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An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry by Robert Browning
page 186 of 525 (35%)

A poem in twelve books.



This monologue is addressed by a poet to a brother-poet whom
he finds fault with for speaking naked thoughts instead of
draping them in sights and sounds. If boys want images and melody,
grown men, you think, want abstract thought. Far from it.
The objects which throng our youth, we see and hear, quite as a matter
of course. But what of it, if you could tell what they mean?
The German Boehme, with his affinities for the abstract,
never cared for plants until, one day, he noticed they could speak;
that the daisy colloquized with the cowslip on SUCH themes!
themes found extant in Jacob's prose. But when life's summer passes
while reading prose in that tough book he wrote, getting some sense
or other out of it, who helps, then, to repair our loss?
Another Boehme, say you, with a tougher book and subtler
abstract meanings of what roses say? Or some stout Mage like
John of Halberstadt, who MADE THINGS Boehme WROTE THOUGHTS about?
Ah, John's the man for us! who instead of giving us the wise talk
of roses, scatters all around us the roses themselves,
pouring heaven into this shut house of life. So come,
the harp back to your heart again, instead of speaking dry words
across its strings. Your own boy-face bent over the finer chords,
and following the cherub at the top that points to God
with his paired half-moon wings, is a far better poem than your poem
with all its naked thoughts.


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