First publ. B & P vii (DR & L), 6 Nov. 1845; repr. 1849, 1863, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1845.
That the ‘lost leader’ was Wordsworth was confirmed by B. in later correspondence, most emphatically in a letter to Ruskin of 1 Feb. 1856: ‘Don’t tell that I thought of—who else but Wordsworth?’ (A Letter from Robert Browning to John Ruskin [ Waco 1958] n.p.). B. had met Wordsworth in 1835, after the publication of Paracelsus introduced him to the literary world, but the acquaintance did not develop. The poem may have been composed in reponse to Wordsworth’s first appearance at Court as Poet Laureate (25 Apr. 1845), when B. wrote sardonically to EBB. of the ridiculous figure which Wordsworth cut in Samuel Rogers’ ill-fitting court costume (28 May 1845, Correspondence x 246); EBB. first saw the poem in proof, calling it in her letter to B. of 21–22 Oct. 1845 one of ‘the new poems’ (ibid. xi 133–4; her comments rec. in the notes are from Wellesley MS). However, B. might have withheld the poem until the last moment because EBB. did not share his hostility to Wordsworth (see below). On balance we prefer a date closer to the award of the Laureateship itself (Apr. 1843). In a fragment from a letter to R. H. Horne (now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; Collections E511, p. 445, though not there identified in connection with Horne), B. responds to Horne’s request for a suitable epigraph for the essay on Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt in Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age (1844) by quoting, for Wordsworth, PL x 441–54 (omitting l. 444), followed by a comment: ‘He, thro’ the midst unmarked, / In show plebeian angel militant / Of lowest order, passed: and from the door / [Of that Plutonian hall, invisible] / Ascended his high throne which, under state / Of richest texture spread, at the upper end / Was placed in regal lustre. Down awhile / He sat, and round about him saw unseen. / At last, as from a cloud, his fulgent head / And shape star-bright appeared, or brighter, clad / With what permissive glory since his Fall / Was left him, or false glitter. All amazed / At that so sudden blaze, the Stygian throng / Bent their aspect. (As Jeffrey does in the reprint of his review of the Excursion: this is too good a bit, I fear: take the kinder side of the matter and give him some or all of your own fine sonnet)’. Unsurprisingly, Horne did not use this passage, though he did adopt several of B.’s suggestions for other writers (see Correspondence viii 202–5). Since A New Spirit of the Age was published in March 1844, a date for the Berg letter of autumn/winter 1843 seems probable, and we date the poem to this period.
The ‘handful of silver’ of l. 1 may be a ref. to Wordsworth’s acceptance of a government appointment in 1813, and the ‘ribband’ of l. 2 to the (effectively unpaid) Laureateship, though B. later denied believing that such mercenary considerations influenced Wordsworth’s conduct (see below). The fact that B. did not show the poem to EBB. until DR & L was in proof may reflect his awareness that her opinion of Wordsworth was more sympathetic than his: in her letter of 30 May 1845, though she agreed with his ridicule of Wordsworth’s conduct in going to Court, she dissociated herself from ‘the sighing kept up by people about that acceptance of the Laureateship … Not that the Laureateship honored him, but that he honored it; & that, so honoring it, he preserves a symbol instructive to the masses, who are children & to be taught by symbols now as formerly … And wont the court laurel (such as it is) be all the worthier of you for Wordsworth’s having worn it first?’ (Correspondence x 247). After the publication of the poem, however, B. made further savagely satirical remarks about Wordsworth’s character in a letter to EBB. of 15 Feb. 1846 (ibid. xii 73–4), and the poem makes it clear that, contrary to her, he saw the Laureateship as a symbolic climax to Wordsworth’s defection from the liberal cause. B. shared the opinion of the second generation of Romantic writers (Shelley, Byron, Keats, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt) that the first (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey: the ‘Lake School’) had committed political apostasy in their conversion to conservatism; hence his remark to EBB. that ‘I always retained my first feeling for Byron in many respects … while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge & Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder, after the Rosicrucian fashion’ (22 Aug. 1846, ibid. xiii 280). In later life, however, B. played down his hostility. He wrote in 1875 to the Rev. A. Grosart: ‘I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account: had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about “handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon”. These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet; whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular face-about of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore … so, though I dare not deny the original of my little poem, I altogether refuse to have it considered as the “very effigies” of such a moral and intellectual superiority’ (LH 166–7).
B. was interested, esp. during this period, in political apostasy: Strafford (1837) and A Soul’s Tragedy (II 180) both have close parallels; see also Italy in England (p. 245), and, later, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871); for non-political parallels, cp. Pictor (p. 226) and Andrea (p. 385).
I.
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a ribband to stick in his coat—
Got the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
5 They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was their’s who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags—were they purple his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
10 Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!
15 He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
II.
We shall march prospering,—not thro’ his presence;
Songs may excite us,—not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence,
20 Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then,—record one lost soul more,
One task unaccepted, one footpath untrod,
One more devils’-triumph and sorrow to angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
25 Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain,
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him,—come gallantly,
30 Strike our face hard ere we shatter his own;
Then let him get the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in Heaven, the first by the throne!
1. A ref. to Judas’s betraying Christ for thirty pieces of silver.
3. Got] Found (1849–88).
4. devote: ‘to dedicate; to consecrate; to appropriate by vow’ (J.). Cp. Leviticus xxvii 28 (quoted in J.): ‘No devoted thing, that a man shall devote unto the Lord of all that he hath … shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is most holy unto the Lord’.
13–14. B. commented: ‘Shakespeare was of us—not for us, like Him of the Defensio [Milton]; nor abreast with our political sympathies like the other two: I wish he had been more than of us’ (letter to Ruskin: see headnote). B. owned a copy of Milton’s anti-Royalist polemic Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio [Defence of the People of England], 1651 (Collections A1621).
13. When the poem was in proof, EBB. noted ‘Burns was with us’ without comment; she discussed the proofs of DR & L with B. on 21 Oct. 1845.
18. excite] inspirit (1849–88).
22.] One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, (1849–88).
23. devils’-triumph] triumph for devils (1849–88, except ‘devil’s triumph’, 1872, 1884). 24. EBB. made a note of this line when the poem was in proof, with ‘done’ canc. after ‘wrong’ and replaced by ‘more’; it is not certain whether the canc. reading was authorial or EBB.’s slip.
29. come] strike (1849–88).
30.] Aim at our heart ere we pierce through his own; (1849); Menace our heart ere we master his own; (1863–88).
31. get] receive (1849–88). new knowledge: cp. Colossians iii 9–10: ‘ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him’.
32. Pardoned in Heaven: EBB. jotted this phrase down when the poem was in proof, without comment. Cp. Hebrews viii 1: ‘We have such an high priest [Jesus], who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens’.