Taste
Browning’s interest in culture, including art and architecture,
appears throughout his work in depictions of his characters’ aesthetic
tastes. His characters’ preferences in art, music, and literature
reveal important clues about their natures and moral worth. For
instance, the duke of Ferrara, the speaker of “My Last Duchess,” concludes
the poem by pointing out a statue he commissioned of Neptune taming
a sea monster. The duke’s preference for this sculpture directly
corresponds to the type of man he is—that is, the type of man who
would have his wife killed but still stare lovingly and longingly
at her portrait. Like Neptune, the duke wants to subdue and command
all aspects of life, including his wife. Characters also express
their tastes by the manner in which they describe art, people, or
landscapes. Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance artist who speaks
the poem “Andrea del Sarto,” repeatedly uses the adjectives gold and silver in
his descriptions of paintings. His choice of words reinforces one
of the major themes of the poem: the way he sold himself out. Listening
to his monologue, we learn that he now makes commercial paintings
to earn a commission, but he no longer creates what he considers
to be real art. His desire for money has affected his aesthetic
judgment, causing him to use monetary vocabulary to describe art
objects.
Evil and Violence
Synonyms for, images of, and symbols of evil
and violence abound in Browning’s poetry. “Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister,” for example, begins with the speaker trying to articulate
the sounds of his “heart’s abhorrence” (1)
for a fellow friar. Later in the poem, the speaker invokes images
of evil pirates and a man being banished to hell. The diction and
images used by the speakers expresses their evil thoughts, as well
as indicate their evil natures. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came” (1855) portrays a nightmarish world
of dead horses and war-torn landscapes. Yet another example of evil
and violence comes in “Porphyria’s Lover,” in which the speaker
sits contentedly alongside the corpse of Porphyria, whom he murdered
by strangling her with her hair. Symbols of evil and violence allowed
Browning to explore all aspects of human psychology, including the
base and evil aspects that don’t normally appear in poetry.
