The original title in ‘Dramatis Personae’ (first published in 1864) was ‘James Lee’.
The poem consists of a succession of soliloquies (rather than monologues*), separated, it must be supposed, by longer or shorter intervals of time, and expressive of subjective states induced in a wife whose husband’s love, if it ever were love, indeed, gradually declines to apathy and finally entire deadness. What manner of man James Lee was, is only faintly intimated. The interest centres in, is wholly confined to, the experiences of the wife’s heart, under the circumstances, whatever they were.
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* For the distinction between the soliloquy and the
monologue, see the passage given in a note, from Rev. Prof.
Johnson’s paper on ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, under the
treatment of the monologue, p. 85 {part III of Intro.}.
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The scene is a cottage on a “bitter coast of France”.
I. ‘James Lee’s Wife speaks at the Window’.—The first misgivings of her heart are expressed; and these misgivings are responded to by the outer world. Summer has stopped. Will the summer of her husband’s love stop too, and be succeeded by cheerless winter? The revolt of her heart against such a thought is expressed in the third stanza.
II. ‘By the Fireside’.—Here the faintly indefinite misgiving expressed in the first soliloquy has become a gloomy foreboding of ill; “the heart shrinks and closes, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.”
The fire on the hearth is built of shipwreck wood, which tells of a “dim dead woe befallen this bitter coast of France”, and omens to her foreboding heart the shipwreck of their home. The ruddy shaft of light from the casement must, she thinks, be seen by sailors who envy the warm safe house and happy freight. But there are ships in port which go to ruin,
“All through worms i’ the wood, which crept,
Gnawed our hearts out while we slept:
That is worse.”
Her mind reverts to the former occupants of their house, as if she felt an influence shed within it by some unhappy woman who, like herself, in Love’s voyage, saw planks start and open hell beneath.
III. ‘In the Doorway’.—As she looks out from the doorway, everything tells of the coming desolation of winter, and reflects the desolation which, she feels, is coming upon herself. The swallows are ready to depart, the water is in stripes, black, spotted white with the wailing wind. The furled leaf of the fig-tree, in front of their house, and the writhing vines, sympathize with her heart and her spirit:—
“My heart shrivels up and my spirit shrinks curled.”
But there is to them two, she thinks, no real outward want, that should mar their peace, small as is their house, and poor their field. Why should the change in nature bring change to the spirit which should put life in the darkness and cold?
“Oh, live and love worthily, bear and be bold!
Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange.”
IV. ‘Along the Beach’.—It does not appear that she anywhere in the poem addresses her husband, face to face. It is soliloquy throughout. In this section it does appear, more than in the others, that she is directly addressing him; but it’s better to understand it as a mental expostulation. He wanted her love, and got it, in its fulness; though an expectation of all harvest and no dearth was not involved in that fulness of love.
Though love greatens and even glorifies, she knew there was much in him waste, with many a weed, and plenty of passions run to seed, but a little good grain too. And such as he was she took him for hers; and he found her his, to watch the olive and wait the vine of his nature; and when rivers of oil and wine came not, the failure only proved that he was her whole world, all the same. But he has been averse to, and has resented, the tillage of his nature to which she has lovingly devoted herself, feeling it to be a bondage;
“And ‘tis all an old story, and my despair
Fit subject for some new song:”
such as the one with which she closes this soliloquy, representing a love which cares only for outside charms (which, later in the poem, we learn she has not) and looks not deeper.
V. ‘On the Cliff’.—Leaning on the barren turf, which is dead to the roots, and looking at a rock, flat as an anvil’s face, and left dry by the surf, with no trace of living thing about it (Death’s altar by the lone shore), she sees a cricket spring gay, with films of blue, upon the parched turf, and a beautiful butterfly settle and spread its two red fans, on the rock. And then there is to her, wholly taken up, as she is, with their beauty,
“No turf, no rock; in their ugly stead,
See, wonderful blue and red!”
and they symbolize to her, Love settling unawares upon men, the level and low, the burnt and bare, in themselves (as are the turf and the rock).
VI. ‘Reading a Book, under the Cliff’.—The first six stanzas of this section she reads from a book. *
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* They were composed by Mr. Browning when in his 23d year,
and published in 1836, in ‘The Monthly Repository’, vol. x.,
pp. 270, 271, and entitled simply ‘Lines’. They were
revised and introduced into this section of ‘James Lee’,
which was published in ‘Dramatis Personae’ in 1864.
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Her experiences have carried her beyond what these Lines convey, and she speaks of them somewhat sarcastically and ironically. This “young man”, she thinks, will be wiser in time,
“for kind
Calm years, exacting their accompt
Of pain, mature the mind:”
and then the wind, when it begins among the vines, so low, so low, will have for him another language; such as this:—
“Here is the change beginning, here the lines
Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
The limit time assigns.”
This is the language SHE has learned: We cannot draw one beauty into our hearts’ core, and keep it changeless. This is the old woe of the world; the tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die. RISE WITH IT, THEN! REJOICE THAT MAN IS HURLED FROM CHANGE TO CHANGE UNCEASINGLY, HIS SOUL’S WINGS NEVER FURLED! To this philosophy of life has she been brought. But she must still sadly reflect how bitter it is for man not to grave, on his soul, one fair, good, wise thing just as he grasped it! For himself death’s wave; while time washes (ah, the sting!) o’er all he’d sink to save.
This reflection must be understood, in her own case, as prompted by her unconquerable wifely love. It is this which points the sting.
VII. ‘Among the Rocks’.—The brown old earth, in autumn, when all the glories of summer are fading, or have faded, wears a good gigantic smile, looking not backward, but forward, with his feet in the ripples of the sea-wash, and listening to the sweet twitters of the ‘white-breasted sea-lark’. The entire stanza has a mystical meaning and must be interpreted in its connection.
She has reached, in this soliloquy, high ground:—
“If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
Make the low nature better by your throes!
GIVE EARTH YOURSELF, GO UP FOR GAIN ABOVE!”
The versification of the first stanza of this section is very lovely, and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits the completest inspiration. No mere metrical skill, nor metrical sensibility even, could have produced it.
VIII. ‘Beside the Drawing-Board’.—She is seated at her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coarse hand of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model, to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who
“Drew and learned and loved again,
While fast the happy moments flew,
Till beauty mounted into his brain
And on the finger which outvied
His art, he placed the ring that’s there,
Still by fancy’s eye descried,
In token of a marriage rare:
For him on earth his art’s despair,
For him in heaven his soul’s fit bride.”
Her effort has taught her a wholesome lesson: “the worth of flesh and blood at last!” There’s something more than beauty in a hand. Da Vinci would not have turned from the poor coarse hand of the little girl who has been standing by in wondering patience. He, great artist as he was, owed all he achieved to his firm grasp upon, and struggle with, and full faith in, the real. She imagines him saying:—
“Shall earth and the cramped moment-space
Yield the heavenly crowning grace?
Now the parts and then the whole! *
Who art thou with stinted soul
And stunted body, thus to cry
‘I love,—shall that be life’s strait dole?
I must live beloved or die!’
This peasant hand that spins the wool
And bakes the bread, why lives it on,
Poor and coarse with beauty gone,—
What use survives the beauty? Fool!”
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* “On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect
round.”—Abt Vogler.
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She has been brought to the last stage of initiation into the mystery of Life. But, as is shown in the next and final section of the poem, the wifely heart has preserved its vitality, has, indeed, grown in vitality, and cherishes a hope which shows its undying love, and is not without a touch of pathos.
IX. ‘On Deck’.—In Sections V.-VIII. the soliloquies are not directed to the husband, as they are in I.-IV. In this last, he is again mentally addressed. She is on board the vessel which is to convey, or is conveying, her to her English home, or somewhere else. As there is nothing in her for him to remember, nothing in her art efforts he cares to see, nothing she was that deserves a place in his mind, she leaves him, sets him free, as he has long shown to her he has wished to be. She, conceding his attitude toward her, asks him to concede, in turn, that such a thing as mutual love HAS been. There’s a slight retaliation here of the wounded spirit. But her heart, after all, MUST have its way; and it cherishes the hope that his soul, which is now cabined, cribbed, confined, may be set free, through some circumstance or other, and she may then become to him what he is to her. And then, what would it matter to her that she was ill-favored? All sense of this would be sunk in the strange joy that he possessed her as she him, in heart and brain. Hers has been a love that was life, and a life that was love. Could one touch of such love for her come in a word of look of his, why, he might turn into her ill-favoredness, she would know nothing of it, being dead to joy.
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