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Robert Browning’s Religious Poetry

Robert Browning is a profound believer of God. He is a religious poet of the great era of Victorian age. Browning preaches God & immortality as the central truths of his philosophy of life which mention him as a religious poet. Browning poems of religion comforted many tenders souls, twilight their faith in that Victorian age through his arguments & excellent use of metaphoric elements. The idea of reason, God, freewill & immortality were the postulates of the moral life.The expression mood of mind of a heathen brought into contacts, more or less intimate, with Christianity. As an experienced writer of pen-picture, he shows his experienced methods of religious element in the canvas of his most famous religious poems like The Grammerian’s Funeral, Christmas-Eve, Easter-Day, Cleon, Soul, Robbi Ben Ezar etc.           

Life of Robert Browning

Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues & religious theme made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

Early years

Browning was born in Camberwell, a suburb of London, England, the first son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His father was a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England, earning about £150 per year.^[1] Browning’s paternal grandfather was a wealthy slave owner in St Kitts, West Indies, but Browning’s father was an abolitionist. Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation. Revolted by the slavery there, he returned to England. Browning’s mother was a musician. He had one sister, Sarianna. It is rumoured that Browning's grandmother, Margaret Tittle, was a Jamaican-born mulatto who had inherited a plantation in St Kitts. Robert's father amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them rare. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist as well as a talented musician. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brother's companion in his later years. His father encouraged his interest in literature and the arts.

By twelve, Browning had written a book of poetry which he later destroyed when no publisher could be found. After attending several private schools, he began to be educated by a tutor, having demonstrated a strong dislike for institutionalized education. Browning was a good student, and by the age of fourteen he was fluent in French, Greek, Italian and Latin. He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian, both of which he gave up later. At the age of sixteen, he attended University College London but left after his first year. His mother’s staunch evangelical faith prevented his studying at either Oxford University or Cambridge University, both then open only to members of the Church of England. He had substantial musical ability and composed arrangements of various songs.

Middle years

In 1845, Browning met Elizabeth Barrett, who lived as a semi-invalid in her father's house in Wimpole Street. Gradually a significant romance developed between them, leading to their elopement on 12 September 1846. The marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's father disapproved of marriage for any of his children. From the time of their marriage, the Brownings lived in Italy, first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence at Casa Guidi (now a museum to their memory). Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849. In these years Browning was fascinated by and learned hugely from the art and atmosphere of Italy. He would, in later life, say that 'Italy was my university'. Browning also bought a home in Asolo, in the Veneto outside Venice, and in a cruel irony he died on the day that the Town Council approved the purchase.^[2] His wife died in 1861.

Browning's poetry was known to the cognoscenti from fairly early on in his life, but he remained relatively obscure as a poet till his middle age. (In the middle of the century, Tennyson was much better known). In Florence he worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known; in 1855, however, when these were published, they made little impact. It was only after his wife's death, in 1861, when he returned to England and became part of the London literary scene, that his reputation started to take off. In 1868, after five years work, he completed and published the long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book, and finally achieved really significant recognition. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem is composed of twelve books, essentially ten lengthy dramatic poems narrated by the various characters in the story, showing their individual perspectives on events, bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself. Extraordinarily long even by Browning's own standards (over twenty thousand lines), The Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and has been praised as a tour de force of dramatic poetry. Published separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the poem was a huge success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought and deserved for nearly forty years. 

 Last years and death

Pic: Browning after death.

In the remaining years of his life Browning travelled extensively. After a series of long poems published in the early 1870s, of which Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country were the best-received, Browning again turned to shorter poems. The volume Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper included an attack against Browning's critics, especially the later Poet Laureate Alfred Austin. According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several occasions. The Browning Society was formed for the appreciation of his works in 1881. In 1887, Browning produced the major work of his later years, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance In Their Day. It finally presented the poet speaking in his own voice, engaging in a series of dialogues with long-forgotten figures of literary, artistic, and philosophic history. The Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned to the short, concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889).

He died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December 1889, the same day Asolando was published. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.

The story of Browning and his wife Elizabeth was made into a play The Barretts of Wimpole Street. The play was later discovered, produced and starred actress Katharine Cornell, for whom the role of Elizabeth became a signature role. The play was a success and brought popular fame in the United States to the couple, and was eventually adapted twice into film.

 Browning's poetic style

Browning’s fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker’s character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the process of rationalizing past actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem. Rather than thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defense which the reader, as "juror," is challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of the most debased, extreme and even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the challenge of building a sympathetic case for a character who doesn't deserve one and to cause the reader to squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a homicidal psychopath. One of his more sensational dramatic monologues is Porphyria's Lover.

The Pied Piper leads the children out of Hamelin. Illustration by Kate Greenaway to the Robert Browning version of the tale.

Yet it is by carefully reading the far more sophisticated and cultivated rhetoric of the aristocratic and civilized Duke of My Last Duchess, perhaps the most frequently cited example of the poet's dramatic monologue form, that the attentive reader discovers the most horrific example of a mind totally mad despite its eloquence in expressing itself. The duchess, we learn, was murdered not because of infidelity, not because of a lack of gratitude for her position, and not, finally, because of the simple pleasures she took in common everyday occurrences. She is reduced to an object d'art in the Duke's collection of paintings and statues because the Duke equates his instructing her to behave like a duchess with "stooping," an action of which his megalomaniacal pride is incapable. In other monologues, such as Fra Lippo Lippi, Browning takes an ostensibly unsavory or immoral character and challenges us to discover the goodness, or life-affirming qualities, that often put the speaker's contemporaneous judges to shame. In The Ring and the Book Browning writes an epic-length poem in which he justifies the ways of God to humanity through twelve extended blank verse monologues spoken by the principals in a trial about a murder. These monologues greatly influenced many later poets, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the latter singling out in his Cantos Browning's convoluted psychological poem Sordello about a frustrated 13-century troubadour, as the poem he must work to distance himself from.

Ironically, Browning’s style, which seemed modern and experimental to Victorian readers, owes much to his love of the seventeenth century poems of John Donne with their abrupt openings, colloquial phrasing and irregular rhythms. But he remains too much the prophet-poet and descendant of Percy Shelley to settle for the conceits, puns, and verbal play of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His is a modern sensibility, all too aware of the arguments against the vulnerable position of one of his simple characters, who recites: "God's in His Heaven; All's right with the world." Browning endorses such a position because he sees an immanent deity that, far from remaining in a transcendent heaven, is indivisible from temporal process, assuring that in the fullness of theological time there is ample cause for celebrating life.

 History of sound recording

At a dinner party on 7 April 1889, at the home of Browning's friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann, an Edison cylinder phonograph recording was made on a white wax cylinder by Edison's British representative, George Gouraud. In the recording, which still exists, Browning recites part of "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" (and can be heard apologizing when he forgets the words).^[5] When the recording was played in 1890 on the anniversary of his death, at a gathering of his admirers, it was said to be the first time anyone's voice "had been heard from beyond the grave.

Complete list of works

• Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
• Paracelsus (1835)
• Strafford (play) (1837)
• Sordello (1840)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. I: Pippa Passes (play) (1841)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. II: King Victor and King Charles (play) (1842)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
• "Porphyria's Lover"
• "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
• "My Last Duchess"
• "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"
• "Count Gismond"
• "Johannes Agricola in Meditation"
• Bells and Pomegranates No. IV: The Return of the Druses (play) (1843)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. V: A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (play) (1843)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VI: Colombe's Birthday (play) (1844)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VII: Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)
• "The Laboratory"
• "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"
• "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VIII: Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (plays) (1846)
• Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)
• Men and Women (1855)
• "Love Among the Ruins"
• "The Last Ride Together"
• "A Toccata of Galuppi's"
• "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
• "Fra Lippo Lippi"
• "Andrea Del Sarto"
• "The Patriot/ An Old Story"
• "A Grammarian's Funeral"
• "An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician"
• Dramatis Personae (1864)
• "Caliban upon Setebos"
• "Rabbi Ben Ezra"

Religious poetry

 Religious poetry is any poetry that contains Religious teachings, themes, or references. The influence of religious on poetry has been great in any area that Christianity has taken hold. Christian poems often directly reference the Bible, while others provide allegory.

Browning's Religious Views

The history of Robert Browning's shifting religious views typifies the difficulties which most thinking Victorians encountered during this period of serious challenge to established Christianity. His mother, a religious woman, both Nonconformist and Evangelical, was still open-minded enough to purchase, at her 14-year-old son's request, "Mr. Shelley's atheistical poem Queen Mab." Robert must have confirmed her worst fears when he promptly became, like Shelley, a vegetarian and an atheist. Although it is pretty clear from his poetry that he did not remain an atheist, whether he ever completely shed his sceptical views is still an open question. Many of his poems approach the problem of faith and the nature of man's religious aspirations, but whenever we think that he has offered us a resolution, a second reading will show that resolution undercut or made suspect. And on one occasion much later in life when he was asked if he considered himself a Christian, Browning is supposed to have answered with "a thunderous 'NO!'" Nevertheless, many nineteenth-century readers thought that they knew where the real Robert Browning stood, and it is easy to find articles with titles like "Browning as a Teacher of Religion." Certainly a love which is very much like Christian love is always approved in his poetry. And Browning knew the Bible so well that he called his first few collections of poems Bells and Pomegranates--a reference (to the decorations on the robes of the Hebrew priests) so obscure that even Elizabeth Barrett, a knowledgeable Bible-reader, had to ask what it meant.

It is difficult, however, to discover a system of belief which he consistently approves. Usually we find believers who have taken their beliefs to extremes shown in an unfavorable light. This pattern of discrediting the extremists may partially explain Browning's fondness for the dramatic monologue: by allowing his speaker to express views with which neither the poet nor the reader would be in sympathy (as for example in "Johannes Agricola"), he is able to undercut positions which he opposes without exposing his own beliefs. One may suspect that this rhetorical technique permits him to leave his own beliefs permanently undecided. Even when his speaker, like David in "Saul" takes a thoroughly pro-Christian stance, it is still a hypothetical position: whether or not the poet is a believer, real belief must work this way.

Noticeable list of Religious poetry of Robert Browning:

1..The Grammerian’s Funeral.          

2.  Christmas-Eve

3. Easter-Day

4. Cleon

5. Soul

6. Robbi Ben Ezar  etc.

Mentionable quotation of Religious poetry of Robert Browning:

The great quotation The Grammerian’s Funeral is mention below

“Was he not great? Did not he throw on God

He loves the burthen-

God’s task to make the heavenly period

Perfect the earthen?”

Another great quotation The Grammerian’s Funeral is mention below,

“This high man aiming at a million,

Misses an unit”

The great quotation of Pippa’s Song is mention below,

“God’s in his Heaven-

All’s right with the world.”

The great quotation of Cleon is mention below

“I believe it! ‘Tis thou, God, that givest, ‘tis I who receive..

Would I suffer for him that I love? So would;st thou-so will

                                                                                                               You”

The quotation of Robbi Ben Ezra is mention below,

“ Let us not always say

Spite of this flesh todsy

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole

As the bird wing & sings

Let us cry, “All good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul”

The quotation of Soul is mention below,

                                                   “Oh, the wild joys of living!

                                                 How good is man’s life, the mere living!”...

Literary criticism on Robert Browning’s religious poetry:

Different critics has given different views on Robert Browning’s religious poetry. There are mention below,

The famous & great critic Hudson said that , “As a moralist & religious teacher Robert Browning held a very distinct place among the writers of the Victorian Age. An uncompromising foe of scientific materialism, he preached God & immortality as the central truths of his philosophy of life, & he preached them as one absolutely assured of their reality. Nor was it only the negation of the current philosophy that he challenged. His poetry was thoughout a protest against the pessimistic mood engendered by them.” 

R. Ranald said, about Robert Browning’s religious poetry: “The ascetic tradition, steaming from early Christianity & other sources, if pursued as a end in itself is bad, Browning’s implies. In such poem as Fra Lipo Lippi  he shows us the converse of asceticism : 'joy in the body & in the material world equally with the spiritual world, which  Browning is convinced must exist”.

Phyllis Grosskurth said, “Browning was no orthodox Christian. However, there is no doubt that he believed in a supreme being, but clearly he did not subscribe to the doctrine of original sin or atonement through vicarious suffering on the Cross, & certainly he did not interpret Bible literally.”

W.T. Young said, about Robert Browning’s religious poetry, “Evils is as permanent as good & therefore man is literally ever a fighter, facing adventure brave & new, for whom the signal is in Browning’s last poetic utterance:

“Strive & thrive! Cry, speed, fight  on, fare ever

                                There as here.”

The other firmly grounded belief which supports the structure of his theory  is the immortality of the soul.”

Compton-Rickett said about the philosophy of the life of Robert Browning’s religious poetry, “Browning’s philosophy of the life is essentially what we should call today pragmatic. He is a courageous soul, & a vigorous & vital comrade for those suffering from spiritual anaemia.

Conclusion

Browning’s religious poetry is the finest religious poetry in the English literature. Because it always deals with the basic elements of religion like  the idea of reason, God, freewill & immortality were the postulates of the moral life etc. Moreover his all the religious poetry bears the vital massage for the weal fear of human being. By following such kind of massage he tries to remove the folly from the society & establish the good for human being & decorated the earth peacefully to live  in. So we can mention him as a religious poet in Victorian period.

Selected Bibliography:

1. Selected Poem of Robert Browning:  Ramji Lall

2. Selected Poem of Robert Browning: Dr. Sen

Websites:

www.google.com

www.sparknote.com

www.Poemhunter.com

www.wikipedia.com

www.poetry.com

www.poetryfoundation.com