R460600B. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.
Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, June 1846, pp. 715–716.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 13, 394–395.
[This article is entitled “Past and Present Condition of British Poetry,” and we include the part about RB.]
Our poetry is in a very sorry kind of plight if it has to depend upon Tennyson and Browning for the hereditary honours of its existence. The Examiner will tell us “No!” The Athenæum will do the same; papers remarkable for the vigour of their articles, the excellence of their occasional criticism, and the general asperity of their manner. A page out of every ten in Herrick’s “Hesperides” is more certain of an hereafter than any one dramatic romance or lyric in all the “Bells and Pomegranates” of Mr. Browning. Not but what Mr. Browning is a poet. He is unquestionably a poet; but his subject has not unfrequently to bear the weight of sentiments which spring not naturally from it, and his numbers at times are overlaid with affectation, the common conceit of men who affect to tell common things in an uncommon manner. He clogs his verses, moreover, with too many consonants and too many monosyllables, and carries the sense too frequently in a very ungraceful manner from one line to the other. Here is a passage from the seventh number of his “Bells and Pomegranates,” which it really is a torture to read:—
But to-day not a boat reached Salerno,
So back to a man
Came our friends, with whose help in the vineyards
Grape harvest began:
In the vat half-way up in our house-side,
Like blood the juice spins,
While your brother all bare-legged is dancing
Till breathless he grins,
Dead-beaten, in effort on effort
To keep the grapes under;
For still when he seems all but master,
In pours the fresh plunder
From girls who keep coming and going
With basket on shoulder,
And eyes shut against the rain’s driving,
Your girls that are older,—
For under the hedges of aloe,
And where, on its bed
Of the orchard’s black mould, the love-apple
Lies pulpy and red,
All the young ones are kneeling and filling
Their laps with the snails
Tempted out by the first rainy weather,—
Your best of regales,
As to-night will be proved to my sorrow,
When, supping in state,
We shall feast our grape-gleaners—two dozen,
Three over one plate,—
Macaroni so tempting to swallow
In slippery strings,
And gourds fried in great purple slices,
That colour of kings,—
Meantime, see the grape-bunch they’ve brought you! [p. 716→]
The rain-water slips
O’er the heavy blue bloom on each globe
Which the wasp to your lips
Still follows with fretful persistence—
Nay, taste while awake,
This half of a curd-white smooth cheese-ball,
That peels, flake by flake,
Like an onion’s each smoother and whiter!
Next sip this weak wine
From the thin green glass flask, with its stopper,
A leaf of the vine,—
And end with the prickly-pear’s red flesh,
That leaves through its juice
The stony black seeds on your pearl-teeth
. . . Scirocco is loose!
Hark! the quick pelt of the olives
Which, thick in one’s track,
Tempt the stranger to pick up and bite them,
Though not yet half black!
And how their old twisted trunks shudder!
The medlars let fall
Their hard fruit; the brittle great fig-trees
Snap off, figs and all;
For here comes the whole of the tempest!
No refuge but creep
Back again to my side or my shoulder,
And listen or sleep.
This may be poetry, but it is poetry in the raw material; for the numbers are those of a scrannel pipe, and such as Cadmus alone could pronounce when in the state of a serpent. This which follows is the mere twaddle of a Cockney at Calais or Cologne:—
Home-Thoughts from Abroad.
Oh, to be in England,
Now that April’s there,
And who wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows—
Hark! where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops, at the bent spray’s edge.
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields are rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
This is very inferior to Ambrose Philips, who acquired the distinction of Namby Pamby for similar verse, e.g. his “Lines to Cuzzoni,” which Charles Lamb had got by heart.
[This concludes the portion about RB.]
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. VII. Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1845.
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