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Updated: May 16, 2025
A room of the "palace by the Dome," of which Pippa seems to stand in so much awe, opens before us. Here we look into the face of the Monsignor, for whom she expressed reverence in the morning, and we find that the Monsignor and the dead brother whose home he comes to bless, are in reality Pippa's own uncles.
"...I count life just stuff To try the soul's strength on, educe the man." Pippa Passes is one of Browning's most artistic presentations of such dramatic scenes. The little silk weaver, Pippa, rises on the morning of her one holiday in the year, with the intention of enjoying in fancy the pleasures "of the Happiest Four in our Asolo," not knowing, in her innocence, of their misery and guilt.
As a matter of fact, how do we actually greet the morning? Do we awake as Pippa did, with a joyous song of praise? Do we pour out our hearts in gratitude that it brings a new day, a new life? Do we give thanks for the new opportunities given us, the new possibilities of enjoyment, the new share in the life of the world? Usually we have no thought about these things.
Performances of Pippa Passes and The Sunken Bell exert a very unpropitious influence upon the mood of the average theatre-goer. These poems are not plays; and the innocent spectator, being told that they are, is made to believe that poetic drama must be necessarily a soporific thing.
Browning's dramatic power is well exhibited in poems like In a Balcony or Pippa Passes, in which powerful individual scenes are presented without all the accompanying details of a complete drama. The great force of such scenes lies in his manner of treating moments of severe trial.
Then his almost faultless artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping upon the solitude of a child.
But, above all, it presents the first rise of that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to pursue. In Pauline and the poems that follow it, Browning has only the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In Pippa Passes he has the only less easy task of giving an account of humanity.
So in I went into the scene of waiting, interspersed with bustle, that always precedes a wedding, and was handed into the bed-room where the bridesmaids were secluded till the bride was ready, all save Pippa and the most favoured cousin, who were arraying her. There were a dozen, and all were Horsmans except Dora and me.
Browning's hopes and intentions with respect to this series are announced in the following preface to 'Pippa Passes', of which, in later editions, only the dedicatory words appear: 'Two or three years ago I wrote a Play, about which the chief matter I care to recollect at present is, that a Pit-full of good-natured people applauded it: ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention.
She felt depressed and lonely, and not quite so sure of herself as she had been; rather, although she did not put it that way, as though something fine had passed her way, like Pippa singing, and had then gone on. She settled down as well as she could to her new life, making no plans, however, and always with the stricken feeling that she had gained her own point at the cost of much suffering.
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