An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry






Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.

       1.

     Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
       Water your damned flower-pots, do!
     If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
       God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
     What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
       Oh, that rose has prior claims—
     Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
       Hell dry you up with its flames!
       2.

     At the meal we sit together:
       ‘Salve tibi!’  I must hear
     Wise talk of the kind of weather,
       Sort of season, time of year:
     ‘Not a plenteous cork-crop:  scarcely
       Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
     What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?’ 
       What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout?
       3.

     Whew!  We’ll have our platter burnished,
       Laid with care on our own shelf!
     With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
       And a goblet for ourself,
     Rinsed like something sacrificial
       Ere ‘tis fit to touch our chaps—
     Marked with L. for our initial!
       (He-he!  There his lily snaps!)
       4.

     SAINT, forsooth!  While brown Dolores
       Squats outside the Convent bank
     With Sanchicha, telling stories,
       Steeping tresses in the tank,
     Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horse-hairs,
     —Can’t I see his dead eye glow,
     Bright as ‘twere a Barbary corsair’s?
       (That is, if he’d let it show!)
       5.

     When he finishes refection,
       Knife and fork he never lays
     Cross-wise, to my recollection,
       As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
     I the Trinity illustrate,
       Drinking watered orange-pulp—
     In three sips the Arian frustrate;
       While he drains his at one gulp.

— St. 5. the Arian: a follower of Arius (died 336 A.D.), who denied that the Son was co-essential and co-eternal with the Father.

       6.

     Oh, those melons?  If he’s able
       We’re to have a feast! so nice!
     One goes to the Abbot’s table,
       All of us get each a slice.
     How go on your flowers?  None double?
       Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
     Strange!—And I, too, at such trouble,
       Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
       7.

     There’s a great text in Galatians,
       Once you trip on it, entails
     Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
       One sure, if another fails:
     If I trip him just a-dying,
       Sure of heaven as sure can be,
     Spin him round and send him flying
       Off to hell, a Manichee?

— St. 7. text in Galatians: chap. 5, vv. 19-21, where are enumerated “the works of the flesh”. There are seventeen named; he uses twenty-nine indefinitely; it’s common in French to use trente-six (36) for any pretty big number. If I trip him: What if I; and so in next stanza. a Manichee: a follower of Mani, who aimed to unite Parseeism, or Parsism, with Christianity.

       8.

     Or, my scrofulous French novel
       On gray paper with blunt type!
     Simply glance at it, you grovel
       Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe:
     If I double down its pages
       At the woful sixteenth print,
     When he gathers his greengages,
       Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?
       9.

     Or, there’s Satan!—one might venture
       Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
     Such a flaw in the indenture
       As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
     Blasted lay that rose-acacia
       We’re so proud of!  Hy, Zy, Hine. . .
     ‘St, there’s Vespers!  Plena gratia
       Ave, Virgo!  Gr-r-r—you swine!

— St. 9. Hy, Zy, Hine: represent the sound of the vesper bell.

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