"Speak from every mouth – the speech, a poem": conflicting voices, discourses and identities in the poetry of Robert Browning

Abstract

It seems very difficult to link autobiography with poetry in Browning’s poetical works because the author constantly and methodically hides behind masks and speakers, expecting his readers to take pleasure in unmasking each. In his epilogue to Men and Women (1855), Browning writes: “ … you saw me gather men and women, / Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy, / Enter each and all, and use their service, / Speak from every mouth, […]” (129-132). With these multiple characters, no speaker could be abusively identified with the poet, who thus became invisible but free to speak in the first person while using several voices. Through odd rhymes, dislocations of syntax and colloquialisms, Browning creates for each speaker a highly individual linguistic personality. The ‘action’ in his poems is thus verbal and vocal. Some of these voices tell the ‘truth’ when they precisely try to hide it and others hide the truth when they pretend to tell it openly, leaving the reader to decide. As the poet states in Sordello (1840), “making speak, myself kept out of view, / The very man as he was wont to do, / And leaving you to say the rest for him.” (I, 15-17); this means that the reader is strongly invited not to trust the speaker and to take his own conclusions from the speaker’s unwonted revelations. The poet never interrupts and judges his speakers but ironically and implicitly invites his readers to do so by obliquely debunking the speeches of his reprehensible speakers. Browning himself staged his aesthetic principle in the dramatic monologue “How it strikes a Contemporary” (1855), in which the artist is described as an observer who needs to put reality to the test, through the drama of conflicting internal voices, and whose reader is a competent one who never takes the text at its face value. In the end, there seems to be a deliberate absence of definitive answers to pressing questions about identity, motive and social context.