Robert Browning

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright born in Camberwell, London in 1812.  He was an intelligent child who was fluent in
five languages by the age of fourteen. He was also passionate about poetry and was a talented musician, composing arrangements of
several songs as well as writing poetry.

In 1845 he met the far more established poet Elizabeth Barrett, they married secretly a year later and moved to Italy, during which time
they both wrote extensively. However, his poems made little impact until 1861, when, after Elizabeth’s death he returned to England.  His
subsequent publication The Ring and the Book, published in four volumes was a huge success, cementing his reputation as one of the
foremost Victorian poets, alongside his wife.  He died at his and Elizabeth’s son’s home in Venice, Italy in 1889.

In 1833, Browning anonymously published his first major published work, Pauline, and in 1840 he published Sordello, which was widely
regarded as a failure. He also tried his hand at drama, but his plays, including Strafford, which ran for five nights in 1837, and the Bells and
Pomegranates series, were for the most part unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the techniques he developed through his dramatic monologues
—especially his use of diction, rhythm, and symbol—are regarded as his most important contribution to poetry, influencing such major
poets of the twentieth century as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.

The couple moved to Pisa and then Florence, where they continued to write. They had a son, Robert "Pen" Browning, in 1849, the same
year his Collected Poems was published. Elizabeth inspired Robert's collection of poems Men and Women (1855), which he dedicated to
her. Now regarded as one of Browning's best works, the book was received with little notice at the time; its author was then primarily
known as Elizabeth Barrett's husband.

Poems summary

A Death in the Dessert

The poem begins with an unnamed speaker introducing an old document, written in Greek, that was found in the "Chosen Chest" and
attributed to Pamphylax. The speaker notes that he awaits "His coming" (the person to whom "His" refers is not identified) and then
begins to share the contents of the document.

The parchment begins with its narrator (presumably Pamphylax) making arrangements for a dying man. He and several others have been
taking care of this fugitive, hiding him in a desert cave while a simple Persian man stands guard outside. Pamphylax and the other disciples
of the dying man feed him wine, but cannot awaken him. Suddenly, one of their companions, a boy, fetches a book from the desert and
then reads from it a line attributed to the Gospel of John: "I am the Resurrection and the Life."

The old man wakes, and we soon realize that this is the author of that Gospel, St. John himself. He begins to speak, and most of the poem
following the text is from his own dictation. John admits he is out of sorts and feverish and has trouble knowing for certain who, where,
and when he is.

Pamphylax interrupts John's speech to explain John's doctrine, which is reflected in his Gospel. As explained, John understands man as
separated into three levels: body, mind, and soul. While the soul is obviously the highest expression of man and closest to heaven, all
three interact to lend credence to one another as a unified whole. The body's ability for physical perception is necessary to give content to
the mind that can then be fed to the soul for the purpose of "constituting man's self."

John continues his dictation, in which he addresses questions of truth. He notes that he is the sole survivor of those who knew the "Word
of Life" (he rarely mentions Christ by name), and that he spent his life "bidden to teach" love. For a long while, men believed his
testimony, but later, he was instructed by God to "take a book and write," and so he penned his Gospel. He continued thereafter to teach
the truth of love, but after a while, men began to doubt both the veracity of his Gospel and even whether he was actually the John who
knew Christ. These doubts were compounded by the world's insistence on knowing specifically when Christ would return. When John fell
sick, his disciples brought him to the desert to escape the doubters, and here he now lies.

He lashes out at those who need empirical evidence to believe in God and love. John believes that evidence of love and God is everywhere
in our lives, in the way that "truth, breaking bounds, o'erfloods [his] soul." Where some need "plain historic fact, Diminished into
clearness" in order to believe truth, John believes the "soul learns diversely from the flesh" and can intuit love in everyday life. Using the
example of how fire brings reprieve from bitter cold, he argues that the body can deliver to the soul evidence of wonder and love, so that
the body and soul both have a part to play in establishing a person's faith.

However, as time has passed since Christ's death, mankind has begun to seek new proofs. John argues that "To test man, the proofs shift,"
and that the journey towards faith must require the individual to be complicit. In other words, one cannot count on Christ-like miracles
any more, but instead must find that faith in himself and his own world. We must always search.

John acknowledges the accusation of his doubters, who claim he was not actually at Christ's crucifixion as he claims in his Gospel. He
admits it was indeed a lie, but a defensible lie, since through his falsehood he was able to communicate the greater truth of Christ's love to
others. He blames the accusation on the world's extreme emphasis on material fact over spirit. He is especially bothered because the
power of Christ is very much "the mere projection from man's inmost mind," but people are more inclined to look outside themselves than
inside for validation.
He thinks of how man has always turned to gods, suggesting that man invents these gods and that they evolve with man's needs, but
again, that the current stage in history makes this impossible since people want only material fact. He argues that "man was made to
grow, not stop" and as such ought to be able to elucidate Christ's message in himself, rather than relying on easy miracles for proof. He
admits that he did invent a miracle in his Gospel, but again argues that he did so in service of a greater truth that was communicated
through his lie. Further, he acknowledges that the choice to stage only a few miracles was a practical decision, and that too many miracles
would "compel, not help" since man's faith has already been established. His hope was that from that initial faith, man's prowess would
grow, but instead man's focus on reason has led to "ignorance."

Towards the end of his speech, John does acknowledge that man cannot reach perfection, but refuses to allow this as an excuse to
compromise the search for knowledge and truth. Even though "what he considers that he knows to-day… he will find misknown
[tomorrow]," John believes it is part of man's higher faculty to constantly seek greater truths. "God's gift was that man should conceive of
truth/And yearn to gain it."

In the midst of these ideas, John dies and the speaker explains how they buried him and how he alone would survive to document this
final philosophy from his master. He hopes that those who read his words will follow John's teachings.

The poem ends with the original speaker again interjecting that another man, Cerinthus, added an addendum to the parchment from
which this piece has been taken. The addendum notes that even if Christ's return is delayed by another 12 years, there are many who will
grieve while others will merely allow Christ to be made manifest in themselves.

"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church"

Summary

The poem is narrated by a fictional bishop on his deathbed. In his address, he falls in and out of lucidity, often trailing off. The
bishop addresses a group of young men whom he calls "nephews," but there is implication one or more might be his sons; particularly one
named Anselm. He mentions a woman he once had as a lover, and how "Old Gandolf," his predecessor and rival in the Church, envied him
for having the woman.

As he contemplates the inevitability of death, he reminds the men that they need to make sure his tomb is built in St. Praxed's church as
he plans. Old Gandolf died before him and thus stole the "niche" where he planned to be buried, and so he intends now to have a
magnificent tomb built, both to bathe his corpse in luxury and to outshine Gandolf's modest tomb of "onion-stone."

He describes how he wants the men to dig up some lapus lazuli, a precious stone that he rescued from a burning church and then hid
away in a secret place that he describes to the men. He wants the stone placed between his knees so that Gandolf will be jealous. He
continues to describe how magnificently he wants the tomb adorned, but notices the men whispering to each other and worries they are
plotting against him. He accuses them of waiting for his death so they can sell off his villas and bury him in a plain tomb. He grows maudlin
and begs them to at least decorate the tomb in jasper, a green stone, and to choose an epitaph worthy of his legacy.

The bishop works himself up again as he contemplates the fading of his life, but then falls to accusing the men of ingratitude. He finally
accepts that they will act dishonorably against him and blesses them anyway. As they leave, he again rememberes how Gandolf envied his
relationship with the woman he had mentioned earlier.

"Caliban Upon Setebos"

Summary

The poem begins with a section in brackets, in which Caliban, the creature from Shakespeare's The Tempest, introduces himself. He crawls
on his belly along the island on which he is trapped, talking to himself freely since his masters Proper (Prospero in Shakespeare)
and Miranda are asleep. He heads for a cave.

From here, he begins his main address, which is about Setebos, the being he considers his God and creator. For Caliban, Setebos created
the world from "being ill at ease," as an attempt to compensate for his cold, miserable existence. Because Setebos could not make himself
a peer, a "second self/To be His mate," he created a miserable island of lesser creatures that "He admires and mocks too."

Caliban, in imitation of what he believes Setebos to be, gourds a fruit "into mash," in effect acting as a creator himself. He imagines if he
could "make a live bird out of clay," he might watch indifferently as that bird "lay stupid-like," unable to fly. He is imagining himself
showing the same indifference to the fate and happiness of his potential creatures as he imagines Setebos shows to him.

Not only does Caliban believe Setebos to rule without any moral sense, he also believes Setebos is entirely unpredictable, liable to cause
pain for an offense that he had otherwise approved of. Caliban does wonder whether he simply might not understand the ways of
Setebos, but also notes that Setebos took pains not to create any creatures who, even if they might be "worthier than Himself" in some
respects, would have the power to unseat Setebos from his godly place.

When Caliban considers why Setebos would be so unhappy to have created an unhappy world, he conjectures that perhaps Setebos is
Himself a subordinate to a power that He does not understand. Calling this greater power "the quiet," Caliban describes it as one "that
feels nor joy nor grief,/Since both derive from weakness in some way." Driven by resentment over not having a connection to His own
maker, Setebos must have angrily made the Earth "a bauble-world" where nothing makes sense.
Caliban next thinks on Prosper, his magician master on the island. He play-acts as Prosper, using other animals to create his own hierarchy
where he is the master over others. From this experience, Caliban considers that perhaps Setebos created the world not from any strong
emotion or feeling, but rather for the sake of work itself, to "exercise much craft,/By no means for the love of what is worked." That the
world might one day fall down does not matter under this line of thought, since the work can simply be repeated.

He returns to thoughts about Setebos's unpredictability, citing how "one hurricane will spoil six months' hope." What's more, Caliban
cannot rationalize why he would be so hated while Prosper would be so blessed by the deity. Caliban holds some hope that the world
might get a chance to improve itself and become less built on random destruction and misery.

The best way to "escape [Setebos's] ire," Caliban believes, is to feign misery. He believes that showing Setebos happiness is sure to bring
pain down on oneself, and so Caliban only dances "on dark nights," while he at other times works to look miserable and angry. He will stay
committed to this plan until Setebos is either taken over by the quiet or dies on His own.

The final section is again bracketed. As a storm begins, Caliban sees a raven flying overhead and fears that the bird will report his musings
to Setebos. Worried he will be punished for revealing happiness and expressing impertinence, he immediately resumes his guise of a
miserable beast.

Robert Browning: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Evelyn Hope"

Summary

The speaker of the poem is an older man sitting with the corpse of Evelyn Hope, a 16-year-old girl who has recently died. He is "thrice her
age" (line 21). Even though she "had scarcely heard [his] name" (line 9), he longed for her. She was too young to have yet loved, so he
never made any direct proposal and wonders whether it is now too late.

He spends much of his address praising her purity and reflecting on how their relationship as "fellow mortals" (line 24) might have made
them partners under other circumstances. He assures himself that their union is not forever prohibited and believes God has merely
delayed it until they meet again and he can have her.

When they rejoin, he will tell her of the many phases of life he has passed since this moment, but will also assure her that she has always
been missing from his happiness. He promises to her corpse that he will always love her. He then places a leaf into her "sweet cold hand"
as a secret that she will see when she reawakens with God and which will communicate to her his promise.

"How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"

Summary

Three riders, the poem's narrator amongst them, ride their horses at top speed from the town of Ghent, on their way to Aix to deliver
important news for the latter town's survival. The nature of the news is never revealed in the poem. The riders do not speak to each other
on their intense journey but instead are focused on keeping their steeds at top gallop. They ride through the night, passing towns which
the narrator marks solely by the movement of the day and night in relation to them. At Aerschot, the sun rises again and the narrator
notices the cattle watching their gallop. He also refocuses on keeping his own horse, Roland, at top efficiency.

Near Hasselt, one of the riders, Dirck, is left behind when his horse dies and unseats him. The third rider, Joris, insists they continue
onwards, and they do until they finally see Aix in the distance. At this moment, Joris's horse also dies and it is left to the narrator and
Roland to carry the news onwards.

The narrator rids himself of his guns and some of his clothing to lessen the weight, and they make it into Aix. There, they are surrounded
by gracious citizens while the narrator sits with Roland's head between his knees. The town gladly allows Roland to drink their "last
measure of wine" in thanks for having carried the news.

"A Grammarian's Funeral"

Summary

The speaker of this poem is a disciple of an accomplished grammarian who has recently died. It begins with the speaker instructing others
to help him "carry up this corpse" (line 1) so they can bury him high "on a tall mountain… crowded with culture" (lines 15-16), far above
normal human life down on "the unlettered plain with its herd and crop" (line 13).

The speaker gives a eulogy for their master, telling how "he lived nameless" (line 35) in pursuit of mastering his studies, which focused on
Greek grammar. He was willing to sacrifice his youth and ruin his body, aging extremely quickly, in the process ignoring "men's pity" over
his choice (line 44). The grammarian put off "actual life" (line 57) until he could know everything there was to know about his field,
believing such mastery would give him a true understanding of life.

As the funeral party reaches the gates of the town where they wish to bury him, the narrator again praises his master for a life that had
"no end to learning" (line 78) and that was willing to forgo the "NOW" (line 83) of life for the "forever" (line 84) of true understanding.
Even as his health continued to decline, the grammarian remained ambitious towards mastering his field, until he finally died. The party
reaches its spot, and the speaker commends the grammarian's body as one "loftier than the world suspects" as the world continues "living
and dying" (lines 147-148).

Robert Browning: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad"

Summary

In this highly Romantic, picturesque poem, the speaker yearns to be in England as springtime arrives. He imagines how those living there
are lucky enough to see the trees begin to sprout as the birds begin to sing.

He grows more specific as he imagines April turning to May, and how the "wise thrush" will sing its gorgeous song twice so nobody can
think the first time was an accident of beauty. He notes that though the fields seem overrun with dew, noontime will return them to their
full beauty. In the last line, he laments that all of England is "far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower" that he apparently faces wherever
he currently is.

"The Laboratory"

Summary

The poem is narrated by a young woman to an apothecary, who is preparing her a poison with which to kill her rivals at a nearby royal
court. She pushes him to complete the potion while she laments how her beloved is not only being unfaithful, but that he is fully aware
that she knows of it. While her betrayers think she must be somewhere in grief, she is proud to be instead plotting their murder.

She notes the ingredients he uses, paying particular attention to their texture and color. She hopes the poison will "taste sweetly" so she
can poison the two ladies she has in her sights. Though she is a "minion" unlike her competitors, she will have the last laugh by having
them killed in a painful way that will also torment her beloved.

When the poison is complete, she promises the apothecary both her fortune (her "jewels" and "gold") but also lets him kiss her. Finally,
she is ready to go dancing at the king's and end her torment.

"Life in a Love"

Summary

The poem's speaker addresses a woman who has seemingly just mentioned the possibility that she might leave him (the first line is
"Escape me?"). He insists that such escape is impossible, since his pursuit of her is "much like a fate, indeed!" Even if his pursuit is
interrupted by failure, he will "get up to begin again." His life is devoted towards the "chase" of her, and no matter how little hope he has,
he will continue after her.

"Love Among the Ruins"

Summary

The poem's speaker, who does not place himself in first person until over halfway through the poem, begins by describing a pastoral
landscape where sheep head home in the early evening. He then tells how a "city great and gay," the country's former capital, once stood
on that very spot. Where a great population once filled the city, now the land is nearly deserted save for the sheep.

The city, which was great both in its imperialism and in peacetime, now only survives through a "single turret" on the landscape. The
speaker is set to meet a woman who waits for him in that turret. He is passionate in his anticipation to see her, but returns again to
contemplation of how the king once stood where she does now, and from that spot sent armies forth to expand the empire. In comparing
the two possibilities, he decides that "Love is best."

"Meeting At Night"

Summary

The speaker is at sea at night, heading towards the black land in the distance. He briefly paints a picturesque image of night at sea but
moves forward until he pulls his vessel up on to the sand.

He walks a mile along the beach and then across three fields until he approaches his goal, a farm. He taps at the window, sees the lighting
of a match, and then is overwhelmed by the beating of his and his lover's hearts as they reunite.

Robert Browning: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Memorabilia"

Summary

The speaker of the poem meets a man who once knew Romantic poet P.B. Shelley. The speaker immediately reveals his great enthusiasm
by asking the man questions, until he makes the man laugh.

In the last two stanzas, the speaker talks of walking through an evocative moor landscape until he found a "moulted feather" that he kept
in his possession. He forgot all of the other impressions of the moor.

"My Last Duchess"

Summary
"My Last Duchess" is narrated by the duke of Ferrara to an envoy (representative) of another nobleman, whose daughter the duke is soon
to marry. These details are revealed throughout the poem, but understanding them from the opening helps to illustrate the irony that
Browning employs.

At the poem's opening, the duke has just pulled back a curtain to reveal to the envoy a portrait of his previous duchess. The portrait was
painted by Fra Pandolf, a monk and painter whom the duke believes captured the singularity of the duchess's glance. However, the duke
insists to the envoy that his former wife’s deep, passionate glance was not reserved solely for her husband. As he puts it, she was "too
easily impressed" into sharing her affable nature.

His tone grows harsh as he recollects how both human and nature could impress her, which insulted him since she did not give special
favor to the "gift" of his "nine-hundred-years-old" family name and lineage. Refusing to deign to "lesson" her on her unacceptable love of
everything, he instead "gave commands" to have her killed.

The duke then ends his story and asks the envoy to rise and accompany him back to the count, the father of the duke's impending bride
and the envoy's employer. He mentions that he expects a high dowry, though he is happy enough with the daughter herself. He insists that
the envoy walk with him "together" – a lapse of the usual social expectation, where the higher ranked person would walk separately – and
on their descent he points out a bronze bust of the god Neptune in his collection.

 "My Star"

Summary

The speaker tells of "a certain star" of which he knows nothing except that "it can throw" beautiful red and blue darts of light. Because of
his enthusiasm, his friends ask to see it.

But when they look, it stops. The friends instead fix their attention on Saturn, which sits "above" the star. The poet is unfazed by their
disinterest, for his star "has opened its soul to [him]" and so he loves it.

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin"

Summary

The speaker introduces the lovely river town of Hamelin in Brunswick and tells of its serious vermin problem 500 years before. Rats had
overrun the city, to the point that the public demanded of the Mayor and "our Corporation" that the rats be destroyed or else the people
would remove them from power.

The Mayor and Corporation have a stressful meeting, but can discover no viable option until "the strangest figure" arrives. He is extremely
gangly, garbed in bizarrely colored clothing, and old-fashioned. They also notice he has a flute hanging around his neck, which he
continues to finger while they talk. He explains that he has heard of their problem and has a "secret charm" that leads creatures to follow
him when he wants. He says he uses his talent "on creatures that do people harm" and asks for one thousand gilders if he can rid the town
of rats. They quickly up his offer to 50,000 gilders.

The piper heads outside and begins to play his flute. Almost immediately, the rats come out from everywhere and follow him as he plays
and dances through the streets, until he finally gets to the river and leads them all to their deaths by drowning. Only one rat escapes, and
the speaker tells how that rat swam to family and told the story of the Piper for the rest of his days.

Hamelin is overjoyed and immediately sets to repairing itself, but the Piper interrupts their merriment to request his 1,000 gilders. The
Mayor and Corporation, suddenly wondering whether they ought to pay a vagabond such money, apologize patronizingly and then offer
him only 50 gilders. Angry, the Piper makes a veiled threat, but the Mayor blows him off.

The Piper heads out into the street and again begins to play his flute. However, this time it is not rats, but the children of the town who
begin to follow him. The adults find themselves unable to move as they watch the children dancing along behind the Piper as he heads out
of town. Finally, the adults are able to move and decide to follow at a distance, assuming he will sooner or later have to stop playing. But
when the Piper reaches a nearby mountain, a magic portal opens and all the children disappear with him into it. The speaker then tells of
one boy, whose lame foot prohibited him from keeping up and who was thus left behind. He remains sad and distraught the rest of his
days for not having glimpsed whatever promise lay in the Piper's song.

Hamelin, having suffered a great tragedy in losing all its children, tried to send word to the Piper that they would pay his fee, but to no
avail. They made laws to commemorate the memories of the children and have rebuilt since then. The speaker adds a note that there is a
"tribe of alien people" in Transylvania whose legends tell how their forbearers once rose "out of some subterranean prison," though
nobody in the tribe understands the meaning of the legend.

The final short stanza is addressed to "Willy," and the speaker insists upon the importance of keeping promises.

"Porphyria's Lover"

Summary

The narrator of "Porphyria's Lover" is a man who has murdered his lover, Porphyria. He begins by describing the tumultuous weather of
the night that has just passed. It has been rainy and windy, and the weather has put the speaker in a melancholy mood as he waits in his
remote cabin for Porphyria to arrive.
Finally, she does, having left a society party and transcended her class expectations to visit him. Wet and cold, she tends to the fire and
then leans against the narrator, professing quietly her love and assuring him she was not deterred by the storm.

He looks up into her face and realizes that she "worshipp'd" him in this moment, but that she would ultimately return to the embrace of
social expectation. Taken by the purity of the moment, he does what comes naturally: he takes her hair and strangles her to death with it.
He assures his listener that she died painlessly. After she dies, he unwinds her hair and lays her corpse out in a graceful pose with her eyes
opened and her lifeless head on his shoulder.

As he speaks, they sit together in that position, and he is certain he has granted her greatest wish by allowing them to be together without
any worries. He ends by remarking that God "has not yet said a word" against him.

 "Prospice"

Summary

The speaker asks himself what it is like to "fear death" in this poem. He begins by describing the oppressive imagery of it – "fog in my
throat," "the press of the storm, [and] the post of the foe."

Despite the deterrents, "the strong man must go" and he insists he will push forward on his journey no matter the end. As he has always
been a "fighter," he refuses to "creep past" death, and is instead committed to following those who died before by facing it head-on.

The second half of the poem stresses his resolve to confront death fully, until he reveals his true motivation: to reunite with a beloved who
has died before him.

"Rabbi Ben Ezra"

Summary

The poem is narrated by Rabbi Ben Ezra, a real 12th-century scholar. The piece does not have a clearly identified audience or dramatic
situation. The Rabbi begs his audience to "grow old along with [him]" (line 1). He stresses that age is where the best of life is realized,
whereas "youth shows but half" (line 6). He acknowledges that youth lacks insight into life, since it is characteristically so concerned with
living in the moment that it is unable to consider the deeper questions.

Though youth will fade, what replaces it is the wisdom and insight of age, which recognizes that pain is a part of life, but which learns to
appreciate joy more because of the pain. "Be our joys three parts pain!" (line 34). All the while, one should appreciate what comes, since
all adds to our growth towards God, and embrace the "paradox" that life's failure brings success. He notes how, when we are young and
our bodies are strong, we aspire to impossible greatness, and he explains that this type of action makes man into a "brute" (line 44).

With age comes acceptance and love of the flesh, even though it pulls us "ever to the earth" (line 63), while some yearn to reach a higher
plane. A wise, older man realizes that all things are gifts from God, and the flesh's limitations are to be appreciated even as we recognize
them as limitations.

His reason for begging patience is that our life on Earth is but one step of our soul's experience, and so our journey will continue. Whereas
youth is inclined to "rage" (line 100), age is inclined to await death patiently. Both are acceptable and wonderful, and each compliments
the other.

What complicates the philosophy is that we are wont to disagree with each other, to have different values and loves. However, the Rabbi
begs that we not give too much credence to the earthly concerns that engender argument and dissention, and trust instead that we are
given by God and hence are fit for this struggle. The transience of time does not matter, since this is only one phase of our existence; we
need not grow anxious about disagreements and unrealized goals, since the ultimate truth is out of our reach anyway. Again, failure
breeds success. He warns against being distracted by the "plastic circumstance" (line 164) of the present moment.

He ends by stressing that all is part of a unified whole, even if we cannot glimpse the whole. At the same time that age should approve of
youth and embrace the present moment, it must also be constantly looking upwards towards a heaven to come and hence simultaneously
willing to renounce the present.

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"

Summary

The poem "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is written in nine stanzas and is narrated by an unnamed Spanish monk who watches in
hatred and envy as Brother Lawrence waters plants. The entire poem is spoken by the monk to himself.

The first stanza opens with the speaker's intense hatred of Brother Lawrence, who the speaker insists would perish "if hate killed men."
Brother Lawrence is watering plants, which the speaker mocks snidely and harshly.

In the second stanza, the speaker thinks of how when the monks have dinner together, Brother Lawrence engages in pleasantries, "wise
talk of the kind of weather," and how such activity angers him. The third stanza follows with the speaker taking the Brother's voice, snidely
mocking what he perceives as Brother Lawrence's love of good food and unwillingness to eat anything sub-par. He snaps out of Brother
Lawrence's voice as he sees the latter break a flower he is watering, which the speaker mocks to himself.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker thinks about how Brother Lawrence is coveting two women who sit nearby talking. The speaker is certain
of his enemy's lust, even if the latter won't "let it show."

The fifth stanza again finds the speaker imagining dinner time. He chastises (to himself) Brother Lawrence for not placing his fork and knife
in the shape of a cross or drinking his juice in three gulps to represent the Trinity, both actions the speaker believes pay glory to Christ and
which Brother Lawrence refuses to do.

In the sixth stanza, the speaker imagines a conversation with Brother Lawrence, who is pruning melons that will provide a dessert for the
monks. The speaker imagines asking about the flowers, which Brother Lawrence presumably confesses are not doing well, and then the
speaker reveals that he's been sabotaging their progress.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker moves to darker territory as he realizes that a "text in Galatians" explains how a sinner will sin
progressively more and be damned for it. The speaker concocts a plan to "trip him" into sin right before he dies, so that Brother Lawrence
will then be sent to hell. In the eighth stanza, the speaker considers using his French novel, which presumably is full of lewd content, to
entice Brother Lawrence into impure thoughts that will ruin his enemy's piety and prepare him for damnation.

The final stanza has the speaker considering even selling his own soul to Satan for the pleasure of thereby damning Brother Lawrence. As
his fantasy escalates, the vesper bells ring and the speaker angrily ceases his hateful imaginings to report for prayer.

 "A Toccata of Galuppi's"

Summary

The speaker of this poem is either playing or listening to a toccata (a piano exercise meant to display the player's virtuosity) by Galuppi, an
18th-century Venetian composer. The piece is spoken directly to the composer.

He begins with a display of melancholy - "this is very sad to find!" - at what he has discovered in Galuppi's music. It makes the speaker,
who admits he has never left England, imagine life in Galuppi's Venice. He paints for himself its sea-defined geography and thinks of how
lovers must have enjoyed each other in such a landscape. He then imagines how the lovers would talk while Galuppi played a toccata for
them.

He believes that Galuppi's music at first would drive the lovers towards the melancholic question, "Must we die?" However, when the
music changed, the lovers were given sudden hope to persist, and the speaker then imagines a vacuous conversation in which the lovers
celebrate their life and love together. The lovers must have praised Galuppi for giving them such hope, he imagines.

His mind then goes to the truth, which is that "death stepped tacitly" in and took all of Venice away. As the speaker considers this idea,
Galuppi's music suddenly seems "cold" to him and frightens him. The music continues to stoke his own hopes that he'll "not die, it cannot
be," but also reminds him that Venetians who felt the same way died nevertheless. In the end, what he hears from Galuppi's music is "dust
and ashes," which makes him "feel chilly and grown old."

"Two in the Campagna"

Summary

The speaker of this poem addresses his beloved as they relax together in the campagna, an area outside Rome that was once an
agricultural boon in the Roman Empire but that had grown unwieldy by Browning's time.

The speaker asks his lover whether she feels as overcome with emotion as he does and admits he has "touched a thought" about her that
he would like to express in a poem but is unable to quite capture. He begs her to help him grab hold of the feeling but acknowledges that
it continues to elude him, escaping just as moments in nature constantly change and therefore escape us.

The speaker reflects on how, sitting on the landscape of "Rome's ghost," they ought to be "unashamed of soul" and love one another. Yet
he recognizes that they cannot fully join – though he would like her to be "all," she is "just so much, no more." They cannot fully join as
one being. Even when he is fortunate enough to "catch [her] soul's warmth," the "good minute" eventually passes. He must accept that
though he has "infinite passion," he is possessed of a "finite heart" and can never reach the level he yearns to reach.

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"

Summary

This quest poem opens with narrator Childe Roland, a knight in search of the fabled Dark Tower, confronting a "hoary cripple" who he
suspects is lying to him. The weird old man points Roland off the dusty road into an "ominous" plain, telling him that he will find the dark
tower in that direction.

Despite his suspicions, Roland heads off into the plain, convincing himself that though the quest inevitably means failure and death, he has
committed to it and is thus duty-bound to see it through. Part of his justification for persevering is a perverse pride to join "the Band" who
have failed before him, other knights who died as he plans to do.

Soon after, Roland looks behind him to see the road and cripple have disappeared; he is surrounded solely by the "gray plain." As he
progresses, he notes a succession of oppressive and horrific images that begin with deprived nature and ragged thistles, all of which he
describes in extremely grotesque language. He comes across a half-dead emaciated horse that doesn't move and finds himself hating the
beast for whatever transgression must have doomed it to live in such depravity.

Frightened, Roland tries to think on happier times, but the two friends whose memories he calls up – Cuthbert and Giles – were both
disgraced for having betrayed their friends, and Roland quashes the memories since they cause him a pain equal in intensity to the
grotesque present.

He continues to journey, coming across a river that swallows the alder trees that dip into it. As he crosses the river, he fears he might step
upon a dead man's face. He finds himself reflecting on the punishments that men undergo, as he continues to confront examples of dead
and painfully evocative nature. His journey sees little change until a great black bird glides over his head, and he looks up to see the plain
suddenly surrounded by mountains.

Roland sees no way to approach the mountains, but suddenly has an intuitive realization that "this was the place!" He focuses on two bent
mountains in the distance and recognizes between them the Dark Tower, made of brown stone and lacking any windows. He is overcome
with both visual and auditory sensations even though he cannot recognize the source of either, and as he approaches, the names and lives
of all the adventurers who failed in their attempt come to him.

As he arrives at the Tower, he looks to see these failed adventurers lined along the hill-sides, watching him. He raises his horn to his lips
and blows what could be his final cry: "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

Common Themes

Death

Much of Browning's work contemplates death and the way that it frames our life choices. Many poems consider the impending nature of
death as a melancholy context to balance the joy of life. Examples are "Love Among the Ruins" and "A Toccata of Galuppi's." Other poems
find strength in the acceptance of death, like "Prospice," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and "Rabbi Ben Ezra." Some poems –
like "My Last Duchess," "Porphyria's Lover," "Caliban upon Setebos," or "The Laboratory" – simply consider death as an ever-present
punishment.

Truth/Subjectivity

If any prevailing philosophy can be found throughout all of Browning's poetry, it is that humans are not composed of fixed perspective, but
instead are full of contradiction and are always changing. Therefore, a wise man acknowledges that every person sees the world
differently not only from other people but even from himself as his life changes. Many of the dramatic monologues make this implicit
argument, by suggesting the remarkable human facility to rationalize our behavior and attitudes. Consider "My Last Duchess" or
"Porphyria's Lover." Even those who believe that there is a truth to be discovered, like Rabbi Ben Ezra or St. John, acknowledge that each
man must get to it in his own way and through his own journey.

Delusion

Perhaps Browning's most effectively used literary device is dramatic irony, in which the audience or reader is aware of something of which
the speaker is not aware. Most often, what this dramatic irony reveals is that the speaker is deluded or does not quite realize the truth of
something. Some poems feature a demented character who is not aware of the extent of his or her depravity or insanity. Examples are
"My Last Duchess," "Porphyria's Lover," "Caliban upon Setebos" and "The Laboratory." Other poems feature a character whose reasons for
behavior are not as clear-cut as he or she believes. Consider "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" or "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St.
Praxed's Church." Finally, one can observe manifestations of this in less obvious ways through poems like "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del
Sarto," "A Death in the Desert" and "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." In these cases, the narrators are not clearly insane or
demented, but are so fixed in their own perspectives that they are unable to appreciate why they are being punished or oppressed.

Beauty

Though Browning's work typically eschews the Romantic poetry that was once his greatest influence, he does continue to contemplate the
nature and limits of beauty through his poetry. Some of his poems take beauty or love as their primary subject: "Meeting at Night," "My
Star," "Two in the Campagna," or "Life in a Love." Of course, even these poems always contemplate the theme through the lens of an
individual's unique perspective. Others see absent beauty as a cause for melancholy. Consider "Home-Thoughts, From Abroad," "Love
Among the Ruins," and "Evelyn Hope." Even some of the more sophisticated monologues consider beauty and the pursuit of it as
something that can torment us. Examples are "Fra Lippo Lippi," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," and "A Death in the Desert."

The quest

A theme that runs through much of Browning's poetry is that life is composed of a quest that the brave man commits to, even when the
goal is unclear or victory unlikely. In some poems, this quest is literal, particularly in "Childe Roland to Dark Tower Came." This is a useful
poem for considering the use of the quest in other poems. Some of them use the metaphor to suggest the difficulties of living in the face
of inevitable death: "Prospice," "Two in the Campagna," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "Life in a Love." Others have less intense quests than that
which Roland undertakes, but nevertheless show Browning's interest in the theme: "Meeting at Night," "How They Brought the Good
News From Ghent to Aix," and "A Grammarian's Funeral." Overall, the theme serves as a metaphor for life and most poems can be
understood through the lens of "Childe Roland" in this way.

Religion
Through Browning never proposes a fixed religious perspective or subscribes to any organized religion, much of his poetry contemplates
the nature or limits of religion. Most often, he casts doubt on the structure and hypocrisy of organized religion. Consider "Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," and "Fra Lippo Lippi." However, Browning often creates characters
whose religious sense is a strong part of their personality. In all of these cases, of course, each individual has his own unique take on
religion. Examples are "A Death in the Desert," "Caliban Upon Setebos," and "Rabbi Ben Ezra." Finally, much of Browning's poetry can be
interpreted through its lack of a religious sense, a world that has death and an afterlife but eschews any relation to a God. This happens in
some of the grander poems like "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" or in the more personal ones like "Prospice."

The grotesque

One of the elements in Browning's poetry that made him unique in his time and continues to resonate is his embrace of the grotesque as a
subject worthy of poetic explanation. Most often, he explores the grotesque nature of human behavior and depravity. Consider
"Porphyria's Lover," "Evelyn Hope," and "The Laboratory." Then there are examples like "Caliban upon Setebos," where the character is
easy to sympathize with while being objectively a grotesque creature. And then there is "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," which
plunges head-first into a grotesque landscape.

Browning’s Unique Writing Style

 Dramatic Monologue: His critical reputation rests mainly due to his dramatic monologues. It is a form of speech addressed to a
silent listener. Its aim is ‘character study’ or ‘psycho-analysis. The poet may speak in self-justification or in a mood of detached
self-explanation, contented, resigned or remorseful. The character sketch of the speaker and even the other person involved in
the vent is clearly described.

 Behavioral Analysis: Robert Browning makes not only striking revelations of human passions and aspirations but also valuable
passages of ethical teaching, which make turns him an inspiring force.

 Character Portrayal: He portrays characters well. The political traits are sometimes introduced too. One finds no
conventionality in his poems. That is why the mind of the reader is always engrossed in something or the other. One has to dive
into the depth of his writings to know the actual meaning.

Robert Browning: Poems About the Victorian Age

Robert Browning is naturally considered a Victorian poet, considering that he wrote during the time period of Victorian England. And yet
Browning's work is simultaneously a revolt against some of the most well-defined aspects of that time, and a reflection of its
characteristics.

Victorian England, named after Queen Victoria who was crowned in 1837, is marked by several social qualities: repressed sexuality, strict
morality, an expansion of English imperialism, a focus on human inventiveness, and nascent doubt over man's place in the universe. With
the world changing so quickly over the roughly 70 year-period, artists, scholars and scientists created and wrote from a place of unrest.
Where perhaps most of them came down strong on one side of the period's many questions, Browning embraced the uncertainty of his
time as a facet of human nature and psychology, and his poetry reflects not strong opinions but rather our tendency to waver between
opposing views.

Perhaps the most well-known aspect of Victorian England was its 'prudish' attitudes on sex. Operating under the belief that women were
not to be consumed with sexual lust, laws and social strictures forced men and women into entirely separate spheres. The hope was that
secure, happy families could be created and by default a moral society. Browning's work takes great issue with such repression. Though he
is by not means a libertine, he reflects in many poems the cost of such repression as an equally vicious reaction. Poems like "Porphyria's
Lover" or "Evelyn Hope" show the grotesque side of such assumptions. Further, the class element of this Victorian idea (that women
should prepare a nice home for a man's success) is shown to be equally vicious in poems like "My Last Duchess" and "The Laboratory."

Though Browning was not explicitly a political poet, his work does reflect doubts in the supremacy of England as Victorianism saw it.
Consider poems like "Caliban upon Setebos," which proffer the thesis that we are all of us flawed creatures who know nothing of anyone
save ourselves. The argument implicitly counters the Social Darwinist ideas that justified England's extreme imperialism.

Browning's time also saw great advances in human knowledge, but ones that came at the cost of a long-held Christian faith in the divinity
of man. The Industrial Revolution opened up man's ability to exploit nature for his own gain, while new opportunities for education
created new readers and thinkers, and new scientific discoveries - primarily Darwin's theory of evolution - led many to doubt that man was
in fact a reflection of a supreme deity. While these advancements certainly improved quality of life, they also brought with them an age of
doubt. Many writers embraced such a worldview and sought to express new ideas in the possibilities, but Browning explored both sides,
questioning the value of a life without faith while also celebrating the possibilities of a man less tied to God. Poems like "Caliban upon
Setebos" or "Rabbi Ben Ezra" confront these questions directly, but many others - like "Andrea del Sarto" - reflect a sophisticated concept
of human psychology, one that suggests we are limited to our perceptions and entirely conditioned by the circumstances of our lives.
These days not a radical idea, in Victorian England it was far more groundbreaking to suggest that there is nothing about us that is a
priori divine and perfect, but instead that we each of us develop our own moral sense, and moreover have the ability to rationalize our
moral sense as acceptable. Browning's love of drama was fed by such a worldview, since he was able to empathize with the perspectives
of characters who otherwise preach attitudes we might find abhorrent. Browning was much enamored of the complications and potentials
of human beings, and found great conflict in the way these elements tried to fit in with a bigger world.

The Victorian period followed directly what is known as the "Romantic period," during which poets explored the concepts of individuality
as a key to transcendence. Browning, as a great admirer of the movement's best writers – Shelley and Coleridge amongst them - certainly
never went full-fledged into Romanticism, but did recognize the power of hope and beauty that comes from self-knowledge and self-
exploration. As such, he did not entirely accept that these doubts led to pessimism, though he did empathize with such pessimism, as seen
in "Caliban upon Setebos."

All in all, Browning was a man of his time, both in the way he reflected the new Victorian learning and questioned some its assumptions on
morality and behavior.

Fra Lippo Lippi

Background

“Fra Lippo Lippi,” another of Browning’s dramatic monologues, appeared in the 1855 collection Men and Women. Fra (Brother) Lippo Lippi
was an actual Florentine monk who lived in the fifteenth century. He was a painter of some renown, and Browning most probably gained
familiarity with his works during the time he spent in Italy. 

Poem

Lines 1-14

And please to know me likewise. Who am I?

This narrative, told solely from the perspective of the artist Fra Lippo Lippi, begins with the man being accosted by police. He is telling his
name to the policemen in the hopes that they will recognize him and let him go. The speaker learns that Lippi is also a monk. He lives at
the “Carmine cloister” and that he is deceitful enough to pretend that the policemen were targeting him unfairly. He was indeed hoping to
get into a “house of ill-repute” to see the “sportive ladies,” or prostitutes, but feigns outrage. He says that these policemen, or guardsmen,
must have seen a monk and thought it would be a good time to “show [their] zeal,” or demonstrate how strong and professional they are. 

Lippi hopes that the men will take offense at his remarks and leave him alone. He compares their attempted arrest of him to a rat who
“haps on his wrong hole.” The policemen have stumbled into the wrong “company.” It appears that this technique is not working and that
the men are not backing off. Lippi has a new idea and says, “Aha, you know your betters.” He commands one of the men to take his hand
“away that’s fiddling on my throat” by threatening retaliation due to who he is. 

Lines 15-25

Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend…………..

He’s Judas to a tittle, that man is!

It is not until Lippi declares his friendship with the powerful “Cosimo of the Medici” that the officers back off. He tells them that he is
employed “the house that caps the corner.” This connection is such an important one that, in an attempt to scare them further, he asks
the men to remember to tell him “the day you’re hanged” for accosting Lippi. He identifies himself as the famous painter who is a friend of
Cosimo and then suggests that they are all, himself included, too quick to bow down to what authority figures suggest. 

He continues to insult the police officers, referring to them as “knaves” and telling them that they are no better than the fishermen who
sweep the ocean and drag in whatever their net catches. He asks if he is a “pilchard,” a small commonly caught fish. He finishes his lines of
insults by calling the men “Judas.” 

Lines 26- 38

Just such a face! Why, sir, you make amends……………….

A wood-coal or the like? or you should see!

At this point, it appears that the guards are apologizing for their “mistake.” Lippi tells them that he is not angry at them for what they’ve
done and that their “hang-dogs,” or tired companions, should take this “quarter-florin” and toast a drink to the house of the Medici. They
are all square in the end. 

The painter motions to one of the police officers, and tells his compatriots that he would like to use that man’s face as the inspiration for
“John Baptist’s head a-dangle by the hair / With one hand.” This comment is both threatening and reconciliatory. 

Unfortunately, this painting or drawing is not going to happen as there is no “chalk” close by. 

Lines 39-50

Yes, I’m the painter, since you style me so…………………

Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air.

Being drunk, Lippo is only too happy to give them the story. And by that, we mean his entire life's story. He starts from the time he was a
poor orphan, literally duking it out with dogs in the streets for their leftovers. He grows into an artistically-gifted monk that at least has a
stable roof over his head and food in his belly. After saying these lines Lippi takes the opportunity to announce to the men, after being
recognized, that he is “the painter” in question. This comment encourages Lippi to launch into the larger story of his life. He wants to make
sure that he can set this whole situation straight. He believes, or at least says, that they need to know more details of his life. 

At the beginning of the story, it is springtime and the painter is working on a number of paintings, all of which seem to concern saints. This
is a tedious subject for him and the poet emphasizes that by repeating, “saints and saints / And saints again.” The artist is exhausted,
stating that he could not “paint all night.” He “leaned out of window for fresh air” and something catches his attention below. 

Lines 51- 61

There came a hurry of feet and little feet,………..

That’s all I’m made of! Into shreds it went,

Down below his window are a number of performers with “lutes” playing music, as well as people laughing. This environment is much
more desirable to the painter, so after singing along to the songs for a few lines, he makes the decision to descend to the festival. He sees
feet roaming here and there. The people are singing a song that talks about love and the unrewarding scenarios for those who chose to
refute love. The song says that taking love away from the world will leave baren like a tomb. The painter speaks of a face specifically, he
felt that the face was beckoning to him to come down and join them. It could have been the little face of a child or the face of a young
maiden.

Lines 62- 75

Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,…………

On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast

With his great round stone to subdue the flesh,

You snap me of the sudden. Ah, I see!

Instead of taking the stairs to the ground level, Lippi decides the best course of action is to “shred” different items of cloth and use them
as a ladder to get to the street. He does so, and “scrambling somehow,” manages to make it. The group of people that Lippi had seen
celebrating are moving down the street and he catches up with them “by Saint Lawrence” church. This church is known today as the burial
place for many of the Medici family.  This church is located in Florence, Italy, solidifying the setting of the poem.  It would seem the monk
is welcomed with open arms, since he's greeted with "Hail fellow, well met!"

It was after this celebration that Lippi was grabbed on his way “to bed and have a bit of sleep.” He uses the rest of the song as form of
justification for enjoying this form of pleasure when he should have been painting. He claims that he must “rise up to-morrow and go
work” on a painting of St. Jerome in the wilderness. St. Jerome here is seen as a man trying to subdue the flesh by beating on his chest
with a stone while Lippi falls for the desire and sensuousness of the body. This is when the policemen grabbed Lippi and demanded to
know what he was doing. He claims, they just mistook his intentions. 

Lines 76- 87

Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your head—……………

The wind doubled me up and down I went.

As Lippo is telling this section of the story he is watching one guard and sees that his “eye twinkles still,” and that he is shaking his “head”
as if he does not believe him. It does seem that he is entertained by this story though and is prepared to let Lippo continue for a while
longer. 

The guard is surprised and judgmental. In the shake of his head, he seems to say “a monk.” As if he does not believe a monk would get up
to such trouble. Lippi attempts to brush this off and claiming camaraderie is the guard, asks that if Cosimo were to approach them that he
would say nothing to the story Lippi just told. If Cosimo Medici happens to come on the scene right now, he'll thank the kindly guardsman
to keep his gob shut.

At this point in Lippi’s monologue, he travels back in time to when he was “a baby” and experienced his mother and father dying. Their
deaths left him “in the street” and it was there that he starved for “year or two.” He ate whatever he could find and the “wind doubled me
up,” it was cold and punishing to Lippi’s body. 

Lines 88- 105

Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,……………….

And day-long blessed idleness beside!

Partially during this time period his aunt, “Lappacia” looked after him “with one hand.” It is clear that she did not do very much to support
him and perhaps hit him. His poor old auntie (Aunt Lapaccia raised him, but was too poor to care for him) snatches him up (and check out
how he's wary of her other hand, which as a "stinger" probably hits the boy on a regular basis) and marches him down to the local
monastery. Aunt Lapaccia might have taken him there or he himself could have run away from him.m

One day Lippi was walking along “the wall, over the bridge, / By the straight cut to the convent.”  It was from the monks there that he had
his “first bread that month.” While he was eating, the “good fat father” who gave him the bread asks if he is prepared to give up “this very
miserable world” and become a monk. Lippi had the wrong impression that the monk was asking him to renounce the bread he was
eating, to which he conceded by no means.

Lippi knows that he does not really want this, but he does “renounce the world, its pride and greed” as well as all the grand places. He was
eight years old at the time and enjoyed the idleness of a monk’s life. He was “warm” and always had a “good bellyful.” 

This time of relaxation did not last though. 

Lines 106-126

“Let’s see what the urchin’s fit for”—that came next……………….

For admonition from the hunger-pinch.

Soon the other monks were trying to find a use for him. They attempted to make him study and learn Latin. But he found this to be a
waste of time. The only word that he remembers is “amo” or “I love.” 

He wants his listeners to remember that this was a very pleasant alternative to living on the streets. His “fortune” was much improved. It
is better than begging for bits of food and trying to judge who will hit him or help him. Every monk tried to teach him disciplines related to
the church and failed in the process. Lippi had picked some skills from the streets he had an innate ability to judge about the aspects of
people and animals by looking at them,( He has finely attuned senses) He was gradually incorporated this skill into painting. His soul and
sense were sharp due to his years in the street. He was able to know which man would fling the partially consumed grape bunch his way
and who would kick him for his own problems. His sharpness allowed him to differentiate between people who would let him catch the
wax droppings and the ones who would have him whipped for doing so.

The "hunger-pinch" (126) is another vivid image that reinforces how Lippo's finely-tuned ability to notice how the outward, physical
appearance of people suggest something of their inner temperament—just like the hunger pains are an inner sensation that links to the
outer physical world that the little boy observes.

Lippi also wants the listeners to know that some of the time he had to fight with dogs for their scraps. While this was a miserable time, he
was able to learn a lot about how to judge other people. 

Lines 127- 142

I had a store of such remarks, be sure,………………

And hereupon he bade me daub away.

The expressions of men that he became so intimate with served as the inspiration for the first portraits he drew. His sketches were done
on “my copy-books,” or workbooks, and often on sheet music. Additionally, he was not afraid of drawing on the walls, something that
made the monks very unhappy. He drew men and women in his prayer books and on the benches, this earned him the discontent of his
teachers and his case was soon reported to the prior with suggestions of expulsion as a solution. The prior however asked the priests to
train him in painting. He was of the opinion that this man would be able to paint large frescos for the church. The church would look like
that of the Carmelites who had great many paintings on their wall. He agreed to help them “put the front on” the church that the monks
have wanted. 

Lines 143-164

Thank you! my head being crammed, the walls a blank,…………………

Choose, for more’s ready!”—laid the ladder flat,

In this section of the poem Lippo is describing the beginning of his career and how, as he was training and learning, he started by drawing
“every sort of monk.” He drew the “black and white” as well as the “fat and lean.” First, Lippo paints all kinds of monks, both those that
wear black robes (Benedictine monks) and those that wear white (Cistercian monks).

He also studied “folk at church.” He studied the people who waited at the church to confess. He was able to identify criminals who had
found solace at the church just after the crime as he was able to read their demeanour.  He saw young women who were harassed. He is
seen becoming emotional when he sees harassed people. While Browning is dealing with words here, he still creates a vivid picture
through using present participles. The phrases "shaking a fist" and "signing himself" (154-155) give readers the impression the scene is
taking place right before their eyes, and creates a poetically vivid parallel to the realism of Lippo's paintings.

He wanted to paint every type of person and scene. He painted young girls and even a murderer surrounded by children. The poet
describes these images vividly. It is easy to see why Lippo was entranced by them and chose to spend time painting them.

Lines 165- 178

And showed my covered bit of cloister-wall……………………

As much as pea and pea! it’s devil’s-game!

Lippo has spent a lot of time painting at this point and wants to show off what he has done. He hangs up what he has done on the walls of
his room and all of the monks “closed in a circle and praised loud.” They were greatly impressed by his realism and were even able to
recognize specific faces and scenes, such as the “boy who stoops to pat the dog.” He had even drawn the face of the prior’s mistress. The
common monks loved his work since in his artistry they could recognize images from their everyday lives. ‘’ it’s the life’’ may refer to the
care that the prior is having and the realistic element of the painting.

This triumph with the monks soon comes to an end as the higher-ranking members of the monastery, including the Prior, come to see his
work. The Prior is clearly upset by what he sees and says, “How? What’s here?” He does not appreciate what Lippo has done. He does not
consider it proper panting but something from the devil.

Lines 179-198

Your business is not to catch men with show,…………………………….Have it all out!” Now, is this sense, I ask?

The Prior attempts, in this section, to adequately describe why he does not like Lippo’s work. He believes that it is a painter’s job to “lift”
men above the world not show them as part of it. The Prior wants Lippo to depict the human soul, but even he cannot come to a solid
answer about what that is. He tries to articulate his thoughts but is ultimately unable. Even though he wants Lippo to paint things that will
lift men above the "perishable clay" (180), the Prior struggles with describing what the soul really is in lines 184-187. He can't even express
himself clearly here, and tries several metaphors that fail. Plus, check out the ellipses and the hyphens, which suggest a difficulty in
articulating this concept. In the end, he drops an exclamation point on us and basically says, "I can't tell you what it is. That's just what it is.
And that's the end of it!" (187). Lippo has apparently painted the Prior's niece ("that white smallish female with the breasts") to look like
King Herod's sister-in-law, and mother of Salome, who got John the Baptist's head cut off.Are you getting the idea that maybe the Prior's
"niece" isn't really his niece at all? Why would the Prior be noticing her breasts up in line 195?

An artist that he believes Lippo should try to copy is “Giotto” who mastered the art of religious painting.  The Prior is so outraged by the
painting, especially the depiction of his “niece” whose breasts he suspiciously notices, that he tells Lippo to get rid of all of the work he has
made.

Lines 199- 215

A fine way to paint soul, by painting body………………………………….

And then add soul and heighten them three-fold?

  The artist is horrified by the prospect of destroying his paintings and in an attempt to rebuff the Prior he asks what the point is
in “painting body, So ill ” that one cannot cope up with it. It doesn’t stop there the artist has to go further down the lane to
make it much worse. He proposes the idea of painting the body good aesthetics and the soul with even better aesthetics( Why
can't he do both—paint the physical body in a realistic way that would then artistically showcase the soul?). This way the
people will be better able to appreciate the ingenuity of the creator. The prior does not agree to this and hardens his stand on
destroying all the art works. Lippo protests to his listener that a painter can reveal the soul through representations of the
body, since "simple beauty" is "about the best thing God invents." Lippo identifies this as the main conflict of his otherwise-
privileged life: where he wants to paint things as they are, his masters insist he paint life from a moral perspective. As much as
he hates it, he must acquiesce to their wishes in order to stay successful, and hence he must go after prostitutes and other
unsavoury activity, like the one he was caught involved in at poem's beginning. As a boy brought up poor and in love with life,
he cannot so easily forget his artistic impulse to represent life as he sees it to be. Can't he? Lippo argues, paint a woman's eyes
and add "breath" and "life's flash" and also the "soul" (213-214), which will elevate the image to be three times as powerful?
What would be wrong with that? On the other hand (he rambles), what if he just paints pure beauty with no soul at all? He calls
this "simple beauty" (217), and lets us in on his viewpoint that this is best thing that God has invented, because simple beauty
in some way gets the viewer to see his or her own soul in that beauty. That sounds good to us.

 To illustrate his point Lippo chips in a parallelism of substituting white with black when it should have been yellow. Lippo here
tries to make the prior understand how idiotic his views are.

Fra Lippo really seems to dwell quite a bit on the Prior's niece here. He apparently thinks she's is seductive, and uses her face as an
example of how it's an idiotic proposition (in his humble opinion) to accept that the beauty of her face will mask the emotions behind it.

He gives the example of the “Prior’s niece” and how her beautiful face will only expand a viewer’s understanding of her soul, not impede
it.

Lines 216-231

Or say there’s beauty with no soul at all—……………….

To plant a flag in, or tie up a horse!

Lippo also offers another side to the argument that the Prior should find even less tolerable, the idea that the body is painted and the soul
is completely ignored, or “simple beauty.”Since Lippo is already angry, he takes the argument further. He reveals his irritation with the fact
that he was taken into the monastery at eight years old when he did not have another choice. But wait—there's more. Lippo's also pretty
ticked that, because of his vows, he misses out on a lot of action with the ladies. Check out that bitter tone when he says, "You should not
take a fellow eight years old/ and make him swear to never kiss the girls" (224-225). And it's clear that Brother Lippo has been breaking
those vows. That's what the whole "escape down the sheet ladder" teenage-like escapades are all about.

He also talks about the rings in the front and says that it serves more purposes than just to plant in a flag in or tie up a horse. Those rings
are able to tie the mouths of the clergy and the church as well. The tethering rings can be considered as a sign of high status as it was
usually found near mansions so that their horses do not wander off. The flag is symbol of political power and shows how the Medici family
had great influence over the political landscape of Italy.

This decision has made him miss out on a lot of life that he is interested in. He is, he says, “a man no doubt.” He states that he will not be
told what to do any longer and that he is his “ own master” and that he will “paint now as” he pleases.

Lippo is not without choices now that he is grown up. He has a friend in the “Corner-house,” referring to Cosimo Medici to whom he can
go.

Lines 232- 250

And yet the old schooling sticks, the old grave eyes……………………………….

Death for us all, and his own life for each!)

Although Lippo has Cosimo Medici to depend on, the monks still will not leave him alone. They are always there telling him that if he does
not work harder, he will never reach the likes of other monk painters such as “Brother Angelico” or “Brother Lorenzo” both of whom the
monks consider great artists. They tell Lippo he will not even finish in third place. When the prior makes a biased comparison of Lippo with
Brother Lorenzo, Angelico, and Giotto he lashes back with a command about the priors mistress but he controls it in time and saves
himself from the displeasure of the prior. This slip of the tongue is known as Freudian Slip. It was the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund
Freud who described a variety of different types and examples of Freudian slips in his 1901 book, "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
A Freudian slip, or parapraxis, is a verbal or memory mistake that is believed to be linked to the unconscious mind. These slips supposedly
reveal secret thoughts and feelings that people hold. Typical examples include an individual calling their spouse by an ex's name, saying
the wrong word, or even misinterpreting a written or spoken word. He also addressed the problem of forgetting names, saying that it may
sometimes be related to repression. In his view, unacceptable thoughts or beliefs are withheld from conscious awareness, and these slips
help reveal what is hidden in the unconscious.

Getting mad, Lippo sarcastically points out that these monks with their Latin are, of course, the best authorities, so they should know good
art when they see (not) it.

 Freud wrote that speech blunders are the result of a "disturbing influence of something outside of the intended speech" like
an unconscious thought, belief, or wish.

Lippo spends the next lines of the poem singing another song, similar to that featured at the beginning of the piece. He does not give
much credence to the opinions of the monks as “their Latin” does not make them art scholars. He does try to please the monks
sometimes, but sometimes he decides he does not care and paints what he likes.

Lines 251-270

And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over,……………………….

I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.

In this section of the poem the painter informs his listeners that it is not the only painting that he wants independence in, but life itself.
“The world and life’s too big to pass for a dream,” he does not want everything to pass him by when he never wanted to be a monk in the
first place. It is this impulse that he satisfies when he sneaks out of the house. Though he admits that he sometimes wonders whether he
or the Church is right, but when he paints, he insists, he always remembers the God of Genesis, creating Eve in the Garden of Eden. That
flesh that was made by God cannot be evil. Realistic paintings actually draw the attention of human beings to real life beauty that they
might otherwise ignore. In this way, too, the artist causes human beings to praise their creator. The central theme of "Fra Lippo
Lippi" then, is that the function of art and poetry, which should deal with real life and its beauty, for that, is its prime function, if not the
only function. The phrase cup runs over shows how Lippi is passionate about the world.

The poet tells a short story that is meant to illustrate his own situation. He sees himself as a “mill-horse” that enjoys eating grass for its
own pleasure, not just as a way to make “chaff” or hay. The earthly pleasure that the horse receives from eating is similar to that which
the speaker gets from living and he does not see a problem with it. It seems as if, even though he knows what he wants, he still holds
some respect for the monks and wants to know what they really believe. Many, he states, profess not to like something but do it anyway.
When we apply this metaphor Well, Lippo would be the horse and the Prior would be the miller and the grass would largely stand for
worldly experience. The chaff represents the spiritual or religious life.He sees the world as the garden that God created for man and
woman. He “learned” this lesson well and “can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.” He will not soon forget it.

Lines 271- 293

You understand me: I’m a beast, I know.

To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,…………………………..

Wondered at? oh, this last of course!—you say.

Lippo continues his story by putting himself down, calling himself a “beast.” Lippo doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of himself,
does he? He calls himself a "beast." But wait—this is a way for him to make a temporary alliance with the guard by pointing out that they
have common ground.

Lippo aligns himself even more with the guardsman by pointing out that neither of them speak Latin. That's important, because during the
fifteenth century (when the real Lippo lived), Latin was the language of the super-educated and Church class. This downplays Lippo's status
and puts him more on the same social level as the guard. It makes the guardsman Lippo's "man. Here Lippo uses the power of finding
common ground. People who disagree the most productively start by finding common ground, no matter how narrow it is. They identify
the thing that we can all agree on and go from there. What they are skillfully doing is inviting us into what psychologists call shared reality.
This shared reality is the antidote to alternative facts.The conflict is still there as the foundation of the debate. Shared reality just gives us a
platform to start to talk about it. The trick of the debate is that you end up doing it directly, face to face, which is important. Research
suggests that listening to someone's voice as they make a controversial argument is humanising. It makes it easier to engage with what
that person has to say.

morning star-a planet, especially Venus, visible in the east before sunrise. In Christianity, the name morning star was associated with
Lucifer, once a beautiful archangel, who refused to honor God and was cast out of Heaven. Luciver means ‘light bringer’ in Latin, which
harkens back to the ancient Egyptian and Greek names for the star. Fra Lippo Lippi is identical to Lucifer as he rebels against the church
from his point of view. He not staying in an abbey or a monastery but in the house of a wealthy man with all the luxuries. This is parallel
with Lucifers expulsion from the holy aspect to the realm of sensuousness and sin.

 The morning star symbol appears in many different cultures and traditions around the world, and here are some of its universal symbolic
meanings:

 Hope and guidance. – Due to its prominent appearance in the celestial sphere, the Morning Star was often used for navigation.
This symbolic meaning can also be drawn from a four-pointed star shape resembling a compass that keeps us on the right path.
Lippo is an artist who has an indomitable stand on his method of painting. The same view and outlook is being incorporated
into his disciple. Thus Lippo’s aspect as a guide is congruent with the symbol of north star.

 Change and new beginnings. – As the Morning Star signals the dawn and the start of a new day, it symbolizes significant
changes in our lives and great experience of spiritual journey and re-birth. Lippo is an artist who incorporates innovative ideas
into religious paintings. He believes that he has the right ideals in painting and these ideals will bring new changes and
beginnings to the art of painting. Thus Lippo like the morning star symbolizes change. Lippo could also be alluding to his disciple
who is going to carry his realistic mode of painting to the future.

 Protection. – In the Christian context, the Morning Star is interpreted as Jesus Christ, who brings joy into the world, just as the
Morning Star brings light to the day. Therefore, the Morning Star often symbolizes a sanctuary from darkness and the
unknown. To some, it’s the personification of Jesus Christ, a source of light and happiness ending a dark night. He considers
himself a crusader or messiah of realistic art and is ready to suffer the insults of the church for its preservation and protection.
Lippo considers spirituality as a part of the material world. Spirituality can be attained through the admiration of the natural
world as it was designed by the divine hand of God. Lippi espouses this cause and tries to bring the church out of its dangerous
ignorance of the natural world. This aspect of the symbol could also allude to his disciple, whom Lippi perceives as the
protector of his artistic movement from the corrosive factors of time.

 Connection to Mother Nature. – Given that the four-pointed star also resembles the cross, it refers to the unity of opposites
and balance. In this regard, the Morning Star represents the perfect link between the spiritual and the material world, and
stands for harmony, goodness, and peace. Lippo espouses a method of painting that gives equal importance to the material
world and the spiritual world.

 If we look at the Morning Star as Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, we could associate it with femininity, passion,
fertility, and prosperity. Lippi is someone who admires beauty, especially feminine beauty. The use of this symbol displays how
attached he is to the concepts of beauty and love.

Lippo is trying to explain to the officers who are listening to his story that there is another boy at the monastery who is just like him. The
young man is learning how to paint and will soon be led to the experiences of life. This boy is large, so much so that Lippo refers to him as
“Hulking Tom.” He then speaks to the listener about what generations of artists owe one another and how an artist who breaks new
ground must always flaunt the conventions. He mentions a Hulking Tom who studies under him, who Lippo believes will further reinvent
artistic practice in the way he himself has done through pursuing realism.

He tells the guard that neither of them speaks Latin, so they should have a similar opinion. He is trying to flatter the man and says that the
guard must have “seen the world.” Lippo wants to know if the man feels “thankful” to God for making the beautiful world they live in. The
speaker is hoping that the guard will understand his impulse to paint and reproduce the world in which they live. Just because it is not
intrinsically religious, does not mean that it should be “passed over” and “despised.”

Lines 294-310

But why not do as well as say,—paint these………………….

If I drew higher things with the same truth!

The painter anticipates an argument from the guard and preemptively mentions it. He says that the guard might be wondering why to
bother painting these at all, “His,” or God’s, “works / Are here already.” There is no need to duplicate them. Now Lippo takes on a
hypothetical voice that questions creating art at all. Since God's work is already present in the world, why paint it? It's already complete,
right? And since you can't reproduce nature (here personified as a woman), an artist has to "beat" her and make his works cause the
viewer to contemplate spiritual things. "Cullion" is a pretty interesting word here. If you look it up in the dictionary, you'll see that it's an
archaic word for "rascal" or a "low fellow." It comes from an Old French word meaning "testicle." Yep—Lippo's gettin' just a wee bit crude
here with his diction.

In an effort to dismiss this idea the pointer points to a woman nearby asking the guard, “Suppose you reproduce her”? He makes sure to
tell the guard that there’s no way, with no painting skills, he could do it. But if he did, “There’s no advantage.” One must “beat her,” make
something that is even more beautiful. Paintings make people better, more beautiful, and they will last longer so that one may see the
perfect version of someone’s face long after they are gone.

God gave man art for this purpose. For example, he says, have you looked at your own “cullion” or rascal-like face? Lippo states that he
would be able to fix it with only a piece of chalk.

Lines 311-336

That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,………………………….

For pity and religion grow i’ the crowd—

Your painting serves its purpose!” Hang the fools!

Lippo knows that if he was able to paint “higher things,” to even a grander standard than they already exist, there would be no need for
the Prior to preaching as he does. He would take the “Prior’s pulpit-place” and do the preaching instead. The speaker continues on to state
that it “makes [ him] mad” that he will not get to see all the changes taking place in the world after he is in his grave. His purpose in life is
to find meaning in the world, that is the only reason he has been put on earth. You're probably wondering at the enjambment that's going
on in this passage. The bro's getting all worked up over his topic, so the poetic lines here reflect that spillover. (Check out "Form and
Meter" for more on how this poem is put together.)

The Prior’s words jump back into Lippo’s head as if he is continually haunted by them. The meaning that Lippo is sussing out is not the
right one, by the Prior’s standards. It does not tell the common people that they need to come to church.

If that is all art is about, the world might as well do away with it and replace it with a “bell to chime the hour with. Lippo wants another
example to prove his point so he tells his listeners of a “fresco,” or painting on wet plaster that was immensely popular during the
Renaissance, that he completed at the church of Saint Lawrence. The people of Florence have defaced his painting, they do not
understand what he was trying to. His work does not compute with their world view and they have “scratched and prodded” at the wall. It
“eased” them to do so. Lippo does mention in these lines that his painting, so hated by the “fool[ish]” public has caused them to pray with
greater reverence and return to church more often.

Lippo gives us a nice anecdote to illustrate (see what we did there?) his point. He recently painted an image of St. Lawrence ("Shout Outs"
is your friend here), which got precisely the type of reaction the Church was looking for. The people have defaced the fresco by scratching
and rubbing out the images of the three slaves who turn St. Lawrence over the fire (eww). (BTW: "phiz" is an archaic term for "face.")

Lines 337- 360

—That is—you’ll not mistake an idle word……………………………….

The man of Uz (and Us without the z,

Painters who need his patience). Well, all these

At the beginning of this section of lines, Lippo is backtracking. He does not want the guards to get too upset about what he has said and
report him. He tells them that it has just been “idle” talk that was “Spoken in a huff.” He reminds the men that he has a head full of
“Chianti wine!” He's going to paint something for the nuns at the basilica of Sant'Ambrogio. This piece, he tells us, will have God, the
Virgin Mary, and the baby Jesus surrounded by a ton of angels. "Boewer, flower" is how Lippo describes them, and doesn't that just roll off
the tongue? Well, it should, because it's an example of internal rhyme, which gives readers the flavor of poetry, but without end rhymes.
This keeps the overall sound of the poem more conversational. The lines there’s for you can also be seen as an instance where Lippo offers
more bribes to the Guards. If his convincing arguments will not shut him up, his coins will shut him up.

The painter seems to have reached the point where he feels bad about what he has said or at least worried he’s going to get in trouble. He
tells the guards that he is plotting to “make amends” with the church. The “plot” he coming up with regards the painting of a piece at
“Sant’Ambrogio’s.” His plan is to “paint God in the midst, Madonna and her babe.” These characters will be “Ringed by” a “flowery…
brood” of angels with sweet faces and flowers.

Other characters in this painting will include “Saint John’…because he saves the Florentines” as well as “Saint Ambrose.”

Lines 361- 376

Secured at their devotion, up shall come……………

His camel-hair make up a painting brush?

There is a “dark stair” in the corner of the painting as well as a “great light, / Music and talking.” From that portion of the wall, Lippo will
paint himself. It was common practice during the Renaissance for painters to add themselves into large scale paintings, oftentimes as
commoners, or unremarkable observers of a scene. He will show himself to be “Mazed, motionless, moonstruck” by what he is observing.

Even within the confines of the planned painting, Lippo does not feel like he belongs in the religious world. He will attempt to make an
escape, “Back I shrink…” but before he can leave, he is trapped. He gets “caught up with [his] monk’s things by mistake” and all wrapped
up in his “gown and rope.” He is unable to get away, especially after an angel confronts him.

The angel who has stopped Lippo then turns to the other characters in the painting and tells them that this man, who is trying to get away
“made you and devised you,” though, he is not like you.

Lines 347- 363

We come to brother Lippo for all that,……………………….

Don’t fear me! There’s the grey beginning. Zooks!

The angels in the painting “come” to brother Lippo because of that and say, “Iste perfecit opus!” or “that is the person who made this.”
This angelic figure speaks to the assembled luminaries and tells them that he (Lippo) is their creator. They (the holy figures, which stand in
in general for higher spiritual contemplation) come to Lippo to be painted. He's their man.

In this complicated narrative that the painter is weaving, his painted self is covered by “a hundred wings” and “kirtles,” a type of dress
worn by women, are thrown over him. The angels want to play games with the painter and close to the door to the room. This risqué
daydream is interrupted by “The hothead husband!” (He imagines himself being flung into the crowd of angels and covered by their
wings, which are like "a spread of kirtles when you're gay" (380). Translation? A "kirtle" is a loose gown worn by a woman. It would seem
Lippo the Ladykiller has had quite a few romps upon discarded kirtles.He also likens being in the midst of these angels to a game of "hot
cockles," which is sort of like blindman's bluff.Oh, snap—here comes the husband. Seems Lippo can't get away from metaphors involving
action with the ladies and possible consequences. Here, though, the "hotheaded husband" is a metaphor for the Church and its moral
restrictions on his art.)

To escape his rage, the painter scuttles “off  / To some safe bench behind.” He is still with the first angel who spoke to him and is holding
“The palm of her.” She reminds him of the “Prior’s niece” or “Saint Lucy.”

He quickly jumps out of this narrative, back into the original story he had been telling the guards. After he paints this complex picture
everything will be right with the church. The guards themselves will see the truth of his statement in “six months hence.”

Lippo runs from the guards at this point, stating that he is not in need of help or any kind of light. The street is very quiet as he runs and
the “grey” is “beginning,” the sun is rising.

The beginning of the poem.

Getting the readers in medias res is one of Browning’s speciality.

The presence of other speakers.

No one else gets to speak, but their questions are implied by responses like, "Who am I?" And their actions are implied by Lippo's real-time
observation. "Take your hand away that's fiddling on my throat" (13-14), for instance, means that these guards are being kinda rough with
him.

Consonance

The repetition of the S sound in- hands and feet scrambling somehow and so dropped. The whispering sound of the S lends a sort of
secretive sound to the line, emphasizing how Lippo attempts to make a clean getaway.

Metaphor.

He calls these cops "knaves," "hang-dogs," and even "Judas" (21, 25, 27). Like those fishermen that trawl around for shrimp but end up
catching a whole lotta other stuff like dolphins and sea turtles, these guys have swept the streets for baddies but landed an innocent monk
as well. Lippo's no "pilchard" (a type of gross fish) to be caught at their whim. This metaphor means that he's seriously unhappy.

Lippo drops an extended metaphor on us in lines 254-257. He says that an old mill horse (a horse that powers a mill that grinds grain) will
frolic around and enjoy himself eating grass, even though the miller isn't constantly preaching to him that grass is only good for making
"chaff" (the dried out, dead hay that the grass becomes after it is cut and dried).The hot head husband stands for his moral restrictions on
art.

Images of Fire and Smoke, Light and Dark

Since the poem starts out with the speaker being accosted by guards on a dark street at night, it's not surprising that light and dark would
be a major starting point. Figures skulking around the darkened streets would pose a danger to other citizens. This prospect morphs
throughout the poem, though, and gets to a more figurative sense of light and dark—much of which involves images of fire and smoke.
So, light signifies knowledge and spiritual growth, while darkness and smoke stand in for ignorance or failure.

 Line 2: The guardsmen have their torches all up in Lippo's grill, trying to figure out who he is. This is a very literal use of light
and dark—using light to banish the dark and the dangers it can cloak at night.

 Line 172: Lippo is super-proud of the way he's able to paint everyday figures in the monastery so true to life. He describes this
as "my triumph's straw-fire," which would be a blazing strong fire. This fizzles out all too quickly under the Prior's criticism, and
the fire "funked" (which means smokes out).

 Line 184: The good bro has some difficulty describing the human soul. First, it's a fire—something bright and hot. But then he
calls it "smoke," which would put it on the darker side of things—something that is not easily understood or perhaps not even
existing. Think about how smoke is insubstantial and quickly dissipates. That gives us a sense of how Lippo is struggling with the
concept here.

 Line 362: Lippo paints himself into a corner—literally—as he is conceiving of the painting he'll do for the nuns of Sant'Ambrogio
(which would become his masterpiece, BTW). He sees himself as one upon a "dark stair" moving "into a great light" (the
figurative light of the holy figures that will surround him). We get the sense that he's starting to understand how he might
reconcile his own views on art with those of the Church. He'll have to accommodate them and just do his own thing. You do
you, Lippo.

 Line 392: This idea is emphasized in the last line of the poem, when Lippo heads off into the grey dawn. He's seen the light, but
it's not all bright. He'll have to submerge part of himself to please all of his masters.

Food

It's not surprising at all that the speaker, who was once an orphan literally starving in the streets, would be concerned with food. From his

days scrabbling for scraps, to the bread he receives upon taking his vows at the monastery, to the Chianti that he glugs down on his forays

into the Florentine night, Bro Lippo is firmly focused on the flesh, and his preoccupation with food is symbolic of this.

 Lines 84-85: Here we get a grotesque description of the foods Little Lippo ate when he was an abandoned orphan in the streets.

He gets the scraps that everyone else discards: skins of figs, melon rinds, and the peels of various vegetables—basically

everyone else's trash.

 Line 92: The poor little guy gets his first piece of bread in he doesn't know how long when his auntie takes him to the

monastery. This bread represents how he becomes a monk not out of a true calling, but rather out of need. He needs to eat.

And since the monk who takes him in is "fat," he's pretty sure he'll have regular meals if he takes those vows.

 Line 103: Now a monk, he has a "good bellyful" of food. This contrasts sharply to the empty fruits (just the rinds and husks) that

he previously dined on when he was lucky.

 Line 339: The Chianti (a sort of red Italian wine) has loosened his tongue. Frolicking about and drinking wine is something a

monk is not supposed to be doing, so the Chianti here (coupled with Lippo's outing) symbolizes the corruption of the Church

and how hypocrisy is running rampant (Prior, we're looking at you—and your "niece").

Sexual Allusions

Even though we have the firm impression that Lippo likes his ladies (the Prior, too, for that matter), Browning pretty much leaves it at that.
We get a few tantalizing details with the "sportive ladies" with their "doors ajar" (6), one reference to a woman's breasts (195), and an
implied romp between Lippo and a woman upon "kirtles" (380), but other than that, things are kept on the down low.

Allusions

Literary and Philosophical References:

Judas (25) -  was one of the twelve disciples who was with Jesus, but in the end betrayed Him.
John the Baptist (34) - Jewish prophet of priestly origin who preached the imminence of God’s Final Judgment and baptized those who
repented in self-preparation for it; he is revered in the Christian church as the forerunner of Jesus Christ. According to Josephus, sometime
after baptizing Jesus, John the Baptist was killed at the palace-fortress of Machaerus, located near the Dead Sea in modern Jordan. Built by
King Herod the Great, the palace was occupied at the time by his son and successor, known as Herod Antipas.

The Gospels of Matthew (Matthew 14:1–12) and Mark (Mark 6:14–29) recorded that Herod Antipas had John the Baptist arrested and
imprisoned after the preacher condemned the king’s marriage to his wife, Herodias, as illegal, because she had previously been married to
his own brother, Philip. Herod Antipas initially resisted killing John, because of his status as a holy man. But after his stepdaughter salome
danced for him at his birthday party, he offered to give her anything she desired. Prompted by her mother, who resented John’s judgment
of her marriage, Herodias’ daughter requested the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

St. John - ("Saint John of the Florentines") - (354, 375) - The Basilica of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini ("Saint John of the Florentines") is
a minor basilica and a titular church in the Ponte rione of Rome, Italy. Dedicated to St. John the Baptist, the protector of Florence. The new
church for the Florentine community in Rome was started in the 16th century and completed in the early 18th, and is the national church
of Florence in Rome.

Herodias (196) - Herod Antipas’s wife who was previously married to his brother Philip.

St. Laurence (person) (323, 328) - The year was 258 A.D. It was a difficult beginning for what would become the First Christian Millennium.
Hostility against the early followers of Jesus Christ was growing. The barbarism and severity of pagan Rome had begun to reach a fever
pitch.Valerian had issued an edict to the Roman Senate that all the Christian clergy-bishops, priests and deacons-were to be arrested and
executed. According to the Christian tradition, Deacon Lawrence, knowing that the fervor of Valerians' hatred was extending to all
Christians who owned property, began to give it all away. He distributed the money and treasures of the Church to the city's poor-
believing the clear admonition of the Savior that they were blessed and especially loved by Him.Valerian heard the news and wanted the
treasure to satisfy his unbridled lust for worldly power. So, he offered Deacon Lawrence a way out of sure death. If he would show him
where the Church's great gold and silver were located, he would issue an order of clemency, sparing his life so that he could continue his
work.Valerian was delighted when the deacon asked for three days to gather all the gold and silver of the Church together in one central
place! His pride and greed filled blinded him from seeing the truth.For three days, Deacon Lawrence went throughout the city and invited
all the beloved poor, handicapped, and misfortunate to come together. They were being supported by a thriving early Christian
community who understood the Gospel imperative to recognize Jesus in the poor.When Valerian arrived, Deacon Lawrence presented him
with the true gold and silver of the Church, the poor! The emperor was filled with rage! Beheading was not enough for this Christian
Deacon. He ordered Deacon Lawrence to be burned alive, in public, on a griddle. Witnesses recorded the public martyrdom. The deacon
cheerfully offered himself to the Lord Jesus and even joked with his executioners!The tradition records massive conversions to the
Christian faith as a result of the holy life and death of one Deacon who understood the true heart of his vocation. He was poured out, like
his Master, Jesus Christ the Servant, in redemptive love, on behalf of others. 

St. Ambrose (355) - Saint Ambrose, also known as Aurelius Ambrosius, is one of the four original doctors of the Church. He was the Bishop
of Milan and became one of the most important theological figure of the 4th century. He distinguished between the friends and enemies
of the church and his works were complicated which made the convent exercise exhaustive study on it. (Famous for his struggles with the
Aryans)

Job (357, 358)- Job is a wealthy man living in a land called Uz with his large family and extensive flocks. He is “blameless” and “upright,”
always careful to avoid doing evil (1:1). One day, Satan (“the Adversary”) appears before God in heaven. God boasts to Satan about Job’s
goodness, but Satan argues that Job is only good because God has blessed him abundantly. Satan challenges God that, if given permission
to punish the man, Job will turn and curse God. God allows Satan to torment Job to test this bold claim, but he forbids Satan to take Job’s
life in the process.His livestock, servants, and ten children died due to marauding invaders or natural catastrophes. Job tears his clothes
and shaves his head in mourning, but he still blesses God in his prayers. Satan appears in heaven again, and God grants him another
chance to test Job. This time Job contracts skin diseases. God finally interrupts, calling from a whirlwind and demanding Job to be brave
and respond to his questions. God’s questions are rhetorical, intending to show how little Job knows about creation and how much power
God alone has. God describes many detailed aspects of his creation, praising especially his creation of two large beasts, the Behemoth and
Leviathan. Overwhelmed by the encounter, Job acknowledges God’s unlimited power and admits the limitations of his human knowledge.
This response pleases God, but he is upset with Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar for spouting poor and theologically unsound advice. Job
intercedes on their behalf, and God forgives them. God returns Job’s health, providing him with twice as much property as before, new
children, and an extremely long life.

St. Lucy (387) - Lucy's history has been lost and all we really know for certain is that this brave woman who lived in Syracuse lost her life
during the persecution of Christians in the early fourth century. Her veneration spread to Rome so that by the sixth century the whole
Church recognized her courage in defense of the faith.Because people wanted to shed light on Lucy's bravery, legends began to crop up.
The one that has passed the test of time tells the story of a young Christian woman who vowed to live her life in service of Christ. Her
mother tried to arrange a marriage for her with a pagan and Lucy knew her mother could not be swayed by a young girl's vow, so she
devised a plan to convince her mother that Christ was the better partner for life.After several prayers at the tomb of Saint Agatha, Lucy
saw the saint in a dream. St. Agatha told Lucy her mother's illness would be cured through faith, which Lucy used to persuade her mother
to give the dowry money to the poor and allow her to commit her life to God.While Lucy and her mother were grateful to God, the
rejected bridegroom was deeply angered and betrayed Lucy's faith to the governor Paschasius. The governor attempted to force her into
defilement at a brothel, but the guards who came to take her away were unable to move her, even after hitching her to a team of oxen.

Historical References:

The Carmine: Santa Maria del Carmine church in Florence, Italy. (7) The beautiful Cappella Brancacci is a small chapel within the otherwise
pretty plain Santa Maria del Carmine Church (due to the fact that most of the church was destroyed in a fire in 1771). It is considered a
miracle that the Brancacci and Corsini Chapels survived the intense fire that destroyed everything else in less than 4 hours. The Church
belongs to the Carmelite order, and like San Lorenzo, offers an unfinished façade.

Cosimo of the Medici (17, 29, 78, 100) - Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici was an Italian banker and politician who established the Medici
family as effective rulers of Florence during much of the Italian Renaissance. His power derived from his wealth as a banker, and he was a
patron of arts, learning and architecture. 

Saint Laurence church (place) (67) - It claims to be the oldest in Florence and in fact, records show it was consecrated in 393 by Saint
Ambrose of Milan, who was considered one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures of the 4th century.The church is the home to
many important “firsts” in the world of art and architecture, and a brief visit with our mini guide will help you see the major points of
interest. The church held the title of duomo for about 300 years, before the title was transferred to Santa Reparata, the present day
Duomo. However, since it was the parish church for the Medici family it still maintained a high standing in the community, which can be
seen by the prestigious works of art and architecture making up the building that you now see.

Jerome (73) - St. Jerome spent in the desert, where he prayed and fasted to still his sexual desires.2 This part of his life is popular in the
art, where he is commonly shown holding a stone used for beating his bare breast (example). One such image shows him in a ruined apse
with a crudely mounted miniature church bell. The "scorpions and wild beasts" the Legend says were his company are represented at least
once, in a relief in Trogir, Croatia.

In paintings of this type Jerome is often shown contemplating a crucifix while beating his breast (example). In an extension of this type of
image, he can also be shown standing at the Crucifixion itself, with bare breast and stone in hand (example).

Carmelites (139) - The Carmelites, formally known as the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel (Latin: Ordo
Fratrum Beatissimæ Virginis Mariæ de Monte Carmelo) or sometimes simply as Carmel by synecdoche, is a Roman
Catholic mendicant religious order for men and women. Historical records about its origin remain very uncertain, but it was probably
founded in the 12th century on Mount Carmel in the Crusader States.[1] Berthold of Calabria has traditionally been associated with the
founding of the order, but few clear records of early Carmelite history have survived. [2] The order of Carmelite nuns was formalised in
1452.[3]

Camaldolese (139) - The Camaldolese monks and nuns are two different, but related, monastic communities that trace their lineage to the
monastic movement begun by Saint Romuald. Their name is derived from the Holy Hermitage of Camaldoli, high in the mountains of
central Italy, near the city of Arezzo.

Preaching Friars: Dominican friars (140) - The Order of Preachers, whose members are known as Dominicans (Latin: Ordo
Praedicatorum, postnominal abbreviation OP), is a mendicant order of the Catholic Church founded in Toulouse, France, by the Spanish
priest Saint Dominic.

Black and white monks: This refers to the color robes each order wears. The Benedictine monks wore black and the Carmelite monks wore
white. (145)

Giotto: Giotto di Bondone was an Italian Renaissance painter, notable for his realism. (189)

Brother Angelico: one of the greatest Italian painters of the 15th century. (235)

Brother Lorenzo: noted Italian painter of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, famed for his gold-leafing techniques.
(236)

Giudi: highly-influential fifteenth-century Italian painter, also associated with Lippo's monastery. (276, 277)

Sant'Ambrogio (346) - One of the most ancient churches in Milan, it was built by St. Ambrose in 379–386, in an area where
numerous martyrs of the Roman persecutions had been buried. The first name of the church was in fact Basilica Martyrum.

Pop Culture References:

"Flower" songs: These snippets of lyrics are in the form of popular Italian lyrics of the time, called stornelli (a type of
short Italian rhyming poem or song which usually contains three lines, and the rhyming scheme aba. Singular – stornello). (53-57, 68-
69, 110-111, 238-239, 248-249)

hot cockles: a game popular at Christmastime in England. (381)  A game where a 'penitent' buries their head into the lap of another and
holds a hand out flat on the back. Others come and slap the hand and the penitent has to guess and accuse someone.
The Importance of Spring

Repetition

Saints and saints, These lines show tedium.

Lippo’s conflict

 To show that he's a rebel with a cause, he sneaks out at night and parties, enjoying the company of women of ill repute.

Throughout his drunken ramblings, Lippo tosses in some of his own philosophies about art and its purpose, and how his ideas differ from
those of the Church and even his powerful patron, Cosimo Medici. It's hard to please both himself and his two very different masters, but
he's working on a painting that will do just that—if he's able to pull it off.

Structure that Aids Dialogue.

Structure

The poem provides a dialectic (the art of discussing and investigating the truth of opinions) structure. This is made clear through the
multiple questions he asks, ‘what am I a beast for?’

There is no real rhyming at all in the poem adding the authenticity of the speech by FLL. Natural speech should not rhyme. This makes the
poem seem more like a conversation between FLL and the guards/silent listener even if there is only one voice in the poem.

There are no stanzas in this poem which is common in Browning’s poems. This makes the speech from FLL sound more fluent and such
that it is happening now.

There is no real meter or rhythm with the poem due to Browning trying to authenticate the speech from FLL.

Fra Lippo Lippi: Hypocrite?

A hypocrite pretends to have values and religious beliefs. However, Fra Lippo Lippi tells the truth, ‘And I’ve been three weeks shut within
my mew!’

A hypocrite can’t have passion for something they don’t believe in.

He has wormed his way out of trouble with everyone ending as friends. He has charmed the night watchmen which also means he has
charmed us.

He portrays the Church as in the wrong, ‘Lose a crow and catch a lark’. Catch him, tame him and use his art.

He is open about his life and how he didn’t want to be a monk, ‘they made a monk of me’, and, ‘poor devils of Medici’.

He was infected by the Church.

He isn’t materialistic unlike The Bishop in The Bishop Orders His Tomb.

He is forced in but wants to get out (rebel against the Church). He openly opposes the Church.

Uses language to make FLL at the same level as the night watchmen.

He has anger, ‘I swallow my rage’, at the Church for making him something he doesn’t want to be, ‘You should not take a fellow eight
years old / And make him swear to never kiss the girls’.

Lippo’s Romance

Lippo is quite the ladykiller. Have you noticed how he keeps inserting love song lyrics into his monologue? That's definitely not something
a monk should have his mind on.

Anecdote
Lippo gives us a nice anecdote to illustrate (see what we did there?) his point. He recently painted an image of St. Lawrence ("Shout Outs"
is your friend here), which got precisely the type of reaction the Church was looking for. The people have defaced the fresco by scratching
and rubbing out the images of the three slaves who turn St. Lawrence over the fire (eww). (BTW: "phiz" is an archaic term for "face.")

Vocabulary

Fra Lippo Lippi means Brother Lippo Lippi

What in the world does "zooks" mean, you ask? Lippo has been using it an awful lot. This is short for "gadzooks," a mild exclamation of the
time—kind of like a mild curse word. It comes from "God's hooks," meaning the nails that held Jesus to the cross. So, this is sort of like
saying "Gosh darn it!" It's one example of Browning's colloquial style, his attempt to recreate the everyday speech patterns that would
have been the norm of the time.

"Cullion" is a pretty interesting word here. If you look it up in the dictionary, you'll see that it's an archaic word for "rascal" or a "low
fellow." It comes from an Old French word meaning "testicle." Yep—Lippo's gettin' just a wee bit crude here with his diction.

God wot - God knows

Holla for the Eight - call for the magistrates (known as I Santi, the Saints) made up of citizens.

Orris-root - root of the flower which is made into smooth powder for the face. Apparently a famous cosmetic.

Knaves – It means a dishonest person. Lippo maybe talking about how the person’s dishonest members are not picking up manners and
not harming one’s reputation.

Sound Check

Since we're talking poetry here, sound is all important in creating an overall feel in "Fra Lippo Lippi." And that overall feel is one of a
rambling drunken man coming home from a night of partying hardy. Of course, that's exactly what Fra Lippo is up to this evening.

First of all, the poem sounds conversational and colloquial. Check out the "Form and Meter" section for some further deets on how the
blank verse form contributes to this. It's not just the form that creates this, though. Browning's word choice and punctuation also play
their roles.

He keeps things colloquial (meaning like a typical fifteenth-century conversation might sound) by adding in words like "Zooks!" (gadzooks,
a mild curse word), "Boh!", and "Ouf!" These replicate how a man might talk in a conversation among friends, which takes us out of the
more artificial feel that much poetry can give.

Browning's punctuation also keeps things on the conversational side. Did you notice all those dashes and ellipses? Check this out:

His name is Guidi—he'll not mind the monks—They call him Hulking Tom, he lets them talk—
He picks my practice up—he'll paint apace.
I hope so—though I never live so long,
I know what's sure to follow. You be judge! (276-280)

Each one of those dashes represent not only a pause, but a shift in the speaker's thoughts. If you think about it, a normal conversation
with friends proceeds in fits and starts. You don't just smoothly present a monologue that is 100% pre-written and goes off without a
hitch. You make connections, backtrack, add on, etc. And that's just what Browning has Lippo do here. It makes it sound much more true
to how a real conversation might proceed.

But, the guy's also drunk. Browning captures this in some of the rambling that his speaker does. He feels the need to tell his entire life
story to the guards, and also lets spill some of his own secrets—namely about how he's not able to stay away from the ladies and climbs
out his window with a sheet ladder. He also adds in fragments of popular songs of the time, showing how Lippo loses his train of thought
and sings melodies. We're sure you can totes picture your own friends doing during a normal conversation.

Setting

The "Big Picture" setting for "Fra Lippo Lippi" is fifteenth-century Florence, a time and place where the Catholic Church was ultra-powerful
and the Renaissance was just starting to take off with great innovations in art. Brother Lippo is certainly an example of that with his new-
fangled realistic techniques (which, incidentally, the Church doesn't take kindly to).

On the more "small picture" side of things, the immediate setting is a dark alley on a night in the middle of the carnival season (the "let
your hair down and let it all hang out" season leading up to the deprivations of Lent). Lippo has been accosted by the town's guardsmen
on his way back home. The darkness and seclusion of the setting contribute to an atmosphere of intimacy (and the liquor doesn't hurt,
either) that makes Lippo feel comfortable enough to tell the guardsmen some of his secrets—relating to his background, his life as a
naughty monk, and his philosophies on art.

Speaker

Fra Lippo Lippi is Browning's poetic representation of a historical figure of the fifteenth century, a monk was noted for his realistic
artworks. We expect him to speak of people, places, and events of that time, and the good Bro certainly doesn't disappoint. We get many
references to the paintings he completed—among them his masterpiece, which he describes in the last section of the poem: "The
Coronation of the Virgin."

Aside from this historical angle, Browning speculates on the type of person Lippo might have been by giving him his own voice. He appears
a rather convivial and feisty monk. He's out partying and gets caught by some guardsmen, with whom he shares some banter and for
whom he buys rounds (so, basically, he bribes them to leave him alone).

He's also a bit of a rebel. Despite being scolded by the church higher-ups for not attending to the spiritual side of things in his artwork, he
professes his own artistic philosophy of painting things that are real. He argues that the best painting takes something familiar and makes
the viewer see it in a new way.

Lippo is also a bit naughty. He's out mingling with "sportive women," who we should probably read as "women of the night." He also
seems to know what it feels like to frolic around on a woman's "kirtle" (a gown—presumably one that has been removed from the lady in
question). He justifies this behavior by saying, "You should not take a fellow eight years old/ and make him swear to never kiss the girls"
(224-225). This totes gives us a big clue that he became a monk out of necessity (he was starving to death) and not out of any true spiritual
calling.

Latin

During the medieval period (and the fifteenth century—when the real, live Fra Lippo Lippi was kickin' around), Latin was the language of
the upper-crust. Anything of permanent value was written in Latin. It was the language of the Church and of the highly-educated. In the
poem, then, Latin is a symbol for not only the Church itself, but also education and the cultural superiority that goes along with it.

Form and Meter

“Fra Lippo Lippi” takes the form of blank verse—unrhymed lines, most of which fall roughly into iambic pentameter. As in much of his
other poetry, Browning seeks to capture colloquial speech, and in many parts of the poem he succeeds admirably: Lippo includes
outbursts, bits of songs, and other odds and ends in his rant. In his way Browning brilliantly captures the feel of a late-night, drunken
encounter.

An iamb is just a two-syllable pairing, made up of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. "Pentameter" just means there are
five (penta- means five) such units (called feet—let's hope they're not stinky) in each line. Check it out:

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches tomy face. (1-2)

This blank verse form allows Browning to recreate through his poetry the ebb and flow of normal conversation. Since it's unrhymed, it
doesn't have what we might consider the stilted artificiality that end rhymes would create. For example:

It's natural a poor monk out of bounds

Should have his apt word to excuse himself:
And hearken how I plot to make amends. (341-43)

The first line spills over into the next, which gives us a solid sentence that is uninterrupted by a heavy end stop or a rhyme. This makes the
passage sound closer to natural English speech. Instead of rhymed lines, we have sentences that sound more like prose.

People don't, you know, typically speak in rhyme. If they did, we would consider that pretty unnatural (not to mention annoying). So, the
blank verse form allows Browning to make Lippo's speech sound closer to a typical conversation than highfalutin verse.

This form is also usually used in epics—Milton gets down with its bad self in Paradise Lost, for instance—but this poem is nowhere near an
epic, which gives it a good dose of irony. Since there's nothing really epic about a drunken monk trying to stumble his way home, getting
caught by guardsmen, and then giving a long, rambling monologue on his life and his views on art, that's where the irony comes in.

Poetic Style

Browning was never considered a great poet by his contemporaries because his subjects were often obscure and lay beyond the tastes
and cognitions of the great bulk of his contemporary readers. His extremely condensed and rugged expression maintains subtle links
between the ideas and the manner through which he expresses them in his poetry. His treatment of the themes is often difficult and
obscure though the keynote of his teaching is a wise and noble optimism. Browning is one of the greatest humourists of English poetry. His
peculiar style of humour gives him a unique space in English literature. His humour covers a wide range of subjects starting from plain and
pure fun to laughter from extremely sarcastic and critical expressions. In “Fra Lippo Lippi”, composed in blank verse, we find the simplest
humour and pure laughter occasionally infused with biting wit and stinging irony. However, the very nature of the character of Lippo Lippi,
as a bohemian sensualist caught, compressed but not contained in the life of a monk, has conditioned such a restless and irrepressibly
comic composition of the poem. Though the story of Fra Lippo Lippi has been taken from Vasari’s Lives, Browning’s portrayal of the
painter can claim complete originality. What the historical fact has served Browning is to act merely as materials for his artistic creations.
Browning, with the help of his jovial tone accompanied by its heart humour and high spirits and the breathless speed of the verse has
rendered the painter to the life.MA English Course 3 (Block 3) 263 Robert Browning: “Fra Lippo Lippi” Unit 14 The style used by Browning
in this poem is that of a dramatic monologue that Browning is famous for. You are already told that this style involves a speaker and an
implied auditor, and the speaker subtly conveys meaning as well as directly revealing meaning. This poem, like many of his monologues,
show an intricate mingling of the colloquial and the unusual that results in an effect of grotesqueness that adds life and a kind of humour
to his characters. The cadences that he employs in the poem may not be as colloquial as they seem, but the artificial and archaic nature of
the expressions distanced his character (Lippo Lippi) from Browning’s own time. This distancing gives an effect of an age and of
individuality suggesting that this particular accent authentically belongs to the man at a particular moment of history in this place.
Browning’s use of double rhymes, used almost in a comic way, helped him to avail such effect.

Commentary

The poem centers thematically around the discussion of art that takes place around line 180. Lippo has painted a group of figures that are
the spitting image of people in the community: the Prior’s mistress, neighborhood men, etc. Everyone is amazed at his talent, and his great
show of talent gains him his place at the monastery. However, his talent for depicting reality comes into conflict with the stated religious
goals of the Church. The Church leadership believes that their parishioners will be distracted by the sight of people they know within the
painting: as the Prior and his cohorts say, “ ‘Your business is not to catch men with show, / With homage to the perishable clay.../ Make
them forget there’s such a thing as flesh. / Your business is to paint the souls of men.’ ” In part the Church authorities’ objections stem not
from any real religious concern, but from a concern for their own reputation: Lippo has gotten a little too close to the truth with his
depictions of actual persons as historical figures—the Prior’s “niece” (actually his mistress) has been portrayed as the seductive Salome.
However, the conflict between Lippo and the Church elders also cuts to the very heart of questions about art: is the primary purpose of
Lippo’s art—and any art—to instruct, or to delight? If it is to instruct, is it better to give men ordinary scenes to which they can relate, or to
offer them celestial visions to which they can aspire? In his own art, Browning himself doesn’t seem to privilege either conclusion; his work
demonstrates only a loose didacticism, and it relies more on carefully chosen realistic examples rather than either concrete portraits or
abstractions. Both Fra Lippo’s earthly tableaux and the Prior’s preferred fantasias of “ ‘vapor done up like a new-born babe’ ” miss the
mark. Lippo has no aspirations beyond simple mimesis, while the Prior has no respect for the importance of the quotidian. Thus the
debate is essentially empty, since it does not take into account the power of art to move man in a way that is not intellectual but is rather
aesthetic and emotional.

Lippo’s statements about art are joined by his complaints about the monastic lifestyle. Lippo has not adopted this lifestyle by choice;
rather, his parents’ early death left him an orphan with no choice but to join the monastery. Lippo is trapped between the ascetic ways of
the monastery and the corrupt, fleshly life of his patrons the Medicis. Neither provides a wholly fulfilling existence. Like the kind of art he
espouses, the Prior’s lifestyle does not take basic human needs into account. (Indeed, as we know, even the Prior finds his own precepts
impossible to follow.) The anything-goes morality of the Medicis rings equally hollow, as it involves only a series of meaningless, hedonistic
revels and shallow encounters. This Renaissance debate echoes the schism in Victorian society, where moralists and libertines opposed
each other in fierce disagreement. Browning seems to assert that neither side holds the key to a good life. Yet he concludes, as he does in
other poems, that both positions, while flawed, can lead to high art: art has no absolute connection to morality.

Themes

Multiple Perspectives on Single Events

The dramatic monologue verse form allowed Browning to explore and probe the minds of specific characters in specific places struggling
with specific sets of circumstances. In The Ring and the Book, Browning tells a suspenseful story of murder using multiple voices, which
give multiple perspectives and multiple versions of the same story. Dramatic monologues allow readers to enter into the minds of various
characters and to see an event from that character’s perspective. Understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of a character not
only gives readers a sense of sympathy for the characters but also helps readers understand the multiplicity of perspectives that make up
the truth. In effect, Browning’s work reminds readers that the nature of truth or reality fluctuates, depending on one’s perspective or view
of the situation. Multiple perspectives illustrate the idea that no one sensibility or perspective sees the whole story and no two people see
the same events in the same way. Browning further illustrated this idea by writing poems that work together as companion pieces, such as
“Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto.” Poems such as these show how people with different characters respond differently to similar
situations, as well as depict how a time, place, and scenario can cause people with similar personalities to develop or change quite
dramatically.

The Purposes of Art

Browning wrote many poems about artists and poets, including such dramatic monologues as “Pictor Ignotus” (1855) and “Fra Lippo
Lippi.” Frequently, Browning would begin by thinking about an artist, an artwork, or a type of art that he admired or disliked. Then he
would speculate on the character or artistic philosophy that would lead to such a success or failure. His dramatic monologues about artists
attempt to capture some of this philosophizing because his characters speculate on the purposes of art. For instance, the speaker of “Fra
Lippo Lippi” proposes that art heightens our powers of observation and helps us notice things about our own lives. According to some of
these characters and poems, painting idealizes the beauty found in the real world, such as the radiance of a beloved’s smile. Sculpture and
architecture can memorialize famous or important people, as in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (1845) and “The
Statue and the Bust” (1855). But art also helps its creators to make a living, and it thus has a purpose as pecuniary as creative, an idea
explored in “Andrea del Sarto.”
Art and Morality:

The poem “Fra Lippo Lippi” raises several important questions regarding the role of art in society and its connection with morality. As you
look at the history of literature and art, you will find that the question of morality in connection with artistic representations has always
been a site for never ending debates among thinkers. You will find reference to these debates in classical Greek texts like Plato’s Republic
and Aristotle’s Poetics. Through Lippi’s life and paintings, Browning tries to raise the same question again. Fra Lippo Lippi’s life as a painter
and his painting would violate all the established norms of the relationship between art and morality. Making a sharp contrast to the
medieval attitude of looking at art as a means to the realisation of God, Lippi paintings aim at gratifying the beauty of the mundane and
phenomenal world with all its sensuousness. Instead of drawing ‘inspired’ faces, the characters in his paintings show secular expressions
caught in their social lives. Instead of aiming at religious preaching and reflecting the soul, his paintings try to focus on gratifying the
beauty of the naked human bodies. Browning shows Fra Lippo as a realist who deviated from the religious idealism of the earlier painters.
The Church authorities criticized his paintings because they did not express religious feelings.

The Question of Realism:

Browning, through the characterisation of Lippi, tries to give vent to the concern for Realism. Throughout the poem, Browning is
constantly making the monk, almost poignantly, attempting to represent the everyday and mundane phenomena expressed in: “A laugh, a
cry, the business of the world,” “this fair town’s face.../The mountain round it and the sky above”. This tendency has indissolubly linked
Victorian poetry with that conception of the world, which was called Realism in the Middle Ages. In this sense, Lippi is instinctively and
essentially a “realist.” He looks for a “meaning” behind the “world” (“To find its meaning is my meat and drink”). By defining everything as
the creations of God (“God made it all!”), Lippi tries to attributeMA English Course 3 (Block 3) 261 Robert Browning: “Fra Lippo Lippi” Unit
14 the highest value to the objects he perceives around him. Lippo defends his realism by declaring that one way of worshipping God is to
take pleasure in the visible world, which God has created. Whereas, Lippo is orthodox in his theology, the austere Prior, with his
pretensions to sainthood, stands convicted of a radical perversion of the realist philosophy. In order to discharge their pious ‘rage’ the
Prior and his disciples have ‘scratched and prodded’ Lippi’s painting of the human forms. Their holy concepts have hardened into mere
externalisms and they fail to find out the hidden meanings of the world. Because their ‘simplistic’ theology is rooted in a defective
formalism, it is not, ironically, the ascetic Prior or his followers but the high-spirited ‘realist,’ Lippi, who is able to discover the religious
meanings.

Human Nature and Significance of the Flesh:

The transitional phase between Medieval and Renaissance painting, or in other words, the beginning of Renaissance influenced Browning.
This attitude is characteristic of Browning’s worldview and perception to life; his keenest sympathies always lie with the young rather than
the old. “Fra Lippo Lippi” is representative of this attitude adopted by the poet. With the coming of the Renaissance, ‘the value and
significance of flesh’ received greater appreciation and the depiction of human form was held no longer an impediment to spiritual
progress. Through this poem, Browning expresses his sympathy with humanism and realism of Renaissance art, its protest against the
asceticism of the Middle Ages, its conviction that ‘the world is too big to pass for a dream’. Through artistic recreation of the world of
nature, Fra Lippo Lippi tries to pave a way to God. He is delighted to express the sensuous beauty of the world of which God is a part, the
creator. This is in direct contrast to the medieval ascetic viewpoint, which holds that the artist should never try to recreate nature. To
recreate nature is like trying to compete with God. However, Lippi holds that recreating is a means of interpretation; he believes that his
task as a painter is to interpret the works of God for262 MA English Course 3 (Block 3) Unit 14 Robert Browning: “Fra Lippo Lippi” men:
“This world is no blot for us, / Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: / To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”

The Relationship Between Art and Morality

Throughout his work, Browning tried to answer questions about an artist’s responsibilities and to describe the relationship between art
and morality. He questioned whether artists had an obligation to be moral and whether artists should pass judgment on their characters
and creations. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Browning populated his poems with evil people, who commit crimes and sins ranging
from hatred to murder. The dramatic monologue format allowed Browning to maintain a great distance between himself and his
creations: by channeling the voice of a character, Browning could explore evil without actually being evil himself. His characters served
as Personae that let him adopt different traits and tell stories about horrible situations. In “My Last Duchess,” the speaker gets away with
his wife’s murder since neither his audience (in the poem) nor his creator judges or criticizes him. Instead, the responsibility of judging the
character’s morality is left to readers, who find the duke of Ferrara a vicious, repugnant person even as he takes us on a tour of his art
gallery.

The poem “Fra Lippo Lippi” raises several important questions regarding the role of art in society and its connection with morality. As you
look at the history of literature and art, you will find that the question of morality in connection with artistic representations has always
been a site for never ending debates among thinkers. You will find reference to these debates in classical Greek texts like Plato’s Republic
and Aristotle’s Poetics. Through Lippi’s life and paintings, Browning tries to raise the same question again. Fra Lippo Lippi’s life as a painter
and his painting would violate all the established norms of the relationship between art and morality. Making a sharp contrast to the
medieval attitude of looking at art as a means to the realisation of God, Lippi paintings aim at gratifying the beauty of the mundane and
phenomenal world with all its sensuousness. Instead of drawing ‘inspired’ faces, the characters in his paintings show secular expressions
caught in their social lives. Instead of aiming at religious preaching and reflecting the soul, his paintings try to focus on gratifying the
beauty of the naked human bodies. Browning shows Fra Lippo as a realist who deviated from the religious idealism of the earlier painters.
The Church authorities criticized his paintings because they did not express religious feelings.

Freedom and Confinement

When you feel the need to rip up all the sheets and curtains in your room and sneak out your window, it's clear you're feeling pretty
confined. In "Fra Lippo Lippi," that's the situation we find Bro Lippo in. He's taken the vows of a monk to get himself out of a life of poverty
(he's literally starving, which is itself a type of confinement). Confinement works on two levels here. On the literal level, Lippo is confined
to the monastery and its rules. On a more figurative level, though, he's confined by the artistic philosophy of the Church and can't really let
his painter's flag fly high. And while being patronized by the Medicis (a very rich and powerful Italian family), this too is a type of
confinement. He's also bounded by their desires when it comes to art.

Art and Culture

"Fra Lippo Lippi" is all about what the definition of art is and who gets to define it. Lippo's idea of art seems to be that his type of realism
elevates his subjects and makes people see the wonder in the everyday things they've passed by hundreds of times, but haven't really
looked at twice. The Church's idea is that the painter shouldn't bother with getting the details right—that what matters is the entire
impression and how the images should prompt people to pray and contemplate higher spiritual subjects. Browning engages in speculation
relating to what makes up artistic objectivity and subjectivity. The poem is a highly ekphrastic one, which is a $10 word that basically
means it's concerned with art and artistic representation.

Lust

As a monk, Lippo has been forced to take a vow of chastity, swearing that he'll remain celibate for the rest of his life. Is it fair that he was
forced to take such a vow at the age of eight, primarily to avoid starving to death? Well, no—it really isn't. In "Fra Lippo Lippi," Lippo
demonstrates both implicitly and explicitly how it's unnatural to take such vows, and that the flesh will out no matter what. This is clear in
how he sneaks out of his cloister to meet with "sportive women." And lest we think it's just the lower monks like Lippo who get up to this
type of thing, he lets us know by sly hints that the Prior is not above the sins of the flesh himself. His so-called niece is really his mistress,
and this becomes part of Lippo's fantasy fodder and the subject of his artwork.

Religion

"Fra Lippo Lippi" is all about the conflict between art and religion. And Browning uses our good friend Bro Lippo as his mouthpiece. Lucky
for us, Lippo is a pretty outspoken mouthpiece whose gift for gab has been lubricated somewhat by the wine that he's been partaking. At
its center, the poem seems to suggest (again through Lippo) that the Church uses art as a propaganda tool that teaches orthodox doctrine.

Lippo has some different ideas, though. He thinks that the artwork that's acceptable to the Church is, well, boring. But even more
problematic is that the Church-sanctioned artwork does nothing for inspiring the individual to grow spiritually or intellectually. So, there's
also some push-and-pull between the individual and the communal values of the Church. Throughout the poem, “Fra Lippo Lippi”
Browning seems to be engaging in a dialogue with the Church regarding celibacy—both in the artistic and sexual sense. The feelings of the
poem’s narrator can easily be seen as Browning’s own critique and while the main theme concerns art, the strict sense in which the church
views artistic pursuits and products is similar to the way it requires priests to live celibate lives. The frequent doubt that the monk
expresses may be criticised by RC

Renaissance Arts and Paintings:

“Fra Lippo Lippi” is one of the poems that display Browning’s abiding interest in the Renaissance civilization. The speaker Fillippo Lippi is a
Florentine painter and monk. He is on the pavement outside the Medici-Riccardi palace. He is paining an altarpiece for Cosimo Medici and
by referring to the characters of the Carmine and San Lorenzo, the poem shows its background of the Renaissance Italy. Most of the
material for the poem comes from the account of Fillippo Lippi in Giorgio Vasari’s book Live of the Painters. With the story of a painter’s
life, the poet tries to express his own philosophy of art and aesthetics. The poem chiefly demarcates the conflict between Medieval and
Renaissance viewpoints on arts and the role of the artist. The early days of Renaissance art saw a gradual shift from the ecclesiastical order
to a secular worldview. The first art of Renaissance retained a great deal of faith and superstition, the philosophy, theology of the middle
ages. The Medieval painting gave themselves chiefly to the representation of the soul upon the face, and the inspired human body under
the influence of religious passion. At this time, painting dedicated its works to the representation of the heavenly life, either on earth in
the stories of the gospels and in the lives of the saints, or in the circles of heaven. Lippi tells the reader that the friars object to realistic art
because it does not inspire obedience to church doctrine; but the Fra clearly believes that devotional art does not foster the spiritual and
intellectual development of the individual. By placing more faith in the masses, Lippi acts far more discriminatingly than his patrons and
superiors. He further attacks idealized devotional art by relentlessly emphasizing the moral hypocrisy of the men of the church. It is
important to note that Browning does not debunk belief in God; he castigates those religious authorities who dictate moral imperatives to
the common people which they themselves do not follow. Browning uses this hypocrisy to persuade his readers that idealized, artistic
representations of life do not inspire people to uncritical devotion. He argues for a less exclusionary vision of art which permits the
exploration of life's "plain meaning". For the Fra, the night watchman represents a kind of new ideal because he engages all of life, not the
censored version sanctioned by the church. Lippi asks The expression of secular passion on the face, figures encaged in their social life and
war and trade, were never regarded as worthy of representation. Gradually, in harmony with the changes in social and literary life, the art
of Renaissance took a turn from the representation of the soul to the representation of the body, with all its beauty and vigour, engaged in
its natural movements. This type of painting shows an acute blending of the reality and symbolism. The poem thus tries to reconstruct a
particular historical ethos prevalent in the socio-cultural life of Renaissance Italy.

Symbols

Taste

Browning’s interest in culture, including art and architecture, appears throughout his work in depictions of his characters’ aesthetic tastes.
His characters’ preferences in art, music, and literature reveal important clues about their natures and moral worth. For instance, the duke
of Ferrara, the speaker of “My Last Duchess,” concludes the poem by pointing out a statue he commissioned of Neptune taming a sea
monster. The duke’s preference for this sculpture directly corresponds to the type of man he is—that is, the type of man who would have
his wife killed but still stare lovingly and longingly at her portrait. Like Neptune, the duke wants to subdue and command all aspects of life,
including his wife. Characters also express their tastes by the manner in which they describe art, people, or landscapes. Andrea del Sarto,
the Renaissance artist who speaks the poem “Andrea del Sarto,” repeatedly uses the adjectives gold and silver in his descriptions of
paintings. His choice of words reinforces one of the major themes of the poem: the way he sold himself out. Listening to his monologue,
we learn that he now makes commercial paintings to earn a commission, but he no longer creates what he considers to be real art. His
desire for money has affected his aesthetic judgment, causing him to use monetary vocabulary to describe art objects.

Evil and Violence

Synonyms for, images of, and Symbols of evil and violence abound in Browning’s poetry. “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” for example,
begins with the speaker trying to articulate the sounds of his “heart’s abhorrence” (1) for a fellow friar. Later in the poem, the speaker
invokes images of evil pirates and a man being banished to hell. The diction and images used by the speakers expresses their evil thoughts,
as well as indicate their evil natures. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) portrays a nightmarish world of dead horses and war-
torn landscapes. Yet another example of evil and violence comes in “Porphyria’s Lover,” in which the speaker sits contentedly alongside
the corpse of Porphyria, whom he murdered by strangling her with her hair. Symbols of evil and violence allowed Browning to explore all
aspects of human psychology, including the base and evil aspects that don’t normally appear in poetry.

Motifs

Medieval and Renaissance European Settings

Browning set many of his poems in medieval and Renaissance Europe, most often in Italy. He drew on his extensive knowledge of art,
architecture, and history to fictionalize actual events, including a seventeenth-century murder in The Ring and the Book, and to channel
the voices of actual historical figures, including a biblical scholar in medieval Spain in “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864) and the Renaissance painter
in the eponymous “Andrea del Sarto.” The remoteness of the time period and location allowed Browning to critique and explore
contemporary issues without fear of alienating his readers. Directly invoking contemporary issues might seem didactic and moralizing in a
way that poems set in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries would not. For instance, the speaker of “The Bishop Orders His
Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” is an Italian bishop during the late Renaissance. Through the speaker’s pompous, vain musings about
monuments, Browning indirectly criticizes organized religion, including the Church of England, which was in a state of disarray at the time
of the poem’s composition in the mid-nineteenth century.

Psychological Portraits

Dramatic monologues feature a solitary speaker addressing at least one silent, usually unnamed person, and they provide interesting
snapshots of the speakers and their personalities. Unlike soliloquies, in dramatic monologues the characters are always speaking directly
to listeners. Browning’s characters are usually crafty, intelligent, argumentative, and capable of lying. Indeed, they often leave out more of
a story than they actually tell. In order to fully understand the speakers and their psychologies, readers must carefully pay attention to
word choice, to logical progression, and to the use of Figures Of Speech, including any Metaphors or analogies. For instance, the speaker
of “My Last Duchess” essentially confesses to murdering his wife, even though he never expresses his guilt outright. Similarly, the speaker
of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” inadvertently betrays his madness by confusing Latin prayers and by expressing his hate for a fellow
friar with such vituperation and passion. Rather than state the speaker’s madness, Browning conveys it through both what the speaker
says and how the speaker speaks.

Grotesque Images

Unlike other Victorian poets, Browning filled his poetry with images of ugliness, violence, and the bizarre. His contemporaries, such as
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in contrast, mined the natural world for lovely images of beauty. Browning’s use of
the grotesque links him to novelist Charles Dickens, who filled his fiction with people from all strata of society, including the aristocracy
and the very poor. Like Dickens, Browning created characters who were capable of great evil. The early poem “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836)
begins with the lover describing the arrival of Porphyria, then it quickly descends into a depiction of her murder at his hands. To make the
image even more grotesque, the speaker strangles Porphyria with her own blond hair. Although “Fra Lippo Lippi” takes place during the
Renaissance in Florence, at the height of its wealth and power, Browning sets the poem in a back alley beside a brothel, not in a palace or
a garden. Browning was instrumental in helping readers and writers understand that poetry as an art form could handle subjects both
lofty, such as religious splendor and idealized passion, and base, such as murder, hatred, and madness, subjects that had previously only
been explored in novels.
Irony

He ironically promises to renounce the world so that he can easily taste the world's riches through a life of monastic "idleness," and this
irony is reflected in the demands the Prior will later make of Lippo's paintings. 

The struggles of an artist who brings in new innovations, realistic painting.

Browning’s and Lippi’s Take on Art.

many of Browning's poems explore the problems of 'faith and doubt, good and evil and problems of the function of the artist in modern
life'.- It is noteworthy that out of Browning's astonishing store of knowledge in history he picks the right time and the right man for this
purpose. It is significant that the background of 'Fra Lippo Lippi' is the early Renaissance, where he could show the contrast between 'an
age of humanistic individualism' and the 'other worldliness and social conformity of the middle Ages. Because we, in the twenty tirst
century, can easily identify ourselves with those who lived through the Renaissance. One was a period of discovery and change, the other
is an age of unprecedented scientific advancement and unimaginable technological achievement. Both ages put its people through an
emotional roller coaster as the changes are too rapid and vast to adapt t.o. Both ages highlight individualism' as the fast-progressing
society released individuals from the bonds of conformity. The' first time we meet Lippi in the poem we tind him struggling under the
clutches of the city guards who are surprised to tind a monk, deep in the night, in an alley where 'sportive ladies leave their doors ajar'. But
he is not the least abashed; rather he exclaims with virility, 'come, what am I a beast for?' (line 80) and threatens the guards with the fact
that he is a 'friend' of the Cosimo of the Medici. He resents it that the guards would have remained mum if it had been the Cosimo who
were caught but he was treated with a 'gullet's gripe', Underlying his jovial and self - confident personality, however, is a poignant strain of
pain and deprivation. As an orphan on the street of Florence, surviving on 'refuse and rubbish', and an aunt who 'trussed' him regularly for
all relation, survival was his main motivation and he readily renounced: The world, its pride and greed' Palace, farm, villa, shop and
banking house, Trash such as these poor devils of Medici Have given their hearts He was content to have instead: The good bellyful, The
warm serge and the rope that goes all round, And day - long blessed idleness beside! (lines 103-05) . The struggle for survival bred in him a
deep insight into human character whereas the reference to the 'Prior's niece' adds a humorous touch to the poem and indicates the
debauched character of the Prior; Lippi gives us human character in two masterful strokes. One is of 'the breathless fellow at the altar -
foot, Fresh from his murder' who sits safely amidst innocent little children, who look at his beard with admiration while the victim's son
shakes his fist in hopeless fury from the church door, yet controls his anger in fear of God. The other is the portrait of a poor prostitute
who came secretly in the evening, her face hardly visible, 'dropped in a loaf, Her pair of earrings and a bunch of flowers' hoping God might
forgive her sins. Here is innocence and crime lying side by side as we find them in this world of flesh and blood. In real life morality is not
an inflexible standard, it is largely dependent on perspective. We can perhaps judge the murderer easily but we cannot pass a sentence so
imperturbably on the prostitute who might have been a victim of circumstances. As William 0 Raymond explains: Browning's acute
consciousness that the central purpose of life on earth is the fashioning of individual character led him to stress its hazards and hardships.
The world is ordained to be a moral battleground, a sphere of trial, testing and probation. The limitations, obstacles, hostile forces with
which man must grapple are the stern but indispensable conditions of soul development. In order to accentuate the poignancy and
arduousness of the process, the poet dwells with unflinching realism on the grim potency of evil and suffering.~ Art, naturally, follows life.
For, it is an expression of what we see around us. And in reality the life we see does not only come in the form of a soul, it has a body as
well. Thus, when Lippi first starts painting, he is drawn instinctively to the people around him for subjects. His paintings are so true to life
that even the Prior who looks at Lippi's art critically, is drawn to appreciate them for a moment, until his old school outlook gets the better
of him, and he rebukes Lippi saying he should ignore 'the perishable clay' and draw people's attention to the soul to 'make them forget
there is such a thing as flesh' (line 182). Here, we can easily recall another poem by Browning, 'Andrea del Sarto'. Andrea was another
Renaissance painter. But whereas Lippi has no doubt about his artistic formula, Andrea suffers from a sense of tragic failure. He envies
Michelangelo and the rest of his contemporaries who have been able to express the human soul through their paintings though their lines
and curves may not have been as perfect as his. It is perhaps because of his lack of inspiration; or it may be the result of his obsession with
perfection which often kills the inspiration behind a work of art. But Lippi is all inspiration and as a result suffers from no such hesitations.
He draws what he sees and since the body and the soul are inseparable in existence, it is the only logical conclusion that they cannot be
separated in art. So, he says: Why can't a painter lift each foot in rum, Left foot and right foot, go a double step, Make his flesh liker and his
soul more like, Both in their order? (lines 205-08) Browning resolves the problem with the idea: For don't you mark? We're made so that
we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted
- better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that. So, the function of the artist, as it stands out in 'Fra Lippo Lippi', is to
represent God's creation in his art and to bring out the beauty and the wonder and the power, The shapes of things, their colours, lights
and shades, Changes, surprises - and God made it all! (lines 283-8)} Browning thus suggests that through art we learn to appreciate not
only God's creations, big and small, good and bad, animate and inanimate, beautiful and ugly, but also Him as the Creator of them all. If we
think in this way, then: You'll find the soul you have missed Within yourself when you return Him thanks. (lines 219-20) William 0 Raymond
says: While Browning's belief in the supremacy of the soul is unfaltering, he rejects any ascetic conception of man's nature. Although the
body and the senses are from one point of view limitations of man's spiritual insight, they are the necessary conditions of his moral
probation, the working tools through which the soul's development on earth is achieved. \{I Thus, the tomfoolery that we find Lippi
indulging in is in fact an expression of his artistic frustration because, 'The world and life's too big to pass for a dream' (line 251). Just as
the body needs food, the creative instinct of an -artist needs freedom. Whereas Lippi wants to enjoy life he is shut up in his mew, while he
wants to draw people in real life he is compelled to paint 'saints and saints and saints again'. But there is hope. Once in a while he defies
his superiors and indulges in little escapades which replenish him and give him fresh inspiration. Because love is a potent force. Specially in
the present age, sometimes we see people constructing a dream of future happiness, to build which they are so engrossed that sometimes
they forget the pleasure of the present. They do not want the bondage and responsibility of marriage, but unable to deny the
requirements of nature, indulge in unstable relationships which bring more pain than pleasure. Lippi reflects the thought in the song: Take
away love, and our earth is a tomb! (line 54). He has never known love since his childhood and easily mistakes the momentary comfort of
physical pleasure as Love. He is painting the portrait of St. Jerome struggling to subdue the demands of the flesh; but he realizes that man
and woman were created to be together as a source of comfort and companionship: I always see the garden and God there A - making
man's wife: and, my lesson learned, The value and significance of flesh, I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards; (lines 266-69) It is thus the
creed of the church forbidding marriage, denying one of the basic demands of human nature that is to be blamed for Lippi's shortcomings.
Browning was a believer in religion but he was too human to think of religion as a sum - total of rules and regulations without any human
considerations. He believed in the divine condescension to human weakness and imperfection as. 'flowing from the very essence of God as
a being of infinite 10ve'.11 So, he is impatient with those who resort to 'scare tactics' to encourage the observance of religious values~ It is
to be inspired, not enforced: You should not take a fellow eight years old and make him swear to never kiss the girls. (lines 224-25)
Browning expressed his in Pauline, 'to be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all' (lines 277-78). life, according to Browning is to be lived, not
contemplated. Art is to portray not the soul alone but the body as well. And in the span of the 392 lines of 'Fra Lippo Lippi', Browning
presents to us about a dozen characters, the conflicting views of life and art, and social evils such as destitution, prostitution and
domination. Character is drawn in only a few strokes but it makes a lasting impression: He's Judas to a tittle, that man is! Just such a face!
(lines 25-26) According to R.B. Anis, 'Browning's men and women are people of action and they hate passive behaviour'. '2 When Lippi is
escaping from his mew in the monastery: Into shreds it went, Curtain and counterpane and coverlet All the bed furniture - a dozen knots,
there was a ladder! Down I let myself, Hands and feet, scrambling somehow and so dropped, And after them. (lines 61-66) His thoughts
are just as quick, even as an eight-year-old. When he is asked: 'will you renounce?', he reacts quickly: 'the mouthful of bread?' thought I;
By no means! (lines 96-97) Browning's language was suited to the special need of expressing action and the process of thought. Because,
like Eliot, in particular, Browning was interested in exploring the devious ways in which our minds work and the complexity of four
motives. 'My stress lay on the incidents in the development of the soul', wrote Browning, 'little else is worth study'. !:I Browning's
unconventional vocabulary has often been compared to the colloquial style of Donne, the soliloquy of Shakespeare or the comic verse of
Chaucer.14 The process of human thought is so complex that to express it in its pure and original form, Browning often uses brackets,
elliptical sentences or his sentences break out of rhyme almost into cacophony sometimes according to mood it goes into a staccato
rhythm! Though his language sometimes shocked his contemporaries, it is exactly what makes his poetry so interesting and realistic. As we
find in Lippi's case, his vocabulary is a mixture of the ragamuffin and the monastic. In one breath he will use a delicate phrase like 'sportive
ladies' and the colloquial 'hunt it up, Do, - harry out', Edwin Muir says 'll. s Browning was interested in human activity, rather than human
states such as grief or happiness, he had a technical interest, and he wrote with a professional appreciation of the importance of the
modes of the professions that came into his poetry'.!5 We find in Lippi's interest in the guard as a subject of his art: I'd like his face His,
elbowing on his comrade in the door With the pike and lantern, - for the slave that holds John Baptist's head a - dangle by the hair . With
one hand ('Look you, now', as who should say) And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped! (lines 31-36) Thus we have a great poet
describing a great artist in 'Fra Lippo Lippi', As Lippi looks for subjects in connection with real life, Browning too wishes to present us real
characters with their flaws and perfections. From the discussion above we can get some of the answers we are looking for. Good and evil
exist in this world side by side. Every example can be found readily in God's world (nature is complete line 297), But He has given us a
choice between the two, We cannot always do the moral thing perhaps, but we are expected to fail: Ah, but a man's reach should exceed
his grasp Or what's a heaven for? ('Andrea del Sarto', lines 91-98) These lines embody the essence of Browning's philosophy of life. And
they encourage us to strive for perfection with whatever we have got. Because ultimately what matters is the effort, endeavour, attempt
and willingness to do good. In this respect the function of the artist is also to lry and highlight God's creation and make man appreciate
what the Creator has given us. But Browning says, to do so he must be able to appreciate life first. As William 0 Raymond explains: It is
Browning's consciousness that the development of a soul on earth can be achieved only by the fashioning of it in the warp and woof of the
coloured strands of human experience which underlies his philosophy of life and imparts warmth and realism to his poetry. Thus, in this
age of scientific advancement, special effects and action mms, we must not forgot that we are on this earth for a purpose. We are here to
do good at whatever station of life we may be. We will always try to do the right thing, the moral thing, even if we fail at times, even if we
suffer at times. It is not for us to judge anyone for their actions as it remains unknown to us under what circumstances those actions were
performed. This is the faith that can keep us in peaceful co - existence in today's world of hatred and war. And it remains the function of
the artist, any artist - whether a painter, a poet, a writer, a photojournalist or an actor - to point out to us the beauty found in God's
creation and guide us towards a goal of purity; it is for them too to point out the ugliness in this world and make us shudder so that we are
conscious to avoid them at all costs. This is what we receive from Browning's reflections on life and art in this poem and this is what makes
the poem so relevant to our situation in the twenty first century.

Attack on Idealised Art.

In "Fra Lippo Lippi", Robert Browning satirizes the essentially corrupt relationship between the Italian Renaissance tradition of art
patronage, the Medici family, and the Roman Catholic church. The poem takes a dialectic structure enabling Lippi to describe and debunk
the tradition of art patronage and then pose his own theory about the role of art and artist in society. He describes the censorious
limitations which occur when representatives of the Church tell the artist

Your business is not to catch men with show,………..

Your business is to paint the souls of men. [ ll.183-87]

Browning suggests here that church doctrine transform art into propaganda rather than creative expression. These devotional works do
not promote a critical awareness of life because the friars compel Lippo Lippi to create idealized representations of life, claiming that art
should depict God’s desires rather than human folly.

God's works-paint any one, and count it crime…………………..

There's no advantage! You must beat her, then." [ll. 295-99]
Lippi tells the reader that the friars object to realistic art because it does not inspire obedience to church doctrine; but the Fra clearly
believes that devotional art does not foster the spiritual and intellectual development of the individual. By placing more faith in the
masses, Lippi acts far more discriminatingly than his patrons and superiors. He further attacks idealized devotional art by relentlessly
emphasizing the moral hypocrisy of the men of the church. It is important to note that Browning does not debunk belief in God; he
castigates those religious authorities who dictate moral imperatives to the common people which they themselves do not follow.
Browning uses this hypocrisy to persuade his readers that idealized, artistic representations of life do not inspire people to uncritical
devotion. He argues for a less exclusionary vision of art which permits the exploration of life's "plain meaning". For the Fra, the night
watchman represents a kind of new ideal because he engages all of life, not the censored version sanctioned by the church. Lippi asks,

What's it all about?

To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,………………….
To let a truth slip. [ll.290-6]

Browning satirizes the hypocrisy of the monks and condemns a theory of art which denies the potential of ordinary people to cultivate a
conscious awareness of life and art. As with the other friars, Fra Lippo Lippi believes art should capture moments of experience and
transform them into focal points of beauty. Yet, Browning suggests that the traditional, idyllic definition of beauty espoused by the church
turns art into propaganda. Instead, he proposes that honest, realistic portrayals of life should be channeled into these aesthetic moments.

Browning increases the drama of "Fra Lippo Lippi" by portraying the monk as an artist still caught in this traditional system of art
patronage. Lippo Lippi emphasizes the hypocrisy of his position because the inspiration for his exalted, religious paintings comes from
abased sources. For example, he finds the inspiration for patron saints in the face of the Prior's so-called niece and informs the night
watchman in the final stanza that the evening's incident - being caught leaving a brothel - will inspire his next painting. The monk makes
clear the depths of his frustration regarding the powerful force of censorship in which he is caught.

So I swallow my rage,
Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
To please them-sometimes do and sometimes don't. [ll. 242-4]

Appropriately, in this interlude the Fra invokes the Medici name, relying upon the entrenched social hierarchy to protect himself. Above all
others, the Medici family propagated the system of art patronage which Fra Lippo Lippi condemns. They represent the Roman Catholic
church at its most abased level. Thus, in "Fra Lippo Lippi" Browning relentlessly indicts religious hypocrisy and elitist conceptions of art
with his realistic, satirical portrait of one monk. In this, the poet reflects the increasingly democratic mores of nineteenth-century British
society.

Character and Philosophy in Fra Lippo Lippo

Character and Philosophy in "Fra Lippo Lippi" W. David Shaw The Victorians valued Browning as a poet of doctrine, whereas modern
critics, even when sympathetic to Browning's art, are usually suspicious of his "philosophy." They praise Browning for his psychology and
style and try to discount his ideas. But if the Browning Society was often a cause of embarrassment to the poet, there is no question that
Browning would have been even more alarmed by the misplaced emphasis of the "New Critics." A Victorian like Arthur Symons may have
exaggerated the im- portance of ideas in poetry when he praised Browning's characters for their power to think.1 But when such a
perceptive scholar as Robert Langbaum tries to read Browning as an English Mallarme, asserting that his "ideas" are "not to mean but to
be evoked,"2 we feel that the fashionable doctrine of "pseudo-statements"- as well as the tendency to glorify a poetry of implication at
the expense of a poetry of explicit statement- has betrayed the critic into the opposite extreme. We may find Professor Langbaum's
Browning more congenial than the Vic- torians'; but one of the functions of a liberal education is that it enables us, in Matthew Arnold's
phrase, "to see the object as in itself it really is." We cannot be content to revaluate Browning merely from the point of view of our own
time. Browning the dramatist-philosopher, the poet of "Fra Lippo Lippi," is confronted by a difficult problem- one we must first understand
if we are to appreciate the triumph of this poem. It is important to remember that Browning the thinker, the Victorian philosopher of art,
religion and morality, believes in his ideas, and is eager to persuade his readers. But there is also Browning the psychologist, the dramatist
manque, who had found his genius in the monologue convention, and who knew that "doctrine" without "art" meant dullness. As an
artist- philosopher, his object is to combine the two roles. To this end Browning makes Fra Lippo's rhetoric alternate between ingratiation
with his auditors and forms of philosophic speculation. Arthur Symons, "Is Browning Dramatic?" Browning Society Papers (London, 1885),
VII, 6: ^"Shakespeare makes his characters live; Browning makes his characters think/' 2Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience
(London, 1957), p. 207. This content downloaded from 128.252.67.66 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 12:20:47 UTC All use subject to
http://about.jstor.org/terms 128 Victorian Poetry The monk's refusal to speak Latin, which he identifies with his opponents ("They with
their Latin"), is a counterpart of Browning's own stylistic strategy. The poet has a philosophic proposition to communicate, but he cannot
deliver it "in Latin." "Latin" is a metaphor for the Prior's pretentious vocabulary of "spiritual" motivation: "Give us no more of body than
shows soul!" Like purely conceptual language, it is devoid of the rich tonalities which contribute to the full, complex appeal of Fra Lippo's
speech. By themselves, Browning's ideas, like the Prior's "Latin," will convince no one. But just as Fra Lippo's frank confidences and worldly
tone enable him to procure the goodwill of the officers, so his subtle ingratiation manifests Browning's own persuasive powers over the
reader, and enables the poet to include all the philosophy that the drama will sustain. Despite the irony, Browning makes the "doctrine"
dramatically con- vincing. Fra Lippo confronts what is for philosophy the eternal prob- lem of the relation between spirit and substance.
Browning is often called a Platonic idealist, but it is significant that Fra Lippo rejects the solution advanced by Neo-Platonism and by its
artistic spokesman, Botticelli, that spirit and substance, though coexistent, are not com- parable. He refuses to see the world simply as the
expression of a spiritual state: "life's too big to pass for a dream." On the contrary, Fra Lippo at times appears to be embracing the
opposite thesis, that spirit is less real than matter: "The value and significance of flesh, / I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards." Despite
the unequal emphasis, however, Browning's Fra Lippo seems constantly to be moving beyond the polarity of style represented by
Quattrocento art and by the historical Filippo Lippi himself. In Fra Lippo's resolve to "add [the] soul" to his transcription of the "flesh,"
Browning is clearly anticipating the evolution of an equal relation, a union of substance and spirit, as it appears both in the classical style of
Italian painting and in the doctrines of philosophic "realism," which confronts an analogy of the problem in its own sphere. But to
understand how Browning makes these ideas compelling to the reader, just as Fra Lippo's intimate confidences ingratiate him with the
officers, we must see how the polarity of flesh and spirit inevitably issues in a polarity of attitudes and styles. The monk keeps executing a
kind of glissade in modulating from one attitude to another. From the bluster of the sensualist we pass to the morbidly introspective
world, so rarefied and ethereal, of the saintly Fra Angelico. The spectacle of the monk "at [his] saints" recalls the "endless cloisters and
eternal aisles" of "Pictor Ignotus"- a sepulchral domain of unreality and death. But from this shadowy This content downloaded from
128.252.67.66 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 12:20:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W. David Shaw 129 realm of spirits and
dreams, Fra Lippo's cultivation of all pleasures and all pains, so nostalgically evoked in "A laugh, a cry, the business of the world,"
irresistibly lures us. The swimming spirits, spicy like the night air, surge to a climax of sensuous intensity: "And my whole soul revolves, the
cup runs over." From this pungent inversion of Old Testament language, Fra Lippo dramatically descends to the level of mocking sermons
and homely parables: "The only good of grass is to make chaff." The rhetorical questions of the pedestrian fable give way to the didactic
jog-trot of his ploddingly anaphoric sermon: You tell too many lies and hurt yourself: You don't like what you only like too much, You do
like what, if given you at your word, You find abundantly detestable. The monk parodies the Prior's ridiculous hypocrisy in the very
language of his opponent's windy and dogmatic manner. From this caustic satire Fra Lippo mounts to a sonorous pronouncement: "I
always see the garden and God there / A-making man's wife." This solemn utterance, so general and impersonal, yet so wonderfully in-
timate, too, is just the kind of truth that would be perfectly accessible to the monk. Fra Lippo is probably the most genuinely religious
sensualist in English literature. His vision of God creating Eve rises instinctively, and releases that incorruptible and childlike impulse to
glorify God and His creation- that passion for spontaneous worship which Browning has so brilliantly dramatized in earlier sections of the
poem. A moment later, as this lofty rhetoric breaks down, Fra Lippo confides in the officers: "You understand me: I'm a beast, I know."
Throughout the poem, Browning is constantly creating a keener sense of character in order to support and generate new ideas. Fra Lippo
steps aside for a moment to marvel at "The shape of things, their colors, lights and shades," then speculatively prods his auditors: "Do you
feel thankful, ay or no?" or "What's it all about?" His outspoken exclamations: "Oh, oh, / It makes me mad," alternates with the most
oracular solemnities: "Interpret God to all of you!" Fra Lippo's irrepressible appreciation is a form of gratitude, of voracious hunger for new
experience, almost as pronounced in Brown- ing as in Henry James, and the closest secular equivalent in the monk (as in his creator) to the
traditional religious motive of glorifica- tion. The monk's almost poignant sense of the identity of individual phenomena- "A laugh, a cry,
the business of the world," "this fair town's face ... / The mountain round it and the sky above"- composes a veritable paean of
thanksgiving, and is indissolubly linked This content downloaded from 128.252.67.66 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 12:20:47 UTC All use subject to
http://about.jstor.org/terms 130 Victorian Poetry with that conception of the world which was called Realism in the Middle Ages. Like
every primitive sensibility, Fra Lippo is instinctively a "realist." He posits a universalia ante rem, a "meaning" behind the "world" ("To find
its meaning is my meat and drink"), and in his crusade for the supreme value of the single thing he projects every object as "an entity . . .
[upon] the heavens":3 "God made it all!" Whereas the sensual monk is orthodox in his theology, the ascetic Prior, with his pretensions to
sainthood, stands convicted, if not of heretical nominalism, at least of a radical perversion of the realist philosophy. In order to discharge
their pious "rage" the Prior and his disciples have "scratched and prodded" Fra Lippo's picture of the pagan "slaves." Their holy concepts,
like the Spanish monk's idea of the Trinity, have hardened into mere externalisms. Like nominalists who reject the universals, these pious
"fools" have failed to penetrate the surface. Because their "simplistic" theology is rooted in a defec- tive formalism, it is not, ironically, the
ascetic Prior or his followers but the high-spirited "realist," Fra Lippo, who is able to discover the religious meanings. Browning critics4
keep insisting, with weary iteration, that the poet's characters never change, that they remain substantially the same from beginning to
end. Though this is true of the early mono- logues, it is radically inadequate in describing the dramatic action in "Fra Lippo Lippl." Near the
opening of the monologue there is a reference to Fra Lippo as a "beast." But as the monk lifts the dialogue to a philosophic plane by using
the same conceit of man's physical nature: "Being simple bodies," we see that the "beast" is not simply a metaphor for sensuality. Fra
Lippo passes from his intercourse with "the girls" to his Socratic intercourse with the officers on the sacramental status of man's creatural
realism: "The value and sig- nificance of flesh, / I can't unlearn." His celebration of the flesh is developed in systematic contrast to the
anemic spirituality of the Prior. The highest level is reached, and the dialectic of flesh and 3J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages
(London, 1924), p. 186. "Every primitive mind is realist, in the medieval sense, independently of all philosophic influence. To such a
mentality everything that receives a name be- comes an entity and takes a shape which projects itself on the heavens." For an excellent
discussion of this whole question see chap, xv, "Symbolism in its De- cline," pp. 182-194. 4See Langbaum, p. 146, for example: The speaker
of the dramatic mono- logue starts with an established point of view, and is not concerned with its truth but with trying to impress it on
the outside world." Professor Langbaum seems to suggest that one difference between a soliloquy and a dramatic mono- logue is that in
the first instance the speaker is a "free" character and in the second case a "fixed" one. This content downloaded from 128.252.67.66 on
Fri, 17 Jun 2016 12:20:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W. David Shaw 131 spirit is momentarily resolved, as Fra
Lippo discerns, in analogy to the Christian Incarnation, the immanence of a spiritual power in nature that will enable him to "interpret God
to all of you!" But this flash of perception immediately alternates with his wilful negation. As Fra Lippo reduces his argument to the lowest
possible level ( Tm a beast, I know," "It's natural a poor monk / Should have his apt word to excuse himself"), the philosophy quickly
dissolves. The struggle between flesh and spirit is not permitted to end, and we may assume that it will never end. The habit of concluding
a monologue with a brief restatement of the speaker's most radical limitations is a recurrent one in Browning. One explanation is that the
conflict between flesh and spirit has its intriguing parallel in Browning's own artistic practice- in the inter- action between the concrete
elements of dramatic personality, which are the "flesh" of Browning's poem, and the ideas they support. Fra Lippo's philosophy is also an
account of Browning's poetic method- a dialectical play of opposites, brought together at their climax, like body and soul, in a synthetic
union of personality and ideas. But if the "philosophy" solves the problem that the speaker raises- if, in this case, the dialectic of flesh and
spirit is resolved, as it almost is- then the poem will cease to be a dramatic monologue and degenerate into a mere lecture by the poet.
The picture of the monk at the end, breaking abruptly into his painting, repeats the reversal of perspective already established in the
opening, as Fra Lippo turns to involve us directly in his own poetic world, and so affirms the pattern. The monk in the painting solicits us in
our world, frontally and melodramatically. He involves us in a round of sensual activity that is as totally opposed to his sacramental
doctrines of nature as is the non-artistic world that we inhabit to the aesthetic space of his painting. The genius of this "violation" is that it
is also a way of being consistent. For it preserves the dialectical condition and prevents the drama from becoming a philosophic
disquisition. Once a character discovers the "truth," the dramatic action is complete. Because we can predict what such a character will
say, he is seldom entertaining as a person. This paradox helps explain why Browning's increasing preoccupation with the "truth" could
prepare the way for the tedious exposition of his later period. The final picture of Fra Lippo as a blushing sensualist, hiding for very shame
among the "company" of the blest, is Browning's unob- trusive way of reminding us, especially after the monk's lofty discourse on the
sacramental status of nature, that the interaction between flesh This content downloaded from 128.252.67.66 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016
12:20:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 132 Victorian Poetry and spirit, personality and ideas, which is the very
condition of his art, must not be suspended. Whereas the limitation of many of the early monologues is that they make everything over in
their own image, the defect of the later didactic poems is that they project no image at all. The triumph of "Fra Lippo Lippi," like most of
Browning's greatest monologues, is that just as the monk cannot separate flesh from spirit, so we, as readers, cannot isolate the
characters from their ideas. The poem evolves a synthetic image, an indissoluble fusion, of character and philosophy together.

Analysis

"Fra Lippo Lippi" stands as one of Browning's most sophisticated dramatic monologues because it works on so many different levels. It is a
discourse on the purpose of art, on the responsibility of the artist, the limits of subjectivity, the inadequacy of moral shapes and strictures,
and lastly a triumph of dramatic voice.

Browning was inspired to write this poem after reading about Filippo Lippi in Vasari's Lives of the Artists, a compendium of Renaissance
painters. Vasari identifies Lippi as the first realist painter, and Browning was attracted to the idea of Lippi being a ground breaker in terms
of artistic style. At the time Lippi was painting, art was expected to conform to certain religious principles and to pursue shadowy, moral
forms rather than delve into the intricacies of life as it is. Browning would have been attracted to this idea as a writer of complicated
psychology in the midst of the Victorian era, which again pushed the idea that art should have a moral purpose.

Probably the most resonant theme in the poem is Lippo's dialectic on the purpose of art. Basically, his dilemma comes down to two
competing philosophies: where he wants to paint life as it is, thereby revealing its wondrous complexity, his superiors want him to paint
life through a moral lens, to use his painting as an inspirational tool. Lippo proposes in several places the importance of "realism" as a
painting style. The best argument for it can be found in the speaker himself, who frequently reveals his love of life. Notice the many times
he breaks into song in the poem, which suggests his whimsical nature. His ability to use details in characterizing people (like when he talks
of begging from a variety of different individuals) shows that he has an eye for the myriad distinctions in the world. As a realist, Lippo
believes art should aspire to capture the beauty God has made in hopes of evoking responses from its audience. Further, he suggests that
humans have a tendency to overlook the details of their lives, to ignore "things we have passed perhaps a hundred times." When a painter
presents the same objects through art, a person is able to suddenly appreciate them in a new light, therefore appreciating God's beauty as
it was meant to be appreciated. As evidence of the effectiveness of his philosophy, Lippo cites the common monks who loved his paintings
and enjoyed recognizing their world in his depictions.

As a counter to this philosophy, Lippo's superiors believe art should "instigate to prayer." They eschew anything that reminds the viewer of
the body, instead insisting that art should represent the soul and thereby inspire man to be better than he is. The Prior needs art to
remind man of his religious instincts, suggesting that anything that focuses on the body must be impure. Lippo wants to reveal the irony of
this philosophy – he suggests that trying to improve on God's beauty (which he captures through realism) is antithetical to the purpose of
trying to bring an audience closer to God. He suggests time and time again that because life is full of complexity, contradiction, and
wonder, representing it as it is will only stress those qualities, whereas the attempt to "transcend" through art will ironically simplify art
into a pure, moral purpose that encourages people to "fast next Friday." Lippo asks, "What need of art at all?" if its purpose is merely to
encourage piety. When Lippo paints a saint, he paints a saint, not what the saint represents, since in attempting to do the latter, he would
no longer capture the contradictions and intricacies of the saint.

The poem also considers an artist's responsibility, especially when he is doing something new (as Browning certainly thought he was doing
with his own work). When Lippo lists as some of his sample subjects "the breathless fellow at the altar-foot/Fresh from his murder," the
irony of a murderer in church calls to mind some of Browning's dramatic monologues like "Porphyria's Lover." The poem ultimately
suggests that an artist must be responsible to only one thing: himself. Lippo paints as his masters demand because he must survive, and he
learned early on in life that by pretending to be something, he could stay fed instead of remaining hungry. In the same way that he
pretended to renounce the world to get bread, so does he continue to paint in a way he does not admire, all the while growing bitter that
he is not adequately expressing his view that good painting should evoke questions and wonder. When he sketches his plan for a final
painting at the end of the poem, he is expressing an idea of how to feed both desires: he will paint what the Church wants but also include
himself, thereby making a subversive comment and negating the moral purpose for which the painting ostensibly is meant.

It is in terms of this idea that the poem has a bigger purpose than just being about art. Instead, it contemplates the limits of subjectivity.
Basically, what Lippo's masters want is for him to attempt a holy subjectivity, to capture the essence of his subjects rather than their
objective facts (which are defined by their specific physical characteristics, for instance). This would conform to the Romantic tradition of
poetry in which Browning writes; by focusing on the subjective experience of nature, a Romantic poet aims to transcend its physical
limitations and reveal something greater. Browning, who was often criticized for his objective focus on trying to represent characters
outside his own mind rather than "putting himself" into a poem, is making a challenge to this criticism. Lippo wants us to see that his
impulse to paint 'objectively' – to paint the world as it appears – does not necessarily mean he eschews this subjective transcendence. One
can capture the subjective wonder of life by painting the objective, because it is only through the body that we can even attempt to
glimpse the soul. He suggests that attempting to paint the 'subjective' is to guess at God's meaning, when God has only given us the
objective. In essence, what Lippo (and Browning) are saying is that to reproduce the world as he sees it is always to be both objective and
subjective. By extension, Browning suggests that, for example, the duke in "My Last Duchess" indeed represents Browning himself, as well
as humankind in general. However, Browning can go no further than representing psychological realism as he observes it, because to
pretend to have a facility for that is to be dishonest – all we have are our eyes and senses, and an artist should revel in the freedom and
wonder of that. The mention of Hulking Tom only suggests that artists should be ground breakers – in the same way Lippo has moved art
to a new place, so will Hulking Tom, for the world changes and artists need to continually mark those changes without having to conform
to illogical demands.

However, what really pushes an artist away from this recognition are moral expectations and strictures, which this poem criticizes in
Browning's usual ironic fashion. The scene in which Lippo is first brought to the convent is hilarious. As he stuffs his mouth full of bread,
the "good fat father" asks the 8-year-old boy if he will "quit this very miserable world?" Having known the pains of near-starvation, the
boy knows better than the "fat father" the pains of the world, but is taking great joy in the simplicity of bread. He ironically promises to
renounce the world so that he can easily taste the world's riches through a life of monastic "idleness," and this irony is reflected in the
demands the Prior will later make of Lippo's paintings. The Prior wants Lippo to continually renounce the world in his art, to ignore the
body in favor the soul, but all the while we are to remember that this is a silly irony. When the Prior suggests that art should inspire people
to pray, to fast, and to fulfill their religious duties, there is an implication of a hierarchy that must be maintained by stressing those duties,
all of which has to do with the material and physical world. These moral expectations are encouraged because they maintain the material
world's chain of command, and for an artist like Lippo, such a philosophy is necessarily a limitation on art.

It is for these reasons that Lippo encourages the police prelate to let him go. He stresses that they, as subordinates to superiors, should
not simply enforce laws because those laws exist, but instead should recognize that man is a "beast" with beastly (sexual) desires. It is easy
to see in Lippo's defense an amusing attempt to rationalize his release, but it also ties into the poem's main themes.

Ultimately, the poem is most effective in its masterful use of voice. Written in blank verse, it attempts to capture the rhythms of human
speech rather than conforming to any strict poetic meter. Lippo's objective in the early part of the poem is simply to be released, and he
accomplishes this through his humorous name-dropping and defenses of his behavior. However, he quickly falls into his life story, which
suggests the extent of his psychological repression. There is obviously nothing this simple policeman can do to help Lippo's situation, but
his insistence on speaking at such length to the man only stresses how terribly he has been caught in a system unable to reveal his unique
gifts. In a sense, Browning's use of voice makes Lippo's point: by objectively capturing a character outside of himself, Browning is able to
engage in his own subjective hang-ups and fascinations about art, life, and humanity. To paint a man as he might be (as Browning has done
with Lippo), with his imperfections intact, is to suggest wonderful possibilities.

Finally, the poem's final image offers a great allegory worthy of dissection. As mentioned above, Lippo's inclusion of his own image in an
otherwise pious painting merely stresses the unavoidable collision between subjectivity and objectivity. He will give them what they want
but surreptitiously put himself in it anyway. The woman who praises him is often linked to the muse, she who revels in his ability to push
boundaries and capture inspiration. From this perspective, the "hothead of a husband" must be the world and its moral strictures, coming
in to force the muse to stay within the lines. Interestingly enough, when this conflict happens, Lippo hides himself behind a bench to
watch it play out, suggesting that it is this very conflict – between unfettered artistry and the demands of the world – that fuel an artist's
creativity. Once the fight between husband and angel is complete, Lippo will have seen enough turmoil to have inspired his next painting.

Analysis as an Ekphrastic Poem

A paradigmatic ekphrastic poem, such as W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, with its central description of how the everyday life of the
painting goes on as usual in Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus while its titular character drowns, demonstrates clearly James
Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis: “The verbal representation of visual representation.”

This is not to say that ekphrasis is without nuance. Foundational ekphrastic theorist Murray Krieger makes this clear in his essay, “The
Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Moment of Poetry; or Laokoon Revisited,” in which he frames ekphrasis as artistic representation that
employs “a plastic object as a symbol of the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must be superimposed upon literature’s
turning world to ‘still’ it.” He concludes that, as a result, “the poem takes on the ‘still’ elements of plastic form which we normally attribute
to the spatial arts” and its “generic spatiality.”

While Lawrence J. Starzyk and various other critics are correct in referring to Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” as ekphrastic, this poem
also spills over the edges of that definition because in it Browning does more than merely describe a work of visual art; he gives voice to
his own version of the 15th century Italian painter Filippo Lippi, and really to his own vision of art, and then lets it run amuck in poetic
space. Granted, there are ekphrastic elements in this poem, as in the case where Browning/the painter speaker refers to works of art
created by the real Lippi; however, that Browning’s Lippi also refers to paintings he never painted implies that Browning is up to more than
merely forming a narrative in response to a work of visual art.

Yet, while Heffernan’s and Krieger’s definitions of ekphrasis may not give us the whole key to Browning’s poem, they help us understand
how Browning’s poem behaves: Lippi acts as artistic sensibility set free to wander and narrate both the words of poetry and the space of
art. This essay will argue that in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” Browning attempts to enact Krieger’s concept of ekphrastic spatiality while
simultaneously trying to resist the stillness that Krieger claims is its inevitable byproduct.

The ekphrastic tendency in art is nothing new. Painting and poetry, for example, have been interwoven in diverse ways for centuries, from
as far back as Horace’s “ut pictura poesis” to Schlegel’s comment that the painter “must be a poet” in “exemplifying the poetic idea of
things” and Alexis-François Rio’s 1836 book that treated the “Christian poetry” of painting. With this in mind, one passage of “Fra Lippo
Lippi” sets the stage for the poem’s blurring of the lines between the visual and the verbal. In it, Lippi takes us on his journey from
studying faces as a form of survival to studying faces as a form of art. As a child growing up on the streets, he learns how to tell from
people’s appearances who will help him and who will harm him. Not surprisingly, this experience strengthens his powers of observation
significantly:

Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,

He ………………………the less………………….

I drew men’s faces on my copy-books,

Scrawled them ……….marge,……………….

On the………………. The monks looked black.

Thus, it is a safety measure that the homeless young Lippi must take that leads to his talent for art when he starts sketching in his lesson
books. This interweaving of language and image is the start of his project to capture his surroundings.The conceptual difference between
the reason he learned to be so observant (survival or “sense”) and the use he puts this ability to (art or “soul”) is reminiscent of the
aesthetic argument that pervades the poem–the Prior’s arguing that the artist should portray the soul and Lippi’s countering that the
painter should depict the flesh.

Because of this philosophical schism at the center of the poem, one would think that soul and sense would be played against one another
in this passage, yet both grow in Lippi as he gains a visual and instinctual knowledge of his world. This is because, although Browning plays
the Prior against Lippi in his poem, he does not do so in order to have one side victor, which would result in a homogeneous aesthetic;
rather, in a decision that makes for a far more thought provoking work, Browning sets forth opposing registers in order to produce a
heterogeneous creative product that struggles with itself. This can be seen in his decision to write, or produce verbal art, about a visual
artist and his visual artistic productions. It is this very ekphrastic impulse that allows Browning to work on two different wavelengths at
once.

It must be noted that Lippi draws faces in his antiphonary, or the book that contains the verses or songs that are sung in alternate parts or
in response to a section of the sermon. This book’s structure resembles that of the poem—one main narrative (Lippi’s) with other voices
and debates that enter from time to time in response to his tale. In this model, the poem is the antiphonary (a place where words call out
in response to pictures) into which Browning inserts his pictorial concerns, penciling faces in the margins, so to speak. Lippi goes on to say
that he created a veritable musical-verbal-visual Frankenstein (again, like the poem itself) by connecting limbs to the musical notes and
locating facial features for the letters. This is quite a visual description. We are left imagining a being with letters for a face and musical
notes for a body. Taking this image one step further, we discover that if these music notes have arms and legs, theoretically, they could
both move and paint and write.

This detail gives music the ability to “walk” in and out of the poem, as it does in the case of the stornelli, or the lyrics of various carnival
songs that Lippi overhears and that continue to invade his consciousness throughout the course of the poem. This gives “Fra Lippo Lippi”
some of the motion that Krieger denies the ekphrastic poem when he argues that it is traded for the spatiality that the description of the
work of visual art lends the poem. That is to say that Browning seems to leverage Krieger’s ekphrastic spatial in an effort to avoid
succumbing to the stillness that Krieger indicates is an inevitable result of ekphrasis.

Furthermore, the young Lippi does not merely doodle idle images here and there; he creates a sequence of faces that he inserts between
the letters. This image is fitting, once again, for conceiving of Browning’s painter poems. This idea that he “made a string of pictures of the
world / Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun” indicates an engagement with negative space that resonates with Herbert Tucker’s
conception of the lyric: “The dramatic monologue is our genre of genres for training in how to read between the lines…In the reading of a
dramatic monologue we do not so much scrutinize the ellipses and blank spaces of the text as we people those openings by attending to
the overtones of the different discourses that flank them.”

Yet another spatial element of the poem is that we as readers are drawn into this in-between location that Lippi describes, scuttling back-
and-forth between the different perspectives on the debates about what lies at the core of art that go on implicitly (the contest between
words and images enacted by the ekphrastic project of this poem) and explicitly (the aesthetic argument between Lippi and the Prior)
around us, shuttling back-and-forth between word and image, soul and text. Thus, by inserting pictures into text, Lippi performs a sleight
of hand similar to Browning’s—he effectively creates a visual-verbal hybrid language all his own. In reference to this achievement, in a
letter to Joseph Milsand, Browning referred to his painter poems as, “Lyrics with more music and painting than before, so as to get people
to hear and see” (DeLaura 377).

Finally, the young Lippi doesn’t merely color within the lines, but takes his drawing habit beyond his copy books and onto the “wall, the
bench, the door” while the monks look on, none too pleased. In this manner, Lippi takes his creative impulses beyond the traditional
bounds of the poem—the page—and starts scribbling right on the three dimensional world. (Even the fact that the line describing this
transaction contains eleven syllables–rather than the traditional ten of the poem’s blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter–reflects
Lippi’s transcending through art the conventional borders of a life circumscribed by the religious imperative.) It is this tridimensional
construction that Browning seems to strive to erect in “Fra Lippo Lippi” through the marriage of the verbal and visual.

The Concept of ‘Idealism’ and ‘Transcendentalism’

when casual readers of Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” have noticed that the speaker of the monologue is a man of irreconcilable
contradictions. Sworn by poverty, chastity and obedience, he goes out of medici’s place and reaches a place “where supporting ladies keep
their doors ajar”; obliged as a paint monk, to dedicate his art to portray human soul, he reveals in every look, his fascination for flesh.
Lippo affirms that soul and perhaps God may be realised by loving submission to the senses. Fra Lippo suggests most of the basic concept
of transcendental concept of Art. However, before Lippo begins to define his own aesthetic ideas, he emphasizes how wrong his superiors
are about the nature and function of Art. The monk wants soul, art, of course, but believes that one gets the soul by distorting reality.
Therefore, the Prior tells Lippo - “Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms” but for Lippo the varying emotions revealed by human face
are but varying forms of human beauty: “Take the prettiest face, the Prior’s niece... Sorrow or joy? Wont beauty go with these?” The
perception of human beauty in the flesh makes one aware of the creative force which produced all beautiful form. For Lippo - “a laugh, a
cry” evokes a vision. Thus, the contemplation of the flesh is the best way to awareness of the soul. Even if the perceiver fails to realise the
soul(ideal) revealed in the flesh, he may sense it in his own, which is too close to the chaos of raw reality. Instead, he chooses the house of
Cosimo of Medici, certainly very much of the world and yet secluded from it. There he finds artistic freedom from monastery control which
he needs for full creative expression. “I am my own master, paint now as I please” By being both an active participant of life and an
objective contemplator of it, Fra Lippo is able to shape the material of the descendant world into a work of transcendent which will
awaken both monks and mistresses to the realization that soul and the body can never be artistically separated. Lippo’s love for flesh is
justified by his consequent elevation of spirit. For Lippo, the world is not simply an expression of the spiritual state. It is the only means of
perceiving the spiritual and so this world with all its beauty and reality is of material existence that art can hope to grasp at greater truths,
higher ideals. Art may become “a way whereby the whole range of mind and imagination can come alive. But that ‘way’ must begin with
some determinable sensory experience. The artist, must be a man of vitality who actively participates in reality in order to transcribe it
vividly and accurately. Fra Lippo is, of course, such a man, not only in his “voracious hunger for new experience” and his “poignant sense
of identity” but even in his manner of speech. Lippo suggests that the artist must be sharpened by the means of rather vigorous privation.
Only after starving “in the streets eight years” does one learn “the look of things” The artist’s job, according to Lippo, is to recreate the
material object as realistically as he can so that he may be elevated to an imaginative perception of the ideal: “Why can’t a painter lift each
foot in turn…. Make his flesh liker and his soul like And then add soul and heighten them threefold?” In Lippo’s opinion a painter should
make body “liker” and the soul “more like”, both in their order. A painter should give equal importance and attention to both, the body
and the soul. It is wrong of the monk to have tried to spiritualize his art when he was yet a lad: “you should not take a fellow, eight years
old and make him swear never to kiss the girls”. He also said that he can never be a good painter because his work was concerned mainly
with the physical aspect and very little with the spiritual side of human beings. When Lippo joined the convent, he “did renounce the
world” for “a mouth full of bread”. So, it was after he saw the Prior’s niece, that Lippo was able to turn from memory to the living present
for his artistic material. Lippo soon felt compelled to seek it restlessly in the streets of Florence. There is no duality. Life and Art cannot be
separated artificially. Art, Lippo said, was given to human beings for a purpose. This world was not meant to be scorned or despised as a
disgrace or, as something empty or meaningless. The world had a different meaning and it’s meaning is good. The function of an artist is to
discover it’s meaning and convey it to the world just the way it is. In recognizing the goodness of nature and its beings, we recognise the
hand of God. The artist helps us in this process of recognition