An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry

A Grammarian’s Funeral.

    —
     * “Grammarian” mustn’t be understood here in its restricted
     modern sense; it means rather one devoted to learning, or
     letters, in general.
    —

     Shortly after the revival of learning in Europe.

The devoted disciples of a dead grammarian are bearing his body up a mountain-side for burial on its lofty summit, “where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go! Lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him,— still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying”.

This poem is INFORMED throughout with the poet’s iterated doctrine in regard to earth life,—to the relativity of that life. The grammarian, in his hunger and thirst after knowledge and truth, thought not of time. “What’s time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever.” “Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure bad is our bargain!”

The poem “exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and the Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon’s friend, Pierre de Maricourt, working at some region of knowledge, and content to labor without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly whatever he undertook” (‘Contemporary Rev.’, iv., 135).

But the grammarian was true to one side only of Browning’s philosophy of life. He disregarded the claims of the physical life, and became “soul-hydropic with a sacred thirst”. *

    —
     * “Every lust is a kind of hydropic distemper, and the more
     we drink the more we shall thirst.”—Tillotson, quoted in
     ‘Webster’.
    —

The lyrico-dramatic verse of this monologue is especially noticeable. There is a march in it, exhibiting the spirit with which the bearers of the corpse are conveying it up the mountain-side.