Many have failed to understand this poem, because they think that Browning himself is constantly guilty of the sin specifically condemned here. Browning has indeed often been called a thinker, a philosopher: but a moment's serious reflection will prove that of all English poetry outside of the drama, Browning's is the least abstract and the most concrete. Poetry is not condemned because it arouses thought, but only when it is abstract in method. Browning often deals with profound ideas, but always by concrete illustrations. For example, he discusses the doctrine of predestination by giving us the individual figure of Johannes-Agricola in meditation: the royalist point of view in the seventeenth century by cavaliers singing three songs: the damnation of indecision by two Laodicaean lovers in The Statue and the Bust. When Browning is interested in any doctrine, idea, or system of thought, he creates a person to illustrate it.
Browning's theory of poetry is further reenforced by his poem How It Strikes a Contemporary, which, in the final rearrangement of his works, he placed directly after Transcendentalism, as though to drive his doctrine home. Here is a picture of a real poet. Where does he live, whence does he get his sources of inspiration, and how does he pass his time? The poem answers these questions in a most instructive manner, if only we keep in mind the original definition given in Pauline. It is conventionally believed that the country is more poetic than the city: that an ideal residence for a poet would be in lonely, lovely, romantic scenery; and that in splendid solitude and isolation he should clothe his thoughts in forms of beauty. Now Browning's own life and methods of work were in exact contrast to these popular ideas; because his theory of poetry requires the poet to live in the very midst of human activities, and to draw his inspiration not from a mountain or the stars, but from all sorts and conditions of men. Thus, in the poem, How It Strikes a Contemporary, the poet lives in a noisy city, spends his time walking the streets, and instead of being lost in a trance, he is intensely aware of everything that happens in the town. The poet is an observer, not a dreamer. Indeed, the citizens think this old poet is a royal spy, because he notices people and events with such sharp attention. Browning would seem to say that the mistake is a quite natural one; the poet ought to act like a spy, for, if he be a true poet, he is a spy—a spy on human life. He takes upon himself the mystery of things, as if he were God's spy.
He walked and tapped the pavement with his cane,
Scenting the world, looking it full in face….
He glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye,
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string,
And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall.
He took such cognizance of men and things,
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note.
This is an exact description of the way Robert Browning walked the streets of Florence. Only a few years after this poem was printed, he was glancing o'er the books on stalls in the square of San Lorenzo, and found the old yellow volume which he turned into an epic of humanity. The true poet "scents" the world, smells it out, as a dog locates game. A still stronger expression is used in Christmas-Eve, where the poets "pried" at life, turned up its surface in order to disclose all its hidden treasures of meaning.
"TRANSCENDENTALISM: A POEM IN TWELVE BOOKS"
1855
Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak?
'Tis you speak, that's your error. Song's our art:
Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts
Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.
—True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up!
But why such long prolusion and display,
Such turning and adjustment of the harp,
And taking it upon your breast, at length,
Only to speak dry words across its strings?
Stark-naked thought is in request enough:
Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears!
The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark,
Which helps the hunter's voice from Alp to Alp—
Exchange our harp for that,—who hinders you?
But here's your fault; grown men want thought, you think;
Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.
Boys seek for images and melody,
Men must have reason—so, you aim at men.
Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth, 'tis true;
We see and hear and do not wonder much:
If you could tell us what they mean, indeed!
As German Boehme never cared for plants
Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,
He noticed all at once that plants could speak,
Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.
That day the daisy had an eye indeed—
Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes!
We find them extant yet in Jacob's prose.
But by the time youth slips a stage or two
While reading prose in that tough book he wrote
(Collating and emendating the same
And settling on the sense most to our mind),
We shut the clasps and find life's summer past.
Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss—
Another Boehme with a tougher book
And subtler meanings of what roses say,—
Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?
He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all,—
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
So come, the harp back to your heart again!
You are a poem, though your poem's naught.
The best of all you showed before, believe,
Was your own boy-face o'er the finer chords
Bent, following the cherub at the top
That points to God with his paired half-moon wings.