Text, publication, and revision
First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863, 18632, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855. The poem was very lightly revised after 1855, the least so of the long poems in M & W.
Composition and date
There are a number of circumstances linking the poem to the Brownings’ period of residence in Rome during the winter of 1853–54. In Nov. 1853 the Brownings met and became friendly with the American artist William Page; he offered to paint B.’s portrait, and the poet sat for him ‘above fifty times’ (EBB to Arabella ii 81). The picture was finished in May 1854. It must have been at this time that Page communicated his ‘discovery’ about the proportions of the human body to the Brownings, as he later recalled: ‘Subsequently [B.] advised me to publish it in some English periodical, and assisted me in recollecting the date of my first observations by saying: “I put it in Cleon, and my wife in Aurora Leigh” ’ (Scribner’s Monthly xvii [Apr. 1879] 894–8). Page then quotes Aurora Leigh i 864–9, and Cleon 55–6 (for the ‘discovery’ itself see ll. 55–6n.). Page’s recollection is corroborated by a letter of 28 May 1855 from B. in which he asks the painter whether or not he has ‘completed [his] studies and discoveries of the proportions of the figure’ (MS in Smithsonian Institution; cited in Julia Markus, ‘“Andrea del Sarto” and William Page’, BIS ii [1974] 2). A date of 1853–54 is also suggested by possible allusions to Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna and Poems (1853); see next section.
Sources and influences
A. W. Crawford first suggested in 1927 that ‘the real occasion of the poem was the publication of Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna, and that B. was endeavoring to present a picture somewhat complementary to that sketched by Arnold’ (‘Browning’s “Cleon”, JEGP xxvi [1927] 485–90). Some of Crawford’s assertions are, however, unsupported by convincing evidence. He states, for instance, that B. procured a copy of Empedocles on Etna on first publication, but the copy of the relevant volume in B.’s library seems to have come from Isa Blagden (Collections A101). Again, Crawford’s statement that B. ‘read [Empedocles] with interest and discernment, and is reported to have greatly favored the poem’ derives (via Elisabeth L. Cary’s Browning: Poet and Man [New York 1899] 127) from Arnold’s dedication of the reprint of the poem to B. in 1867 (see below); it does not decisively establish that B. read the poem as soon as it appeared in 1853.
There is, however, evidence in favour of the possibility of a connection between the two poems in a letter of 2 May 1853 from EBB. to her brother George: ‘Have you heard a volume of poems by Dr. Arnold’s son (“by A”) spoken of in London? There is a great deal of thought in them & considerable beauty. Mr. Lytton lent them to us the other day’ (George Barrett 184). Since EBB. had read Arnold’s The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems on its first publication in 1849 (see EBB to MRM iii 283–7), this is almost certainly a reference to Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, publ. in Oct. 1852. Both Cleon and the title poem of Arnold’s 1852 volume examine the adequacy of Pagan philosophies as a response to human life. Arnold’s Empedocles bears little detailed resemblance to the Pre-Socratic philosopher on whom he is supposedly based, although Arnold, like B., probably had some knowledge of the extant fragments of Empedocles (see ll. 99–111n.). Empedocles was seen by his contemporaries as something of a messianic figure, perhaps because of his advanced knowledge of the natural world; he is reputed to have brought a woman back to life from a ‘trance’, and his own death was shrouded in mystery and stories of apotheosis. Arnold transforms this shadowy figure into a precursor of his own brand of Stoicism who recognizes the human desire for ‘joy’ but cannot find any grounds for it in the beliefs available to him. (Specific resemblances to moments in Arnold’s poem are noted below; see ll. 21n., 73–94n., 112–27n., 225–6n., 309–17n., 323–35n.) B.’s Cleon, in contrast, is a fictional figure living around the time when St Paul was attempting to spread the message of Christianity to the Pagan world, with limited success. He too realizes that the ‘joy-hunger’ of humanity is not satisfied by Pagan philosophy (although his is Epicurean or Hedonistic rather than Stoical), yet rejects out of hand the doctrine put forward by the ‘barbarian Jew’ Paul which might provide the answer to his difficulty by positing the existence of a future state. On the question of the dialogue between the two poems see Antony H. Harrison, ‘Cleon’s Joy-Hunger and the Empedoclean Context’ (SBC ix.2 [1981] 57–68). It is possible that B. may have followed Arnold in consulting the surviving fragments of Empedocles’ works; see esp. ll. 199–202n. It may be this philosophical dimension which led Ruskin to regard it as ‘harder than most’ of the poems in M & W in his letter to B. of 2 Dec 1855 (Appendix B, p. 878).
There may be a wider indebtedness to Arnold in the poem. Certain sections seem to echo the Stoicism of ‘Resignation’ (see ll. 235–72n., 271n.); see also head-note to By the Fire-Side (p. 456). There may also be a response to the arguments put forward in Arnold’s famous ‘Preface’ to his Poems. A New Edition, publ. in Nov. 1853. In this Preface Arnold ‘unmasks’ himself as the author of Empedocles, but goes on to explain why he has excluded the poem from the current collection. It is, he argues, unhelpful to the modern age because ‘the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity’ of the ‘early Greek genius’ have been replaced in it by ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself ’: ‘modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust’ (R. H. Super [ed.], The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold [Ann Arbor, 1960–] i 1). It is not therefore ‘dedicated to Joy’, as the highest forms of art should be. Arnold goes on to call for a return to antique norms in the construction of works of art; unlike modern writers, the ancients placed the representation of noble actions above the quality of expression: ‘They regarded the whole; we regard the parts’ (ibid. i 5). This neo-classical manifesto elicited a strong response from the literary journals, sparking a debate on the nature of the ‘modern’ subject in art which Arnold responded to in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’ (1857). The implicit antagonism in Cleon to the idea that Hellenic culture and philosophy are superior to Christianity might then be a rejoinder to Arnold’s ideas (see also Parallels). B. later quoted an extract from this Preface in his own Preface to The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877).
Arnold eventually decided to reprint Empedocles on Etna—‘I cannot say republish, for it was withdrawn from circulation before fifty copies were sold’—in 1867 ‘at the request of a man of genius, whom it had the honour and good fortune to interest,—Mr. Robert Browning.’
An influence closer to home may well have been that of the themes and characters which EBB. was beginning, in the period of the poem’s composition, to develop in Aurora Leigh. As already noted, Page’s ‘discovery’ of the proportions of the human body found its way into both poems (see above, Composition); Cleon resembles Aurora in the high value he places on his own art (see ll. 23–5n.) and in confronting the predicament of the ‘latecomer’ in culture.
Parallels in B.
The poem has often been seen as complementing An Epistle (DeVane Handbook 263; see headnote, pp. 509–10), examining the way in which the claims of Christianity might have been viewed by a representative of Hellenistic culture; they are also the only two epistolary poems in B.’s published work. Cp. also Saul (III 491) and the late poem Imperante Augusto Natus Est—(Asolando, 1889). Harrison (see above) suggests that Rabbi Ben Ezra (p. 649) can be seen as a counterpart in a different sense; the Rabbi’s joyful old age, enlivened by his faith in God, contrasts with the futile hedonism of Cleon’s search for ‘joy’ (see ll. 323–35n.). The limitations of the world-view implied by the ‘perfection’ of Pagan art are also examined in Old Pictures 81–160 (pp. 415–21), and this theme is taken up again (as DeVane notes) in Gerard de Lairesse (Parleyings, 1887).
“As certain also of your own poets have said”—
Cleon the poet, (from the sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily, that o’erlace the sea,
And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps “Greece”)—
To Protos in his Tyranny: much health!
5 They give thy letter to me, even now:
I read and seem as if I heard thee speak.
The master of thy galley still unlades
Gift after gift; they block my court at last
And pile themselves along its portico
10 Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee:
And one white she-slave from the group dispersed
Of black and white slaves, (like the chequer-work
Pavement, at once my nation’s work and gift,
Now covered with this settle-down of doves)
15 One lyric woman, in her crocus vest
Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands
Commends to me the strainer and the cup
Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine.
Well-counselled, king, in thy munificence!
20 For so shall men remark, in such an act
Of love for him whose song gives life its joy,
Thy recognition of the use of life;
Nor call thy spirit barely adequate
To help on life in straight ways, broad enough
25 For vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest.
Thou, in the daily building of thy tower,
Whether in fierce and sudden spasms of toil,
Or through dim lulls of unapparent growth,
Or when the general work ’mid good acclaim
30 Climbed with the eye to cheer the architect,
Didst ne’er engage in work for mere work’s sake—
Hadst ever in thy heart the luring hope
Of some eventual rest a-top of it,
Whence, all the tumult of the building hushed,
35 Thou first of men mightst look out to the east.
The vulgar saw thy tower; thou sawest the sun.
For this, I promise on thy festival
To pour libation, looking o’er the sea,
Making this slave narrate thy fortunes, speak
40 Thy great words, and describe thy royal face—
Wishing thee wholly where Zeus lives the most
Within the eventual element of calm.
Thy letter’s first requirement meets me here.
It is as thou hast heard: in one short life
45 I, Cleon, have effected all those things
Thou wonderingly dost enumerate.
That epos on thy hundred plates of gold
Is mine,—and also mine the little chaunt,
So sure to rise from every fishing-bark
50 When, lights at prow, the seamen haul their nets.
The image of the sun-god on the phare
Men turn from the sun’s self to see, is mine;
The Poecile, o’er-storied its whole length,
As thou didst hear, with painting, is mine too.
55 I know the true proportions of a man
And woman also, not observed before;
And I have written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.
60 For music,—why, I have combined the moods,
Inventing one. In brief, all arts are mine;
Thus much the people know and recognise,
Throughout our seventeen islands. Marvel not.
We of these latter days, with greater mind
65 Than our forerunners, since more composite,
Look not so great (beside their simple way)
To a judge who only sees one way at once,
One mind-point, and no other at a time,—
Compares the small part of a man of us
70 With some whole man of the heroic age,
Great in his way—not ours, nor meant for ours,
And ours is greater, had we skill to know.
Yet, what we call this life of men on earth,
This sequence of the soul’s achievements here,
75 Being, as I find much reason to conceive,
Intended to be viewed eventually
As a great whole, not analysed to parts,
But each part having reference to all,—
How shall a certain part, pronounced complete,
80 Endure effacement by another part?
Was the thing done?—Then what’s to do again?
See, in the chequered pavement opposite,
Suppose the artist made a perfect rhomb,
And next a lozenge, then a trapezoid—
85 He did not overlay them, superimpose
The new upon the old and blot it out,
But laid them on a level in his work,
Making at last a picture; there it lies.
So, first the perfect separate forms were made,
90 The portions of mankind—and after, so,
Occurred the combination of the same.
Or where had been a progress, otherwise?
Mankind, made up of all the single men,—
In such a synthesis the labour ends.
95 Now, mark me—those divine men of old time
Have reached, thou sayest well, each at one point
The outside verge that rounds our faculty;
And where they reached, who can do more than reach?
It takes but little water just to touch
100 At some one point the inside of a sphere,
And, as we turn the sphere, touch all the rest
In due succession; but the finer air
Which not so palpably nor obviously,
Though no less universally, can touch
105 The whole circumference of that emptied sphere,
Fills it more fully than the water did;
Holds thrice the weight of water in itself
Resolved into a subtler element.
And yet the vulgar call the sphere first full
110 Up to the visible height—and after, void;
Not knowing air’s more hidden properties.
And thus our soul, misknown, cries out to Zeus
To vindicate his purpose in its life—
Why stay we on the earth unless to grow?
115 Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out,
That he or other God, descended here
And, once for all, showed simultaneously
What, in its nature, never can he shown
Piecemeal or in succession;—showed, I say,
120 The worth both absolute and relative
Of all His children from the birth of time,
His instruments for all appointed work.
I now go on to image,—might we hear
The judgment which should give the due to each,
125 Shew where the labour lay and where the ease,
And prove Zeus’ self, the latent, everywhere!
This is a dream. But no dream, let us hope,
That years and days, the summers and the springs
Follow each other with unwaning powers—
130 The grapes which dye thy wine, are richer far
Through culture, than the wild wealth of the rock;
The suave plum than the savage-tasted drupe;
The pastured honey-bee drops choicer sweet;
The flowers turn double, and the leaves turn flowers;
135 That young and tender crescent-moon, thy slave,
Sleeping upon her robe as if on clouds,
Refines upon the women of my youth.
What, and the soul alone deteriorates?
I have not chanted verse like Homer’s, no—
140 Nor swept string like Terpander, no—nor carved
And painted men like Phidias and his friend:
I am not great as they are, point by point:
But I have entered into sympathy
With these four, running these into one soul,
145 Who, separate, ignored each others’ arts.
Say, is it nothing that I know them all?
The wild flower was the larger—I have dashed
Rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup’s
Honey with wine, and driven its seed to fruit,
150 And show a better flower if not so large.
I stand, myself. Refer this to the gods
Whose gift alone it is! which, shall I dare
(All pride apart) upon the absurd pretext
That such a gift by chance lay in my hand,
155 Discourse of lightly or depreciate?
It might have fallen to another’s hand—what then?
I pass too surely—let at least truth stay!
And next, of what thou followest on to ask.
This being with me as I declare, O king,
160 My works, in all these varicoloured kinds,
So done by me, accepted so by men—
Thou askest if (my soul thus in men’s hearts)
I must not be accounted to attain
The very crown and proper end of life.
165 Inquiring thence how, now life closeth up,
I face death with success in my right hand:
Whether I fear death less than dost thyself
The fortunate of men. “For” (writest thou)
“Thou leavest much behind, while I leave nought:
170 Thy life stays in the poems men shall sing,
The pictures men shall study; while my life,
Complete and whole now in its power and joy,
Dies altogether with my brain and arm,
Is lost indeed; since,—what survives myself?
175 The brazen statue that o’erlooks my grave,
Set on the promontory which I named.
And that—some supple courtier of my heir
Shall use its robed and sceptred arm, perhaps,
To fix the rope to, which best drags it down.
180 I go, then: triumph thou, who dost not go!”
Nay, thou art worthy of hearing my whole mind.
Is this apparent, when thou turn’st to muse
Upon the scheme of earth and man in chief,
That admiration grows as knowledge grows?
185 That imperfection means perfection hid,
Reserved in part, to grace the after-time?
If, in the morning of philosophy,
Ere aught had been recorded, aught perceived,
Thou, with the light now in thee, couldst have looked
190 On all earth’s tenantry, from worm to bird,
Ere man had yet appeared upon the stage—
Thou wouldst have seen them perfect, and deduced
The perfectness of others yet unseen.
Conceding which,—had Zeus then questioned thee
195 “Wilt thou go on a step, improve on this,
Do more for visible creatures than is done?”
Thou wouldst have answered, “Ay, by making each
Grow conscious in himself—by that alone.
All’s perfect else: the shell sucks fast the rock,
200 The fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims
And slides; the birds take flight, forth range the beasts,
Till life’s mechanics can no further go—
And all this joy in natural life, is put,
Like fire from off thy finger into each,
205 So exquisitely perfect is the same.
But ’tis pure fire—and they mere matter are;
It has them, not they it: and so I choose,
For man, Thy last premeditated work
(If I might add a glory to this scheme)
210 That a third thing should stand apart from both,
A quality arise within the soul,
Which, intro-active, made to supervise
And feel the force it has, may view itself,
And so be happy.” Man might live at first
215 The animal life: but is there nothing more?
In due time, let him critically learn
How he lives; and, the more he gets to know
Of his own life’s adaptabilities,
The more joy-giving will his life become.
220 The man who hath this quality, is best.
But thou, king, hadst more reasonably said:
“Let progress end at once,—man make no step
Beyond the natural man, the better beast,
Using his senses, not the sense of sense.”
225 In man there’s failure, only since he left
The lower and inconscious forms of life.
We called it an advance, the rendering plain
A spirit might grow conscious of that life,
And, by new lore so added to the old,
230 Take each step higher over the brute’s head.
This grew the only life, the pleasure-house,
Watch-tower and treasure-fortress of the soul,
Which whole surrounding flats of natural life
Seemed only fit to yield subsistence to;
235 A tower that crowns a country. But alas!
The soul now climbs it just to perish there,
For thence we have discovered (’tis no dream—
We know this, which we had not else perceived)
That there’s a world of capability
240 For joy, spread round about us, meant for us,
Inviting us; and still the soul craves all,
And still the flesh replies, “Take no jot more
Than ere you climbed the tower to look abroad!
Nay, so much less, as that fatigue has brought
245 Deduction to it.” We struggle—fain to enlarge
Our bounded physical recipiency,
Increase our power, supply fresh oil to life,
Repair the waste of age and sickness. No,
It skills not: life’s inadequate to joy,
250 As the soul sees joy, tempting life to take.
They raise a fountain in my garden here
Wherein a Naiad sends the water-spurt
Thin from her tube; she smiles to see it rise.
What if I told her, it is just a thread
255 From that great river which the hills shut up,
And mock her with my leave to take the same?
The artificer has given her one small tube
Past power to widen or exchange—what boots
To know she might spout oceans if she could?
260 She cannot lift beyond her first straight thread.
And so a man can use but a man’s joy
While he sees God’s. Is it, for Zeus to boast
“See, man, how happy I live, and despair—
That I may be still happier—for thy use!”
265 If this were so, we could not thank our Lord,
As hearts beat on to doing: ’tis not so—
Malice it is not. Is it carelessness?
Still, no. If care—where is the sign, I ask—
And get no answer: and agree in sum,
270 O king, with thy profound discouragement,
Who seest the wider but to sigh the more.
Most progress is most failure! thou sayest well.
The last point now:—thou dost except a case—
Holding joy not impossible to one
275 With artist-gifts—to such a man as I—
Who leave behind me living works indeed;
For, such a poem, such a painting lives.
What? dost thou verily trip upon a word,
Confound the accurate view of what joy is
280 (Caught somewhat clearer by my eyes than thine)
With feeling joy? confound the knowing how
And showing how to live (my faculty)
With actually living?—Otherwise
Where is the artist’s vantage o’er the king?
285 Because in my great epos I display
How divers men young, strong, fair, wise, can act—
Is this as though I acted? if I paint,
Carve the young Phoebus, am I therefore young?
Methinks I’m older that I bowed myself
290 The many years of pain that taught me art!
Indeed, to know is something, and to prove
How all this beauty might be enjoyed, is more:
But, knowing nought, to enjoy is something too.
Yon rower with the moulded muscles there
295 Lowering the sail, is nearer it than I.
I can write love-odes—thy fair slave’s an ode.
I get to sing of love, when grown too grey
For being beloved: she turns to that young man
The muscles all a-ripple on his back.
300 I know the joy of kingship: well—thou art king!
“But,” sayest thou—(and I marvel, I repeat,
To find thee tripping on a mere word) “what
Thou writest, paintest, stays: that does not die:
Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,
305 And Æschylus, because we read his plays!”
Why, if they live still, let them come and take
Thy slave in my despite—drink from thy cup—
Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive?
Say rather that my fate is deadlier still,—
310 In this, that every day my sense of joy
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
In power and insight) more enlarged, more keen;
While every day my hairs fall more and more,
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase—
315 The horror quickening still from year to year,
The consummation coming past escape
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy—
When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
Being present still to mock in men’s mouths,
320 Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou,
I, I, the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so over much,
Shall sleep in my urn. It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
325 Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us,
That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait
330 On purpose to make sweet the life at large—
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death
We burst there as the worm into the fly,
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But, no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and, alas!
335 He must have done so—were it possible!
Live long and happy, and in that thought die,
Glad for what was. Farewell. And for the rest,
I cannot tell thy messenger aright
Where to deliver what he bears of thine
340 To one called Paulus—we have heard his fame
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him—
I know not, nor am troubled much to know,
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
345 Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all.
He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write.
350 Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;
And (as I gathered from a bystander)
Their doctrines could be held by no sane man.
Epigraph. The quotation is from Acts xvii 28. In ad 51 Paul, having been driven to Athens from Thessalonika by the hostility of the Jews, meets ‘certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks’, who invite him to expound his new philosophy on the Areopagus. Paul attempts to persuade the philosophers that they worship the Christian God without being aware of it: ‘God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands … For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring’ (xvii 24–8). The last phrase comes from the Phaenomena of the Hellenistic poet Aratus, which opens with the lines: ‘Let us begin with Zeus, whom we mortals never leave unspoken. / For every street, every market-place is full of Zeus. / Even the sea and the harbour are full of this deity. / Everywhere everyone is indebted to Zeus. / For we are indeed his offspring’. In ‘The Apostle and the Poet: Paul and Aratus’, R. Faber suggests that Paul might have known Aratus’ work through the work of Aristobulus, a Jewish writer of the second century bc (Clarion xlii [1993] 291–304). Paul’s was the first of many attempts to find corroboration for the Christian revelation in classical Greek literature and philosophy. A notable example is Clement of Alexandria, whose Stromateis ransacks the Hellenic corpus for anticipations of and parallels to Christian doctrine, including some of the fragments of Empedocles. (On the significance of Empedocles for the poem as a whole, see above.) Note that the poem begins with a quotation from the ‘mere barbarian Jew’ whom Cleon disparages at the end (see ll. 343–5). 1–4. Cleon and Protos are fictional. Turner notes that ‘Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary (first published 1788) lists Cleons of many professions, including a general, a sculptor, an orator, a commentator, and a tyrant’ (p. 373); and Ohio adds that ‘Byron, in “Childish Recollections,” gave the name Cleon to a college friend of noble character (ll. 325–40)’. Cp. Aristophanes’ Apology (1875) 3302. sprinkled isles: cp. Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk 2: ‘the scattered islands of the Cyclades’ (tr. A. D. Melville, OUP [1986], p. 32). Both Ohio and Turner suggest, almost certainly rightly, that ‘sprinkled isles’ is simply a translation of Sporades. B. may also be recalling Byron’s famous song ‘The isles of Greece’ from canto II of Don Juan.
4. Protos] Protus (1865–88). The revision brings the name closer to the Protus who gives his name to another of the M & W poems (see III 635), although he is a weakling from a later period of the eastern Empire at Constantinople. Tyranny: ‘Absolute monarchy imperiously administered’ (J.). The Greek ‘tyrannos’, although it underlies modern ‘tyrant’, means only a non-hereditary ruler, such as Oedipus, although B. would have been conscious of Shelley’s rendition of Oedipus Tyrannos as Swellfoot the Tyrant, with reference to King George III as a tyrant in the modern sense.
7. unlades: ‘To discharge (a cargo, etc.) from a ship’ (OED).
10. Royal: crimson-coloured.
13. at once my nation’s work and gift: either ‘the work of my countrymen, who gave it to me as a gift’ or ‘a craft native to my country, which is also a “gift” or talent’.
15. lyric woman: a woman given to singing; cp. Grammarian 34 (p. 591), the address to EBB. (‘O lyric love!’) in Ring i 1391, and Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) 186: ‘Strangers, greet the lyric girl!’ crocus vest: a garment decorated or embroidered with crocus-flowers. Crocus is a name for saffron, but the vest cannot be saffron-coloured (see next note); it is also the name for a coarse cloth, but this seems equally inappropriate since the context suggests Protos’ lavish generosity.
16. sea-wools: ‘wools dyed with sea-purple (Greek haliporphuros, from the murex)’; Turner’s gloss is esp. plausible in view of the extended allusion to the murex in Popularity (p. 446).
17. the strainer: a reference to the ‘small cup-like utensils of silver or bronze’ used for removing the dregs from good-quality wines in classical antiquity; see ‘Vinum’ in William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (2 vols., 1870).
18. bettered: improved, made of even higher quality.
21. joy: a key term in Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna and his 1853 Preface; see head-note. See also the extensive use of the word in Sordello: e.g. vi 259–324 (I 732–6).
23–5. Cp. the defence of poetry in bk. i of EBB.’s Aurora Leigh: ‘while common men / Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine, / And dust the flaunty carpets of the world / For kings to walk on, or our president, / The poet suddenly will catch them up / With his voice like thunder’ (ll. 869–74). See headnote, Sources.
26–36. Cleon praises Protos for realizing that sovereignty is not an end in itself, but that ‘the use of life’ is to acquire knowledge. He illustrates this by means of an extended metaphor, the building of a tower: through all the difficulties of its construction, the ‘architect’ (Protos) has kept in mind not just the material accomplishment of his design but its ultimate purpose, which is to enable him to ‘look out to the east’ (the traditional source of wisdom). B. may have intended a dramatic irony in Cleon’s emphasis on ‘the sun’ (l. 36): as so often in the poem, Cleon puts his hand without realizing it on the key which would unlock his despair (belief in Christ as the son of God). Cleon’s choice of metaphor has ominous associations: in the Bible the building of the tower of Babel (Genesis xi 1–9) is an image of overweening human pride; it is the incompleteness of Giotto’s bell-tower in Old Pictures (see headnote, p. 408) which saves it from this judgement. Cleon returns to the tower metaphor in ll. 231 ff. in a passage which suggests that the view from its top is not so enticing after all.
37–8. on thy festival / To pour libation: Cleon comes close here to saying that he will worship Protos as a god; cp. Protus 8–9 (III 637). See also next note.
41–2. Cleon’s phrasing is equivocal at this point in the poem; since he does not in fact believe in the possibility of a life after death, he finds a way of wishing Protos a godlike fate which may, or may not, involve the survival of his personal consciousness. The ‘element of calm’ might suggest the happiness of the abode of the Greek gods on Mount Olympus, untroubled by human cares (Turner [p. 373] cites Iliad xxiv 526 and Lucretius, De rerum natura v 82); but an ‘eventual element of calm’ rather suggests the peace of oblivion. Zeus ‘lives the most, / Within the eventual element of calm’ because he, as king of the gods, is supremely carefree; B. may have been aware of Empedocles’ comment that the wise ‘arise as gods highest in honour, sharing with other immortals their hearth and their table, without part in human sorrows or weariness’ (Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis V, 122, 3, in G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield [eds.], The Pre-Socratic Philosophers [Cambridge 1983] 317). Out of courtesy (mixed with condescension) Cleon allows Protos to believe that he might one day share this state, but once he decides to tell Protos the whole truth of human life as he perceives it (see l. 181) he makes clear that for him this is an illusory hope.
44–61. Cp. Ring x 1702–4: ‘But I, of body as of soul complete, / A gymnast at the games, philosopher / I’ the schools, who painted, and made music …’ The speaker is Euripides, as imagined by the Pope. B. had intended, at the beginning of his career, to work in all the arts: see the unpublished ‘preface’ he wrote for Pauline (p. 2).
47–50. Cp. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) v 201–8: ‘That in the name of all inspirèd souls, / From Homer the great Thunderer, from the voice / That roars along the bed of Jewish song … from those loftiest notes / Down to the low and wren-like warblings, made / For cottagers and spinners at the wheel’, noting its source in Twelfth Night: the ‘old and plain song’ which ‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun … Do use to chant’ (IV ii 42–5).
47. epos: an epic poem; cp. Aurora Leigh v 155, and Imperante Augusto Natus Est (Asolando, 1889) 12. plates of gold: the ‘plates’ would be thin tablets, incised with text; such (small) tablets have been found in tombs, but no parallel can be found in antiquity for this extravagant method of preserving a literary work, including that of Homer. The phrase ‘plates of gold’ in fact suggests a more modern source, the ‘golden plates’ on which Joseph Smith claimed to have received the Book of Mormon in 1827. According to Smith (in the so-called ‘Wentworth Letter’, publ. 1842), ‘In this important and interesting book the history of ancient America is unfolded, from its first settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel, at the confusion of languages to the beginning of the fifth century of the Christian Era … This book also tells us that our Savior made His appearance unto this continent after His resurrection; that He planted the Gospel here in all its fulness, and richness, and power, and blessing.’ Smith’s claim that these plates had been inscribed in antiquity was ridiculed on historical grounds. Knowledge of the Mormons could have come to B. from books and journal articles, or from American acquaintances in Florence and Rome; during the Brownings’ lengthy stay in Rome in the winter of 1853–54, EBB. ‘expressed a desire “to read about the Mormons” ’ to her friend Mary Brotherton (EBB to Arabella ii 183).
48. the little chaunt] the little chant (1863–88, except 18632, which agrees with 1855). Both spellings were current in the first half of the 19th century.
50. haul their nets] haul their net (1865–88).
51. phare: lighthouse; this spelling, as distinct from ‘Pharos’, was uncommon by B.’s time: all OED examples for the nineteenth century are his. B. has ‘snowy phares’ at Paracelsus v 367 (I 286), and he also uses the word in his letter to EBB. of 11 Feb. 1845: ‘like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea’ (Correspondence x 70).
53. Poecile: B. wrote to Amelia Edwards on 14 Jan. 1879: ‘Poecile … means a “variegated place” anywhere—primarily at Athens where a gallery was so called from the paintings it was adorned with,—and afterwards, any such gallery—applicable therefore to one in Cleon’s island—wherever that may have been’ (Somerville College Oxford MS). He was responding to the erroneous gloss in her notes to Cleon in A Poetry-Book of Modern Poets, consisting of Songs & Sonnets, Odes & Lyrics (Leipzig 1878) 326. The original gallery was the Stoa Poecile in Athens, painted by Polygnotus of Thasos (5th century bc) and others; as Thomas points out, it was from this ‘porch or covered colonnade’ that the ‘Stoics’ took their name (Thomas 64). Cp. Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) 2697, where the spelling ‘Poikilé’ conforms to a (supposedly) more correct system of transliterating Greek names; B.’s spelling here is rec. by OED from 1819. o’er-storied: decorated all over with scenes from history or legend. Given that mortality is a principal theme of the poem, there may be an echo of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’: ‘Can storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?’ (ll. 41–2). B. uses the word in Luria ii 75–6: ‘their triumphal arch / Or storied pillar’ (II 399) and Ring x 468–9: ‘unwary folk / Who gaze at storied portal, statued spire’.
55–6. See headnote, Composition and date. Page’s theory of human proportion, first put forward in his New Geometrical Mode of Measuring the Proportions of the Human Body (1860), was based on Revelation xxi 17: ‘And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.’ Page derived from this the rule that ‘the figure in height and breadth is divided by twelve’ (Scribner’s Monthly [April 1879] 895), and that the human figure with arms outstretched could therefore be contained within a grid of 144 squares. If Cleon’s theory of human proportion coincides with this it would represent another unrecognized anticipation of the Christian revelation on his part. See also B.’s letter to Harriet Hosmer of 16 Nov. 1854: ‘I carry in my mind all I can of his doctrine about the true proportions of the human figure, and test it by whatever strikes me as beautiful, or the reverse’ (Harriet Hosmer, ed. Cornelia Carr [1913] 45).
57–9. The most important classical work on the soul is Aristotle’s De Anima. In ch. ii, Aristotle lists previous definitions (incl. Empedocles’), and uses the word ‘absurd’ of most of them.
60. moods: more usually ‘modes’: the various musical scales which originated with the Greeks and survived until the 16th century in European music. In what sense the modes could be ‘combined’ is not clear: one sense might be, ‘drawn together, systematised’, or, anachronistically, ‘made into a single scale’, which is what took place in the tonal system which succeeded the modal.
63. our seventeen islands: cp. l. 1n. There is no group of Greek islands numbering seventeen; the Cyclades are 39 in number, the Sporades 11 and the Dodecanese 12.
64–72. Cp. Arnold’s ‘Preface’ to his 1853 Poems: ‘Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido,—what modern poem presents personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of an “exhausted past”?’ See next note, and headnote, Sources, pp. 557–8.
73–94. The sense is that in both the individual life and the life of humankind as a whole no achievement or individual ‘effaces’ a predecessor; rather they all lie separately, as on a plane surface, and contribute towards the overall pattern. The phrasing recalls Arnold’s Empedocles, where the human soul ‘A thousand glimpses wins, / And never sees a whole’ (I ii 84–5), and also the 1853 Preface, in which Arnold argues that Greek poetry is superior to modern poetry because it regards ‘the whole’ rather than ‘the parts’. Cp. also Arnold’s sonnet ‘To a Friend’, in which he describes Sophocles as an ‘even-balanced soul’ who ‘saw life steadily, and saw it whole’ (ll. 9, 12).
73. Yet] For (1863–88).
74. With ‘this sequence’, Oxford compares B.’s comments on evolution (mentioning Cleon) in the letter to Furnivall discussed at l. 202n.
76–8. A familiar sentiment in B.: Turner (p. 374) compares By The Fire-Side 246–50 (p. 475).
82. chequered pavement: cp. ll. 12–13; Adrienne Munich suggests a possible allusion here to George Herbert’s ‘The Church-floor’: ‘Mark you the floor? that square and speckled stone, / Which looks so firm and strong, / Is Patience: // And th’other black and grave, wherewith each one / Is checkered all along, / Humility’ (ll. 1–6; ‘Temporality in “Cleon” ’, BIS vi [1978] 130).
83. rhomb: ‘A plane figure having four equal sides and the opposite angles equal (two being acute and two obtuse). Also, a lozenge-shaped object or formation’ (OED). Cp. Milton, Paradise Regained iii 309: ‘See how in warlike muster they appear, / In Rhombs and wedges, and half moons, and wings’.
84. lozenge: ‘A plane rectilineal figure, having four equal sides and two acute and two obtuse angles; a rhomb, “diamond” ’ (OED). trapezoid: ‘A quadrilateral figure no two of whose sides are parallel’ (OED).
89–92. Referring to the idea of ‘combination’ which B. had found in Dante’s De Monarchia (see headnote to Sordello I 366), and possibly also influenced by Empedoclean cosmogony, which supposed that first the separate limbs of the human and animal creation appeared, only later being joined into composite forms (see e.g. Simplicius, in De Caelo 586.7). These lines, and ll. 126–37, evidently refer to contemporary discussions of evolution in the decade before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859); some ambiguous passages in Empedocles’ own work have led modern commentators to perceive him as a proto-Darwinian.
92. Or where] For where (1868–88).
99–111. The simile here is based on the Greek discovery that air, although invisible, has the properties of a substance, and might again specifically derive from Empedocles, who was the first to distinguish air from void in an experiment using a water-vessel; see Aristotle, De Respiro [Loeb ed.] 473a15: ‘[Respiration is] just as when a maid plays with a water-clock of gleaming bronze. When placing on her shapely hand the channel of the tube she dips it into the delicate body of water silver white, not then does the shower flow into the vessel, but the mass of air pressing from within on the crowded holes checks it, until she sets free the dense stream. Then the air gives way and the water duly enters. So in the same way, when the water lies in the depths of the bronze vessel, the passage and channel being blocked by the human hand, the air outside craving entrance keeps the water back about the gates of the resounding channel, holding fast its surface, until the maid lets go with her hand; then back again in the reverse way, as the air rushes in, the water duly flows away.’
100. a sphere: Cleon refers to a spherical vessel, but the sphere is also a prime image of perfection in Greek thought: B. may have had in mind Parmenides’ resolution of the general order of things into the form of a sphere (see Simplicius in Physica 146.5). Cp. Old Pictures 133–6n. (pp. 419–20).
109–111. Cp. Empedocles: ‘There is no part of the whole that is empty or over-full’ (quoted Aetius, Doxographia Graeci 1.18.2). Empedocles accepted Parmenides’ conclusion that there are no gaps in Nature, and that ‘emptiness’ is therefore impossible, but allows for change, which Parmenides excludes.
112–27. And thus … a dream: cp. Arnold, Empedocles I ii 377–86: ‘“Changeful till now, we still / Look’d on to something new; / Let us, with changeless will, / Henceforth look on to you, / To find with you the joy we in vain here require!” // Fools! That so often here / Happiness mock’d our prayer, / I think, might make us fear / A like event elsewhere; / Make us, not fly to dreams, but moderate desire’.
113. in its life] in our life (1863–88).
115–22. Cleon’s ‘fiction’ is of course invented, but some of its themes resemble those of B.’s own Sordello, esp. the problem of representing ‘the Simultaneous and the Sole’ by means of ‘the Successive and the Many’ (ii 594–5, I 500).
115. imaged: three senses are possible: ‘imagined, conceived’; ‘represented, projected in images’; ‘represented in writing’. B. uses the word again in A Grammarian 69 (p. 593) where the sense is more straightforward: ‘Image the whole, then execute the parts’. In EBB.’s A Drama of Exile (1844) the reverence shown by each angel who greets a redeemed human soul stems from the fact that ‘upon your hands and feet / He images his Master’s wounds’ (ll. 2098–9).
126–7. And prove … a dream: this seems to rule out the pantheist implications of the passage from Aratus quoted in the note to the Epigraph (p. 565). For passages in which B. seems to support this possibility, see Paracelsus v 627–66 (I 296–8) and Epilogue (DP, 1864) 66–101 (esp. ll. 99–101).
126. the latent, everywhere] the latent everywhere (1868–88).
131. culture: cultivation.
132. savage-tasted: combining the senses of ‘primitive, crude to the taste’ and ‘the food of primitive people’. drupe: in the letter to Amelia Edwards (see l. 53n.), B. responds to her gloss—‘an over-ripe, wrinkled olive’—by suggesting that he might have been mistaken about the meaning of the word: ‘“drupe”,—in accordance with certain paragraphs about horticulture I have happened to read,—I meant for the rude original fruit whence, by cultivation, the improved and refined fruit is obtained—as the apple from the crab, the plum from the sloe—But certainly the original word, both in Greek and Latin, is only used for a “mouldy olive:” its derivation is uncertain,—and I should hardly think it refers to the olive only: I must see farther—if it be worth while!’ (Somerville College Oxford MS). B.’s etymology is correct, but the word in English simply designates ‘a fleshy or pulpy fruit enclosing a stone or nut’ (OED).
134. ‘The flowers become double [in form, size or beauty] through cultivation, and the leaves themselves become flowers’.
136–7.] Refines upon the women of my youth— / Sleeping upon her robe as if on clouds. (H proof).
136.] Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds, (1888).
139. verse like Homer’s] verse like Homer (18632, 1868–88). It is rare for 1868–88 to contain a substantive variant which originates in 18632.
140. Terpander: ‘a lyric poet and musician of Lesbos, 675 bc. It is said that he appeased a tumult at Sparta by the melody and sweetness of his notes. He added three strings to the lyre, which before his time had only four’ (Lemprière). Cp. Christmas-Eve 674 (III 74).
141. Phidias: the most famous of Greek sculptors (c. 490–c. 430 bc). The syntax implies that his friend was a painter; candidates include Polygnotus of Thasos, who was according to EB ‘[the] contemporary, and perhaps the teacher, of Pheidias’, and who ‘painted … in the time of Cimon a picture of the taking of Ilium on the walls of the Stoa Poecile’ (see above l. 53n.).
145. ignored each others’ arts: either B. or Cleon is misinformed here: Phidias was renowned not only for his skill as a sculptor but as a painter and engraver, and according to Pliny opened up new possibilities in metalwork (Oxford Classical Dictionary). each others’ arts] each other’s arts (1884); each other’s art (1888; ‘each other’s’ is evidently a misprint, but was not corrected in 1889).
147–50. Cp. ll. 130–4 above. The statement that ‘the wild flower was the larger’ is puzzling; primitive varieties are almost always smaller than those bred for show. The sense presumably is that the ‘natural’ flower was superior in vigour to its ‘civilized’ successor. Cleon ‘anticipates’ Rousseau’s primitivism, and his contention that civilization is a degenerative force, although Cleon argues for the superiority of modern complex artistry over the ‘primitive’ single-mindedness of antiquity.
151–2. Refer … it is! this may be the line B. had in mind when he replied to John Kenyon’s observations on the proofs of M & W in a letter of 1 Oct. 1855 with the comment: ‘“The whole is with the Gods” as Cleon sums up in one of the things I send you’ (SBC iii [1975] 28–9, and see Appendix C, p. 892).
152–5. which, shall I dare … depreciate: ‘which’ refers back to ‘gift’ and ‘(All pride apart)’ means ‘leaving aside any personal feelings of pride I may have in my art’; Cleon argues that it would show disrespect to the gods for him to undervalue their gift simply on the basis of that gift having come to him by chance.
167. than dost] even than (H proof, but not H proof2).
175–9. Cp. Shakespeare, Sonnet lv (‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme’) and, noting ‘brazen’ in l. 175 and the fact that Protos is a ‘tyrant’ (l. 4), the closing lines of Sonnet cvii: ‘And thou in this shall find thy monument, / When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent’. The image of the tyrant’s ruined statue also recalls that of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. The most famous statue standing on a promontory in the ancient world was the Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the sun-god Helios, destroyed by an earthquake in 226 bc; but B. may have had in mind a famous ode by Horace (I xxviii, ‘Te maris et terrae’), a dramatic monologue addressed by an unnamed speaker (who turns out to be himself a ghost) to the dead philosopher, astronomer and statesman Archytas: ‘Measurer of earth and ocean and numberless sand, / Archytas, you are now confined / near the Matine shore, by a little handful of dust duly sprinkled, / and it profits you nothing to have probed / the dwellings of air and traversed the round vault of heaven / with a mind that was to die’ (ll. 1–6, transl. David West, Horace: The Complete Odes and Epodes, Oxford 1997). Besides being a philosopher and astronomer, Archytas was also (elected) ruler of Tarentum; although the position of his grave links him to Protos, the fate of the philosopher whose transcendent achievements are negated by his ineluctable mortality is applied by Cleon to himself, notably at ll. 308–23.
175. brazen: both ‘made of brass’ and ‘hardened in effrontery’. that o’erlooks] to o’erlook (1868–88).
187–214. If, in … be happy: the idea that in compensation for his lack of animal powers man was given reason is a commonplace in antiquity: cp. Plutarch, Moralia 98d.: ‘Certainly, in so far as chance and Nature’s endowment at birth are concerned, the great majority of brute animals are better off than man. For some are armed with horns, or teeth, or stings, and Empedocles says: “But as for hedgehogs / Growing upon their backs sharp darts of spines stand bristling,” and still others are shod and clad with scales or hair, with claws or horny hoofs. Man alone, as Plato says, “naked, unarmed, with feet unshod, and with no bed to lie in,” has been abandoned by Nature. Yet by one gift all this she mitigates, the gift of reasoning, diligence, and forethought.’ The Christian tradition took up this idea but emphasized man’s pre-eminence over the perfection of the natural world; cp. Milton’s account of the sixth day of creation, in which, after the establishment of the animal kingdom, ‘There wanted yet the master work, the end / Of all yet done; a creature who not prone / And brute as other creatures, but endued / With sanctity of reason, might erect / His stature, and upright with front serene / Govern the rest, self-knowing’ (PL vii 505–10; see also ll. 199–202n.). Milton’s phrase ‘self-knowing’ may refer to the Socratic precept ‘Know thyself ’, but also implies self-consciousness, which is not identical to reason, and which seems to be Cleon’s meaning here. The idea that self-consciousness defines and distinguishes the human goes back to Plato, but was most fully developed in Cartesian and Romantic philosophy; as Coleridge puts it, through self-consciousness ‘we at once identify our being with that of the world without us, and yet place ourselves in contra-distinction to that world’ (The Friend ed. B. E. Rooke [1969] Essay x: i 497). Cp. also Arnold, Empedocles, II 345–54: ‘But mind, but thought— / If these have been the master part of us— / Where will they find their parent element? / What will receive them, who will call them home? / But we shall still be in them, and they in us, / And we shall be the strangers of the world, / And they will be our lords, as they are now; / And keep us prisoners of our consciousness, / And never let us clasp and feel the All / But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.’
187–92. If, in the morning … seen them perfect: Cleon (unwittingly) ‘quotes’ the first chapter of Genesis, in which God views his successive acts of creation and approves of his own handiwork; see e.g. v. 25, the final act of creation before that of man: ‘And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.’ See also ll. 199–202n.
188. recorded, aught perceived] recorded, nay perceived (1865–88).
191. Ere man had yet] Ere man, her last, (1865–88).
195. “Wilt thou] “Shall I (1863–88).
199–202. Cp. Milton, PL vii 501–4: ‘earth in her rich attire / Consummate lovely smiled; air, water, earth, / By fowl, fish, beast, was flown, was swam, was walked / Frequent’. These lines come just before the creation of man, the ‘master work’: see ll. 187–214n. This view of nature refers to an original state of perfection; both Christian and classical accounts of the vicissitudes of physical life emphasize pain as well as pleasure, e.g. Empedocles: ‘at one time, in the maturity of a vigorous life, all the limbs that are the body’s portion come into one under love; at another time again, torn asunder by evil strifes, they wander, each apart, on the shore of life. So it is too for plants, and for fish that live in the water, and for wild animals who have their lairs in the hills, and for the wing-sped gulls’ (Simplicius in Physica 1124.7). Note that Empedocles here conflates man with the animals, where Cleon is distinguishing them; and cp. ll. 309–23 below.
201.] And slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight, (1870, 1872, 1888).
202. life’s mechanics: the process by which individual animals are adapted to their environments. B. cites this phrase in a letter to F. J. Furnivall commenting on his attitude towards Darwinism: ‘[All] that seems proved in Darwin’s scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning: see in Paracelsus the progressive development from senseless matter to organized, until man’s appearance (Part v). Also in Cleon, see the order of “life’s mechanics,”—and I daresay in many passages of my poetry: for how can one look at Nature as a whole and doubt that, wherever there is a gap, a “link” must be “missing”—through the limited power and opportunity of the looker?’ (11 Oct. 1881, Trumpeter 34).
209. to this scheme] to the scheme (1863–88).
211. within the soul] within his soul (1865–88).
212. intro-active: ‘having the property of acting within, internally active’ (OED, for which this is the first citation).
220. The man] Thus man (1865–88).
223. natural man: again Cleon unwittingly agrees with St Paul in making God the origin of self-consciousness: ‘But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned’ (1 Corinthians ii 14).
224. the sense of sense: i.e. self-consciousness. of sense.”] of sense!” (1872).
225–6. The escape from human knowledge into primitive animal being is the subject of Callicles’ song in Arnold’s Empedocles ii 427–60, where Cadmus and Harmonia are transformed into snakes and ‘[w]holly forget their first sad life … and stray / For ever through the glens, placid and dumb’ (ll. 458, 459–60). The idea of ‘two bright and aged snakes’ basking in the sunshine became a motif of B.’s correspondence with Isa Blagden.
225.] There’s failure in man, only since he left (H proof, but not H proof2).
226. inconscious: alternative spelling of ‘unconscious’: very rare by B.’s time, but used by him nine times, as against 18 for ‘unconscious’. From these instances, it would appear that B. uses ‘unconscious’ to mean simply ‘unaware’, ‘inconscious’ to mean ‘ideationally blank, nescient’, but the distinction is not invariable.
228. A spirit … that life] Man’s spirit … man’s life (1865–88).
231–4. Cp. the opening of Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’ (1842 text): ‘I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, / Wherein at ease for aye to dwell … A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnish’d brass / I chose. The rangèd ramparts bright / From level meadow-bases of deep grass / Suddenly scaled the light’. The soul is later described as ‘Joying to feel herself alive, / Lord over nature, Lord of the visible earth, / Lord of the senses five; / Communing with herself ’ (ll. 178–81) and, in her ‘God-like isolation’, despising ‘the darkening droves of swine / That range on yonder plain’ (ll. 199, 201–2). Tennyson’s ‘pleasure-house’ is itself indebted to the ‘stately pleasure-dome’ in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. The ‘Watch-tower’ evokes several biblical passages, notably Isaiah xxi 4–5: ‘My heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me: the night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me. Prepare the table, watch in the watch-tower’; the ‘treasure-fortress’ may allude to Jesus’s injunction in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth … But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven’ (Matthew vi 19–20).
235–72. Cp. the Stoical philosophy outlined in Arnold’s Resignation: To Fausta (see headnote, Sources) 215–22: ‘The World in which we live and move / Outlasts aversion, outlasts love: / Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, / Remorse, grief, joy:—and were the scope / Of these affections wider made, / Man still would see, and see dismay’d, / Beyond his passion’s widest range / Far regions of eternal change.’
239–42. there’s … abroad: cp. Pauline 268–80n. (p. 25).
243. you climbed] thou climbedst (1863–68); thou clombst (1870–88).
249. It skills not:] It skills not! (1868–88).
251–60. For an analogous use of this image of the fountain, cp. Mr. Sludge 1367–71 (p. 843): ‘Young, you’ve force / Wasted like well-streams: old,—oh, then indeed, / Behold a labyrinth of hydraulic pipes / Through which you’d play off wondrous water-work; / Only, no water left to feed their play!’
252. Naiad: a statue in the form of a nymph; in Greek religion, Naiads were ‘inferior deities who presided over rivers, springs, wells, and fountains’ (Lemprière). the water-spurt] the water-bow (1863–88).
260. straight thread] thin thread (1863–88).
262–4. Cp. Old Pictures 89–104 (pp. 416–17) and l. 288n.
268. where is the sign, I ask—] where is the sign? I ask, (1865–88). The desire for a ‘sign’ is repeatedly condemned by Jesus, e.g. Mark viii 11–12: ‘And the Pharisees came forth, and began to question with him, seeking of him a sign from heaven, tempting him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, Why doth this generation seek after a sign? verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto this generation’; cp. also Matthew xii 39: ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign’.
271. Cp. Arnold, ‘Resignation’, l. 214: ‘Not deep the Poet sees, but wide’; and see headnote.
273–300. Cp. Aurora Leigh v 434–501, esp. ll. 474–6: ‘To have our books / Appraised by love, associated with love, / While we sit loveless!’. Cp. also Last Ride 67–89 (III 289–90) and Grammarian (p. 586).
278. B. continues to put biblical phrases in Cleon’s mouth: ‘verily’ is esp. associated with Jesus’s formulaic phrase ‘verily I say unto you’; ‘trip upon a word’ recalls 1 Peter ii 8: ‘a stone of stumbling … even to them that stumble at the word’.
280. by my eyes] with my eyes (H proof).
288. carve the young Phoebus: ‘Phoebus’ is Phoebus Apollo, god of the sun and of poetry, and the type of male beauty; B. may have in mind the famous statue of the ‘Apollo Belvedere’ in the Vatican, long believed to be a pre-eminent example of ancient sculpture. In Old Pictures the perfection of Greek art is seen as oppressive because it sets an unattainable standard for human beings (see ll. 89–104, pp. 416–17); here the contrast has a Platonic inflection, since the work of art, no matter how perfect, is at one remove from the real, so that no true identification between it and its creator is possible.
304. Sappho: a famous female poet of the late 7th to early 6th century bc. In her case especially, and to a certain extent that of Aeschylus in the following line, Protos’ statement has an element of dramatic irony: few of Sappho’s poems actually survive except as fragments, and nearly all of Aeschylus’s plays are lost.
305. Æschylus: the earliest of the major Greek tragedians (525–456 BC).
309–17. Cp. Arnold, Empedocles I ii 332–6: ‘But still, as we proceed / The mass swells more and more / Of volumes yet to read, / Of secrets yet to explore. / Our hair grows grey, our eyes are dimm’d, our heat is tamed’.
309. Say rather] Say wiselier (H proof).
312. In power] By power (1863–88).
313. my hairs fall] my hair falls (1872), a rare example of a substantive variant unique to this ed.
320. in the phrase] in the praise (1888).
323–35. With this section cp. Empedocles on Etna, I ii 367–81; and contrast Rabbi Ben Ezra 19–24 (pp. 653–4).
323. sleep in my urn: cp. Tennyson, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, l. 113, where the speakers refer to ‘those old faces of our infancy’ as ‘Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!’ Note that in using the image of death as sleep, Cleon flinches from affirming the certainty of his annihilation. Cp. also Byron, Don Juan iii 88: ‘to what straits old Time reduces / Frail man, when paper—even a rag like this, / Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his!’ Shall sleep] Sleep (H proof, 1888), a very rare example of agreement between these two texts.
325–8. Harrison (see headnote, Sources) compares Keats’s ‘favourite speculation’ that ‘we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated’ (letter to Bailey of 22 Nov. 1817). 328. forces us,] emended from ‘forces us.’ in 1855 in agreement with all other eds.
330. to make sweet] to make prized (1868–88).
337–53. And, for the rest … no sane man: Protos, who is anxious about the afterlife, is evidently prepared to consult not just the famous and respectable Cleon but the lowly representatives of a new religion of which he has heard rumours. Cleon himself is hazy about the details of this obscure Jewish sect: his doubt as to whether Paul is identical to Christ (ll. 340–1) stems, as Adam Roberts remarks in his edition (Robert Browning [Oxford 1997] 766), from the fact that ‘Christus’ is not strictly speaking a proper name, but a title (‘the Anointed One’). The fact that the new religion is spread by Jews and ‘slaves’ (l. 350) would increase Cleon’s distaste (these slaves contrast with those at the beginning of the poem); but he is mistaken in calling Paul a ‘barbarian’ (l. 343), since he was in fact a Roman citizen and made great play with this status (see e.g. Acts xvi 37–9, xxii 25–9).
340. one called Paulus] him called Paulus (marked as a change in H proof, and included in the lists of errata which B. sent to his American publisher James T. Fields (B to Fields 194) and to D. G. Rossetti (LH 42), but not carried out in 1855 or any subsequent ed.). Paulus: i.e. St Paul.
341. ‘If Christ be not the same person [as Paul]’. Once again, Cleon is made to speak more than he knows; ironically he is ‘quoting’ Paul himself, in a passage which also recalls the poem’s epigraph: ‘For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians iii 26–8).
344. one circumcised] and circumcised (marked as a change in H proof, and included in the lists cited in l. 340n., but not carried out in 1855 or any subsequent ed.).
347. such an one] such a one (H proof).
348. impose: ‘take us in, hoodwink us’.