Sordello's Lost Ruby

Tracking down a baffling reference in Book 3 of Robert Browning's "Sordello" (1840)

Sordello (1840), Browning’s epic poem, about the life of Sordello da Goito, 13th-century Italian poet (he crops up in Canto VI of Dante’s Purgatorio), is famous, or notorious, for its obscurity and difficulty. Tennyson claimed that he had read the entire poem and only understood two lines of it, the first (‘Who will, may hear Sordello's story told’) and the last (‘Who would, has heard Sordello's story told’)—and they were both lies. There’s a tale about Douglas Jerrold, probably apocryphal, though it would be great for it to be true: he was recovering from a severe fever and was given Sordello as convalescence reading: as he pushed through he grew distressed, ‘My God! My disease has left me an idiot! My health is restored but my mind’s gone! I can’t understand two lines of an English poem!’ His family gave him a different book, and he discovered that he could still read and understand English, to his great relief. Thomas Carlyle claimed that he had read the whole poem without ever understanding whether Sordello was a man, a town or a book. Ezra Pound, in the next century, loved the poem precisely because it is so obscure, and the case is sometimes made for Sordello as a proto-Modernist experiment in fragmentation and anti-expression. I’m not so sure: I tend to think that the poem’s obscurity gets overplayed a little. But then, I’ve read it twice and am going through it again at the moment. My first time, as a student, was a struggle, I’ll confess.

Some of the difficulty is in Browning’s rather torturous, grotesque idiom and expression, some with the way he stretches his verse across a very un-Popian, un-Drydenesque type of heroic couplet, and some is that the poem is full of allusions and references that are not always easy to understand.

So, here’s an example of what I’m talking about, from the end of the third book (Sordello 3:947-966). This passage moves the poem from 13th-century Italy to 19th-century Britain, and brings in two of Browning’s contemporaries. We know who they are: the poet Walter Savage Landor, a generation older than Browning but a friend and supporter, and Browning’s friend and contemporary Euphrasia Fanny Haworth. Browning brings this latter in under a kind of in-joke (the Latin name of the herb ‘eyebright’ is Euphrasia officinalis, so RB calls her “My English Eyebright”) though how any reader not in Browning’s personal circle is supposed to be able to work that out isn’t clear. The Landor reference likewise walks the not-spelling-things-out-to-baffle-the-readers road. RB calls Landor ‘my patron friend’ but doesn’t name him:

That's your kind suffrage, yours, my patron-friend,
Whose great verse blares unintermittent on
Like your own trumpeter at Marathon,—
You who, Platæa and Salamis being scant,
Put up with Ætna for a stimulant—
And did well, I acknowledged, as he loomed
Over the midland sea last month, presumed
Long, lay demolished in the blazing West
At eve, while towards him tilting cloudlets pressed
Like Persian ships at Salamis. [Sordello 3: 950-9]

The syntax is a little gnarled here, but the meaning is deducible: RB is comparing Landor to Aeschylus, who fought in the Athenian army against the Persian invasion (hence: ‘Marathon’) at the Battle of Salamis, 480 BC; and who also fought at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. Salamis is important in Aeschylus’s play The Persians (472 BC), his oldest surviving play. Landor’s own ‘great verse’ trumpets as magnificently as Aeschylus’s, says Browning; although, since Landor was never a soldier, he takes as inspiration not historical battles, but the mountain of Etna. Browning is thinking of this passage from Landor’s own epic poem, almost as incomprehensible as Sordello in parts, Gebir (1798):

And now Sicanian Etna rose to view:
Darkness with light more horrid she confounds,
Baffles the breath and dims the sight of day.
Tamar grew giddy with astonishment
And, looking up, held fast the bridal vest;
He heard the roar above him, heard the roar
Beneath, and felt it too, as he beheld,
Hurl, from earth's base, rocks, mountains, to the skies. [Landor, Gebir book 6]

That’s all clear enough. But what follows next has baffled all readers, editors and critics for nearly 200 years. Browning continues his address to Landor, calling him ‘friend’:

... Friend, wear
A crest proud as desert while I declare
Had I a flawless ruby fit to wring
Tears of its colour from that painted king
Who lost it, I would, for that smile which went
To my heart, fling it in the sea, content,
Wearing your verse in place, an amulet
Sovereign against all passion, wear and fret! [Sordello 3:959-666]

What’s the reference here? Whose ruby? Nobody knows.

John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, in their Longman The Poems of Browning (1991), refer us to a story in Herodotus (3:40f) about Polycrates, King of Samos, who threw a precious gemstone into the sea to escape the envy of the gods, only for the jewel to be returned to him inside a fish that had been caught cooked and served him at table. But this can’t be right: Polycrates doesn’t weep gemstone tears, and the jewel that he deliberately discards (not loses) is an emerald, not a ruby. And in this bit of Sordello it’s not the king who flings the jewel in the sea; it’s Browning himself. Ian Jack and Margaret Smith, in their Oxford edition of Robert Browning’s work consider the Polycrates story, but dismiss it: ‘this is clearly irrelevant,’ they say, pulling no punches, and adding, ‘the story to which Browning is alluding has not been found.’

Reader, I have found it. Or at least I think I have, although: hoo boy, it’s obscure—so, again, how could Browning ever have thought any of his readers would recognise it?

Start with Browning describing the monarch here as a ‘painted king’. This is a French phrase for a king who absents himself from actual rule, a figure with the trappings but not the actuality of power: “roi en peinture” as defined in the Dictionnaire Universel (1690): on dit aussi qu’on n’est roi qu’en peinture lorsqu’il ne gouverne pas son Etat par lui- même, lorsqu’il en laisse à d’autres le soin et l’autorité. ‘We also say the king is only a painted king when he does not govern his State himself, when he leaves its care and ruling to others.’

The story about the ruby itself Browning must have found in Practical Philosophy of the Muhammadan People, being a translation of the Akhlak-i-Jalaly from the Persian of Fakir Jany Muhammad Asaad, by W F Thompson (London: Oriental Translation Fund 1839). 1839 is right towards the end of Browning’s long labours composing this piece, work he began at the beginning of the 1830s. In the summer of 1838 Browning travelled to Venice as a tourist: his ship passed Etna and he recorded himself as very struck by the sight. Back in England in 1839 he worked bringing the poem to a finish: it was published March 1840.

The Practical Philosophy of the Muhammadan People volume by Jany Muhammad Asaad—to give him his full name, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn As’ad al-Dawānī—is a combination of medical textbook and advice manual: it includes advice on how to cure or avoid certain diseases, physical and mental, and maintain good health; but also sections on how to choose a good wife, how to conduct politics and much else. Thompson, a Civil Servant, translated it in Bengal, but the English version was published in London.

An unnamed Persian king is cited as an example of ‘mental diseases’ amongst royalty. After discussing arrogance, perfidy and malice, Asaad gives us the example of a king who, having lost a large round ruby, was so chagrined that he lost his mind, and abandoned the business of actually ruling becoming (though Thompson doesn’t use this phrase) a painted king.

The king was so deeply affected [by the loss of his ruby] as to become an altered being; giving up all interference in the affairs of his kingdom—all observance of his subjects’ interests—all conviviality with his most favoured associates of the banquet or the sport. In the agony of sorrow and chagrin at its loss, he bit his lips as though he took them for rubies that he wished to crush: in the fulness of his deplorings, he poured tears down his cheeks, as it were wine to carry the fragments away. His tears were a silver, and his cheeks a gold, which he lavished in the purchase of melancholy. The loss of his precious moments was a small outlay for the indulgence of his recollections. So deeply did sorrow for the artificial globe he had lost prey upon his system, that the real globe of the firmament, though studded with innumerable gems that illuminate the night, was darkness to his eyes. The stony heart of the ruby was melted into tears at his predicament, and the dull fabric of coral was observed to bleed at the calamity. Much as the nobles and princes exerted themselves to obtain some precious jewel that might comfort the king by replacing the lost, they returned in hopeless exclusion from his presence. In the end he lost all hold of the reins of his government or the guidance of his possessions, and irreparable ruin crept into the affairs of his dominions.

This is the ruby, its loss, his ruby-tears and him becoming a ‘painted king’. Asaad doesn’t name the king. Thompson adds a footnote that ‘Asiatics’ are in the habit of melting or dissolving precious jewels into drinks and imbibing them, to cure themselves of sickness or woe.

This is surely the story to which Browning is alluding in this portion of Sordello but, to repeat myself: phew. There’s obscure, there’s super obscure, and there’s this. It is, so far as I can tell, recorded in no other volume than this entirely forgotten, uncited and unknown book. No wonder previous scholars weren’t able to track the source down. *buffs nails and whistles*