In 1910, in November, when he was a very old man and half mad, Tolstoy left home because he was at odds with his wife and because he somehow wanted to make the world a better place. He began to walk—he knew not where. Every newspaper in the civilized world headlined his disappearance, and hordes of reporters descended upon his province and his little town. A few days later he arrived at a remote railway junction at Astapovo, Ryazan Province, suffering from pneumonia, and there he died. What he had seen during those few lost days, and why he had wandered where he went, and whether he had found what he was seeking, we do not know.
ROBERT BROWNING
1812–1889
Selected Poems
Robert Browning was born in London in 1812. He received practically no formal education, reading instead in his father’s large library. He lived at home with his parents until he was thirty-four, reading and writing poems.
The story of Browning’s courtship of and marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, the invalid poet who was six years his senior, is, because of the long-running play The Barretts of Wimpole Street and the later movie, as well known as the story of any English poet’s life. Indeed it is a fine story. Browning fell in love with Elizabeth in 1845, before he had ever met her (although he had read her poems). He rescued her the next year from the half-prison that was her father’s home and swept her off to Italy in a romantic turmoil that gave both of them great joy. She wrote better poems about their love than she had ever written before, but he wrote little then, conserving until after her death in 1861 the well of inspiration that she remained to him throughout his days. He would have been a fine poet without her; with her he became a great one.
Browning felt that there are three levels or kinds of poets: good, better, and best. He defined them in “Sordello.”. The good poets, he wrote:
say they so have seen;
For the better, what it was they saw; the best Impart the gift of seeing to the rest.
The ordinary poet looks out the window and tells his auditors, seated in the room, that he sees something outside. The better poet gives his readers a detailed running account of what he is seeing outside the window. The best poet, whom Browning called the “Maker-see,” puts his readers at the window and lets them see for themselves. It is a great gift.
It was a gift that Browning had in full measure. Take this short poem, titled “Meeting at Night”:
The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!
Each line gives more concrete reality to the scene, until the final triumph of “the quick sharp scratch/And blue spurt of a lighted match,” with its extraordinary caesura between “blue” and “spurt” while the “made-to-see” reader waits for the match to light, and then the quiet sound of two hearts “beating each to each.” I have read that poem a hundred times and never tire of it. I never will tire of it until I cease to think that poetry has everything to do with real life.
The intensity of physical presence is the most characteristic mark of Browning’s poetry, but there are other intensities as well that, in the end, are even more important. Browning is the acknowledged master of the dramatic monologue, in which a single speaker tells a story or describes a scene as though he were describing it to another person, an auditor who, though silent, is just as much a character in the poem as the speaker himself. The intensity of presence of these auditors is sometimes almost overwhelming, even though they do not say a word: the wife in “Andrea del Sarto”; the investigating officer (as the reader must suppose himself to be) listening to the crazed account of his crime by “Porphyria’s Lover”; the representative of the count in “My Last Duchess.” The drama of these lyric poems is all in the interchange, in the words spoken and the words attended to, even though only one side of the conversation is heard. Browning’s dramatic monologues are among the finest achievements of English poetry.
His single finest poem is, I think, The Ring and the Book (1868–69). This long poem in twelve books had a curious genesis. Browning came upon an old book in a shop in Florence that detailed the crime, committed two centuries before, of a certain Count Guido Franceschini, who, to recoup his wasted fortune, tricked a young girl into marrying him, then, after tortuous windings of the plot, murdered her and her parents and was himself executed for the deed. Browning worked for years on the poem and made of it what is certainly the finest detective story in verse. Each of the twelve books of the poem tells the story, or an aspect of the story—there is remarkably little repetition—from a different point of view. The Ring and the Book is not easy reading but it is worth the effort to read it. You will feel when you are finished that you have seen into three human hearts as perhaps you have rarely been able to see before.
That is the secret of reading Browning: to let him make you see. Some readers resist this; they find him too difficult, his syntax too complicated, his verse too dense and packed with meaning. This criticism applies, perhaps, to all the best poets, to all of the “makers-see.” At any rate, Browning is one of those.
You may wish to start with these poems: “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” “Home-Thoughts, from the Sea,” “Meeting at Night,” “Porphyria’s Lover,” “My Last Duchess,” “A Woman’s Last Word,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” “The Last Ride Together,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Prospice,” and “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” Whether you decide to tackle The Ring and the Book is up to you.
LEWIS CARROLL
1832–1898
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Through the Looking-Glass and What
Alice Found There
Lewis Carroll loved photography, mathematics, and little girls. Out of these, plus a wonderfully playful imagination and a good memory, he fashioned one of the great books of all time.