One surprise after another followed: dramatic romances, dramatic lyrics, and the Pied Piper that rid Hamelin of its rats, then spirited its children away. Three riders galloping, galloping; two, their horse spent; so, alas! only one makes it into Ghent. My eyes fly from word to word, my heart pounds.
Then, a pause... a different note. A wistful, contemplative note, as the poet surveys what was once an ancient city; or recalls a day in the city-square, oh to have a house there! if there was 'money enough and to spare', where a trumpet might announce the arrival of a puppet show 'Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife'. Noise and bustle, or the calm of a villa where nature more forcibly strikes you, its darkness pierced by song and lute. Music has crept in, its language and its notes, as have the longer storytelling poems, which I have to, I admit, often read twice through, because sometimes only then does the full story take, my full understanding awaken. My mind, it is true, occasionally drifts on these selected journeyings, somehow loses the ability to at first grasp the words and sees only imagery, but as if through a fog as compared to a clear mist. I reach the end and begin again, Ah! Light, here she comes, line by line, until a sun has edged the clouds away. As the madman saith to the Arab physician: 'It is strange'; strange how the hour of the day influences. But perhaps the hour too made its mark on Browning? I know from my own experience it can be difficult to return to a work unfinished in a different hour: the same thread might not be found, so that which is complete is abandoned or revised, or continued from but disjointedly. The writer loses objectivity, for the work to them reads like two separate pieces: the joins can be perceived. Have they in their tinkering, continuation, or re-write made it worse or better? Perhaps, though, Browning had none of those problems...
This certainly seems to be the case with Childe Roland, which Browning claimed some thirty-odd years later came to him, with no conscious intention, 'as a kind of dream. I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day, I believe.'
Is Browning to be believed? Yes! Some ideas just come, entire, with no clue whence they came from, or how, in the aftermath, the artist (the writer, the poet etc.) executed them, for the style, the language might not seem their own: their normal habitable mode. It was all there, existing already in the mind, the imagination, and had to be written, with no reflection until later of what it meant or might suggest; and indeed that might never become clear. Being in that creative flow, however, feeling borne along by it or almost united with it, is a wonderful feeling, whether as an active participant or passive spectator. It is present in all art forms (and nature), and is the closest we have, in an increasingly secular world, to achieving what was once described as religious ecstasy: a soaring of spirit.
Did Browning's spirit soar with Childe Roland? I think so; and though it may not have been as apparent to me as to him, we have to take his word.
Art, the written, the visual is collaborative. Words paint landscapes and portraits; two sources might combine, for example, to paint a man in poetry or prose: the historical giving way to fiction or verse. One artist's work becomes a handbook for the other. It is to this he refers, as Browning does with Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, to create, in different words, in different form, his own. Art, in other words, inspires art. Or comment. Just as Browning found cause to write how a poet might strike a contemporary; just as I have found cause to write on Browning.
Picture credit: Robert Browning by George Frederick Watts (source: WikiArt)
See Selected Poems by Robert Browning (Penguin Classics, 2004).
Written October 2021.
