother’s and sister’s patient care. This
explains her high sense of loyalty and gratitude to them for their nursing and care. Laura’s
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descent into the nightmare world of Goblins can then be seen as the record of her own
descent into the nightmare of madness through a violent stage of hallucination and torment,
“thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, followed by a passive state of listlessness and despair.
Helped by Maria, she recovered her equilibrium, and the 1860’s were the most fruitful and
satisfactory period of her life. Following her recovery from her illness, she paid her
thankfulness to God by offering herself in the services of the Home for Fallen Women in
Highgate.
At thirty, Christina was still unmarried and given to a strictly religions life of a
celibate but the temptation of a worldly life still tugged her mind. Her passions still seethed
beneath her calm and quiet exterior. This contradiction in her nature was uniquely and
sinfully her own
By day she woes me, soft, exceeding fair.
But all night as the moon so change the she;
Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy
And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.
Christina’s passions, her wild imagination and sympathies could not be suppressed
easily. As an early biographer expressed it “when Christina was put back one way she always
reappeared in some other way, an elementary piece of human psychology which never seems
to have occurred to her stern priests. Her poetry often breaks out of its narrow limits and
shows the effusion of powerful feelings within.
Christina’s sister Maria Francesca Rossetti, stayed with her all the while and
exercised a great deal of surveillance and influence over, her softer and sensitive sister. She
was an extremely dedicated follower of religious instructions and wished her sister to remain
under the same sort of austere discipline. She was however not such a dry religious fanatic as
it may appear to be. The family speak of her “playfulness” and “warm heart”. In her thirties,
she turned her entire attention to God. Christina talked of religion, but she very seldom talked
of its joys, but Maria’s devotion was of much greater intensity. She wrote “No tongue can tell
the unspeakable happiness of coming a right to the Blessed Sacrament. It is the very nearest
approach we can make on earth to the joys of Heaven. Edmund Gosse thought her “the
stronger character of the sister, though of narrower intellect and infinitely poorer
imagination”. Gosse commented that the high-church views of Maria who throve on ritual
starved the less pietistic mind of Christina who had otherwise a very conscien-tious nature.
The influence of Maria on her sister seemed to be “a species of police surveillance exercised
by a hard convicted mind over a softer and more fanciful one”.
Goblin Market: An Interpretation
On 27th April 1859, Christina Rossetti completed her most celebrated and mysterious poem
Gobi in Market. It is combination of the grotesque, the fairy tale, the erotic with a unique
moral. It is a narrative of strange and grotesque creatures with strange incidents, which are in
the nature of fantasy as we find in fairy tales. The events of the narrative may also seem to be
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operating on a different allegorical level-they represent or mean a different set of things. The
poem also seems to function at a psychological level. William Rossetti wrote in his notes to
the poem: “I have more than once heard Christina say that she did not mean anything
profound by this fairy tale-it is not a moral apologue consistently carried out in detail. Still,
the incidents are such as to be at any rate suggestive, and different minds may be likely to
read different messages into them.”
C.M. Bowra in the Romantic imagination thought that the poem was “not a product of
Christina’s conscious thoughts but had its roots in dreams and longings which lay locked in
unexplored corners of her mind”. Her genius on this occasion took command of her mind and
wrote things which reflected her true self.
This other self had passionate sexual feelings awakened by her love affair with
Collinson which were denied any outlet. Christina in Goblin Market draws a picture of two
sisters sleeping together in happy innocence - the parallel with herself and Maria

Golden head by golden head

Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings
They lay down in their curtained bed.”
But this peaceful beauty of the two sisters sleeping together is disturbed after Laura
succumbs to the Goblin’s temptation She..goes to bed and lies there
Silent till Lizzie slept;
Then sat up in a passionate yearning
And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept
As if her heart would break.
British poetry in 1850’s was so beautiful, discreet, refined and comfortable that there
was nothing that would hurt the feeling or sensibility of mid-Victorian gentle woman. Into
this gentle atmosphere tumbled Christina’s goblins, half men, half beast, with their seductive
cries, and their panniers of exotic forbidden fruit.
One had a cat’s face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace
One crawled
Published By : Executive Director, School of Open Learning, 5 Cad like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a rate tumbled hurry-scurry

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 Goblin Market has its root deep in the female gothic consciousness, springing from
the same imagination that produced Wuthering Heights, referred to as the “eccentricities of
women’s fantasy”, and drawing the force and creative energy from the anger and repressed
violence and passion buried within them. The goblins are brothers, set up in opposition to the
sisters. Christina used her visits to Regent’s Park Zoo to provide details for her creations.
Dante Gabriel represented the goblins as beasts with human hands that helped the public form
the idea of what these goblins should look like. In Christina’s own water color done in the
margins of a 1862 edition, the goblins are varied and humoresque, slim athletic figures
dressed in blue, part human part beast. They are simultaneously like and unlike each other
that is where the horror of the possibility of deception lies. Coming now to their enchanting
merchandise:
Some of the fruits are ordinary, to be found at the green grocer’s :
Apples and quinces
Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries
Melons and raspberries.
There are other fruits from the exotic south
Our grapes fresh from the vine
Pomegranates full and fine
Dates and sharp bullaces (plum)
Rare pears and greengages
Damsons and bilberries
Taste them and try.
These fruits are not ordinary. They are larger more succulent, odorous, and sugar-
sweet as we shall find later on. Christina was aware of the link between fruit and sex when
Eve ate the first apple in Paradise and fell from a state of innocence to one of guilty
knowledge. There is an explicit connection between consumption of fruit and the sexual act.
Christina makes the theme of sisterhood as the central theme of the poem. The
relationship of sisters is the subject of many of Christina’s poems written during this time.
For example Noble Sisters, Sister Maude, etc. In Goblin in Market the two sisters Laura and
Lizzie go down to the river each evening for water. Laura cautions Lizzie not to listen to the
cries of the goblin men who tramp through the rushes inviting them to come and buy.
Lie close, Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
‘We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:

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Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots’
But Laura is unable to resist the temptation of raising her own ‘glossy head’ to watch
the goblins’ progress. The moment they sense her willingness to buy their goods, they come
to her without delay and surround her.
When they reached where Laura was
They stood stock still upon the mass,
Leering at each other,
Brother with queer brother;
Signaling each other,
Brother with sly brother.
Laura longs for the ‘golden weight’ of fruit they offer but has no money; the goblins
invite her with a golden curl. As is Pope’s Rape of the Lock, the transaction with the hair is
sexually significant Laura gorges herself on fruit in an orgy oral eroticism.
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She sucked until her lips were bore;
She sucked until her lips were sore.
Drunk with pleasure, she lost the sense of time. Her sister Lizzie who was awaiting
her late return anxiously, met her at the gate, and reminded her of Jeanie “in her grave.”
Who should have been a bride?
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fall six and died.
She makes explicit the connection between unsanctioned sex and what the goblins
have to offer, for Jeanie had “met them in the moonlight… Ate their fruits and wore their
flowers”. Afterwards she had dwindled and died.
Laura Discovers that sexual gratification only breeds desire for further pleasure of the
same kind. ‘Like a leaping flame’ she goes with her sister to the river, eager to taste more
goblin fruit, only to discover that having once eaten, she is incapable of seeing them and deaf
forever to their cries.
Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain
In sullen silence of exceeding pain

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She never caught again the goblin cry
“Come buy, come buy;”
She never spied the Goblin men
Hawking their fruit along the glen:
Her hair turns grey; she can’t eat, sleep or work and rapidly declines. a kernel stone
she had saved from the fruit fails to germinate, though she plants it facing south and waters it
with her tears.
While with sunken eyes and faded mouth
She dreamed of melons, as a traveler sees
False waves in desert drouth.
Lizzie fears that her sister will die, just as Jeanie died, and she resolves to traffic with
the goblins for Laura’s sake though we are not told how she knows that a further meal of the
golden fruit will cure her. Laura puts a silver penny in her purse and goes down to the river at
twilight. The laughing goblins come towards her in a macabre pack.
Flying, running, leaping
Puffing and blowing,
Chuckling, clippings, crowing
Clucking and gobbling.
Lizzie stands her grounds, tosses them her penny and asks to buy the fruit. The
goblins invite her to sit down with them and eat. They offer elaborate reasons why they
cannot give it to her to take away. Such are the alluring parts of a temptation that induce a
victim to succumb to the wrong and guilty act.
Such fruits as these
No man can carry
Half their bloom would fly
Half their dew would dry
Half their flavor would pass by.
However to hold one’s own with courage and determination is the difficult but
required action to do. All masks of civility and decency are shed off in the process, and the
temptation is exposed. Lizzie refuses to eat the fruit and asks for the return of her money. The
goblins cease to be pleasant and persuasive and resort to violence.
They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her

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Clawed with their nails
Braking, mewing, hissing and mocking
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking
Twitched her hair out by the roots
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
The parallel with rape is reinforced by the description of Lizzie resisting this invasion
“Like a royal virgin town.” She will not open “lip from lip” to allow the goblins to force their
fruit into her mouth. At last the goblins abandoned the assault and vanished mysteriously.
Bruised and beaten, Lizzie romped home with pulp and juice smeared all over her
face but delighted with her victory.
She cried ‘Laura’ up the garden,
‘Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblins fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura makes much of me:
The Peaces and order of the quiet and beautiful life of the twin sister is disturbed by
the fearful goblins, and here in this scene between Laura and Lizzie there is an attempt to
restore that initial order, and revive that health and beauty of their lives as we find it in the
beginning. This process of restoration is presented through another set of similar action which
is as strong and intensely erotic as the episode with the goblins. The religious interpretation
of this course of redemption is latent in the description. In the Gospel of St. John, Jesus Christ
says: “Whose eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life”, Lizzie’s invitation to
her sister to eat her, drink her and suck her juices means the promise of a new life for Laura.
In the Bible, Eve’s consumption of the forbidden apple dooms mankind, and Christ’s
suffering and sacrifices redeem them. In the poem, Laura’s eating of the fruit is the cause of
her suffering and Lizzie sacrifices herself for Laura’s redemption and opens the course for
her revival. Laura ‘started from her chair’ and “clung about her sister/ and kissed and kissed
and kissed her”.

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 But this is a different order of experience, which is such that can end her sorrow and
suffering and restore her to a life of peace, calm, and equilibrium.
Her lips began to scorch
That juice was wormwood to her tongue
She loathed the feast:
Such is the painful and tortuous course of religious discipline and faith, that a person
forgets his life of temptations, greed, disappointments, and guilt and is redeemed into a new
life filled with a fresh zest and religious ecstasy. The way this change is effects in Laura is
described through images which are startlingly bright and intense.
Her lips began to scorch
That juice was wormwood to her tongue
She loathed the feast
…..
Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart.
Met the fire smoldering there
And overbore its lesser flame;
She gorged on bitterness without a name.
The juice is not sweet and like honey, as earlier, but it scorches her lips, and tastes
like wormwood, and has a “bitterness without a name”. she falls to the ground in a fit of
frenzy, described through a series of phallic similes:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree spun about,
Like a foam-topped waterspout
Cast headlong down in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?
Thus Laura is restored to a new life out of a state of deep despair and anguish. It is
like the dawning of a new day for her, fresh and innocent with new buds and water lilies
opening. She “laughed in the innocent old way” and was reunited with her sister once again
as in the past.
The scene shifts now to several years later when both the sisters are happily married
and have children of their own-“their lives bound up; in tender lives”. Laura would call the

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little ones and tell them of the haunted glen and the “wicked quaint fruit merchant men”. She
would tell them how her sister took great risks once to win the fiery antidote and then she
sings in praise of sisterly love.
“For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather
To cheer one on the tedious way
To fetch one if one goes astray
To life one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands”.
This is rather a tame end of a spiritual drama in the poem that may also carry other
allegorical, religious or psychological meanings. There is a sudden dilution in the spirit and
tone of the poem as sisterly love is celebrated weakly in ordinary words. But for Christina
these words of praise for sisterly love had some special significance. William Rossetti wrote
to Mackenzie Bell, Christina’s first biographer, that the closing lines of the poem indicated
‘something’, though he could remember “no personal circumstances of a marked kind”.
William Rossetti goes on. “Christina Considered herself to be chargeable with some sort of
spiritual backsliding against which Marisa’s influence had been exercised beneficially. But he
refused to speculate freely on the nature of this spiritual backsliding. But due to the absence
of all possible evidences it is difficult to pinpoint what is was. Christina had been unhappy in
1859. She wrote in August that year “No hope in life; yet there is hope/In death”. The two
poems that precede Goblin Market are L.E.L and Winter Rain. The Winter Rain describes her
desolate life as she was increasingly getting conscious that she was childless and her artistic
creations had no life.
Every valley drinks
Every dell and hollow
Where the kind rain sinks and sinks
Green of spring will follow.
The life and greenery with all its joy and beauty is contrasted with the desolation and
barrenness of her own life, where there is no joy, or hope or an impetus for any fresh and new
energy. Her own life is described thus:
But miles of barren sand
With never a son or daughter
Not one lily on the land
Or lily on the water.

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 At this state of her extreme despair she could turn only Maria for help and support. It
is said that she could have even gone for self-destruction during this time, hence Maria. Used
to bar the doorway to prevent her leaving the house. It is this that explains the grateful
acknowledgment of a sister’s love and help. Laura’s longing for the taste and sweetness of
the goblin fruit leads her to a state of guilt and anguish which is transmuted to religious
ecstasy through the love and courage of Lizzie who redeems her from this fallen state. In
some poems such as The Heart Knoweth Its own Bitterness” her passionate longing for
earthly love is directly transmuted to religious ecstasy through an intense desire to be
‘ravished by Christ’ as we find in much medieval religious ecstasy through an intense desire
to be ‘ravished by Christ’ as we find in much medieval religious and devotional poetry where
the erotic and religious are found to be mingling together. Christina writes in her poem of her
rapacious and craving love for Christ, and her burning desire to be “ravished” by him:
To give, to give, not to receive!
I long to pour myself, my soul,
Not to keep back or count or leave,
But king with king to give the whole
I long for one to stir my deep-
I have had enough of help and gift- I long for one to search and sift
Myself, to take myself and keep.
Like Laura in pursuit of the deceitful goblins and their illusory fruits, Christina’s own
pursuit of worldly pleasures and desires have led to despair and frustration. She cannot find
her satisfaction and fulfillment in this narrow and imperfect would filled with petty human
beings who do not understand her. He tells the world in the same poem:
You scratch my surface with your pins,
You stroke me smooth with hushing breath
Nay pierce, nay probe, nay dig within,
Probe my quick core and sound my depth
You call me with a puny call,
you talk, you smile you nothing do:
how should I spend my heart on you,
My heart that so outweighs you all?
During 1859, Christina started working at St. Mary Magdalen home at High gate, an
institution for ‘fallen women’, unmarried mothers etc. for their reclamation and protection.

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 Unit-4(d)

Dover Beach
Mathew Arnold
K. Ojha
The Poet
Mathew Arnold (1822-1888), a major Victorian poet, was ‘a classicist by sympathy and
training and had a great admiration for Greek writers and thinkers. Like a classicist he
believed that great poetry is always impersonal or objective, and assigned lower status to the
subjective poetry. Keeping in view his poetic principles he wrote Sohrab and Rustam,
Tristram and Iseult, and Empedocles At Etna. It is noteworthy that whatever his poetic
convictions may have been, Arnold’s best poems are the expression of his personal feelings
and experiences. They are subjective to a great extent.
Arnold lived in an age of transition when new discoveries in the fields of Biology and
other sciences gave a jolt to the old traditional views and values. Darwin’s theory of
evolution and the discoveries made by the geologists about the life of our planet, seemed to
question the validity of one’s faith in the supremacy of Man (as the best creation of God) and
religious beliefs which had been hitherto a binding force and had enlightened man’s path of
life. Arnold understood and described the dilemma of the 19th century mind in his poems
when the old traditional concepts were losing ground and the new convictions had not yet
established themselves. He writes:
“Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head”.
Arnold seems to be occupied with the inevitable loss of faith and the meaning of life’
and was aware of the isolation and helplessness of man, who is being carried away by the
rapid movement of time to an unimaginable goal. He has described man’s bewilderment in
the mechanical and industrial civilisation. This awareness has given a melancholic tone to his
poems. Even his Dover Beach is a lamentation over the loss of spiritual faith and man’s
miserable lot. The only hope which he can think of in ‘this world of no faith’ lies in personal
relationship.
The Poem
Dover Beach was first published in the volume New Poems in 1867 but was probably
written much earlier. “The general decline of faith and Arnold’s own bewilderment and
melancholy constitute”, the theme of Dover Beach. In it too Arnold "expresses the belief that
in a successful love-relationship we may discover certain values which are not easily found in
modern life". It is a short poem which embraces a great range and depth of significance.

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Paraphrase of the Poem
STANZA 1
To-night the sea is clam and the tide is full. The moon shines brightly upon the straits of
Dover. A light appears (in some cottage) on the French coast but soon disappears. The cliffs
of England stretch far into the tranquil bay and glimmer in the moonlight. The night-air is
pleasant. Come to the window (and watch the peaceful scene). Only from the place where the
land (shining silvery) is touching the sea and where the dashing of waves is spraying water
vapours a roar is emanating. Listen to the grating roar produced by continuous clashing of the
waves and the land. The waves draw back the pebbles, then fling them up on the rocky shores
and again carry them back. This repetitive action of the waves produces the roar—it begins,
ceases and begins again. It has a soft vibrating tone which brings in the eternal note of
sadness.
STANZA 2
Sophocles heard this sad note long ago on the shores of the Aegean sea and this made
him think of the ups and downs in life. (Man’s life is full of miseries and turmoil). We (the
poet and his beloved) are also compelled to think of man’s plight when we hear the tremulous
cadence slow on the shores of the distant Northern sea (Dover Beach).
STANZA 3
The sea of Faith was also once at the full (as the sea at Dover is to-night) and surrounded
the earth’s shore like the folds of a bright girdle. But now I hear only its sad, long,
withdrawing roar. (Faith is fast disappearing and the sea is no more full.) It is retreating with
the breath of the night wind, leaving behind chunks of drear land covered with naked
shingles. (The world, devoid of Faith. has been reduced to a desolate wasteland, full of
doubts, confusion, fear and uncertainties).
STANZA 4
Ah, love, let us be true to each other. The world which seems to be a land of dreams –
beautiful, various and new– has nothing to offer us. It is devoid of joy, love, light,
convictions, peace, faith and help for pain. We are standing here on a darkling plain. We
(human beings) are swept with the alarms of struggle and flight. Here ignorant armies clash
by night. They do not know why and against whom they are struggling. The world is
resounding with the frightening alarms of struggle and the flight of terror stricken soldiers
(human-beings).
STUDY NOTES
Dover is a port and sea-side resort on the straits of Dover in England.
The straits of Dover is the narrow sea between England and France.

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Lines 1 to 6
The sea: Here the sea at Dover.
(The Sea is a major image in the poem. It stands not only for the sea at Dover but also for
the Aegean sea in Greece, on whose banks Sophocles stood long, long ago and perhaps it was
the sea which inspired him to write about human sufferings and miseries in his great
tragedies. The sea thus represents continuity of unhappiness and links the past with the
present. It also symbolises faith in spiritual values which have been considered essential and
sacred for a long time but are now being discarded.)
calm: peaceful quiet. Arnold usually pictures nature as quiet. (Its very calmness suggests
sadness).
The moon lies fair: The moon here represents the moonlight. The poet finds complete
serenity and peace in nature. These are lacking in human life.
the straits: the straits of Dover.
gleams: shines. The poet is attracted by the light emanating from some human dwelling on
the French Coast (on the opposite side).
is gone: The light shines for a short while and then disappears.
The light gleams and is gone: The light seems to disturb the peacefulness of the night but
this is a momentary disturbance.
glimmering: shining dimly or weakly.
vast: huge, extensive and expansive.
tranquil: quiet, peaceful.
bay: sea which has come inland. Example: the Bay of Bengal.
The cliffs of England stand..........glimmering: Arnold presents a majestic picture of Nature.
In the uncertain light the mountains seem larger. Arnold’s pictures of Nature are
vivid.
come to the window: The poet is addressing his beloved and inviting her to watch the
peaceful scene from the window. The person addressed to is most probably
Marguerite who was a French girl and Arnold loved her once. Some critics think that
here the poet is addressing his wife.
sweet is the night air: soft and fragrant breeze is blowing. The air is pleasant.
Note how skillfully Arnold has painted a picture or a perfectly tranquil atmosphere. The
words calm, full, fair, tranquil and sweet are suggestive of perfect calmness and abundance.
This peace seems to be disturbed by the light which gleams on the French Coast but is soon
gone.

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Lines 7 to 14
only: The word has been aptly placed by Arnold to suggest that the atmosphere is going to
change. The atmosphere is peaceful no doubt, but it is not perfectly or absolutely
calm. It is being disturbed by a grating roar.
long line or spray: As the water clashes against the rocks it breaks in the air into very fine
drops. This is the spray which looks like a thin silver streak in the moonlight.
moon-blanched: made white in the moonlight.
land: The land looks white (silvery) in the moonlight.
listen: Hear the roar. The poet discovers a discordant note (element) in this peaceful tune
(peaceful atmosphere).
grating: disturbing or irritating.
a grating roar: The waves of the sea throw tiny pieces of stones on the rocky shores. The
clash of the stones and the shores produces a music which though apparently soft and
rhythmical is harsh and irritating to the ears. The roar is disturbing the peace in
Nature.
of pebbles......fling: The sound (irritating to the ear) is produced by the pebbles that the
waves carry backward and forward. The sound is eternal since the waves go on
flinging stones up, sucking them and carrying them back and then again throwing
them at the shores. It is a continual process. It was there in the past, it is in the present
and will be there in future.
fling: throw forcibly or forcefully.
up: on the high rocky shore. The word ‘up’ is significant here. It gives “an almost physical
sense of the force with which the pebbles are flung on to the beach”.
strand: the sea-shore.
Begin, cease, and then again begin: The action of the waves carrying the pebbles is
repetitive. It is continuous.
tremulous: shaking, vibrating.
cadence: rhythm.
with tremulous cadence slow: The repetitive action of the waves has its own vibrating slow
music even though it is grating.
The eternal note of sadness in: the slow vibrating music of the waves echo the still sad
music of humanity. Arnold believes that sadness is a permanent condition of man’s
life. Man has always been beset with miseries, anxieties and cares. This sadness is
eternal because it has been heard (the sad note) by every age in the history of
mankind. The miserable plight of man stimulated the imagination of Sophocles (a

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 Greek dramatist) long ago and he produced tragedies, which describe man’s
sufferings and privations (turbid ebb and flow of human life). The line echoes
Wordsworth’s famous lines in The Tintern Abbey—“The still sad music of humanity,
nor harsh nor grating yet of ample power.”
Perhaps Arnold was here thinking of Sophocles’ great tragedies Antigone, The Women of
Trachis and Oedipus at Colonus.
“For as one sees, when North or South wind blows,
In strength invincible
Full many a wave upon the ocean wide
Sweeping and rushing on,
So like a Cretan Sea,
The stormy grief of life,
Now bringeth low the son on Cadmos old
Now lifts him up again...” (The Women of Trachis)
“And here this woe-worn one
(Not I alone) is found,
As some far northern shore,
Smitten by ceaseless waves,
Is lashed by every wind,
So ever-haunting woes,
Surging in billows fierce,
Lash him from crown to base...” (Oedipus at Colonus)
Only......sadness in: In the calm scene outlined in lines 1 to 6), the only disturbing sound is
that of the pebbles dashing against the rocks, a sound that is sad to the poet.
Lines 15 to 20:
Sophocles: The word eternal takes the poet to the past, to the Greek tragedian Sophocles.
Both the writers (Arnold and Sophocles) see life as a whole and are sadly aware of the
miserable fate of man. Here the sea helps the poet link the past with the present.
long ago: in the distant past—Sophocles lived in 496-406 B C.
the Aegean: the sea near Greece.
Sophocles long ago heard the same sad note in the Aegean sea as Arnold hears now
on the Dover Beach.

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the ebb and flow: rise and fall. The words are suggestive of the withdrawing of the waves.
turbid: confusing or confused.
the ebb: the sea waves move forward to the land and then recede. The latter is the ebb.
distant: far away from the Aegean sea.
We......sea: What Sophocles heard a long time ago, the poet with his beloved is hearing
now... They are aware of the sufferings of mankind.
The thought the poet finds in the sound brings him near to the gloomy despondency.
Lines 21 to 28
The sea takes a symbolic meaning in these lines. The poet has introduced explicitly the
theme of the poem—the loss of faith, here.
The sea of Faith: The sea has been used here metaphorically. It stands for religious faith or
faith in spiritual values which bind humanity together. This sea was once full like the
sea at Dover but unlike the sea the poet has been watching through the window the
sea of Faith is receding or withdrawing with a melancholy note. People are
questioning the spiritual values or beliefs and doubts have crept in (like the pebbles).
The world is devoid of faith and is becoming a wasteland, a comfortless world of
doubts and conflicts (naked shingles). The poet laments the loss.
at the full: at the height of its glory.
girdle: a belt, a binding force.
furled: rolled.
round the earth’s shore: Once the world was held fast (protected) by the religious faith as a
belt holds a dress.
But now I only hear: Note the use of only here. Refer to line 7. The poet hears only the
withdrawing roar of the sea of faith. The stress is on but and only. It highlights
sadness of the poet at the loss of faith. The poet can hear no other sound except the
‘roar’ of the receding waves of the sea of Faith. Even the use of the word roar is
significant. It implies not only the melancholy of the poet but also his fear at the loss.
Faith is disappearing fast and man is left in a frightening and bewildering world where
he does not know what to believe—only naked shingles (doubts) are left.
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar: (Note the use of words which echo the sound. This
is called onomatopoeia). As the sea withdraws one hears the sound of the water
flowing back over the stones. Shingles (the pebbles which were covered under water
when the tide was full) are visible. As faith recedes from the life of people, one senses
doubts, anxiety, disbelief and sadness.
edges: shores; brims.

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drear: dreary; gloomy, sad.
And naked shingles...... world: Faith is lost and doubts are left behind. The world is now a
gloomy, comfortless place. Man can no longer adhere to the faith which sustained
generations before him.
Lines 29 to 37:
(In this world, devoid of spiritual faith, where can man go for support ? Should he
grope in darkness? Is there any escape from the darkness and the waste of pebbles ?)
Ah, love, let us be true to one another: Yes, here is a way of escape.
Ah, love: The poet turns to his beloved for support. He makes a tender appeal to her. Man can
hardly believe in a benevolent God any more. The solace lies in personal relationship.
let us be true to one another: Let us be loyal to each other.
a land of dreams: The poet has been talking of the moon-blanched land of Dover in the first
six-lines. Now this land has a wider meaning. It symbolises the whole world. The
world seems to be an enchanting world-a world full of variety, beauty and novelty.
But in reality it is a mere dream—an illusion. It is a neither beautiful nor peaceful. It
is full of miseries. There is no joy, no love, no light (of faith), no conviction, no
peace, and no help, if one is in trouble.
pain: misery; trouble; suffering.
darkling: literally it means in the dark. It has a symbolic meaning here. The world is likened
to a darkling plain a world of difficulties, of ignorance and confusion. There is no
light of faith to take human beings away from ignorance, and conflicts. It is a
bewildering world.
swept by: blown by or carried by.
alarms: battle-sounds. People are in a state of terror (refer to lines 21-25).
ignorant armies: the soldiers (human beings) do not know why they are fighting and against
whom. (They do not know their enemies. They fight aimlessly).
flight: running away.
struggle: fight.
Where ignorant armies......... night: Reference is to the passage in Thucydides’s account of
the battle of Epipolaes which was fought at night between the Athenians and the
Spartans. The battle was waged upon a plain at the top of a cliff in dim moonlight, so
the soldiers could not distinguish clearly between friends and foes. The uncertain
Athenian troops ran away. There was great confusion and this was accentuated by the
alarms and the battle cries.

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 In a world of confusions where Faith has broken down the only morality is one
individual’s loyalty to another.
COMMENTS ON THE POEM
Stanza 1:
The poet describes a natural scene at Dover in the moonlit night. The stress is laid on the
clash between the sea and the land. The sea is calm the tide is full, the moon lies fair and then
there are the tranquil bay and sweet night-air. All these words (calm, full, fair, tranquil and
sweet) suggest perfect calmness and contentment.
The poet invites his beloved to come to the window to observe the peaceful scene
Watching a cross the sea at Dover the poet sees a light gleaming in a French hut for a short
while only. It soon disappears. The English cliffs stretch far and wide ‘glimmering and vast.’
Everything is calm and quiet as far as eyes can see. It is a peaceful scene. There is serenity
and continuity which the poet would like to experience in his own life.
What does the poet hear? A disturbing roar, of course. The waves are clashing against
the rocky shores spreading ‘a long line of spray’. The waves carry tiny pieces of pebbles with
them, they throw them at the shores, they clash and produce the grating roar. And only this
grating roar is disturbing the peace in Nature.
This disturbing ‘roar’ is frightening no doubt, yet it has its soft music. If you see the
moon-blanched land, it appears to be perfectly tranquil but when you observe it carefully, you
hear the tremulous cadence which is really a disturbing element. This ‘cadence’ reminds the
poet of the ‘eternal note of sadness’ in life and in the world. The very fact that this sound is
eternal seems to make it sad for the poet.
Arnold was profoundly aware of man’s miserable life on his planet. He has described the
dilemma of his age and at the same time he has depicted that man since time immemorial has
been struggling with hostile forces and suffering.
The atmosphere created in the first six lines is suggestive of “the serenity, balance and
stability which Arnold desires for himself”.
Stanza 2:
The poet detects the eternal note of sadness in the sea in the concluding lines of stanza 1
and now in the second stanza he ‘mentions a Sophoclean interpretation of it’. In fact here
Arnold relates his own emotional state to the landscape. The poet is no more thinking of the
sea at Dover. He is with Sophocles who stood on the shores of the Aegean sea long, long ago,
thinking of the ebb and tide in human life. (Man’s life is comparable to a sea). The Aegean
sea brought into Sophocles’ mind the ‘turbid ebb and flow of human misery’. The poet tells
his beloved that the sea at Dover is not at rest. (There is the grating roar with its tremulous
cadence). This compels him to think (as Sophocles did ages ago) of man’s sufferings. Man’s
life lacks in peace and contentment. (You must have noted that the sea has become the

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Aegean sea and then the sea of life. Here the poet has linked up the present with the past and
Nature with Man.)
Nature seems to have naturally merged with man (Stanzas 1 and 2—the eternal note of
sadness in............and the turbid ebb and flow of human misery). The past has been brought to
us as we remain in the present. The sea becomes the sea of faith in the third stanza.
Stanza 3:
The poet says that once the Sea of Faith was full (Man could believe in a universe that
was adjusted to his needs.) It (sea) wrapped round the earth’s shore like ‘the folds of a bright
girdle furled’ but now the sea is receding (leaving the land) leaving behind bare pebbles of
doubts and uncertainty. There is no harmony between man and the universe. (This is what
one observes in the age of scientific development). The poet hears the withdrawing roar of
the Sea of Faith also. The poet expresses the divorce between man and the universe or nature
through the withdrawal of the Sea. The withdrawal is described in terms of fear darkness
whereas once the sea of Faith was bright. The roar is both terrifying and sad since the world,
devoid of spiritual faith, has become barren and ugly. It is a waste land. Compare the grating
roar and tremulous cadence which brought in the eternal note of sadness of the first stanza
with the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the third stanza. What do you find ? Both the
sounds are described as roars and both have sadness implied. Here perhaps Arnold is thinking
of all the challenges which religious believers had to encounter in his age. But is Arnold’s
description of the dreariness of the world confined to his age only? Certainly not. “This is an
early instance of the expressions of a horror of the utterly negative which occur from time to
time in modern literature, In A Passage to India and The Waste Land for instance” says a
critic.
You have already observed that in this stanza the poet has skillfully and cleverly
introduced the central theme of the poem—the inevitable loss of faith.
What else do you find here in the third stanza ? Like the first stanza the third one consists
of two contrasting parts. The first few lines present to us a picture of a happy and contented
world where the sea of faith reigned—the words ‘full’, ‘girdle’, give the sense of ‘fullness’,
‘perfection’ and ‘protectiveness’. Again like the first two stanzas the poet draws our attention
from the visual image to the auditory image by introducing the word ‘but here. (It echoes the
sense of disorder.) Refer to only of the stanza one. The struggle between the land and the sea
is eternal (stanza 1). This struggle becomes the turbid ebb and flow of human misery (stanza
2) and now it leads to a state of hopelessness (the naked shingles of the world) (stanza 3).
Stanza 4:
As nature and the universe have abandoned man, as it is no longer possible to believe in a
Divine Being who guides man’s destiny, and as the world has become a dreary place, the poet
turns to his beloved for consolation and pleads to her to be true and faithful. (Note the sea at
Dover has taken the poet away from the immediate to the past (Sophocles), then to human
suffering (stanza 2) and from there to the loss of Faith (the melancholy long withdrawing roar

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of the sea of Faith) And he feels completely lost and disappointed. Doubts have crept in life
the protective influence of Faith is gone, the world has become a ‘drearier world.
The poet again appeals to his beloved, no more thinking of the sea. He is conscious of
the land-the world. As far as the eye can see the world seems to be a land of dreams
(promises) beautiful, various and new. But this is an illusion. Reality is something torturous
and despairing. The world is devoid of joy, love, light, conviction, faith, peace and sympathy.
With the disappearance of the sea of Faith we are left on a waste land-a dark land where we
live in ignorance and despair. The struggle is now no more between the sea and the land
(stanzas I to 3) it is between various groups of people. They clash aimlessly and foolishly
since they do not know what they exactly need. In this bleak situation the only ray of hope
the poet can discover is in personal relationship (loyalty in love).
“Ah love, let us be true
To or another”.
Note : “Only in the last line (where ignorant...clash by night) which startles us by its brevity
after the seven longer lines preceding it, does Arnold reveal the strangeness and
horror of his concluding analogy. Emphasized in this way, the image becomes his
most memorable comment on the modern world”.

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