So, force is sorrow,
and each sorrow, force:
What
then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
The palm, his
hope be in the vivid horse
Whose
neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
Sluggish and safe!
Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair:
but ever ’mid the whirling fear,
Let, through the
tumult, break the poet’s face
Radiant, assured
his wild slaves win the race!”
The poem is followed by an exquisite Epilogue, one of the most delicately graceful and witty and tender of Browning’s lyrics. The briefer Prologue is not less beautiful:—
“Such a
starved bank of moss
Till,
that May-morn,
Blue ran the flash
across:
Violets
were born!
Sky—what
a scowl of cloud
Till,
near and far,
Ray on ray split
the shroud:
Splendid,
a star!
World—how
it walled about
Life
with disgrace
Till God’s
own smile came out:
That
was thy face!”
27. DRAMATIC IDYLS.
[Published in May 1879 (Poetical
Works, 1889, Vol. XV. pp.
1-80).]
In the Dramatic Idyls Browning may almost be said to have broken new ground. His idyls are short poems of passionate action, presenting in a graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. Not only by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of Browning’s later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty of interest, that here for the first time Browning has found subjects for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of the lower classes. That he has never done so before, though rather surprising, comes, I suppose, from his preponderating interest in intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among what Leon Cladel has called tragiques histoires plebeiennes. But the happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, “Publican Black Ned Bratts and Tabby his big wife too,” as a relief to the less pleasant and profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on which every poem plays a new variation. The motto of the book might be:—
“There is
a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at
the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the
voyage of his life
Is bound in shallows
and in miseries.”