Men and Women | Page 6

till Europe hears!
The six-foot Swiss tube, braced
about with bark,
Which helps the hunter's voice from Alp to Alp--

Exchange our harp for that--who hinders you?
But here's your fault; grown men want thought, you think;
Thought's
what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.
Boys seek for images
and melody,
Men must have reason--so, you aim at men.
Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth,'tis true;
We see and hear
and do not wonder much: 20 If you could tell us what they mean,
indeed!
As German Boehme never cared for plants
Until it happed,
a-walking in the fields,
He noticed all at once that plants could speak,

Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.
That day the
daisy had an eye indeed--
Colloquized with the cowslip on such
themes!
We find them extant yet in Jacob's prose.
But by the time
youth slips a stage or two
While reading prose in that tough book he
wrote 30 (Collating and emendating the same
And settling on the
sense most to our mind)
We shut the clasps and find life's summer
past.
Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss--
Another
Boehme with a tougher book
And subtler meanings of what roses
say--
Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made
things Boehme wrote thoughts about?
He with a "look you!" vents a
brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, 40 Over

us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the
chairs
And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all--
Buries us with
a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
So come, the harp back to your heart again!
You are a poem, though
your poem's naught.
The best of all you showed before, believe,

Was your own boy-face o'er the finer chords
Bent, following the
cherub at the top 50 That points to God with his paired half-moon
wings.
NOTES
"Transcendentalism" is a criticism, placed in the mouth of a poet, of
another poet, whose manner of singing is prosaic, because it seeks to
transcend (or penetrate beyond) phenomena, by divesting poetic
expression of those concrete embodiments which enable it to appeal to
the senses and imagination. Instead of bare abstractions being suited to
the developed mind, it is the primitive mind, which, like Boehme's, has
the merely metaphysical turn, and expects to discover the unincarnate
absolute essence of things. The maturer mind craves the vitalizing
method of the artist who, like the magician of Halberstadt, recreates
things bodily in all their beautiful vivid wholeness. Yet the poet who
sincerely holds so fragmentary a conception of art is himself a poem to
the poet who holds the larger view. His boy-face singing to God above
his ineffective harp-strings is a concrete image of this sort of poetic
transcendentalism.
[It is obvious that Browning uses the Halberstadt and not the Boehme
method in presenting this embodiment of his subject. The
supposition
of certain commentators that Browning is here picturing his own
artistic method as transcendental is a misconception of his
characteristic theory of poetic art, as shown here and elsewhere.]
22. Boehme: Jacob, an "inspired" German shoemaker (1575-1624),
who wrote "Aurora," "The Three Principles," etc., mystical
commentaries on Biblical events. When twenty-five years old, says
Hotham in "Mysterium Magnum," 1653, "he was surrounded by a

divine Light and replenished with heavenly Knowledge . . . going
abroad into the Fieldes to a Greene before Neys-Gate at Gorlitz and
viewing the Herbes and Grass of the Fielde, in his inward light he saw
into their Essences . . . and from that Fountain of Revelation wrote Signatura Rerum>," on the signatures of things, the "tough book" to
which Browning refers.
37. Halberstadt: Johann Semeca, called Teutonicus, a canon of
Halberstadt in Germany, who was interested in the unchurchly study of
mediaeval science and reputed to be a magician, possessing the
vegetable stone supposed to make plants grow at will, having the same
power over organic life that the philosopher's stone of the alchemists
had over minerals, so that, like Albertus Magnus, another such mage of
the Middle Ages, he could cause flowers to spring up in the midst of
winter.
HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY
1855
I only knew one poet in my life:
And this, or something like it, was
his way.
You saw go up and down Valladolid,
A man of mark, to know next
time you saw.
His very serviceable suit of black
Was courtly once
and conscientious still,
And many might have worn it, though none
did:
The cloak, that somewhat shone and showed the threads,
Had
purpose, and the ruff, significance.
He walked and tapped the
pavement with his cane, 10 Scenting the
world, looking it full in face,

An old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels.
They turned up, now,
the alley by the church,
That leads nowhither; now, they breathed
themselves
On the main promenade just at the wrong time:
You'd
come upon his scrutinizing hat
Making a peaked shade blacker than