Swims—heaven above, sea under,
Yet always earth in sight?
R. Browning (Prologue to Fifine at the Fair).
This is not one of Browning’s best poems, but it is interesting. The butterfly in the air over the poet swimming is compared to a ‘certain soul,’ Mrs. Browning, looking down upon him from heaven. The ‘flying,’ free and entirely released from the earth, is the life of the soul, to which the poet cannot attain; but during periods of inspiration he lives a life free of ‘worldly noise and dust,’ which approaches that of the soul. Such periods of inspiration are likened to ‘swimming’ with the land always in sight, as compared with the ‘flying’ of the soul in the far-removed celestial regions. “We substitute, in a fashion, For heaven—poetry.”
Whatever they are we seem: during inspiration the poet’s life is a reflex of or approach to the heavenly life.
Amphibian, because the poet is of earth and yet can “swim” in the sea of imagination. Charles Lamb speaks of his charming Child Angel, half-angel, half-human, as Amphibium. Browning’s poem may have been an unconscious development of a passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:—“Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.”
The sixth and last verses are interesting. Browning, while in the world “Both lives and likes life’s way,” nor is anxious that his “wings” should be “unfurled”; and he wonders how his angel-wife regards him, content with his “mimic flight.”—[See p. 114.]
We work so hard, we age so soon,