Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the last line of this poem? Is the speaker surprised, relieved disappointed? On the page they are all possible. Even the best reader has to choose. And for that reason I have been avoiding this poem for far too long.

Browning was the master of the dramatic monologue. And he perfected what we might loosely call ‘performative dissonance’. What is being said, is qualified or contradicted or undermined by the way it is being said. It’s an endemic characteristic in 19th Century fiction, from Gogol to Poe to Le Fanu to James.

It’s harder to achieve in a single monologue which has to create its own context. The effect is most famously achieved in ‘My Last Duchess’ where the message the speaker thinks he’s sending, and the one we receive, are so very different. He took it as far as it could go in “The Ring and the Book’ where the reader is presented with different versions of the same story.

In this case the effect is created much more simply, because what the speaker does and says are so far out of the normal definitions of sane behaviour. The problem is how to make him sound believable. If you are paying attention to the first half you can be forgiven for thinking you’re in familiar romance story territory. Then comes the swerve.

One of the familiar critical games to play with this poem is to try and gender the speaker from evidence within the poem. If you put aside the assumption the speaker is male, you will find no evidence within the poem to prove this. On the other hand, that’s also true for any number of first person poems. Browning exploits this common feature as part of the overall creepiness of the poem. (Creepiness is a very technical term…)