This is my favourite of Browning’s dramatic monologues, and has been so ever since I first read a snatch of it -

    "There's a great text in Galatians,
       Once you trip on it, entails
     Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
       One sure, if another fails;"

in Kipling’s brilliant school story, ‘Stalky & co.’ [1]. I read the rest of the poem much later, and I must say it has more than lived up to the promise of that first excerpt.

Browning’s monologues are never easy, though, and today’s is no exception. A major part of the difficulty (and one that has been commented on before on the Minstrels; see Poem #526) is that his speakers are far removed from the heroic ‘I’ who bestrides the world of the earlier Romantics - indeed, more often than not they’re villains of the first order. This makes it necessary to peel away several layers of self-justification and empty rhetoric (combined with the occasional overt glorying in wickedness) in order to arrive at the ‘truth’ of the situation, i.e., the poet’s own view of the matter.

In today’s poem, for example, the speaker is a monk, working in the garden of a monastery (the Spanish cloister of the title); in his (silent) monologue, all the pent-up frustrations and petty jealousies arising from years of confinement in the company of the hated Brother Lawrence boil forth in righteous indignation. But (and the irony here is delicious) the speaker’s many arguments serve merely to convict himself of the crimes he lays at Lawrence’s doorstep. For instance: his description of brown Dolores and her lustrous, blue-black tresses reflects, not Lawrence’s roving eye, but his own; his rebuke of Lawrence’s ‘impious’ table manners illustrates the tawdry nature of his own faith; his wild accusations of heresy ought to draw the Inquisitor’s attention, not to Lawrence, but to himself. The malicious cataloguing of vices goes on; the reductio ad absurdum is reached when the speaker plans to corrupt the good Lawrence by tempting him with his own copy of a salacious French novel - and then has the gall to accuse the latter of the sin of Lust!

Questions of casuistry apart, the Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister also showcases Browning’s remarkable technical skills. His mastery of what I like to call ‘the speaking voice’ is as effortless as it is absolute: today’s monologue is perfectly rhymed and perfectly metrical, yet it does not seem the least bit stilted or unnatural. And as always, his poetry is imbued with a wonderful richness of texture [2] - the simultaneous threads of gardening and Church politics that are woven into the soliloquy put the speaker firmly into context, both locally and within the warp and weft of history on a larger scale.

I could go on and on about this poem, but I think that’s enough for the day. Enjoy!

— Thomas

[1] The lines are quoted by ‘that mad Irishman’, McTurk. Stalky’s memorable response is, “Browning’s an ass”. McTurk replies by quoting from another Browning monologue, ‘Caliban upon Setebos’:

    "Setebos, Setebos and Setebos
     Thinketh he liveth in the cold of the moon"

Sadly, the rest of the Caliban poem isn’t quite as good as this (utterly brilliant) couplet.

[2] This too has been commented on before on the Minstrels; see Poem #526 in our archives.

Notes

As I mentioned in my commentary above, Browning uses a number of phrases and expressions that confirm the monastic setting of the poem. Herewith, a brief explication:

Salve tibi - Good health to thee.

Arian - a follower of the doctrine of Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria in the 4th century, who denied the divinity of Christ and hence (implicitly) denied the Trinity. His opinions were embraced by large sections of Christendom, and the dissensions by which the church was rent lasted for nearly a century. (OED)

Manichee - An adherent of a religious system widely accepted from the third to the fifth century, composed of Gnostic Christian, Mazdean and pagan elements. The special feature of the system which the name chiefly suggests to medern readers is the dualistic theorogy, according to which Satan was represented as being co-eternal with God. (OED)

Belial - The spirit of evil personified; used from early times as a name for the Devil or one of the fiends, and by Milton as the name of one of the fallen angels. (OED)

Hy, Zy, Hine - perhaps the beginning of a necromantic spell for summoning Satan.

Vespers - The sixth of the Canonical hours of the breviary, said or celebrated towards evening; evensong. (OED)

Plena gratia ave Virgo - Hail, Virgin, full of grace, a version of opening lines of the Ave Maria, an invocation to the Virgin Mary.

Galatians - Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, from the New Testament. The passage that the speaker is referring to is probably this, from the fifth chapter of the letter:
“[19] Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, [20] idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, [21]envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.”

Links

Both Martin and myself (not to mention several list subscribers, judging from our guest poem submissions) happen to like Browning; as a result there’s a fair bit of his work in the Minstrels archive:

Home Thoughts From Abroad, Poem #65
My Last Duchess, Poem #104
The Lost Leader, Poem #130
Song, from Pippa Passes, Poem #133
The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Poem #242
My Star, Poem #352
The Patriot, Poem #364
Memorabilia, Poem #425
A Toccata of Galuppi’s, Poem #526

Of these, only the second and the last can properly be called dramatic monologues, though nearly all share some (if not all) of the qualities I talked about in my commentary.

Click on The Wondering Minstrels to see a list of all the poems in our archive, sorted by poet name. You might also want to check out the works of Browning’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning - their love for each other produced some of the most celebrated romantic lyrics ever written.