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Pippa Passes, beginning
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A King lived long ago, was one of these; and the lyric,
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Still ailing, wind? Wilt be appeased or no? afterwards revised and incorporated in
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James Lee, was another. But the two which are much the most noteworthy are
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Johannes Agricola and
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Porphyria. Even more distinctively than in
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Pauline, in their novel sentiment, new method, and generally unique quality, is a new voice audible in these two poems. They are very remarkable as the work of so young a poet, and are interesting as showing how rapidly he had outgrown the influence of any other of his poetic kindred.
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Johannes Agricola is significant as being the first of those dramatic studies of warped religiosity, of strange self-sophistication, which have afforded so much matter for thought. In its dramatic concision, its complex psychological significance, and its unique, if to unaccustomed ears somewhat barbaric, poetic beauty,
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Porphyria
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I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced. My own passionate longing to see Venice dates from those delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood.
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Paracelsus, begun about the close of October or early in November 1834, was published in the summer of the following year. It is a poem in blank verse, about four times the length of
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Pauline, with interspersed songs. The author divided it into five sections of unequal length, of which the third is the most extensive:
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Paracelsus Aspires ;
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Paracelsus Attains ;
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Paracelsus ;
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Paracelsus Aspires ;
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Paracelsus Attains. In an interesting note, which was not reprinted in later editions of his first acknowledged poem, the author dissuades the reader from mistaking his performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common, from judging it by principles on which it was not moulded, and from subjecting it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. He then explains that he has composed a dramatic poem, and not a drama in the accepted sense; that he has not set forth the phenomena of the mind or the passions by the operation of persons and events, or by recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis sought to be produced. Instead of this, he remarks,
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I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency, by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama. A little further, he states that a work like
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Paracelsus depends, for its success, immediately upon the intelligence and sympathy of the reader:
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Indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights into one constellation--a Lyre or a Crown.
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Paracelsus will not
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From this it might fairly be inferred that Browning had not definitively adopted his characteristic method: that he was far from unwilling to gain the general ear: and that he was alert to the difficulties of popularisation of poetry written on lines similar to those of
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Paracelsus. Nor would this inference be wrong: for, as a matter of fact, the poet, immediately upon the publication of
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Paracelsus,