First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855, the concluding poem of the first volume; repr. 1863, 18652, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855. The title of the poem appears in the Contents page of H proof, but the leaf on which it should appear is blank; H proof2 also notes ‘This leaf is blank in proof copy.’ Oxford suggests that the poem was added at the last minute to fill up the blank page, but there is no concrete evidence that this was the case.
There are two plausible datings for this poem: late 1851, the period during which B. was writing Shelley (see Appendix A, p. 851); or 1853–54 (in Rome), the period to which Sharp assigns the poem. On the basis of the evidence that the majority of the M & W poems were written in 1853–54, and the use of the relatively new term ‘memorabilia’ (see below), the later date is to be preferred.
B.’s early devotion to Shelley has been well documented: see Pauline 141–229 and notes (pp. 19–24), and the headnotes to Sordello (I 367) and Shelley (pp. 852–3). In a conversation with W. G. Kingsland, B. claimed that the poem had been prompted by an incident which took place ‘in the shop of Hodgson, the well-known London bookseller’: ‘[A] stranger came in, who, in the course of conversation with the bookseller, spoke of something that Shelley had once said to him. Suddenly the stranger paused, and burst into laughter as he observed me staring at him with blanched face … I still vividly remember how strangely the presence of a man who had seen and spoken with Shelley affected me’ (W. G. Kingsland, ‘Some Browning Memories’, Contemporary Review cii [1912] 206–7). Leigh’s New Picture of London (1819) lists under ‘Booksellers who chiefly sell Modern Publications’ a Hodgson in Upper Wimpole Street; this shop is mentioned frequently in the courtship correspondence, and B. chose it as the meeting place for the poets’ departure to Italy after their marriage (Correspondence xiii 379).
This was not, however, B.’s only acquaintance with someone who ‘saw Shelley plain’; in June 1847 EBB. describes a visit to the ‘ex consul of Venice & his family, Mr & Mrs Hoppner . . the Hoppners mentioned & written to in Lord Byron’s letters & I think Shelley’s … There was … a good deal of talk about poor Shelley & his wife, and how they passed three weeks, with the Hoppners once at Venice, & how on their arrival they ate nothing except water gruel & boiled cabbages & cherries, because it was a principle of Shelley’s not to touch animal food, & how Mrs Hoppner did, as she said, “seduce” him into taking roast beef & puddings’ (EBB to Arabella i 100).
OED suggests that ‘the currency of the word [memorabilia] in English may be due to its use as the Latin title of Xenophon’s ‘Recollections (′Αποµνηµονεήµατα) of Socrates’; EBB. owned a copy of a 1741 edition, Memorabilium Socratis Dictorum, libri IV (Collections A2507). OED’s first citation is from 1806–07. In its primary signification the word means ‘Memorable or noteworthy thoughts, observations, writings, etc.’, but B.’s poem also seems to refer to the other sense listed in OED: ‘Objects kept or collected because of their historical interest or the memories they evoke of events, people, places, etc., with which they have been associated; souvenirs, mementos.’ This latter sense is identified as an American usage, whose earliest citation is 1855. Many of B.’s friends in Rome were American, and he might have picked up the word from them. B. collected some memorabilia of his own, in this sense, e.g. pressed flowers from Keats’s and Shelley’s graves (1859; Collections H566); and cp. La Saisiaz (1878), 579–80: ‘Turn thence! Is it Diodati joins the glimmer of the lake? / There I plucked a leaf, one week since,—ivy, plucked for Byron’s sake’. He admitted in an early letter to EBB. that he had ‘always retained [his] first feeling for Byron in many respects .. the interest in the places he had visited, in relics of him’, and ‘would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves’ (22 Aug. 1846: Correspondence xiii 280).
The metaphor of the moulted eagle’s feather in the fourth stanza has been the focus of much of the critical discussion of the poem. Shelley mentions eagles frequently in his poetry, often in connection with his contemporaries; the Byron character in Julian and Maddalo is described as an ‘eagle spirit’ (l. 51), and Keats in Adonais is compared to ‘the eagle, who like thee could scale / Heaven, and could nourish in the sun’s domain / Her mighty youth with morning’ (ll. 147–9). The image also, of course, applies to Shelley himself, the ‘sun-treader’ of Pauline (l. 151, p. 20). Shen Yao (‘A Note on Browning’s “Eagle-feather”, SBC v, no. 2 [Fall 1977] 7–16) argues that the image recalls Keats as well as Shelley; he points out a number of uses of the motif of the ‘moulted feather’ in Keats’s work, and highlights similarities to the poem’s language and images in other poems of B.’s, most strikingly Light Woman 13–24 (III 609) and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871) 764. See also headnote to Popularity (p. 446).
Oxford notes a poem by Sarah Flower for W. J. Fox which makes the link between the feather and the pen: ‘His pen it hath come / From the wing of an eagle, / And tells of its home’ (p. 257).
1
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
2
5 But you were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at—
My starting moves your laughter!
I crossed a moor with a name of its own
10 And a use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand’s-breath of it shines alone
’Mid the blank miles round about—
4
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
15 A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—
Well, I forget the rest.
1. plain: ‘clearly, manifestly’; for this adverbial use of the adjective in respect of perception, OED cites Spenser Faerie Queene I i 16: ‘Ay wont in desert darknes to remaine, / Where plain none might her see, nor she see any plaine’.
3. again: ‘in reply’.
6. And you] And also you (18652, 1868–88).
7. started at: was startled by.
9–16. The ‘moor’ is an image of the life of the person whom the speaker meets, and who is of interest only because of his encounter with Shelley; the speaker picks up this recollection like a stray ‘eagle-feather’, disparaging the importance of the rest of the man’s life. For the image of the ‘eagle-feather’, see headnote.
10. And a use] And a certain use (1868–88).
11. hand’s-breadth: cp. In Three Days 11 (III 6).
15. an eagle-feather—] an eagle-feather! (18652, 1868–88).