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An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry
An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Author:Robert Browning Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness, So long as soul has power to make them burn, express What lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash be... more »hind, Howe'er the chance : if soul be privileged to find Food so soon that, at first snatch of eye, suck of breath, It shall absorb pure life : " etc. The Flight Of The Duchess. In ' The Flight of the Duchess' we are presented with a generous soul-life, as exhibited by the sweet, glad Duchess, linked with fossil conventionalism and mediaevalism, and an inherited authority which brooks no submissiveness, as exhibited by the Duke, her husband, " out of whose veins ceremony and pride have driven the blood, leaving him but a fumigated and embalmed self." The scene of the poem is a " rough north land," subject to a Kaiser of Germany. The story is so plainly told that no prose summary of it could make it plainer. Its deeper meaning centres in the incantation of the old gypsy woman, in which is mystically shadowed forth the long and painful discipline through which the soul must pass before being fully admitted to the divine arcanum, "how love is the only good in the world." The poem is one which readily lends itself to an allegorical interpretation. For such an interpretation, the reader is referred to Mrs. Owen's paper, read before the Browning Society of London, and contained in the Society's Papers, Part IV., pp. 49 et seq. It is too long to be given here. The Last Ride Together. " The speaker is a man who has to give up the woman he loves; but his love is probably reciprocated, however inadequately, for his appeal for 'a last ride together' is granted. The poem reflects his changing moods and thoughts as ' here we are riding, she and I.' ' Fail I alone in words and deeds ? Why, all men strive, and who succee...« less