Browning's "By the Fire-Side" and "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" in the Light of Word Theory

By Julian Scutts, Student

A critical study of Browning's poetry

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1. Browning's Reticence and its Relation to the Interpretation of his Poetry

A most remarkable characteristic of Browning's poetry lies in the fact that it makes
such little reference either to the author himself or to contemporary England. Without
embracing the position of George Santayana when arguing that Browning sought
self-concealment in all sorts of different guises in remote historical settings, (1) one
may still ask whether the poet's apparent avoidance of themes concerned with
Victorian England might not have resulted from some psychologically conditioned
estrangement from his native land and family background. It does seem possible that
Browning's use of language served as some form of verbal camouflage behind which
the oversensitive poet was able to conceal himself and his most intimate concerns.
Certainly, G.K. Chesterton observed in Browning's poetry a dissociation of language
and content. (2)

Among modern critics, Barbara Melchiori sees the problem of artistic reticence as
the central aspect to be tackled in critical attempts to adequately discuss Browning's
poetry. She establishes this point in first paragraph of her book Browning's Poetry of
Reticence. (3)

Some of the tension, which lends strength to his work, arises from the conflict
between his wish to guard jealously his own thoughts and feelings, and the pressing
necessity he was under to reveal them.

According to her line of argument, as the reader of Browning's poetry is debarred from
making direct inferences about Browning's personal life from his poetry, he or she
should adopt an indirect approach to better understand Browning's poetry by paying
attention to clues provided by certain key words found within it. The principle
underlying Melchiori's mode of interpretation is based on the assumption that the
poet's choice of individual words is not subject to the same degree of mental scrutiny
as that applied to sentences and groups of words combining to express ideas and
opinions. Melchiori suggests that the key word in Browning's poetry is "gold",
occurring, as it does, approximately 390 times throughout Browning's poetic works.
C. Williard Smith, on the other hand, attaches much the same order of importance to
the word "star" in his book Browning's Star Imagery.(4) Other key words or verbal
clues have apparently attracted less attention, particularly words like "promise",
tower" or "cross", which assumes a position of importance in this study as it is also
a prominent key word in the poetry of Dylan Thomas.

2. A Three-level Approach to the Task of interpreting Browning's Poetry

In the introduction of this study I made reference to the "sustained Metaphor" which
both lends structural unity to a particular work and helps to reveal the unity
underlying all the works of a poet or author. I suggested earlier that the notion of a
journey to the Promised Land informs a central sustained metaphor in Browning's
poetry. However, an awareness of the macrostructure of a work in no way precludes
sensitivity to its minutæ, the individual words that together constitute a poem or
prose passage. Indeed, we shall soon consider how sustained metaphors and the
poet's use of individual words are inseparably connected and, when duly studied,
mutually enhancing in the light they cast on each other. In line with this argument I
wish to subject two of Browning's poems to criteria based on the contention that
poems may be read at three levels, which I set out as follows:

1. The Narrative or Literal Level
2. The Allegorical Level (based on a Sustained Metaphor, e.g. a Journey
3. The Level Implied by Key words
The following case studies may contribute to clarifying the basic approach I apply to
the study of poetic texts and provide evidence showing how the problem of time
impinges on Browning's poetry.

I: "By the Fire-Side" (published in Men and Women)

At what I have termed Level 1, the speaker, Browning himself, recalls making a
mountain excursion with his wife in Italy. The poem reaches its highest degree of
intensity in the rendering of a profound mystical insight which the couple experience
when exploring a ruined chapel. (5)

At "Level 2", the mountain climb assumes a symbolic dimension with the implication
of an ascent from the earthly to the spiritual realm (cf. the mountain as a symbol of
divine habitation or presence in the Bible or Greek mythology, and, indeed, in other
works by Browning such as Pauline or even "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" with the line
"He never can cross that mighty top".

At "Level 3", at which individual words undergo particularly close scrutiny, we find
evidence corroborating the contention that the surface description of a mountain
climb is permeated with mystical and religious symbolism. In stanzas XXXIV, XXXV,
and XXXVI there is a conspicuous Repetition of the word "cross":

Silent the crumbling bridge we cross, (line 166)
…………………
The cross is down and the altar bare, (line 174)
………………..
We stoop and look in through the grate
See the little porch and rustic door,
Read duly the dead builder's date;
Then cross the bridge that we crossed before, (line 179)

Within the space of only thirteen lines the word "cross" occurs three times, twice as
a verb meaning "to traverse" and once as a noun signifying a crucifix. In logical terms
this repetition appears to be accidental, yet the three-fold occurrence of "cross"
strikes the reader's attention, entailing recognition that in some sense "the same
word" is receiving emphasis. The Russian Formalist Jurij Tynjanov drew attention to
the phenomenon which in my view concerns us here in an article entitled "The Word
in Verse".(6) The article points out that while the conspicuous repetition of the same
word in prose usually produces a discordant note, in poetry its effect is often to
enhance and deepen the power of language. Tynjanov and other Formalists incurred
the censure of Leon Trotsky for having succumbed to "the superstition of the word"
and allied themselves to the pronouncements of Saint John. (7) According to one of
Tynjanov's postulations the word in its immediate context partakes in the word of like
appearance that transcends all contexts - a contention which, incidentally, echoes
the second principle of scriptural exegesis in rabbinical tradition. But what relevance
has this theory of language to the occurrences of the word "cross" in the lines cited
above? Let us consider the two lines, which follow the last citation.

Take the path again - but wait!
Oh moment, one and infinite!

In the seventh chapter of his book Browning - Background and Conflict, F.R. G.
Duckworth quotes the line "Oh moment one and infinite!" among passages which, in
his view, are expressive of Browning's quest to reconcile two apparently contradictory
concepts of time. - in short - the "Greek" and the "Jewish" understanding of time. (8)
The former conceives of eternity as an ideal or absolute state beyond time altogether,
while the latter stresses the objective reality of time as temporal succession, even
when it reveals aspects of the eternal. Duckworth argues that both these concepts of
time coexist in the universe represented by Browning's poetry. The nearest Browning
comes to reconciling these two attitudes to time, the critic asserts, is when his
poems intimate that eternity breaks through the succession of temporal events in
moments when individuals experience a flash of intense insight and recognition
releasing them from normal time-bound consciousness. W. Whitla argues that
Browning brings theology to bear on the question of time's relationship to eternity.
The Christian belief in the Incarnation, Whitla argues in The Central Truth, suited
Browning's philosophical and intellectual frame of mind as it pointed to a possible
reconciliation of what Browning perceived as two fundamentally different ways of
understanding time. (9)

Perhaps the lines cited from "By the Fire-Side" will help to illustrate Whitla's
assertion. The lines quoted above contain a number of striking juxtapositions. Not
only does the word "cross" recur with noticeably frequency, but a reference to the
date of the builder's death, suggesting temporal fixity in the course of history and the
irreversibility of death, almost immediately precedes the ecstatic experience of the
"moment one and infinite". This together with the force of the twice-repeated word
"cross" surely recalls "the Cross" as the central reference point in theology and the
meeting of historical time and eternity. I would even relate Browning's apparently
jocular treatment of the Pied Piper of Hamelin to his interest in the main symbolic
elements in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, for nearly all the
literary treatments of the story, however much they vary otherwise, retain the kernel
of the original story in as far as they assign a historical date to a supernatural or
mysterious event. (10)

The appearance of "cross" as a verbal clue is not only found in Robert Browning's
poetry, of course. Another notable case of a significant repetition of the word is found
in Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", in the lines ''At length did cross an
Albatross'' in line 63 and ''With my cross-bow/ I shot the Albatross'' in lines 81 and
82). Here the verbal clue could point to what G.H. Hartman sees as the sustained
metaphor of the Wandering Jew informing and underlying this poem. (11)


II. "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"


This poem, so well known to many English schoolchildren, furnishes an example of a
poem which rarely receives close critical attention, doubtless because its riveting
narrative excellence is so eminently satisfying in itself. However, the following study
of the poem will take account of verbal clues that may deepen our perception of the
poem's symbolic and allegorical attributes that are not apparent if the poem is
considered only at the narrative or literal level.

At Level 1, three messengers, Joris, Dirck and the speaker, gallop on their horses
through the night and the following morning to "bring the news which alone could save
Aix from her fate" (line 46). The horses of Dirck and Joris die from exhaustion on the
journey but Roland, the speaker's horse, survives, all rigours notwithstanding, and
reaches Aix to be rewarded by the acclamation of its jubilant inhabitants and by the
riders' "last measure of wine" (line 58)- a strange beverage for a horse, when one
comes to think of it. Could "wine" provide a verbal clue in view of its obvious
sacramental associations?

There is more than one reason for questioning whether the poem could be treated
only as a realistically treated story, however gripping and well told. Browning himself
commented that the story had no historical foundation, and William Clyde Devane
notes that the route chosen by the riders was far from direct (12). Was the path of
the riders dictated by the poet's need to synchronize earth-bound incidents
accompanying the ride with the position and visibility of the sun, moon and stars in
accordance with a symbolic framework?

At Level 2, the journey described in the poem reveals a sustained metaphor based on
the motif of a journey through life and experience towards ever-higher states of
progress, which characterizes Browning's poetry generally. Brown skilfully avoids
foisting an overt allegorical frame on the poem but intimates one by the use of
expressions which ambivalently fulfil the reader' expectations of what is plausible in
terms of the story itself and still point to other planes of significance. This
ambivalence we discover in Joris's words "Yet there is time!" (line 18). On the one
hand, they can be taken to mean what one could paraphrase as "There's still time, it
isn't too late", which are fully consistent with the dramatic situation of the riders. On
the other, the words point to one of the major questions the poem raises in wider
metaphysical terms, the nature of time itself. Further to this inquiry, let us now
consider the main events reported in the poem.

As in Browning's poetic drama Pippa Passes, the reported events in "How they
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" are framed by the diurnal cycle starting
from around midnight, as reported in the first Stanza, and ending not long after Joris
and the narrator sight Aix in the oppressive heat of the midday sun. We note a
marked contrast between "a great yellow star" at the break of dawn (see stanza III),
probably evoking the star of Bethlehem in many readers' minds, and the sun, which
here carries negative associations with soulless aridity and the remorseless progress
of time. These lines arouse such an impression:

The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,
'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff
(Stanza VII)

The death of two horses and the survival of Roland imply a contrast of life and death
in terms that transcend the specifics of the story itself, even carrying a possible
allusion to the third day of the Resurrection reinforced by an allusion to wine and the
Eucharist, especially so in the light of a reference to "red blood".

At level 3 we find further corroboration of the religious symbolic framework we have
already considered. The words "Good News" in the poem's title refer in the first
instance to the contents of the message which the three riders bring to the city of
Aix. It is surprising in some ways that the contents of this message itself are never
divulged to the reader, suggesting that only the the idea of "the good news" is
paramount, and of course, in a religious context, the "good news" imports the
Gospel, especially to someone like Browning, with a staunch Nonconformist family
background. Another word of particular significance in evangelical circles appears in
the wording that Aix is "saved." This is not to say that the poem is a cryptic religious
tract, though there are strong reasons to conclude that it is the product of a mind
steeped in a Christian, particularly a Nonconformist, attitude to life, irrespective of the
fact that Browning in his youth underwent a Period of religious doubt and even
antireligious sentiment when the young poet was subject to the powerful influence of
Shelley's "Queen Mab".

1George Santayana, "The Poetry of Barbarism", in Robert Browning / a Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. P. Drew (London, 1966), p. .21.
2G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning, (London, 1916), p. 142.
3 Barbara Melchiori, Browning's Poetry of Reticence (London, 1968).
Ibidem, p.1.
4 C. Williard Smith, Browning's Star Imagery (New Jersey, 1941).
5 The ruined chapel was close to a mountain pass leading to Prato Fiorito.
6 Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse", in Readings in Russian Poetics
Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska
(Michigan Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor, 1978), pp. 136-145.
7.Leon Trotsky, "The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism" in Literature and
Revolution (Russian version published in 1924), tr. Rose Strumsky (Ann Arbor: 1960).

8 F.R. G. Duckworth, Browning: Background and Conflict (Connecticut, 1966).
9. W. Whitla, The Central Truth: The Incarnation in Robert Browning's Poetry
(Toronto, 1963).
10. Julian Scutts, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Der Rattenfänger von Hameln) as a
Motif in European Poetry", in Wascana Review, University of Regina, (Winter, 1985).
Revised version on the website of Jonas Kuhn, University of
Stuttgart:http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/-jonas/Scutts-article.html
11. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'" Romanticism
and Consciousness Essays in criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970).
12 William Clyde DeVane, A Browning Handbook (New York, 1955), p. 154.