BRIDGING INTERPRETATIONS - LOUISA ZHANG

“Don’t Tell Me the Moon Is Shining; Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass”-Chekhov

When envisioning interpretations which encompass a larger scope of Browning’s poems, I began with one poem and tried to notice the subtle pathways of it that led towards another poem in the collection. Take Toccata of Galuppi’s for example. There is a cycle of darkness, ignition and extinguishment across ‘deaf and blind’ to ‘burning’ to ‘dust and ashes’, a light-gradient motif that becomes akin to the speaker’s faltering between conviction and doubt in the poem. Thus, we are captured into this progressive sequence of pre-enlightenment, epiphany and ultimately disenchantment. By the end of the poem, the sense of ‘extinction’ being inevitably near, is equated with a ‘death’ that ‘stepped tacitly’, and ‘took’ one ‘where they never see the sun’. This imagery may serve to vivify the estrangement from the sporadic glow of a fluorescent light that was only temporarily offered through cherishment of art. An air of virtuosity instilled within the sporadic octameter of the poem is stolen away by a sweep of transience and the reanimations of time and space which seem to pervade the poem. Throughout the poem, the speaker’s visualisation of Venice succumbs to the transmuting power and metamorphic power of musical composition. However, the sublimity of a picturesque ‘street’ arched by ‘Shylock’s bridge’ and the religious transcendentalism of ‘Doges’ ‘wed[ding] the sea with rings’ become inverted into frivolity and corporeal sensuality as observation magnifies towards the prospect of a fallen society incompatible with the ‘stately’ quintessence of the melody unravelled by the ‘clavichord’. The speaker seems to suggest the relentless celebratory grandeur of Venetian art and its society ‘burns ever to midday’ only to consume its own fabrications, their ‘fruitage’ of art ‘born to bloom and drop’. The succinctness of the phrase joining one-syllabled words resembles the ultimate dissolution and cessation of romanticism.

Once I have let one way of looking at a poem broaden my view, I can start finding resonances amid Browning’s other poems, searching for a flight through conceptual thresholds which stem from an analogous permeating force. It is okay and sometimes necessary to let flowing threads fall freely at first; the final product still in the making. We may notice that Browning’s narrator in Love among the Ruins similarly paints the imaginative vistas of memory as it seeks to reconstruct a fallen past with its lost ‘age’ of a bygone civilisation. As the speaker here panoramically observes the ‘miles and miles’ of landscape before him, his diction sweeps from the idyllic ‘solitary pastures’ with ‘quiet-coloured ends of evening smiles’, ‘thro the twiligh’ not towards a conduit of access to the present, but instead, memory becomes a sentimental and nostalgic distraction from it. His perception also ‘wielding far’ from his spatial surrounding towards an inscape of ‘a site once of a city great and gay’. There is an evident counterpointing of flowing lyricism of the longer lines with the staccato rhythm of the shorter lines; its rise and falls mirror the way the speaker is subconsciously torn between the meandering movement of thought and pausing on the present. As the sonorous reverberations of the rhyme scheme continues on beyond the ‘slopes of verdure’, the transcendent ‘brazen pillar high/As the sky’ has been dissonantly equated to the historical rush for ‘gold’ and ‘lust of glory’ of ‘the multitudes of men’ in the alliterative crescendo towards ancient grandeur, and the speaker becomes ‘embedd[ed]’ within this apocalyptic whirlwind of reminiscence reshaping and re-sculpting his vision. In the end, the idea of love or pastoral peace is bewitched with an elusiveness. And so on…

When we have ventured upon a possible link between two poems, we can begin to grasp for interconnecting ideas across seemingly disparate poems and strengthen the ties between them. Why may Browning portray the impossibility of precipitating any sentiment as crystalline and pure? With no reconciling channel between internal visions and exterior setting? As the ‘old music of Venice’ becomes confined in an alternation between concealing and unveiling, does this share a likeness with the way the Duke in My Last Duchess ‘draws’ the ‘curtain’ to uncover a ‘pictured countenance’, one which he endeavours to voyeuristically reanimate, his narrative voice also asserting and obscuring the truth? Are there moments in Browning’s poems which leave narrators clutching at remnants of dissolving linguistic or gender structures which are gradually fleeting the Victorian society; inclining towards the modern poetic tendency for open-endedness? Hopefully these help you get a sense of the many routes you can take when interpreting, but avoid being lost in a sense of boundless freedom through showing close-analysis and working carefully with the text. Explore one path and illuminate the others as you travel further and reach a destination.

A big big thank you to Louisa for her incredible contribution to the blog!