As a collection ‘Men and Women’ is also notably without a definite structural unity, and Browning’s complete rearrangement of the poems within it for a later collection of his work indicates that initially he did not see the pieces as grouped together by anything more than the date that they were written. Eight poems from the original volume were included, together with some from other publications, in the new ‘Men and Women’ and the rest appeared under the more prosaic titles of ‘Dramatic Lyrics’ and ‘Dramatic Romances’. By this time Browning obviously saw these chosen poems as belonging to a specific ‘Men and Women’ type.
The poems in the original publication of ‘Men and Women’ do however share a common form, that of the dramatic monologue which itself often indicates a doubtful unity between the views expressed by the speaker and the views suggested by the poem itself. The elaborate characterisation enables the poet to hide behind an alien persona (often made more so by Browning’s choice of Renaissance Italy or the Bible lands as settings) in order to explore controversial issues at a safe distance, and the reader is then left to form their own judgement of these creations and thus the implications of the poem. It is improbable that these, Browning’s ‘fifty men and women’ have been selected at random and therefore we must assume that they illustrate in some way an aspect of himself and his own views, whether directly or more obliquely. Fra Lippo Lippi addresses issues of the purpose of art and the allure of power, although the monk pretends to be rebellious he is quick to cite his Medici connection when stopped by guards, suggesting that he is comfortable with the fact that his tenuous artistic freedom depends on political tyranny
‘I’m my own master, paint now as I please-
Having a friend, you see, in the Corner-house!’
and Browning himself was particularly interested by conflicts between law and liberty, whether in the context of art, religion or even love.
As previously mentioned, ‘In Memoriam’ is also unified by a form created by the poet and now known as the Tennysonian stanza, consisting of chiasmic rhymed quatrains in iambic tentrameter. The unusual rhyme scheme gives a sense of unity to each stanza as it seems to close in on itself in the middle couplet, thus delaying and undermining the rhyme of the fourth line which seems thus to be just a mournful echo of the first line and reflects the sadness which pervades the whole work. The monotony of 133 different sections in this stanza signifies the fact that there is no real progression for much of the poem and is reminiscent of the monotony of a life lived in grief. Both poets were concerned with the question of how far we are all united in terms of perception. Browning’s theory of the imperfection of human knowledge held that one could be certain of nothing except one’s own existence and thus he was faced with the problem of how to develop a generally valid argument on the basis of subjective knowledge. He believed that so called knowledge of anything else was dependent on individual faith, which ought to come from the heart as the intellect could not prove it, and this is explored in ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, in which the speaker’s argument is so clever and complex that it is difficult to see what he actually arguing. In fact the bishop explicitly equates self interest with spiritual well being
‘Let us concede (gratuitously though)
Next life relieves the soul of body, yields
Pure spiritual enjoyment: well, my friend,
Why lose this life in the meantime, since its use
May be to make the next life more intense?’
seeing all existence as purely formed for personal pleasure. He has been corrupted and seduced by the misleading power of his own intellect and tries to present his personal twisted morality as a general truth.
There is a noticeable divide in ‘In Memoriam’ between passages of private grief and tragedy
‘Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.’
concerned with the continuous cycle of transient emotion and despair, and the more generalised sections concerned with the wider public perspective on grief and the meaning of our very existence which is often symbolised by the greater metaphysical picture
‘Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?’
or within the huge belittling scope of geological time
‘’So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.’
as if Tennyson saw the impossibility of trying to voice something as intensely personal as bereavement. In contrast there are some extremely private emotions of his own included in the poem, such as the sentiment that Arthur was ‘more than my brothers are to thee’, to the extent that it becomes almost embarrassing for the reader to be witness to such outpourings of grief and love.
‘In Memoriam’ has no unifying theme, although there are several symbols which reappear infrequently throughout the poem, including that of the yew tree symbolising the unfeeling eternity of death ‘who changest not in any gale’ which the poet longs to emulate in order to numb his pain ‘sick for thy stubborn hardihood’. It is too simplistic to see the poem as the classic Christian journey from despair to hope and redemption, whilst the voice at the end is admittedly more positive than initially, it suggests a unity the poem simply does not have, either thematically or in terms of a definite progression throughout the stanzas. Like Browning, Tennyson suggests that as we cannot know God, or prove him scientifically as we can evolution (‘a thousand types are gone’), we must reach out to him through faith ‘Believing what we cannot prove’. The spiritual crisis of the mid nineteenth century is evident here in the poet’s agonising over whether ‘He who trusted God was love indeed’ will be ultimately reduced to dust and nothingness in the same way as the ‘thousand types’ who have gone before, at the mercy of indifferent nature.
Matthew Reynolds has suggested that all of the different kinds of character in nineteenth century poetry are ‘brought into relationship with one another by the possibility or reality of marriage’, a bond which also often represented the growing relationship between individual and state. The theme of marriage unifies a number of poems in Browning’s ‘Men and Women’, mixed up with his belief that any kind of unification of individuals into a greater body necessarily involves the suppression of the individual will in favour of a stronger will and thus is a form of tyranny, whether within a marriage or in a political context. This is principally evident in ‘Mesmerism’ where the violent power of the speaker over his wife is emphasised by the repetition of a quotation from the service of marriage ‘to have and to hold’. He wishes to hold her in order to mould her into a creature of his own will, seeing her own personality as an empty space to be manipulated
‘Having and holding,till
I imprint her fast
On the void at last’ .
In ‘Two in the Campagna’ the speaker is unable to adopt the will of his lover, although he wishes to do so, the implication perhaps being that this unification cannot be born of love but must be forced by violence, and thus they are unable to be one for more than a ‘good minute’ before the closeness inevitably passes and individualism reasserts itself. Browning sees marriage as the constraint imposed by society on its individual members, particularly women.
Tennyson by contrast sees marriage as a joyful unification of two like personalities for the equal benefit of both. There are many suggestions in ‘In Memoriam’ that he and Arthur were as a married couple, for example he talks of his ‘widow’d race’ and says ‘I shall be thy mate no more’, as well as the reiterated metaphor of man and wife, and it is clear that their friends regarded them as a unit. However, it seems likely that many of the references to marriage in the poem refer to his grief not only for his own loss but for his sister Emily, effectively widowed before she and Arthur were ever married, and that he saw both of them as having being widowed in different ways by Hallam’s death. The marriage of another of Alfred’s sisters at the end of the poem is a symbol of hope for the future and a confirmation that life will continue despite the inevitability of death
‘Her feet, my darling, on the dead;
Their pensive tablets round her head,
And the most living words of life
Breathed in her ear.’.
The idea that their offspring will bring a ‘closer link Betwixt us and the crowning race’ suggests that Tennyson has reconciled the idea of man in the divine image with the evolution theory by seeing humanity as constantly evolving into a being closer to God with every generation.
Neither ‘In Memoriam’ or ‘Men and Women’ were conceived as a unified coherent whole, whatever ‘In Memoriam’ may have become and thus it is hardly surprising that they do not bear up to close study in terms of the concept of poetic unity. The very lack of unity in ‘In Memoriam’ contributes to the mood of the poem itself, suggesting a mind split by the madness of grief and a country shaken by doubt, and it is fitting that the only markers of progress, the Christmas sections, signify the inevitable passing of time rather than the hope of new birth. Browning’s poems are unified by the pervading awareness of artistry, of power issues in terms of both personal and private relationships and by that conflict between the sexes implied by the division in the title ‘Men and Women’, but essentially are a collection of separate poems, united only by Browning’s idea that ultimately we must rely on individual perception, for all truth is relative, an idea expressed through the subjective words of his characters. Matthew Reynolds believes that this can be explained by the growing fragmentation of Victorian society ‘to recognize the perceived relation between national and artistic unity is to understand why so many of these works fail to cohere in any obvious fashion, presenting themselves rather as groups, series or collections: not so much unities, perhaps, as communities’.
J.A. Froude, ‘Carlyle’s Life in London’ volume I page 291, 1884
Matthew Reynolds, ‘Orientations’
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Memoir I, page 304