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Emblems of Temporality in Browning's “Cleon”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Adrienne Munich
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Extract

Browning's melancholy epistle from the polymorphous artist Cleon to the Greek tyrant Protus is a poem about immortality, not only in a religious realm but in an artistic dimension as well. In fact, the emblems in the poem illustrate, at least on one level, that Browning subordinated the religious aspect of the theme to concerns about his art. Thus, one can read many of the religious references as having as much relevance to Browning's wish to attract an audience to his own message as to the efforts of “Paulus” to convert the Gentiles.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 6 , Spring 1978 , pp. 117 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

NOTES

117 before”: DeVane, William C., A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1955), p. 207.Google Scholar

118 Physician”: DeVane, , pp. 263–64Google Scholar, considers the poem as also a complementary poem to “Empedocles on Etna,” and Rich, Nancy B., in “New Perspectives on the Companion Poems of Robert Browning,” Victorian Newsletter, No. 36 (Fall, 1969), pp. 5–9Google Scholar, traces complementary image patterns in “Karshish” and “Cleon.”

119 garb: Even the word “sane,” one could argue, has personal, artistic connotations for Browning, since J. S. Mill used the word in describing the poet's morbid self-consciousness in Pauline. Robert remembered. See The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, ed. Kintner, Elvan (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), I, 28.Google Scholarfaith: Bate, W. Jackson, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, documents poets' awareness of this burden for nineteenth-century poets. artists: I consider the identification of Browning with his creation, Cleon, to be quite close. Browning's distance fluctuates. He views Cleon's snobbery and inability to accept Christianity with some irony, but as an artist, Cleon speaks largely for the poet's own aspirations and fears.

120 Lotos-Eaters”: The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, Christopher (London: Longmans, 1969), pp. 560–66, 429–38.Google Scholar

123 Cleon”: Honan, Park, Browning's Characters (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), p. 215Google Scholar, points out the recurrence of the word “joy” but gives a different interpretation. The uses of joy as a concept in the nineteenth century are complex, and I have space only to suggest some of the ways which they bear upon this poem. all: McAleer, Edward C., “Browning's Cleon and Auguste Comte,” Comparative Literature, 8 (1956), 142–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses Positivist philosophy, which considers immortality as living in memory and which Browning seems to be answering here.

124 Browning”: Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, Kenneth (London: Longmans, 1965), p. 149.Google Scholarform”: Ibid., p. 147.

126 enjoyment': Ibid., pp. 591–92. Denominator: Ibid., p. 171, quoted from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus.

129 message: Not only is Browning's knowledge of the rhetoric of emblems clear from reading his poetry, but he claimed that he knew Francis Quarles' Emblems by heart before he could read. See Griffin, W. Hall and Minchin, H. C., The Life of Robert Browning (London: Methuen, 1910), p. 59.Google Scholar

131 Humilitie: The Works of George Herbert, ed. Hutchinson, F. E. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 66.Google Scholar

132 well: Tillotson, Kathleen, “Donne's Poetry in the Nineteenth Century,” Mid-Victorian Studies (London: Athlone Press, 1965), pp. 278–300Google Scholar, and Duncan, Joseph E., “The Intellectual Kinship of John Donne and Robert Browning,” Studies in Philology, 50 (1953), 81–100.Google Scholar

133 holes?”: The Divine Poems, ed. Gardner, Helen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 31, 11. 21–22.Google Scholar