Chapter VI: Part I: Browning's Heroines (5)

Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?
Say--I am all in flowers from head to foot!
Say--not one flower of all he said and did,
But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree
Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place
At this supreme of moments!"

She has recognised the truth. This _is_ love--but how different from the love of the smilings and the whisperings, the "He is your lover!" He is a priest, and could not marry; but she thinks he would not have married if he could:

"Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,

* * * * *

In heaven we have the real and true and sure."

In heaven, where the angels "know themselves into one"; and are never married, no, nor given in marriage:

". . . They are man and wife at once
When the true time is . . .
So, let him wait God's instant men call years;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty! Through such souls alone
God, stooping, shows sufficient of his light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."

* * * * *

Who would analyse this child would tear a flower to pieces. Pompilia is no heroine, no character; but indeed a "rose gathered for the breast of God":

"Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses,
L'espace d'un matin."

FOOTNOTES:

[126:1] _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, 1886, p. 152.

[130:1] Abandoning for the moment intermediate events, it was _this_ which moved Guido to the triple murder: for once the old couple and Pompilia dead, with the question of his claim to the dowry still undecided as it was, his child, the new-born babe, might inherit all.

[131:1] Guido's second speech, wherein he tells the truth, in the hope that his "impenitence" may defer his execution.

[131:2] Her dying speech.

[131:3] Browning's summary. Book I.

[137:1] Mrs. Orr, commenting on this passage, says: "The sudden rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case, becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and culture; it was not suggested by the facts"--for Mrs. Orr, who had read the documents from which Browning made the poem, says: "Unless my memory much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical defence of her flight. . . . The real Pompilia was a simple child, who lived in bodily terror of her husband, and had made repeated efforts to escape from him." And, as she later adds, though for many readers this character is, in its haunting pathos, the most exquisite of Browning's creations, "for others, it fails in impressiveness because it lacks the reality which habitually marks them." But (she goes on) "it was only in an idealised Pompilia that the material for poetical creation, in this 'murder story,' could have been found." These remarks will be seen partly to agree with some of my own.

[146:1] Her dying speech.

[158:1] How wonderfully is the wistful nature of the girl summed up in these two lines!

[159:1] Caponsacchi uses almost the same words of her: he will "burn his soul out in showing you the truth."