My Star
All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me, therefore I love it.
Commentary
A highly uncharacteristic poem by Browning - so much so, in fact, that I would not have guessed it for one of his. Absent is the sheer energy that spills out from so many of his poems - ‘My Star’ is an altogether quieter, more reflective, almost mystical poem of the sort far more characteristic of Blake[1] or possibly one of the Romantics in an abstract mood. There is also a rather charming naivete about it - the use of the diminutive ‘dartle’, the easy enthusiasm, the ingenuousness inherent in ‘what matter to me if their star is a world?’, the pathetic fallacy[2] - that is, again, so uncharacteristic of Browning that I have to wonder if the poem was mainly a stylistic experiment.
Experiment or not, though, it is a perfectly nice poem - the word ‘pretty’ springs to mind. It also displays, in full measure, Browning’s almost uncanny ear for rhythm - the combination of irregularity and flawlessness, the seamless way in which the transitions between different metrical patterns are handled is truly amazing; and the last four lines are pure music.
[1] indeed, the first time I read this poem I took it for one of his, though that probably bespeaks nothing more than my unfamiliarity with Blake’s work
[2]Pathetic fallacy: A term used by John Ruskin to decry the ascription of human attributes, traits, feelings, and so forth to nonhuman objects. Such ascriptions, he argues, “produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” The term is also used nonpejoratively to denote a common feature of descriptive poetry; it is related to but somewhat less formal than the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia, or personification.
– http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/Pathetic_fallacy.html
Links
Never has Bierce’s summation seemed apter: poem #148
We’ve had a number of Browning poems appear on Minstrels - The Wondering Minstrels
And for the biography, see poem #65
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Suresh Ramasubramanian · 25 February 2000
Thus spake Martin Julian DeMello :
Try reading his “Pippa Passes” - the one that ends with “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world”. It shows the same kind of childlike outlook this poem has. IMHO, this sounds more like Christina Rossetti - not much of Blake’s layer within layer mysticism.
OTOH, there ~are~ poems like “Prospice” which are much more energetic, and even combative .. in fact, Prospice was the favorite poem of Rash Behari Bose, the founder of the India Intelligence League - which later became the INA under Subhas Bose).
Amit Chakrabarti · 26 February 2000
…Absent is the sheer energy that spills out from so many of his poems
- ‘My Star’ is an altogether quieter, more reflective, almost mystical poem…
I disagree. I read (past tense) this poem as energetic, at least the first half of it, which contains the words ``thorw’’ and ``dart’’. I think the narrator in this poem is trying to say that he sees energy and vitality in that which fails to impress his ``friends.’’