“The Jewelled Bow”: A Study in Browning's Imagery and Humanism

Extract

In Browning's second letter to Elizabeth Barrett he uses the imagery of “white light” versus “prismatic hues” to represent the contrast between the full and direct reflection of her personality in lyric utterance, and the partial and oblique refraction of his own personality in the medium of the dramatic monologue. A little later, he reveals his consciousness of the limitations of his poetry through a kindred image: “these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you …” In response, Elizabeth Barrett, while deprecating the merit of her own poetry and paying tribute to the worth of Browning's, acknowledges the justice of his self-criticism: “and in fact, you have not written the R. B. poem yet—your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. I see you only in your moon” (i, 22). In one of her letters, though referring to “the glory of dramatic art,” she urges: “Yet I am conscious of wishing you to take the other crown besides—and after having made your own creatures speak in clear human voices, to speak yourself out of that personality which God made, and with the voice which he tuned into such power and sweetness of speech” (ii, 182).