Popularity. (Men and Women, vol. ii., 1855.) This poem is a tribute to Keats. Shelley and Keats soon displaced Pope and Byron from the mind of the youthful poet who gave us Pauline: it is not difficult to trace in that first work of Browning’s the influence of both. When, as a boy, he made acquaintance with the then little-known works of Keats, we can guess, even if biographers had not told us, how the author of Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes would charm the young poet’s soul. “Remember,” he says here, “one man saw you, knew you, and named a star!” Then he fancies him as a fisherman on Tyrian seas, plundering the ocean of her purple dye: kings’ houses shall be made glorious and their persons beautiful with the product of the coloured conchs. Then he sees merchants bottling the extract and selling it to the world. They eat turtle and drink claret, but who fished up the murex? How does he live? What mean food had John Keats all his struggling life? He taught men to paint their ideas in glowing word-tints and images luxuriant. These men gorge, while the man who ransacked the ocean of thought and the world of fancy is left to starve.
Notes.—Verse 6, Tyrian shells: the genera Murex and Purpura have a gland called the “adrectal gland, which secretes a colourless liquid, which turns purple upon exposure to the atmosphere, and was used by the ancients as a dye” (Encyc. Brit.). It was a discovery of the Phœnicians, and was known to the Greeks in the Homeric age. The juice collected from the shells was placed in salt, and heated in metal vessels; then the wool or silk was dyed in it. Tyrian purple wool in Cæsar’s time cost £43 10s. a pound. Purple robes were used from very early times as a mark of dignity. Tyre was a very ancient city of Phœnicia, with great harbours and very splendid buildings. Astarte: the Venus of the Greeks and Romans, a powerful Syrian divinity. She had a great temple at Hieropolis, in Syria, with three hundred priests. v. 12, Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes: fancy names, of course—meaning the men who profit by other men’s labours. They bottle and sell the precious things for which the brave fisherman risks his life and spends his days and nights, after all receiving but a miserable fraction of the gain. v. 13, Murex: the genus of molluscs from which the Tyrian purple dye was obtained. It was of the class Gastropoda, order Azygobranchia, sub-order Siphonochlamyda, *Rachiglossa, family Muricidæ. Purpura also was used (hence purple), of the same sub-order—family Buccinidæ. “What porridge had John Keats?” John Keats, the poet, was born Oct. 29th, 1795, and died of consumption in Rome, Feb. 23rd, 1821, when only twenty-six years old. His Ode to a Nightingale will serve to immortalise him, even if he had written nothing else. After this his best poems are his Endymion, Hyperion, and the Eve of St. Agnes. His straitened circumstances and his ill-health made him hysterical and fretful; but though he was certainly cruelly used by his reviewers, it is only a ridiculous legend that he was killed by an article against him in the Quarterly Review. Bitter reviews of our books do not introduce to our lungs the microbes of tuberculosis.
Porphyria’s Lover. (Published first in Mr. Fox’s Monthly Repository in 1836, over the signature “Z.” Reprinted as II. “Madhouse Cells,” in Dramatic Lyrics, Bells and Pomegranates, 1842.) In the midst of a storm at night, to a man sitting alone by a burnt-out fire in his room, enters the woman whom he loves, but of whose love he has never been sure in return. She glides in, shuts out the storm, kneels by the dull grate and makes a cheerful blaze, takes off her dripping cloak, lets down her damp hair, sits by his side, speaks to him, puts her arm around him, rests his cheek on her bosom, and murmuring that she loves him, gives herself to him for ever. At last, then, he knows it; his heart swells with joyful surprise, he realises the tremendous wealth of which he is thus suddenly possessed; and lest change should ever come, lest the wealth should ever be squandered, the possession ever be lost, he will kill her that moment: and so, as she reposes there, he winds her beautiful long hair in a cord thrice round her little throat, and she is strangled—painlessly, he knows, but his unalterably, because dead. And God, he says, has watched them as they sat the night through, and He has not said a word! This poem was Browning’s first monologue.
Potter’s Wheel, The. The figure of the potter’s wheel in Rabbi Ben Ezra is taken from Isaiah lxiv. 8, Jeremiah xviii. 2-6, and Romans ix. 20, 21. See a similar use of the figure in Quarles’ Emblems (Book III., Emblem 5).
Pretty Woman, A. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) Here is a beautiful woman—simply a beauty, nothing more. What, then, is not that enough? Why cannot we let her just adorn the world like a beautiful flower? Why do we demand more of her than to gladden us with her charms? So the craftsman makes a rose of gold petals with rubies in its cup, all his fine things merely effacing the rose which grew in the garden. The best way to grace a rose is to leave it; not gather it, smell it, kiss it, wear it, and then throw it away. Leave the pretty woman just to beautify the world,—it needs it!
Prince Berthold. (Colombe’s Birthday.) He claims, by right, the duchy which is held by Colombe.
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871). Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau represents the Emperor Napoleon III. Hohenstiel-Schwangau represents France. The name is formed from that of one of the Bavarian royal castles called Hohen-Schwangau. Visitors to the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play will remember the beautiful and luxurious castles which the mad king built and furnished in so costly a manner in the midst of the picturesque scenery of the Bavarian Alps. The poem deals with the subjective processes which Browning supposed animated Napoleon III. in his character as Saviour of Society. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is not precisely a soul-portrait of the Emperor Napoleon III. Mr. Browning does not draw portraits—he analyses characters. He has therefore used the Emperor as a model is used by an artist. The artist does not simply paint the model’s portrait, he uses him for a higher purpose of art. Mrs. Browning was greatly interested in Louis Napoleon, enthusiastically entered into the spirit of his ambitions, and considered him as “the Saviour of Society.” She loved Italy so passionately that the destroyer of the power of Austria over the land which she loved could not fail to win her admiration; and this, probably, was the chief reason of her esteem for him. Her poem Napoleon III. in Italy should be read in this connection; each verse ends “Emperor Evermore.” She says:—
“We meet thee, O Napoleon, at this height
At last, and find thee great enough to praise.
Receive the poet’s chrism, which smells beyond
The priest’s, and pass thy ways!
An English poet warns thee to maintain
God’s word, not England’s;—let His truth be true,
And all men liars! with His truth respond
To all men’s lie.”
She goes on to call him “Sublime Deliverer,” and praises him for that “he came to deliver Italy.”