The transport o'er again. A week he passed, Sucking the sweet out of each circumstance
(Sordello,11,125-7) Only later in his thoughts does he start to wonder why
the people reacted as they did. In fact, his very creativity
has arisen from such a brooding on each discovery - until || this brooding becomes so weighty he must remove it by
investing what he broods on with its own character.
Sordello's 'flesh... amply lets in loveliness/At eye and ear' (Sordello,1,478-9) unlike 'the rest* of mankind who have 'furled' round them
A veil that shows the sky not near so blue. And lets but half the sun look fervid through.
(Sordello,1,481-2) Here we may well be reminded of how,at the poem's opening, we are told:
A single eye From all Verona cared for the soft sky,
(Sordello,1,85-6) and in hollow people hatred was the only intense emotion:
Fear had long since taken root
In every breast, and now these crushed its fruit. The ripe hate, like a wine: to note the way
It worked while each grew drunk! Men grave and grey Stood, with shut eyelids, rocking to and fro.
Letting the silent luxury trickle slow About the hollows where a heart should be; But the young gulped with a delirious glee Some foretaste of their first debauch in blood
(Sordello,1,91-9) Sordello's intensity is in contrast to this kind, but
too burdensome. Wordsworth describes how:
•A child, I held unconscious intercourse With the eternal beauty, drinking in A pure organic pleasure from the lines Of curling mist, or from the level plain Of waters coloured by the steady clouds
(The Prelude,1,559-63) The word 'steady' is significant; he has earlier described how Nature purifies :
The elements of feeling and of thought. And sanctifying, by such discipline. Both pain and fear, until we recognise A grandeur in the beatings of the heart
(The Prelude,1,414-7) For the child Wordsworth, his drinking in of nature has led to discipline and steadiness; for Sordello, it starts as burdensome - after a brief, very young period - and leads to something unreal:
How can such love? - like souls on each full-fraught Discovery brooding, blind at first to aught
Beyond its beauty, till exceeding love Becomes an aching weight; and, to remove
A curse that haunts such natures - to preclude Their finding out themselves can work no good To what they love nor make it very blest
By their endeavour, - they are fain invest
The lifeless thing with life from their own soul. Availing it to purpose, to control.
To dwell distinct and have peculiar joy
(Sordello,1,483-493) So, on the positive side, the intensity leads, at least in the poet's mind, to the giving of life, through and in the imagination, to the beloved object. Sordello is thus
already seen as projector as well as absorber. Yetman uses these very words of Sordello, adding that he belongs to the 'assimilative' rather than 'expressive' category of poet, making the point also that these two can co-exist
harmoniously before the character is capable of self-regard 72
or judgement. This kind of character does not rest at giving one lifeless soul apparent life (he thinks real life) but :
fresh births of beauty wake Fresh homage, every grade of love is past. With every mode of loveliness
(Sordello,1,496-8) Casting aside 'Inferior idols' he now recognises his 'crown' as 'borrowed' (Sordello,1,499). And so these idols have
their crowns cast off 'Before a coming glory' (Sordello,1,500). Here the imagery is biblical; as the character learns to
cast away false idols, so eventually will he come to a paradisal state and see God:
Up and down
Runs arrowy fire, while earthly forms combine To throb the secret forth; a touch divine - And the scaled eyeball owns the mystic rod; Visibly through his garden walketh God.
(Sordello,1,500-504) This passage should be read bearing in mind St.Paul's
letter to the Corinthians where he describes how with true knowledge will come vision of God, where he says: 'now
73 we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face* ,
anticipating a new Eden.
Alba Warren in his chapter on Browning defines succinctly what this kind of poet is, one who invests nature with the motion of his own mind and eventually comes to find God
in a beautiful combination of earthly f o r m s . T h i s kind of poet has been termed 'objective'. In Browning it is
contemporary with Carlyle: 'The true poet is ever...the seer; whose eye has been gifted to discern the godlike mystery of God's Universe; we can still call him a Vatis or seer'. This kind of poet, however, does not necessarily use
his insight in a profitable way. The narrator indeed says that the ultimate effect is the negating of the poet.
These poets need:
to blend with each external charm.
Bury themselves, the whole heart wide and warm, - In something not themselves; they would belong To what they worship - stronger and more strong Thus prodigally fed -
(Sordello,1,507-511) This leads to something sinister; the objects the poet
worships do not necessarily lead to God; any object he worships ;
gathers shape And feature [to his, the poet's mind], soon
imprisons past escape The votary framed to love and to submit
Nor ask, as passionate he kneels to it. Whence grew the idol's empery.
(Sordello,1,511-15) The poet's situation means giving so much that he dissipates himself completely; there is nothing of himself left when he has added his energy to the creation of other objects,
previously incomplete:
So runs
A legend; light had birth ere moons and suns. Flowing through space a river and alone.
Till chaos burst and blank the spheres were strown Hither and thither, foundering and blind:
When into each of them rushed light - to find Itself no place, foiled of its radiant chance.
(Sordello,1,515-521) Browning has taken the idea of the 'chameleon' poet and explored its implications in a troubled world, showing what could happen if this idea were taken to one absurd - but logical - conclusion. The Oxford edition's note on the next line; 'Let such forego their just inheritance!'
is helpful: 'Let such forego; as light, according to the legend, illuminates the universe yet has no proper home, so such loving natures are destined to find no resting- place' (p.220). However the comment does not indicate the tone implied .by the exclamation-mark, which seems
ambiguous. Is the narrator merely dismissing such poets carelessly, or does the exclamation-mark refer to the shock that such generous souls have to be allowed to forego what is justly theirs?
This account of what is likely to happen to a poet whose nature becomes involved with others' is rather different from Keats' account of the chameleon poet, whom he sees as becoming absorbed into all others in his vicinity, but not to the extent that he merges with objects to which he
himself first gave life, or believed he gave life. Coleridge's account of this kind of poet is even more enthusiastic than Keats'. He uses Shakespeare as the example of what he calls the Protean genius, describing how he'darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood'. Browning
could then be seen to have taken an earlier theory of the poet, one favouring the 'chameleon' kind, and to have worked out what could actually happen in an extreme case with such a character.
The narrator then proceeds to outline another kind of poet, just as eager to look on beauty, but unlike the
'gentler crew' (Sordello,1,524) referring outward signs of beauty inward. This kind:
Proclaims each new revealment born a twin With a distinctest consciousness within. Referring still the quality, now first
Revealed, to their own soul - its instinct nursed In silence, now remembered better, shown
More thoroughly, but not the less their own
(Sordello,1,525-30) As Lee Erickson says, 'The self-conscious soul discovers
poetry within itself and not in the world and so it directs its homage not toward the world but toward itself: "So, homage, other souls direct/Without turns inward"....But even as this soul pays homage to itself, it also seeks the
77 approval of others to feed its pride in itself...'
Ryals seems nearer than Erickson to what this passage is about, putting well Sordello’s overall problem as poet:
'This "subjective" type cannot be fully embodied in art, always having something left over and giving the audience "proof" that "the singer's proper life" exists underneath his song, that the song itself is but an episode in the poet's life (3,622-30). For such a poet formal closure -
"completeness" - is out of the question, because more is suggested than can ever be produced. For such a poet
7 8 there is always an imbalance between himself and his forms'. In this kind of poet, rather than considering outward
forms or shadows of truth to come, the outward forms are like mirrors of the inward and simply 'born a twin'
(Sordello,1,525) to those. Anything outward, 'The being fair, or good, or wise, or strong' has been 'Dormant within their nature all along' (Sordello,1,533-4).
However, although they may have extraordinary gifts, such -I do not consider it their fault if they do not actually
express them in the world. They soothe themselves easily: Whose fault? So, homage, other souls direct
Without, turns inward. "How should this deject "Thee, soul?" they murmur; "wherefore strength be
quelled
"Because, its trivial accidents withheld,
"Organs are missed that clog the world, inert, "Wanting a will, to quicken and exert,
"Like thine - existence cannot satiate,
"Cannot surprise? Laugh thou at envious fate, "Who, from earth's simplest combination stampt "With individuality - uncrampt
"By living its faint elemental life,
"Dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife "With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last.
Equal to being all! -- -
2Q2 (Sordello,1,535-48)
Duff's paraphrase here is extremely helpful; 'Whose fault is it if the conception is never wrought out by themselves - if they -do not find their own expression for it? There is no fault at all: far from blaming themselves, they do
themselves homage. "How should the failure to act out such conceptions deject thee, my soul?" they murmur. "Why should the power of thine inward life be quenched simply because, fit opportunities for the proper revelation of these
conceptions being withheld, thou lackest the means of outward expression that belong to common men, who, indeed, are cumbered by their means of expression, which are too great for anything there is in them to express, - who have not a mind like thine, which existence itself, with all its wealth, cannot satisfy and cannot surprise, since thou hast already dreamed the fairest it can show? Laugh thou at envious fate, which denies thee sufficient
temporal powers to reveal thy soul - thou who dost boldly soar from the conception of the nature of the lowest form of individual life, too slenderly endowed to feel its
earthly limitations, to the conception of heaven's | complexest essence, and art able to realise in thine
imagination all existences in the universe, however grand
79
they be i