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POETS AND

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always loved Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument” best among her poems, so I will confine myself to an appreciation of its beauty, and a comparison of it to Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan,” a lyric at least equal in splendor.

II

Homer and Plato say that Pan, god of the woodlands, was the son of Hermes the messenger. As “panic” intimates, Pan has the effect of a sud-den fear, like the night-terror he caused at Marathon, inducing the Persians to flee, and yet he was named “Pan” because, at his birth, he delighted all hearts, but particularly that of Dionysus, who recognized in the babe a kindred spirit of ecstasy. Attended by nymphs, Pan roams the wild places, and yet the other likely origin of his name means the “feeder”

or herdsman, presumably of goats in Arcadia. Though sexually human, Pan has goats’ ears and horns, and carries remarkably little mythology with him. His love affairs with Syrinx, Echo, and Pitys (nymph of the fir-tree) express his notorious amorousness, as does the music of his reed-pipe.

Though Pan acquired no transcendental overtones, in the Phaedrus he is among the gods to whom Socrates appeals for an inward beauty.

Here is Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument,” one of the best and most vitalizing lyrical poems in the language:

What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?

Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat

With the dragon-fly on the river.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, From the deep cool bed of the river;

The limpid water turbidly ran, And the broken lilies a dying-lay, And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan While turbidly flowed the river;

And hacked and hewed as a great god can, With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan (How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man.

Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sat by the river.

‘This is the way,’ laughed the great god Pan (Laughed while he sat by the river),

‘The only way, since gods began

To make a sweet music, they could succeed.’

Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

Piercing sweet by the river!

Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man;

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain For the reed which grows nevermore again

As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Had she written often thus, she would be beyond praise, and I am puz-zled that she did not cultivate her lyric powers. “A Musical Instrument” was published in 1860, a year before her death in Florence, and in it Barrett Browning rejoins the High Romantic vitalism of Shelley, Keats, the young Tennyson, and the young Browning. She knew Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan,” and I suspect she deftly writes an affectionate critique of it in her darker hymn of Pan:

I.

From the forests and highlands We come, we come;

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From the river-girt islands, Where loud waves are dumb

Listening to my sweet pipings.

The wind in the reeds and the rushes, The bees on the bells of thyme, The birds on the myrtle bushes,

The cicale above in the lime, And the lizards below in the grass, Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,

Listening to my sweet pipings.

II.

Liquid Peneus was flowing, And all dark Tempe lay In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing

The light of the dying day, Speeded by my sweet pipings.

The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,

And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves, To the edge of the moist river-lawns,

And the brink of the dewy caves, And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,

With envy of my sweet pipings.

III.

I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal Earth,

And of Heaven—and the giant wars, And Love, and Death, and Birth—

And then I change my pipings—

Singing how down the vale of Maenalus I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed.

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:

All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood,

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

I love both hymns, and appreciate their differences and originalities.

Shelley’s Pan chants in the first person, but sings also for the nymphs who

accompany him, and addresses two auditors, Apollo and the reader. Pan’s tone is sublimely exuberant and self-confident, content as he is to have subdued (aesthetically) all nature with his sweet pipings, which are the envy of Apollo, god of Poetry. A music of earth challenges and overgoes the Olympian art. There is both a high Shelleyan irony and a universal male lament in the exquisite:

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed.

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

This omits the perspective of the maiden Syrinx, whose metamor-phosis saved her from Pan’s lust, and thus provided him with a reed he transformed into his musical instrument. Barrett Browning, with her own superb irony, shows us Pan turning a male into a reed-pipe, and at the close reveals that her exquisite lyric is a parable of the incarnation of the poetic character itself:

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man;

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain For the reed which grows nevermore again

As a reed with the reeds by the river.

I read this as a profound fable of the denaturalization of the male poet, as opposed to the female, with the “true” or Olympian gods showing a very uncharacteristic sorrow, as if they too had been feminized. That Barrett Browning had the gifts that would have made her into a great lyric poet, I do not doubt. What diverted them, into narrative and sonnet sequence, is a complex matter, not to be discussed in this brief context, but she does seem to me most herself in ballads and dramatic lyrics. Yet the matter of her canonical eminence, or lack of it, remains to be resolved, per-haps when our age of ideology passes into another time.

ONE OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION THAT WILL ARISE OUT OF THE

future study of the intricacies of poetic revisionism, and of the kinds of mis-reading that canon-formation engenders, is the realization that later poets and their critical followers tend to misread strong precursors by a fairly consistent mistaking of literal for figurative, and of figurative for literal.

Browning misread the High Romantics, and particularly his prime precur-sor, Shelley, in this pattern, and through time’s revenges most modern poets and critics have done and are doing the same to Browning. I am going to explore Browning, in this essay, as the master of misprision he was, by attempting to show our tendency to read his epiphanies or “good moments” as ruinations or vastations of quest, and our parallel tendency to read his darkest visions-of-failure as if they were celebrations.

I will concentrate on a small group of Browning’s poems including Cleon, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, A Toccata of Galuppi’s, Abt Vogler, and Andrea del Sarto, but I cannot evade for long my own obsession with Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and so it and its contrary chant, Thamuris Marching, will enter late into this discourse. Indeed, I want to end with a kind of critical self-analysis, and ask myself the question: why am I obsessed by the Childe Roland poem, or rather, what does it mean to be obsessed by that poem?

How is it that I cannot conceive of an antithetical practical criticism of poet-ry without constantly being compelled to use Childe Roland as a test case, as though it were the modern poem proper, more even than say, Tintern Abbey or Byzantium or The Idea of Order at Key West? is there a way to make these questions center upon critical analysis rather than upon psychic self-analysis?

In Browning’s prose Essay on Shelley, there is an eloquent passage that idealizes poetic influence:

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