Plague take all your pedants, say I!
He who wrote what I hold in my hand,
Centuries back was so good as to die,
Leaving this rubbish to cumber the land;
This, that was a book in its time,
Printed on paper and bound in leather,
Last month in the white of a matin-prime
Just when the birds sang all together.
Into the garden I brought it to read,
And under the arbute and laurustine
Read it, so help me grace in my need,
From title-page to closing line.
Chapter on chapter did I count,
As a curious traveller counts Stonehenge;
Added up the mortal amount;
And then proceeded to my revenge.
Yonder’s a plum-tree with a crevice
An owl would build in, were he but sage;
For a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis
In a castle of the Middle Age,
Joins to a lip of gum, pure amber;
When he’d be private, there might he spend
Hours alone in his lady’s chamber:
Into this crevice I dropped our friend.
Splash, went he, as under he ducked,
At the bottom, I knew, rain-drippings stagnate;
Next, a handful of blossoms I plucked
To bury him with, my bookshelf’s magnate;
Then I went in-doors, brought out a loaf,
Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis;
Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf
Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.
Now, this morning, betwixt the moss
And gum that locked our friend in limbo,
A spider had spun his web across,
And sat in the midst with arms akimbo:
So, I took pity, for learning’s sake,
And, de profundis, accentibus lætis,
Cantate! quoth I, as I got a rake;
And up I fished his delectable treatise.
Here you have it, dry in the sun,
With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
And reddish streaks that wink and glister
O’er the page so beautifully yellow,
Oh, well have the droppings played their tricks!
Did he guess how toadstools grow, this fellow?
Here’s one stuck in his chapter six!
How did he like it when the live creatures
Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in, each one, for his right of trover;
When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed just so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black wife’s closet?
All that life and fun and romping,
All that frisking and twisting and coupling,
While slowly our poor friend’s leaves were swamping
And clasps were cracking and covers suppling!
As if you had carried sour John Knox
To the play-house at Paris, Vienna or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
And danced off the Ballet with trousers and tunic.
Come, old Martyr! What, torment enough is it?
Back to my room shall you take your sweet self.
Good-bye, mother-beetle; husband-eft, sufficit!
See the snug niche I have made on my shelf!
A.’s book shall prop you up, B.’s shall cover you,
Here’s C. to be grave with, or D. to be gay,
And with E. on each side, and F. right over you,
Dry-rot at ease till the Judgment-day!
“Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis” (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics – 1845)
This poem is delightfully amusing from start to finish. Ian Jack comments that “In so far as it is a narrative, it might well be described as a comic Dramatic Romance”. Browning uses different tools from his artist’s kit to created a totally different kind of humor. In this poem, one warm spring morning, the speaker, probably Browning himself, carries an old leather book into his garden for an afternoon of pleasant reading. The speaker reads the book from cover to cover and, disgusted with its pedantic contents, prepares for “revenge.” The book is one written by the German scholar Sibrandus of the city of Aschafenburg. In the title, Browning plays with the name of the city, garbling, gnarling and warping Aschafenburg to Schafnaburgensis. The pronunciation is difficult if not comically impossible; a precursor of the poet’s own feelings about those who believe in and practice pedantic forms of education. Browning summarizes his contempt for this dry, lifeless, unnatural education with the first word of the poem “Plague” and with humorously Biblical proportions, he proceeds to do just that, he casts a plague on the book and its writer and, presumably, on all those who follow these tenets. The speaker calls the book “rubbish” and declares it a bother to the land.
The humor is acute in the personification of wrecking “revenge” on an old book. Most readers, finding some offence with a book would simple set it aside without bothering to read it in entirety. Other, more drastic reactions might be to burn the distasteful old tome. But this reader decides to go one step further and to teach the book (and its writer) a lesson about the meaning of real life, a life throbbing with vibrant, flourishing, colorful and rich action; quite the opposite of the dry, flat and pedantic nature of the book by Sibrandus. To exact his revenge, the reader decides to drop the old book into the rotting, insect-laden pool of stagnant rain-water found at the bottom of a crevice in the garden’s old plum tree “where it endures the indignity of being invaded by amorous efts and bugs.” Once the book has been deposited, the speaker tosses “a handful of blossoms he plucked/To bury him with.” It is interesting to note that the speaker drops the book into the “crevice of a tree, which an owl (conventional symbol of wisdom) has rejected for a home.” Afterward, the speaker goes back to the house and returns to the garden with a loaf of bread, “Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis” along with a different book “and forgot the oaf/Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.”
A month later, the speaker, feeling sorry for the old book, comically says: “I took pity, for learning’s sake,” and rescues the book from its water-logged nest with a rake. Once the book has been baptized in the joyousness of life’s brew, he refers to the redeemed book (and Sibrandus), as “our friend,” “this fellow,” “old martyr” and “your sweet self.” During the soaking, a spider had spun a web over the crevice and now “sat in the midst with arms akimbo.” The following quotation has a high edge of comedy as the speaker describes the condition of the old stuffy book now that it has been fished from the nook in the plum tree and is allowed to dry in the sun:
With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
And reddish streaks that wink and glister
O’er the page so beautifully yellow:
Oh, well have the droppings played their tricks!
Did he guess how toadstools grow, this fellow?
Here’s one stuck in his chapter six!
How did he like it when the live creatures
Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in, each one, for his right trover?
–When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed just so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black wife’s closet?
All that life and fun and romping,
All that frisking and twisting and coupling,
While slowly our poor friend’s leaves were swamping
And clasps were cracking and covers suppling. (42–60)
A partial catalogue of the words from the above quote highlights the humor: blister, reddish streaks, toadstools, live creatures, tickled, toused, browsed, worm, slug, eft, water-beetle, “blind deaf face,” eggs, deposit, newt, life, fun, romping, frisking, twisting, coupling, swamping, cracking and supplying. Of course, insects and reptiles don’t couple, but that’s part of the fun. W. David Shaw makes these comments on the inherent humor of this poem: “The toadstool growing in Sibrandus’ sixth chapter and ‘the live creatures’ that ‘Tickled and toused and browsed’ his book all over advertise the speaker’s hilarious revolt against pendants like the grammarian. But even in discrediting the pendants, the extravagance of the speaker’s own high spirits become an object of comedy.”
The book and the author are conjoined into one personified “he” and “him.” The speaker asks: “How did he like it when his creatures/ Tickled and toused and browsed him all over?” The verb browsed is usually used in reference to looking through a book, and the humorous twist in these lines is that the insects are literally browsing through the book; toadstools are growing “Here’s one stuck in your chapter six!” Meanwhile, insects including newts, beetles and efts are “coupling,” burrowing and laying eggs from cover to cover. The combined effect is absurd, bizarre and comic. Elizabeth Browning wrote in a letter to her future husband: “Do you know that this poem’s a great favourite with me –it is so new, and full of a creeping, crawling grotesque life.” The speaker, delighted with the result of his revenge, compares it to the horror and disgust that the puritanical Scottish religious leader, John Knox, might feel if he were “fastened…into a front-row” seat at a ballet and forced to watch the dancers wearing “trousers and tunic.” To a pious and straight-laced fellow such as John Knox, this performance would be disgusting, appalling and against every fiber of his moral and spiritual character.
But for Browning, a great nature lover, the creepy, crawling grotesqueness of this poem would be amazing and alluring, not at all disgusting. Sibrandus symbolizes intellectuals who have lost touch with what is real and meaningful in life; they have lost sight of the true, base origins from which life grows. This poem shows “how natural and simple beauty of true knowledge is found in close association with the harmonies and rhythms of nature and the instinctive life processes.”
The poem ends when the speaker asks the book: “What, torment enough is it?” Then the speaker and the personified voice of the book say farewell to “mother beetle; husband eft” and the old, warped, rotting, cracking volume is returned to the house and placed on the bookshelf surrounded by other books to “Dry-rot at ease till the Judgment day!” Obviously, in the speaker’s mind at least, the book and its author have received a taste of redemption, but have not been forgiven. Understanding the humor of this poem will help the reader understand the much more subtle humor found in “A Grammarian’s Funeral” (Men and Women – 1855) where another pedantic character is satirically eulogized by his loving and adoring students.
Among Browning’s most despised character flaws of humanity are vanity, arrogance and pride – he attacks these vices, often humorously, over and over throughout his work. Sibrandus, and his book, are given due punishment; in the next poem, the characters also pay the price for their own unbridled vanity, arrogance and pride.
