I think the confusing passage you point out arises from the fact that the Bishop is dying, and delusional. It explains so much, especially the moment of clarity in the muddle of greed and beauty, past and present: “Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage” cutting through it all like a shark’s fin.
I think the Rachel-contemplative/Leah-active image (well-established by the time Dante uses it in the Purgatorio) is a kind of retrojection from the pairing that's more explicitly normative for Christians: Mary and Martha. Jesus explicitly says that Martha's bustling activity is less to be commended than Mary's still contemplation. Browning's character here is the Bishop of Bustle, the Prelate of Praxis — but that makes it more interesting that he imagines for himself a future of contemplation. He imagines himself seeing, hearing, feeling, and even tasting — but not acting. Perhaps he is not wholly cynical and sees this future as his necessary purgation: a Dantean *contrapasso* in which he is forced to spend centuries cultivating what on earth he neglected.
I'm sure this is an absolute commonplace among Browning scholars, but it's quite obvious that, however strongly Browning may have disapproved of Catholicism, all his aesthetic sensibilities are with baroque elaboration. I've long wondered whether he wrote "A Death in the Desert" as a kind of discipline, a deliberate immersion in a more ascetic and less aesthetically sumptuous world.
My first (or, actually, second) academic publication was an essay on the narrator of "A Death in the Desert" for a volume called "Robert Browning in Contexts". I look forward to your post!
I've loved that poem, and made my own pilgrimage to the church once. Thank you. It is so full of life and greed.
thank you Adam — brilliant reading of one of my absolute all-time favourites
I think the confusing passage you point out arises from the fact that the Bishop is dying, and delusional. It explains so much, especially the moment of clarity in the muddle of greed and beauty, past and present: “Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage” cutting through it all like a shark’s fin.
I think the Rachel-contemplative/Leah-active image (well-established by the time Dante uses it in the Purgatorio) is a kind of retrojection from the pairing that's more explicitly normative for Christians: Mary and Martha. Jesus explicitly says that Martha's bustling activity is less to be commended than Mary's still contemplation. Browning's character here is the Bishop of Bustle, the Prelate of Praxis — but that makes it more interesting that he imagines for himself a future of contemplation. He imagines himself seeing, hearing, feeling, and even tasting — but not acting. Perhaps he is not wholly cynical and sees this future as his necessary purgation: a Dantean *contrapasso* in which he is forced to spend centuries cultivating what on earth he neglected.
I'm sure this is an absolute commonplace among Browning scholars, but it's quite obvious that, however strongly Browning may have disapproved of Catholicism, all his aesthetic sensibilities are with baroque elaboration. I've long wondered whether he wrote "A Death in the Desert" as a kind of discipline, a deliberate immersion in a more ascetic and less aesthetically sumptuous world.
(In any event, I've been sketching out a post on "A Death in the Desert" and Alison Knight's THE DARK BIBLE.)
My first (or, actually, second) academic publication was an essay on the narrator of "A Death in the Desert" for a volume called "Robert Browning in Contexts". I look forward to your post!