Text and publication
First publ. DP, 28 May 1864; repr. 18642, 1865, 1868, 1872, 1888, the penultimate poem in the volume. The MS, part of the printer’s copy for DP, is at Morgan. The pages of the bound MS, from the title page of this poem to the end of the Epilogue, are numbered 1–11 in ink, and lack the pencil numbering of the rest of the MS, which suggests that they were added at a late stage. The MS is a very clean copy, with only two cancelled readings, and one variant from 1864. With just one punctuation variant in subsequent editions, this is the least-revised poem in the DP volume.
Composition and date
The visit to the Morgue commemorated in the poem is said to have taken place ‘Seven years since’ (l. 1), during a visit to Paris which coincided with the ‘baptism of your Prince’ (l. 3). This is a reference to the baptism of Napoleon III’s son, Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph (usually referred to as the Prince Imperial), which took place on 14 June 1856. EBB. witnessed the public celebrations, but did not herself participate in the festivities: ‘The cortège was magnificent—but not a carriage is permitted—so I stay at home’ (Fitzwilliam Museum MS). This date of 1856 is confirmed by the reference in ll. 7–8 to the Paris Congress, the meeting of Europe’s great powers which brought the Crimean War to a formal end (see also ll. 7–8n.). The chronology of B.’s poem is, however, slightly confused, as the Congress ended on 16 Apr. 1856, nearly two months before the baptism of the Prince Imperial; the speaker may be confusing his memory of the baptism with his recollection of the public celebrations for the Prince’s birth, which happened during the Congress on 16 Mar. 1856.
These allusions would, therefore, suggest a date of 1863 for the composition of the poem. DeVane speculates that the poem might have been written at Pornic in Brittany, where B. spent part of the summer of 1863 between late July and early September, but there is no direct evidence for this.
Setting
The Morgue mentioned in the poem stood in 1856 on the quai du Marché-Neuf on the Île de la Cité in Paris. There were already at this stage plans for its demolition as part of the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann; see, e.g., A.-J. Meindre, Histoire de Paris et de son influence en Europe (Paris 1855), p. 405. It was not, however, demolished until 1867, by which time a new and larger Morgue had been constructed behind Notre Dame (see The Times Thursday, 14 Jan. 1864, p. 10). Both DeVane (Handbook 313) and Thomas (pp. 32–3) mistakenly identify this later Morgue as the one referred to in the poem; the picture which accompanies Thomas’s entry on the poem is in fact of the earlier Morgue.
Sources and influences
The function of the Morgue is succinctly described by Mrs Gore in her Paris in 1841 (London 1842): ‘On the Quai du Marché Neuf, adjoining the Parvis de Notre Dame, rising from the bed of the river, stands a small stone mansion of simple form, yet never viewed without awe—La Morgue,—in which are deposited the bodies of all persons found dead in the city or river, till claimed by their relatives. The bodies thus found are stripped and placed in a current of air on leaden trays, with a small jet of water trickling over them,—the clothes of each individual being suspended above, to facilitate recognition. The public is admitted to view them through a grating; and if not claimed, the bodies are subjected to anatomical purposes, and buried at the cost of government. It will readily be imagined that scenes of the most heartrending nature are constantly occurring at the Morgue’ (pp. 125–6). As Firmin Maillard noted in 1860, the Morgue became a source of fascination to British visitors in particular: ‘Les étrangers la visitent, particulièrement les Anglais: ceux-ci ne se contentent pas de la Salle d’Exposition, et, si on les y autorisait, ils visiteraient l’intérieur jusque dans ses moindres détails’ [Foreigners visit it, the English in particular: these last do not content themselves with the ‘Salle d’Exposition’, and, if they were permitted to do so, would undertake a minute examination of the interior.] (Cited in Paul Veyriras, ‘Visiteurs Britanniques à la Morgue de Paris au Dix-Neuvième Siècle’, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiennes 15 (April 1982), 52.) One such visitor was Charles Dickens; in The Uncommercial Traveller (1861), he writes that he is ‘dragged by invisible force into the Morgue’ whenever he is in Paris:
I never want to go there, but am always pulled there. One Christmas Day, when I would rather have been anywhere else, I was attracted in, to see an old grey man lying all alone on his cold bed, with a tap of water turned on over his grey hair, and running, drip, drip, drip, down his wretched face until it got to the corner of his mouth, where it took a turn, and made him look sly. One New Year’s Morning (by the same token, the sun was shining outside, and there was a mountebank balancing a feather on his nose, within a yard of the gate), I was pulled in again to look at a flaxen-haired boy of eighteen, with a heart hanging on his breast—‘from his mother,’ was engraven on it—who had come into the net across the river, with a bullet wound in his fair forehead and his hands cut with a knife, but whence or how was a blank mystery. This time, I was forced into the same dread place, to see a large dark man whose disfigurement by water was in a frightful manner comic, and whose expression was that of a prize-fighter who had closed his eyelids under a heavy blow, but was going immediately to open them, shake his head, and ‘come up smiling.’ Oh what this large dark man cost me in that bright city! (pp. 94–5)
The Morgue also appeared in a number of nineteenth-century French and English literary texts. B. referred to its popularity with the French ‘Convulsive School’ as early as 1834 in a letter to Monclar: ‘While on the subject of abortions let me observe, that your Convulsive School at Paris seems to be pretty nearly “done up”—Balzac, Sue &c. Our Journals assure us that Horrors are at a discount, & Puppyism “no go”—that you may see, here a dramatist ey[e]ing longingly the Slaughter-house & La Morgue, his quondam Academus’ (5–7 Dec. 1834, Correspondence iii 110). One of its most famous appearances in English literature is the closing scene of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), in which Count Fosco’s body is exposed at the Morgue after being pulled out of the Seine.
In 1856 the Brownings’ friend Eliza Ogilvy, an American whom they met in Florence, published Poems of Ten Years, a copy of which she presented to EBB. (EBB to Ogilvy 135n.). One of the poems is called ‘La Morgue’; it contrasts the beauty of the Seine and the sights of Paris with the sights to be seen at the Morgue, where the drowned lie on ‘brassy beds where living men ne’er lay’, their identities almost completely erased:
Ah who had known them as they were? not sister, no, nor wife,
Not child who might have clomb their knees, not friend who shared their life,
The seething waves had worked their will upon each senseless weft,
A dim resemblance of our race was all that they had left.
Athwart a grated aperture the light upon them streamed
Revealing strangest lineaments such as were never dreamed,
And from the crowd of passengers a few turned back to gaze
And shuddering looked and crossed themselves and hastened on their ways.
The loneness of abandonment for grief was like a claim,
Yet no one knew their parentage, their history, or their name;
None guessed what once had been those forms so purpled by decay,
Or generous lovers of their kind or savage beasts of prey. (ll. 17–32)
With the second stanza, contrast B.’s boast in ll. 15–18; the last stanza may have prompted his speculative treatment of the three men’s life-stories in ll. 37–54.
In a letter of 18 Oct. 1849 from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to his brother William Michael, headed ‘Proem at the Paris Station’, Rossetti claims to have come across the Morgue ‘In passing by’; he sees the corpse of a man ‘Who had been stabbed and tumbled in the Seine / Where he had stayed some days’. Rossetti’s speculation focuses not on the identity of the victim but of the murderer:
Now very likely, he who did the job
Was standing among those who stood with us
To look upon the corpse. You fancy him—
Smoking an early pipe, and watching, as
An artist, the effect of his last work.
Although the poem was not published until 1886, when it appeared as ‘The Paris Railway-Station’, B. may have known it; he had become friendly with Rossetti during the early 1850s, and the two men spent time together in London and Paris during 1855–6 and again in the period following B.’s return to London in 1861.
Parallels in B.
The poem forms part of a group in DP set in France ( James Lee [p. 665], Gold Hair, Dîs Aliter Visum [p. 688]), though its specific mention of a public building in Paris looks back to Respectability in M & W (p. 345). Anecdotal poems founded on events in B.’s personal life (whether or not we take the speaker to be a self-portrait) are exceptionally rare: cp. Guardian Angel (III 13) and Memorabilia (p. 553). Like Guardian Angel, the poem contains poignant allusions to EBB., though here presented obliquely (as in the reference to Italian politics in ll. 6–7, and to Vaucluse in l. 12). If the speaker is identified with B., ll. 37–54 would represent an unusually direct and concrete statement of his political and ethical opinions; his only unequivocally personal testimony of political affiliation, the sonnet ‘Why I Am a Liberal’ (1885), is couched in much more abstract terms. The poem’s rejection of the doctrine of eternal punishment was reiterated in the late poem Ixion ( Jocoseria, 1883).
“We shall soon lose a celebrated building.”
Paris Newspaper.
1
No, for I’ll save it! Seven years since,
I passed through Paris, stopped a day
To see the baptism of your Prince;
Saw, made my bow, and went my way:
5 Walking the heat and headache off,
I took the Seine-side, you surmise,
Thought of the Congress, Gortschakoff,
Cavour’s appeal and Buol’s replies,
So sauntered till—what met my eyes?
2
10 Only the Doric little Morgue!
The dead-house where you show your drowned:
Petrarch’s Vaucluse makes proud the Sorgue,
Your Morgue has made the Seine renowned.
One pays one’s debt in such a case;
15 I plucked up heart and entered,—stalked,
Keeping a tolerable face
Compared with some whose cheeks were chalked:
Let them! No Briton’s to be baulked!
First came the silent gazers; next,
20 A screen of glass, we’re thankful for;
Last, the sight’s self, the sermon’s text,
The three men who did most abhor
Their life in Paris yesterday,
So killed themselves: and now, enthroned
25 Each on his copper couch, they lay
Fronting me, waiting to be owned.
I thought, and think, their sin’s atoned.
4
Poor men, God made, and all for that!
The reverence struck me; o’er each head
30 Religiously was hung its hat,
Each coat dripped by the owner’s bed,
Sacred from touch: each had his berth,
His bounds, his proper place of rest,
Who last night tenanted on earth
35 Some arch, where twelve such slept abreast,—
Unless the plain asphalte seemed best.
5
How did it happen, my poor boy?
You wanted to be Buonaparte
And have the Tuileries for toy,
40 And could not, so it broke your heart?
You, old one by his side, I judge,
Were, red as blood, a socialist,
A leveller! Does the Empire grudge
You’ve gained what no Republic missed?
45 Be quiet, and unclench your fist!
And this—why, he was red in vain,
Or black,—poor fellow that is blue!
What fancy was it, turned your brain?
Oh, women were the prize for you!
50 Money gets women, cards and dice
Get money, and ill-luck gets just
The copper couch and one clear nice
Cool squirt of water o’er your bust,
The right thing to extinguish lust!
7
55 It’s wiser being good than bad;
It’s safer being meek than fierce:
It’s fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
60 That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can’t end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.
Epigraph: the ‘Paris newspaper’ in question has not been identified.
1–3. Seven years since … the baptism of your Prince: see headnote, Composition.
7–8. The Paris Congress, which took place between 25 Feb. and 16 Apr. 1856, brought the Crimean War to a formal conclusion. Prince Gortschakoff (1789–1866) was the Russian delegate, while Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810–61) represented the Kingdom of Piedmont at the Congress. He used the occasion to raise awareness of the ‘Italian question’, a strategy which brought him into conflict with Karl Ferdinand Graf von Buol-Schauenstein (1797–1865), the Austrian foreign minister. B. dined with Cavour at Lady Monson’s on 1 April 1856, according to EBB. (EBB to Arabella ii 221). EBB. was a passionate supporter of Italian independence, and the shock of Cavour’s death in 1861 may have hastened her own.
10. Doric little Morgue: the Morgue is described as ‘a plain Doric building’ in Galignani’s New Paris Guide for 1855 (Paris and London 1855), p. 324.
12. Shortly after their marriage, B. and EBB. ‘made a pilgrimage to Vaucluse as became poets’ in the course of their journey to Pisa, and, EBB. wrote in a letter to her sister Arabella, ‘my spirits rose & the enjoyment of the hour spent at the sacred fountain was complete. It stands deep & still & green against a majestic wall of rock, & then falls, boils, breaks[,] foams over the stones, down into the channel of the little river winding away greenly, greenly’ ([16–19 Oct 1846], Correspondence xiv 23–4).
13. has made] ’tis, makes (MS, canc.).
15. stalked: to stalk is ‘To walk with high and superb steps’, and is ‘used commonly in a sense of dislike’ ( J.).
17. whose cheeks were chalked: ‘whose cheeks were as white as if they had been rubbed with chalk’; OED 2b cites Tennyson, The Princess (1847) iv 357–8: ‘Fear / Stared in her eyes, and chalked her face’. were chalked] grew chalked (MS).
18. baulked: ‘Checked, foiled; disappointed’ (OED).
21. the sight’s self: ‘the sight itself’, ‘what people come to see’.
22–4. The three men … killed themselves: Rowena Fowler (‘Blougram’s Wager, Guido’s Odds: Browning, Chance, and Probability’, VP 41.1 [Spring 2003]) argues that these lines relate to ‘those most quoted of all nineteenth-century statistics: the suicide figures’ and to the individual’s anxiety about becoming a ‘statistical subject’: ‘Two hundred and forty people, in an average year, drowned in the Seine, most of them apparently suicides … Although Browning’s poem suggests that the three people had killed themselves “yesterday,” the law of averages suggests that three bodies would typically represent three or four days’ drownings’ (pp. 13–14 and p. 26n.18).
25. copper couch: Mrs Gore describes the inclined slabs on which the bodies were placed as ‘leaden’; Eliza Ogilvy has ‘brassy’ (see headnote); no other source identifies them as ‘copper’.
26. Fronting: facing; with the sense of ‘confronting’, ‘presenting a bold front to’ (OED 3a).
27. their sin’s atoned: in Christian, and esp. Catholic, doctrine, suicide was a mortal sin, whose punishment was eternal damnation; the ‘wood of suicides’ is one of the locations in Dante’s Inferno (canto xiii). Suicides were refused burial in consecrated ground in Britain until 1823 (the act itself remained illegal until 1961); socially it carried a terrible stigma. B. does not deny the sinfulness of suicide, but claims that this sin, like others, can be ‘atoned’ (implicitly by Christ’s sacrifice); in the last stanza he explicitly attacks the concept of eternal punishment itself. their] these (MS canc.).
29–32. The display of the person’s clothes, which the poet here converts into an act of reverence, was designed to help identify the body.
33. bounds: limits or boundaries; the poet’s point is that the deceased have the dignity of their own designated space in death, something which was not afforded to them in life. proper place of rest: combining the archaic sense ‘one’s own’ ( J.) with the later meaning of ‘decent, decorous, respectable, seemly’ (OED).
36. I.e. unless it seemed best simply to sleep on the pavement, rather than under the arch of a bridge. asphalte: B.’s use of the French spelling highlights this material’s association with Paris; EBB. frequently mentions the ‘asphalte’ in her descriptions of Parisian life.
38. Buonaparte: France was ruled at this time by the Emperor Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Buonaparte, whose claims to be the legitimate hereditary ruler of France had been disputed by most until the coup d’état of Dec. 1851 which brought him to power. Cp. Bishop Blougram 436 ff. (p. 308).
39. Tuileries: the royal palace in the heart of Paris adopted by Napoleon Buonaparte as his official residence; Napoleon III moved the seat of government back there after becoming Emperor in 1852.
42–3. red as blood, a socialist, / A leveller! The terms ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’ seem to have originated in Owenite circles in Britain during the 1820s, but were quickly adopted in France, and came to be associated with the revolutionary disturbances that punctuated French history throughout the nineteenth century. The earliest citation in OED linking the colour red with Socialism comes from 1851, but the association is already present in a letter from EBB. to her sister Henrietta, dated to 4–5 May 1849, in which she playfully refers to some of Pen’s ‘red republican and socialist pretensions’ (Correspondence xv 281). The French Socialists fiercely opposed Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, and were violently repressed as a result. The speaker places socialists in apposition to ‘levellers’, the English Civil War grouping associated with John Lilburne, which argued in favour of greater equality and popular participation in government. B. refers twice to the pillorying of Lilburne in letters to Alfred Domett in 1844–5, with admiration for Lilburne’s behaviour (Correspondence ix 69, xi 193).
44. what no Republic missed: i.e. avoided; namely, the ‘equality’ of death.
45. quiet, and] quiet then (MS, canc.).
46–7. red in vain, / Or black: as the remainder of the stanza makes clear, the primary reference here is to gambling, and more specifically to the red and black suits that make up a deck of cards. For B.’s puritanical dislike of card-playing, see Bishop Blougram 48n. (p. 288).
52–3. The jets of water sprayed onto the corpses are mentioned in most accounts of the Morgue.
58–9. Cp. the description of the Day of Judgement in ED 501–46 (III 123–5).
60. Cp. Revelation xxii 13: ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.’
61. The expression ‘to fetch a compass’ means ‘to take a circular or circuitous course’ and occurs several times in the Bible, e.g. 2 Samuel v 23, Acts xxviii 13. OED cites one of Archbishop John Tillotson’s Sermons (1693): ‘What a compass do many men fetch to go to heaven, by innumerable devices.’ The fame of Tillotson’s sermons makes it plausible that B. had come across this text in his father’s library, which had rich holdings in the religious literature of the seventeenth century.
63. accurst: ‘That which is cursed or doomed to misery’ ( J.). This archaic spelling is used on a number of occasions by B.; cp., e.g., Bad Dreams III (Asolando 1889) 36.