Reviews

R400315A.  Sordello.

Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 15 March 1840, p. 4.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 416.

In the name of Browning, many of our readers will recognize the author of “Paracelsus,” a work of extraordinary power and promise. The poem before us is of a higher and more ambitious tendency, and cast in a maturer mould. It requires, and will, we believe, richly repay a careful, and patient [s]tudy. This we have not yet been able to afford it, and the little space necessarily allotted to this department of our journal will not admit of our attempting an analysis at all adequate to its merits and importance. It may be described as the psyc[h]ological biography of Sordello, a provençal poet of the twelfth century, an exposition of the sensations, aspirations, and progress of the poetic mind and character. There are many and rare beauties throughout the book, from which we select the following address to Dante, showing, we think, the impress and true cunning of a master-hand—“the vision and the faculty divine.”

Florentine!

A herald star* I know thou did’st absorb

Relentless into the consummate orb

That scared it from its right to roll along

A sempiternal path, with dance and song,

Fulfilling is allotted period,

Serenest of the progeny of God,

Who yet resigns it not, his darling stoops

With no quenched lights, desponds with no blank troops

Of disenfranchised brilliances, for, blest

Utterly with thee, its shy element

Like thine upburneth prosperous and clear—

* * Dante, pacer of the shore

Where glutted hell disgorgeth dithiest gloom,

Unbitten by its whirring sulphur spume—

Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope

Into a darkness quieted by hope—

Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God’s eye

In gracious twilights where his chosen lie.

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*Sordello

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Reviewed:

Sordello (RB), London: Moxon, 1840.

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