— * Transcendentalism: a poem in twelve books. It must be understood that the poet addressed has written a long poem under this title, and a brother-poet, while admitting that it contains “true thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up”, raises the objection that they are naked, instead of being draped, as they should be, in sights and sounds. —
Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak?
‘Tis you speak, that’s your error. Song’s our art:
Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts
Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.
—True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up!
But why such long prolusion and display,
Such turning and adjustment of the harp,
And taking it upon your breast, at length,
Only to speak dry words across its strings?
Stark-naked thought is in request enough: {10}
Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears!
The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark,
Which helps the hunter’s voice from Alp to Alp—
Exchange our harp for that,—who hinders you?
But here’s your fault; grown men want thought, you think;
Thought’s what they mean by verse, and seek in verse;
Boys seek for images and melody,
Men must have reason—so, you aim at men.
Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth, ‘tis true;
We see and hear and do not wonder much: {20}
If you could tell us what they mean, indeed!
As German Boehme never cared for plants
Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,
He noticed all at once that plants could speak,
Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.
That day the daisy had an eye indeed—
Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes!
We find them extant yet in Jacob’s prose.
But by the time youth slips a stage or two
While reading prose in that tough book he wrote, {30}
(Collating and emendating the same
And settling on the sense most to our mind)
We shut the clasps and find life’s summer past.
Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss—
Another Boehme with a tougher book
And subtler meanings of what roses say,—
Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?
He with a “look you!” vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, {40}
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Boehme’s book and all,—
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
So come, the harp back to your heart again!
You are a poem, though your poem’s naught.
The best of all you showed before, believe,
Was your own boy-face o’er the finer chords
Bent, following the cherub at the top {50}
That points to God with his paired half-moon wings.
— 22. German Boehme: Jacob Boehme (or Behmen), a shoemaker and a famous theosophist, b. 1575, at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz; d. 1624. The 24th verse of the poem, “He noticed all at once that plants could speak”, may refer to a remarkable experience of Boehme, related in Dr. Hans Lassen Martensen’s ‘Jacob Boehme: his life and teaching, or studies in theosophy: translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans’, London, 1885: “Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendor that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things. He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out upon the green. But here he remarked that he gazed into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and that actual nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen.” Martensen, in his biography, follows that by Frankenberg, in which the experience may be given more in detail.
37-40. him of Halberstadt, John: “It is not a thinker like Boehme, who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, conjure roses up.”
“The ‘magic’ symbolized, is that of genuine poetry; but the magician, or ‘Mage’, is an historical person; and the special feat imputed to him was recorded of other magicians in the Middle Ages, if not of himself. ‘Johannes Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadht in Germany, after he had performed a number of prestigious feats almost incredible, was transported by the Devil in the likeness of a black horse, and was both seen and heard upon one and the same Christmas day, to say mass in Halberstadht, in Mayntz, and in Cologne’ (‘Heywood’s Hierarchy’, Bk. IV., p. 253). The ‘prestigious feat’ of causing flowers to appear in winter, was a common one.” —Mrs. Sutherland Orr’s ‘Handbook to the works of Robert Browning’, p. 209.
It may be said that the advice given in this poem, Browning has not sufficiently followed in his own poetry. On this point, a writer in the ‘British Quarterly Review’ (Vol. 23, p. 162) justly remarks: “Browning’s thought is always that of a poet. Subtle, nimble, and powerful as is the intellect, and various as is the learning, all is manifested through the imagination, and comes forth shaped and tinted by it. Thus, even in the foregoing passages {cited from ‘Transcendentalism’ and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’}, where the matter is almost as purely as it can be the produce of the mere understanding, it is still evident that the method of the thought is poetic. The notions take the form of images. For example, the poet means to say that Prose is a good and mighty vehicle in its way, but that it is not Poetry; and how does the conception shape itself in his mind? Why, in an image. All at once it is not Prose that is thought about, but a huge six-foot speaking-trumpet braced round with bark, through which the Swiss hunters help their voices from Alp to Alp— Poetry, on the other hand, being no such big and blaring instrument, but a harp taken to the breast of youth and swept by ecstatic fingers. And so with the images of Boehme and his book, and John of Halberstadt with his magic rose—still a concrete body to enshrine an abstract meaning.”
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