8 Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
First publ. B & P iii (DL), 26 Nov. 1842, with Incident of the French Camp (II 3), which preceded it, under the collective title Camp and Cloister, with the title ‘Cloister (Spanish)’. Repr. 1849 (when it was separated from Incident and given its present title), 1863, 18632, 1868, 1880, 1888. In 1863 the poem was listed on the contents page as no. III of Garden-Fancies, but, though it immediately follows that poem in the text, it retains its separate identity. The contents page may be misprinted, or may contain the trace of a change which B. thought better of; the contents page of 1865, the revised reissue of 1863, lists the poem separately. The date of composition is unknown. J. U. Rundle (N & Q cxcvi [1951] 252) suggests a debt to Burns’s Holy Willie’s Prayer. G. Bornstein, in Poetic Remaking: The Art of Browning, Yeats and Pound (Pennsylvania 1988, p. 23) suggests that the poem ‘may glance at the debate over religious ritual stirred by the Oxford Movement’: see headnote to Tomb at St Praxed’s (pp. 233–4). The setting is contemporary, but articulates a traditional Protestant attack on monastic life as a breeding-ground for petty feuds and religious hypocrisy; cp. the ‘old monk’ in Sordello i 299–308 (I 414). False or perverted religious feeling, whether Protestant or Catholic, is a recurring topic of B.’s work; cp., in this period, Johannes Agricola (p. 74) and Tomb at St. Praxed’s (p. 232). Spanish Catholicism in particular is further attacked in Confessional (II 337).
I.
Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
5 What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims—
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
II.
At the meal we sit together:
10 Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
15 What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?
What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout?
III.
Phew! We’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
20 And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps—
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He, he! There his lily snaps!)
IV.
25 Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank,
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
30 —Can’t I see his dead eye grow
Bright, as ’twere a Barbary corsair’s?
That is, if he’d let it show.
V.
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork across he lays
35 Never, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I, the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp;
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
40 While he drains his at one gulp!
VI.
Oh, those melons! If he’s able
We’re to have a feast; so nice!
One goes to the Abbot’s table,
All of us get each a slice.
45 How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange!—And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep ’em close-nipped on the sly!
VII.
There’s a great text in Galatians,
50 Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails.
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of Heaven as sure can be,
55 Spin him round and send him flying
Off to Hell a Manichee?
Or, my scrofulous French novel,
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
60 Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?
IX.
65 Or, the Devil!—one might venture
Pledge one’s soul yet slily leave
As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
70 We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine …
St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratiâ
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r—you swine!
10. Salve tibi: a Latin greeting, lit. ‘hail to thee’.
14. oak-galls: growths produced by gall-flies on various species of oak; used in the manufacture of ink. See also Sordello iii 42n. (I 529) and Caliban 51 (p. 628).
16. Swine’s Snout: the dandelion (punningly insulting Brother Lawrence’s appearance). The phrase ‘swine’s snout’ also occurs in Proverbs xi 22.
17. Phew] Whew (1849–88).
22. chaps: jaws or cheeks.
24. R. A. Day (Explicator xxiv, no. 4 [Dec. 1965] item 33) points out that the lily is a traditional emblem of chastity, and that this line is immediately followed by the erotic images of the following stanza.
30–1. grow / Bright, as] glow / Bright, as (1849, 18632); glow, / Bright as (1863, 1865–88).
32.] (That is, if he’d let it show!) (1849–88).
33. refection: a light meal.
34–5. across he lays / Never,] he never lays / Cross-wise, (1849–88).
37–40. The speaker’s ‘three sips’ symbolize his adherence to the doctrine of the Trinity, rejected by the 4th-century theologian Arius (the ‘Arian’ heresy).
42. feast;] feast! (1870–88, except ‘feast:’, 1884, a rare example of a reading unique to this ed.).
48. Keep ’em] Keep them (1863–88, except 18632, as 1842).
49–56. No passage in Galatians can be made to fit the context satisfactorily. B. later wrote admitting that the reference was inaccurate, adding that he ‘was not careful to be correct’ (letter of Apr. 1888 in SBC ii, no. 1 [1974] 62). An ingenious, but not wholly convincing, attempt has been made by R. B. Pearsall (‘Browning’s Texts in Galatians and Deuteronomy’, MLQ xiii [1952] 256–8) to transfer the ‘twenty-nine distinct damnations’ to the litany of curses in Deuteronomy xxviii 16–44, a passage connected with Galatians iii 10. As Oxford remarks, the general tenor of Galatians, with its attack on formal religious observance, fits the poem; cp. also the contrast between flesh and spirit in v 19–23: ‘Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like …But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law’. With the speaker’s fantasy of ‘tripping’ Brother Lawrence, cp. Hamlet’s notion of killing Claudius when he is ‘about some act / That has no relish of salvation in’t; / Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, / And that his soul may be as damn’d and black / As hell, whereto it goes’ (III iii 91–5).
56. Manichee: a follower of the Manichaean heresy; a dualist, holding that good and evil are independent and equally balanced forces in the cosmos, rather than, as Christian orthodoxy maintains, both being the work of God. See M. K. Starkman, ‘The Manichee in the Cloister: A Reading of Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” ’, MLN lxxv (1960), 399–405.
57. French novels in general were a byword for immorality, but the speaker may mean something explicitly pornographic (see l. 62n.). ‘Scrofulous’ (from scrofula, the disfiguring disease also known as the ‘king’s evil’) implies sexual license; OED cites Swift, Argument against abolishing Christianity (1708): ‘the scrophulous and consumptive productions furnished by our men of wit and pleasure’. Contrast the ‘jolly chapter of Rabelais’ enjoyed by the speaker of Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis (l. 32, p. 217), and the ‘little edition of Rabelais’ adorning the bachelor’s apartment in A Likeness (l. 24, p. 645).
60. Belial’s gripe: cp. PL i 490–2: ‘Belial came last, than whom a Spirit more lewd / Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love / Vice for itself ’.
62. the woeful sixteenth print: the illustrations to French novels were considered one of their most licentious features; Starkman (see l. 56n.) cites Manon Lescaut; other examples include works by the Marquis de Sade, whose illustrations were ‘woeful’ both in the obscenity of their content and the execrable standard of their draughtsmanship.
64. sieve: a basket, used chiefly for market produce.
65–6.] Or, there’s Satan!—one might venture / Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave (1849–88).
65–70. Or, the Devil … so proud of: the speaker would trick the devil into persecuting Brother Lawrence, by pretending to pledge the devil his (the speaker’s) soul, but leaving a ‘flaw’ in the contract which would allow him to escape damnation, a flaw which the devil would not notice until after he had fulfilled his side of the bargain. The apparent triviality of asking the devil to do no more than ‘blast’ (wither) a plant has led some commentators to argue that the ‘rose-acacia’ is a symbol of Brother Lawrence himself. See L. D. Fryxell and V. H. Adair in Explicator xxii, no. 4 (Dec. 1963) item 24. Adair makes the useful point that the ‘rose-acacia’ appears in Flora’s Dictionary (1832) as a symbol of friendship, but her speculation about its theological application (rose = Lawrence, from Latin ‘laurus’ = Greek ‘rhododendron’, a rose-tree; acacia = Arian heretic, follower of Acacius, Bishop of Caesarea) seems far-fetched. Other commentators have defended the literal sense as both appropriate to the speaker’s pettiness and indicated by the use of ‘that’, which would suggest that the speaker has just noticed Brother Lawrence tending to this particular shrub. See e.g. R. G. Malbone in VP iv (1966) 218–21. By this reading, the ‘we’ of l. 70 would be a further example of the speaker’s sarcastic identification with Lawrence, as in st. iii, rather than the collective voice of the monastery, as in st. vi. In our view, the ‘rose-acacia’ is both a literal plant and a symbol of everything that the speaker hates about Brother Lawrence; his asking the devil to destroy it has, therefore, a metaphorical as well as a literal force, but a sense of incongruity at the triviality for which the speaker is prepared to risk his soul remains appropriate. Cp. Burns, Holy Willie’s Prayer 78–9: ‘Curse thou his basket and his store, / Kail and potatoes’, and see headnote to Johannes Agricola (p. 75) for another ref. to this poem. 69. rose-acacia: a tree with rose-coloured flowers, Robina hipsida.
70. Hy, Zy, Hine: only two of the astonishingly numerous and frequently bizarre accounts of this phrase carry any conviction, those of G. Pitts (‘Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”: Hy, Zy, Hine’, N & Q xiii [1966] 339–40) and J. F. Loucks (‘ “Hy, Zy, Hine” and Peter of Abano’, VP xii [1974] 165–9). Pitts argues that B. derived it from a medieval liturgical parody, the Mass of the Ass; Loucks, that B. adapted the phrase from a string of nonsense words in a medieval manual of magic formulae, the Heptameron, or Elementa Magica, ascribed to Pietro of Abano (c. 1250–c. 1316). B. was certainly familiar with Abano’s work from his reading in the occult (see headnote to Paracelsus, I 105); cp. his translation of a quatrain ascribed to Abano (II 371) and the late poem Pietro of Abano (DI2, 1880). S. H. Aiken (‘ “Hy, Zy, Hine” and Browning’s Medieval Sources for “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” ’, VP xvii [1979] 377–85), while admitting that B.’s spelling of the phrase may have been influenced by the Abano source, supports Pitts’ argument by drawing attention to the availability of the Mass of the Ass in learned and popular writings of the period, esp. William Hone’s Ancient Mysteries Described (1823). Hone notes that the mock-ceremony begins before vespers and parodies vesper anthems; he also mentions the survival of such customs in contemporary Spain. Aiken’s argument is persuasive except that it gives the speaker no motive for uttering the phrase other than a general inclination to mock Brother Lawrence; Loucks’s interpretation, that the phrase is the beginning of a magic formula which will raise the devil with whom the speaker proposes (whether in earnest or no) to make his pact, fits the context better.
71–2. Plena gratiâ / Ave, Virgo: ‘full of grace, hail, Virgin’. Two problems arise in connection with this phrase: the first, that its Latin, besides being in an odd order, represents a hybrid of two prayers, the ‘Hail Mary’ and the ‘Litany to the Blessed Virgin’; and second, that neither of these two was the conventional opening of vespers in the 19th century. It is unlikely either that the speaker would deliberately mock the ritual, or that he, of all people, would make a mistake; according to C. T. Phipps, SJ (VP vii [1969] 158–9), the error is B.’s, and ‘resulted from equating the vesper bell with the evening Angelus. The thrice-daily Angelus bell is a signal for an antiphonal prayer honoring the Incarnation … which includes most of the words of the present-day form of the Ave Maria’. As for the words themselves, and their order, it is probable that B. altered them to fit the rhyme and rhythm of the stanza. Cp. Ring vi 438ff. for another passage in which the Latin liturgy is interjected with a speaker’s profane comments.