Men and Women. Robert Browning

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"TRANSCENDENTALISM: A POEM IN TWELVE BOOKS"

       Table of Contents

1855

       Table of Contents

      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.

      NOTES

       "Transcendentalism" is a criticism, placed in the mouth of a poet,

       of another poet, whose manner of singing is prosaic, because it

       seeks to transcend (or penetrate beyond) phenomena, by divesting

       poetic expression of those concrete embodiments which enable it to

       appeal to the senses and imagination. Instead of bare abstractions

       being suited to the developed mind, it is the primitive mind, which,

       like Boehme's, has the merely metaphysical turn, and expects to

       discover the unincarnate absolute essence of things. The maturer

       mind craves the vitalizing method of the artist who, like the

       magician of Halberstadt, recreates things bodily in all their

       beautiful vivid wholeness. Yet the poet who sincerely holds so

       fragmentary a conception of art is himself a poem to the poet who

       holds the larger view. His boy-face singing to God above his

       ineffective harp-strings is a concrete image of this sort of poetic

       transcendentalism.

       [It is obvious that Browning uses the Halberstadt and not the Boehme

       method in presenting this embodiment of his subject. The

       supposition of certain commentators that Browning is here picturing

       his own artistic method as transcendental is a misconception of his

       characteristic theory of poetic art, as shown here and elsewhere.]

       22. Boehme: Jacob, an "inspired" German shoemaker (1575–1624), who

       wrote "Aurora," "The Three Principles," etc., mystical commentaries

       on Biblical events. When twenty-five years old, says Hotham in

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