“His Word Was Still:” Silence and the Isolation of Self in Browning’s Poems

Of Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, Chloe Chard writes, “Like all works of Gothic fiction, the novel constantly raises the expectation of future horrors, suggesting that dreadful secrets are soon to be revealed, and are threatening the eruption of extreme – though often unspecified – forms of violence” (A critical introduction to The Romance Of The Forest, Oxford University Press, 1986). This description of Gothic fiction could just as aptly describe the poetry of Robert Browning, who displays in his dramatic monologues and narrative forms a decidedly Gothic sensibility.

However, unlike most of his Gothic predeccessors, Browning does not seem to delight in the use of terror for sensation’s sake. He is not content to turn his readers into an audience of darkly thrilled voluptuaries. Terror in Browning’s poetry is a means to an end, that end being heightened awareness of a moral, psychological, or philosophical nature. Browning can thus be ranked with the small group of Gothic writers who wrote poetry or prose within that genre with ulterior motives, placing him in the same circle as Radcliffe, Blake, Coleridge, the Shelleys, and (if advocacy of the negative aesthetic and the destructive impulse counts) Sade. Gothicism for Browning is not just an artistic expression or genre, but a statement about social structure, particularly the relationship between self and the outside world. The self and external reality are separated as if by some deep, romantic chasm.

That Browning’s most frequent poetic form is the dramatic verse, in soliloquy or monologue, implies a certain paradoxical detachment within the voice of each narrator. On the one hand, to lose his ego within the personae of the Duke of Ferrara, Johannes Agricola, or other created characters bespeaks a capacity for empathy within Browning. On the other hand, the characters Browning creates all suffer to some degree from isolation, often self-imposed, which frequently results in what today is called sociopathic behaviour. In “My Last Duchess,” the Duke of Ferrara is jealous to an extreme degree not generally associated with the sound of mind:

“Twas not…
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek…
She had
A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad
Too easily impressed; she liked what e’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere…” (13-24)

The crime of the Duchess is that of not living solely for the Duke’s pleasure. She is put into a double bind, however – so prideful is the Duke that he refuses to tell her the nature of her crime:

“Even had you skill In speech – (which I have not) – to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me… E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop.” (35-43)

Thus the Duke of Ferrara conveniently explains the necessity of executing his young wife. Bluebeard could not have been more efficient. The true chill in the Duke’s statement comes at the end of the poem, however, when he calmly shows off another of his paintings, this one a mythological piece. The most recent wife wife (hopefully, the next will instinctively know how to avoid smiling at sunsets or favourite mules) is reduced to a show-piece, objectified even more in death than she was in life. Meanwhile, the reader becomes a voyeur, isolated and egoistically detached as he or she wanders through the Ferrara gallery, gazing at the late Duchess and her surviving, arrogant Duke. The true violence is not the Duke’s act of murdering his wife, but rather the detachment of sensibility experienced by the reader as the reader grows more attuned to the Duke’s character, witnessing all the figures in the poem as portraits, actors, things to be watched.

If voyeurism is implicit in “My Last Duchess,” it is excruciatingly explicit in “Porphyria’s Lover.” Incidentally, “Porphyria’s Lover” is more obviously Gothic than “My Last Duchess,” as well – whereas “My Last Duchess” only has the far-away setting and the earlier time period, “Porphyria’s Lover” opens with the dark and stormy night so beloved of Gothic writers of previous decades:

“The rain set early in tonight;
The sullen wind was soon awake
It tore the elm-tops down…
I listened with heart fit to break…” (1-5)

Like the Duke of Ferrara, Porphyria’s lover (such an odd name for a female character, porphyria is a rare blood disease responsible for the superficial resemblance of those stricken with it to vampires) is a swaggering specimen of masculine arrogance, possessiveness, and dominance. Porphyria is consistently portrayed as weak and helpless next to her lover, although when the speaker and Porphyria are first seen together, he seems passive, and she seems to be helping him. This help is more of an enabling sort than an assisting sort, if the gestalt of the poem is taken into consideration. Again, this is a typically Gothic dichotomy.

“She shut the cold out…
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up…
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied
She put my arm about her waist…
Murmuring how she loved me – she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor
To set its struggling passion free
From pride…
And give herself to me forever…” (8-25)

Note the cold detachment of the narrator, who never deigns to speak to his coy mistress but rather remains silent and aloof. Also, note the sexual ambiguity inherent in this description of Porphyria. The phrasing of the narrator’s speech seems to imply a very carnal interpretation of Porphyria’s conflicting desires to submit and to remain her own person (i.e. virginal). The strangulation of Porphyria is likewise disturbingly sexual, too close to the description of defloration for the comfort of most readers –

“Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do…
No pain felt she
I am sure she felt no pain…” (31-42)

Given that Victorian sensibilities demanded euphemism regarding the pleasures of the flesh, this passage once examined seems shockingly frank, especially given that erotic strangulation is not unheard of in the wide array of human sexual behaviour. Browning displays an all-too-accurate knowledge of human physiology, as well, adding to the disturbing power of this poem – after Porphyria has been strangled, her lover states

“Her cheek once more Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss.” (47-48)

Strangulation turns a face bright red, a sort of deep blushing colour. Again, the final devastating sentence is the most chilling of all statements made in the poem:

“And yet God has not said a word!” (60)

There is no moral judgment, if the reader is limited to the eyes of Porphyria’s lover. If God exists, God will not save the helpless or punish those who abuse their natural power. Indeed, to such as Porphyria’s lover, is not such power God-given?

The Duke of Ferrara and Porphyria’s lover both (and with them can be counted other Browning characters: Napoleon, Johannes Agricola, and to a much lesser degree, the Bishop whose dying command is a sumptuous tomb at St Praxed’s Church) speak in the language of the id, a language full of stark isolation and even starker silence. It is a silence not at first detectable – how better to hide silence than in a long monologue, a barrage of words? – and yet it is there. The silence is that of moral ambiguity. In Browning’s Gothic poems, his narrators and protagonists have cut themselves off from God, society, and moral convention, sometimes with devastating results. The Duke and Porphyria’s lover trap themselves, entomb their romantic urges with the female companions (their repressed shadow-selves, if seen from a Jungian perspective) that they slay. Johannes Agricola, who seeks to reach God through sin, never achieves his goal. “I intend to get to God,” he declares, but his intent never bears fruit – Johannes Agricola spends his entire “meditative” poem in frantic speech, speaking aloud his desire to reach God but never giving any evidence of having done so. His statement,

“I have God’s warrant, could I blend
All hideous sins, as in a cup
To drink the mingled venoms up
Secure my nature will convert
The draught to blossoming gladness fast” (“Johannes Agricola In Meditation,” 33-37)

is a far cry from Yeats’ declaration that “everything is blest.” The voice of the narrative politely conceals, like a fig leaf covering exposed genitalia, the neurosis of the character who is cut off from God, humanity, and sensibility – in other words, from the soul. As a result, there is a certain lack of resolution in the Romantic villain as portrayed by Browning. When such statements as “And yet God has not said a word!” or

“How could I praise
If such as I might understand
Make out and reckon on His ways And bargain for His love” (Johannes Agricola, 56-59)

are made, a hush falls on the mind of the reader. A still place is created, where conventional yardsticks of right and wrong no longer have meaning. The result is delirium. Browning’s villains are mad.

This stillness within a whirlwind of madness can be seen clearly, as well, in the nightmarish “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” The scene is that of a blasted wasteland, and the outlook of the knightly protagonist is a mistrusting of person, setting, and ideal, resulting ultimately in nihilism.

“What else should he be set for, with his staff;
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there
And ask the road?” (7-10)

Roland asks. What, indeed, except possibly to point the way to the dark tower that Roland seeks? The figure of the old man is generally seen, in dreams, as an archetype of the wise, benevolent guide, an extension of the father-image. Roland has vastly different perceptions from other people, however, which perhaps explains his automatic mistrust of his guide; his difference of perception is established in lines 91-95 when he dismisses his former friends on the grounds of perceived moral lapses:

“Good – but the scene shifts – faugh! what hangman hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst Better this present than a past like that…” (100-104)

Roland’s difference, his uniqueness, has banished him to this wilderness. He has succeeded in damning himself.

Roland’s psychic landscape, a hell of imagination, is rife with images of death. The old man who points the way is close to death; Roland himself is close to death (stanzas 5 and 6); the plain is dead (“grey plain all round/ Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound,” 52-53); a starving horse, portrayed in monstrous terms, chews on grass that is “as scant as hair/In leprosy” (73-74); the world Roland inhabits is stunted by war, plague, and famine. This is the inner landscape denied so vigourously by the villain in Browning’s poetry; this wasteland, that only the antiheroic Roland is honest enough to even probe, is what is held at bay by the terrible acts of Porphyria’s lover and Johannes Agricola. What Roland shares with his villainous counterparts, and what he sees as they do not, is the void contained within isolation. Roland rides to his certain doom. Again, the silence of nihilism is masked within deafening noise.

“Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers…
Lost! lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. and yet

Dauntless to the slug-horn to my lips I set
And blew. Childe Roland to the dark tower came” (193-204)

Isolated by his perceptions and his lonely ego to the last, Roland observes his companions as if gazing at a lurid painting before he meets his death. Thus the poem ends on an unresolved note. Doom is implied, but is not spelled out and is thus not entirely certain; furthermore, the actual meaning of the poem is hidden within its Gothic trappings of nightmare and terror. Browning has once again struck his chord of silence into the heart of his reader, with emotionally devastating effects.

However, to say that Browning is a nihlist, or a writer who scribbles such verses out of a perverse desire to inspire uneasiness in the reader, is to miss the point of his poetry altogether. Browning disturbs in order that the dark, uncomfortable places might be exposed and thus revealed to the reader as sordid, sad little corners of the mind: deserving of scorn and perhaps a little pity. It is far more natural, in Browning’s eyes, to say

“Let us be unashamed of soul
As earth lies bare to heaven above
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?” (“Two In The Campagna,” VII)

than it is to embrace the nihilist ideal, especially in its extreme form. Browning’s villains, unlike the other characters in his poetry, do not accept the awkward presence of love, death, and the need for the individual to find a place within a largely oblivious society; rather, they reject both love and death by trying to capture each within a single fleeting moment, and they inflate the importance of the self to the point of solipsism. Those readers who fail to see the moralist lurking within Browning’s more lurid tales are blind not only to his sense of irony (which was keen), but also to the underlying pathos that exists within the twisted characters who hold themselves captive within their own grey plains of ego.

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Categorized as darkness

By grandpoobah

Indeed there will be time
For a hundred visions and revisions...

T.S. Eliot

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