Analysing darker motives or delving Robert Browning’s "Poetry of revenge"

Abstract

Literature generally likes to illustrate the noble passions and not the more evil and ignoble ones, like envy, jealousy, avarice, hatred or revenge. When these are portrayed in the plays of Shakespeare or in a novel such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, they are driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly accumulates around them, they master the body and soul, the intellect and the will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim into madness. Robert Browning (1812-1889) took some of those terrible powers and made them obsessive subjects in his poetry. Short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in his dramas and longer poems but also in the smaller compositions. The combination, for example, of envy and hatred resolved in vengeance in The Laboratory is too intense for any pity to intrude. But in A Forgiveness our natural revolt against the work of hatred is modified into pity even though the ‘justice’ of revenge is accomplished. Unlike many of his Victorian contemporaries, Browning deliberately populated his poetic creations with evil people – who not only commit crimes and sins, ranging from simple hatred to cold-blooded murder, but who are also crafty, intelligent, argumentative and capable of lying. In this sense, the poems we propose to analyse provide interesting snapshots of his speakers and their often deranged personalities. By channelling the voice of a character, Browning explores evil without actually being evil himself, allowing several forms of consciousness and self-representation to emerge. He thus seems to question the artist’s responsibilities (in his creations) and the direct relationship between art and morality, issues that were only developed later in the century.