lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

TENNYSON,BROWNING, & SOME OTHERSThe chapel and bridge are of stone alike,Blackish gray and mostly wet;Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke.See here again, how the lichens fretAnd the roots of the ivy strike !the streets of Paris in Respectability:Ere we dared wander, nights like this,Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine,And feel the Boulevart break againTo warmth and light and bliss.The story suggested, the scenic setting so vividly presentedare often fanciful in the highest degree, but justbecause they are only suggested—what is the storybehind The Laboratory or Too Late or Dis Aliter Visum ?'—the poet does not get involved in the dramatic andsentimental difficulties which he encountered when,as in The Blot in the 'Scutcheon, he attempted to completeand make explicit the latent or just-outlineddrama.And the thought, the style, and the verse are ofthe same dramatic and also fanciful character. ThatBrowning was a careless, awkward writer, who, asJowett chirpingly declared, "has no form, or has itonly by accident when the subject is limited. Histhought and feeling and knowledge are generally outof all proportion to his powers of expression," thatone can hardly credit, recalling the range of his metricalexperiments and triumphs. Indeed, though thereare elements in Browning's form which I dislike, thecolloquial cliches in his blank verse, yet it seems to mealmost the opposite of the truth. The thought isoften simple enough, the feeling not a little sentimental.It is the cunning and surprising art, the picturesque75