5705. Edward Dowden to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 51–52.
8. Monte Notte
Cork.
Feb. 15. 1866.
Dear Sir,
I have been reading “Sordello” with care, & have summoned up courage to ask you a question. I ask it with fear lest it may betray some wide-spreading ignorance which would in part cancel the right of expressing the profound admiration I have of this great poem. Yet let me first—not praise because I love so much—but say, for the pleasure of saying it, that your poems have been to me & to many known to me, a gift which we take as in many respects the most precious our time has offered.
Here is my question– What is the meaning of the name “Elys” pp 290. 293. 327. 406. 407 (Ed, 1863)? [1] And having asked one question I will ask a second–
P.p 268. 272. two very different characters are described. One with a need to:
Bury themselves the whole heart wide & warm
In something not themselves. [2]
The other turning inward homage which other souls direct outward–
”
On a first reading I was led to suppose (from the opening lines–“Yourselves shall trace” [3] &c) that Sordello belonged to the class first described. But from the period of the awakening of judgment, from the moment when he desires some special office of his own (& even before, when he was taking nature captive) I can find in Sordello no resemblance to the first class. To it belong Eglamor & in another way Palma. [4] But Sordello is governed by no out-soul, he cares for song’s results not song, he wants only a body for acting out his will, & to compass self-perception with. And if one may name a moral for the Story is it not the great need Sordello had of some Power revealed yet wholly out of rivalry which he might
Love, though unloving all conceived by men.
[5]How then is he at all related as the passage pp. 269–269 [sic] seems to imply to that worshipping class first described?
I have liked to think of Sordello as a companion-poem of Paracelsus– Paracelsus would know– Aprile love– Sordello act out his will—in a way the conditions of life forbid—each “forcing in time eternity’s concern.” [6]
I have written this at the risk of being thought a descendant of Naddo– [7] Your charity however could forgive even Naddo if he loved, & for this sake (if need be) forgive
Yours faithfully
Edward Dowden [8]
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Yale University.
1. RB answers this question and Dowden’s second in letter 5716.
2. Cf. Sordello (1840), I, 508–509.
3. Sordello, I, 462.
4. Sordello’s great love. Eglamor is a rival troubadour.
5. Cf. Sordello, VI, 592.
6. Cf. Sordello, I, 566.
7. The editors of the Longman edition of RB’s poems describe Naddo as a “type of literary hack … he is the ‘hanger-on’ of whoever happens to be the current literary star, and he represents the popular and conventional view of poets and poetry” (The Poems of Browning, Vol. 1., ed. John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, London and New York, 1991, p. 441n). Naddo is first mentioned in Sordello, I, 693.
8. Edward Dowden (1843–1913), literary scholar, became the chair of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1867. He published a biography of RB, Robert Browning, in 1904.
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