Imagery in Browning's the Ring and the Book
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THE RICE INSTITUTE IMAGERY IN BROWNING'S THE RIH3 AND THE BOOK ¥ Mary Margaret Schulsc A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS -yi-i lM <■( l i ? A Houston, Texas April, 1953 3 1272 00583 0920 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER X: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER II j THE RING IMAGE 8 CHAPTER Ills VERTICAL IMAGES ....... 35 CHAPTER IV: HORIZONTAL IMAGES. 93 CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION. Iby Notes 147 Bibliography lj?4 INTRODUCTION As Browning addresses the reader in his own voice in the final book of The Ring and the Book, ho expresses a thought that clearly represents his own philosophy of the function and nature of poetry: Why take the artistic way to prove so much? Because, it is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.... Art may tell a truth Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, Eor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word. So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, Beyond mere imagery on the wall,— So, note by note, bring music from your mind, Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,— So write a book shall mean beyond the facts, Suffice the eye and save the soul beside. (XII, 906, 50-76J1 That Browning wishes to "tell a truth" through his poetry has long been recognized by readers and critics alike; that he wishes to "breed the thought" lias been recognized also. In the passage quoted above from The Ring and the Book, however, it is clear that Browning con¬ sidered himself both an artist and a revealer of truth; indeed, in his mind the function of the artist, whether poet, painter, or musician, was to reveal truth through his art. Browning was awaro that through art truth that could not be spoken effectively in a direct fashion could be revealed indirectly. By painting a picture, the artist can show more than "mere imagery on the wall." Similarly, Browning would say, the poet can show truth beyond mere imagery on a page. Though The Ring and the Book is only one of many works in which Browning reveals truth through art, this poem is significant because it is the one to which Browning first referred persons who wished to become acquainted with his works• Ho must have felt that especially in this poem he had succeeded in telling the truth through art. It is impossible to compare adequately such a macGive work as this with sxich brief yet powerful dramatic monologues as "Ky Last Duchess" or "Fra Lippo Lippi" because of the difference in scope, but The Ring and the Book in undoubtedly Browning's magnum opus. A study of this work proves that the imagery on the page is used by Browning the artist to chow truth beyond the facts, and that this imagery is one of the important methods through which the artist achieves the purpose set forth in the final lines of The Ring and the Book. In this study tho word imagery is used to mean any kind of figurative language; comparison is the bacis of the image. The formal differences between metaphor, simile, symbol, personification, and analogy are not important to this study, nor are the distinctions between such kinds of images as the decorative, expansive, intensive, or the exuberant. Caroline Spurgeon, who, in her study of Shakespeare’ imagery, uses the word image to include any figurative language, states that we all know pretty well what wc moan by an image. The image, she continues, is a "’little word-picture’ used by a poet or prose writer to illustrate, illuminate, and embellish his thought." She defines the function of the image: It is a description or an idea, which by comparison or analogy, stated or understood, with something else, transmits to us through the emotions and associations it arouses, something of the ’wholeness,’ the depth and richness of the way a writer views, conceives or has felt what he is telling us. The image thus gives quality, creates atmosphere and conveys emotion in a way no precise description, however clear and accurate, can possibly do,2 5 The importance of the image, which is stressed by Miss Spurgeon, is no new discovery. Aristotle in his Poetics wrote of the importance of the metaphor, stating that, for the poet, the "greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." He pointed out that masterful use of the metaphor cannot be learned from others, but that it is an in- dication of genius, because "a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilarsThe chief significance of imagery, then, is that it can reveal something which can be re¬ vealed satisfactorily in no other way; it can reveal "obliquely." Murry emphasises the complexity of the nature of the metaphor or image: It is the means by which the less familiar is assimilated to the more familiar, the unknovm to the known: it ’gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name,' so that it ceases to bo airy nothing. To attempt a fundamental examination of metaphor would be nothing less than an investigation of the genesis of thought itself—a dangerous enterprise. Murry states that the highest function of imagery is to reveal the spiritual qualities which can best be perceived by analogy. The image, he continues, functions to define qualities and matter which cannot be measured: Sensuous perception is of the qualities of the visible, audible, tangible world; of the spiritual qualities of the more recondite world of human personality and its creations there is intuition. Both faculties are necessary to the great poet, but there have been many who, though richly gifted with sensuous perception, have been deficient or altogether lacking in spiritual intuition. To the great poet his constant accumulation of vivid sense-perceptions supplies the most potent means by which he articulates his spiritual intuitions, for recognitions of spiritual quality can be most forcefully and swiftly conveyed through analogous recognitions of sonsuotis quality.5 Most images are visual, but they frequently also refer to the senses of taste, smell, hearing, and touch. But, though sense perceptions are the basis of imagery as a method of transmission of a description or an idea, the spiritual aspect of the image is that which gives it its greatest significance in poetry* When Browning stated in his letter to Ruskin that all poetry is the “putting of the infinite into the finite,"^ he was speaking of all the language of poetry, but especially in his images do we see evidence of Dense-perceptions used to convey spiritual qualities. The finite is indeed for Browning the languago of the infinite; as Herford says, the "vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their points d'appui in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leafTo convey the infinite, images are used constantly; it has boon suggested that Browning, a great admirer of Donne, felt particular sympathy with Donne's analogies which link the spiritual and the physical, or the infinite and the finite.^ Browning seems to think in terms of images, which "play the part of synonyms" and which "occur to him at any moment from all the corners of his memory.Wells has included Browning as one of the four great makers of symbols in all of English literatureHost of the symbols, as of the images, are visual, but in creating images Browning uses not only the painter's eye but also the musician's ear and the sculptor's hand. It is interesting to note that Browning was trained in music, that he expressed his great interest in music and in painting in his poetry, that many of his figures may bo called 'touch images,' and that late in life he experimented with clay-modelling.^ His images are usually vivid with color, either abrupt or very smooth in line, or intense with sound—or they may combine all these elements. Seldom, however, are they purely decorative; most of the images are genuinely illuminating, and, as Duffin comments, "grow organically out of the subject.jt has beon pointed out that, because of his analytic quality, Browning, the most voluminous of English poets, is also, paradoxically, the most concise, for he "puts the name thing in twenty concise wayo"j he may look at a fact or a thought from many sides and illustrate it by abundant images.^5 His images are clear and distinct, although he may change rapidly from one to another, as he rapidly develops thought aftor thought in his writing. When I-iss Barrett, early in the acquaint¬ ance of the two poets, commented indignantly to a charge in the Athenaeum that Browning was misty, she commented specifically upon his images: And then 1 rmast1 is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. You never are misty, not even in 'Sordello'— never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always,— and there is an extra-distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape.' Esther Matson has aptly expressed Browning * s mastery of one particular kind of image, the symbol: "Browning...has that sort of imagination which not only rises to meet the symbol on the wing but has power as yell to glide from one symbol to another It is to a large degree through the imagery of the poem that Browning transformed the materials of the Old Yellow Book to the com¬ pleted poem, The Ring and the Book, in which he intended to show truth beyond the facts of the Roman murder-case* It is through the imagery also that he achieved variety in the twelve monologues in which basically the same story is told in eleven ways by ten speakers* Symons has commented on the imagery in stressing the variety and the individuality of the monologues and of the speakers: 111 have been astonished in reading and re-reading the poem at the variety, the difference, the wonderful individuality in each speaker1s way of telling the same stony, at the profound art with which the rhythm, the metaphors, the very details of language, no less than the broad distinctions of character and subtle indications of bias, are adapted and converted into harmony.