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Updated: May 16, 2025
We may catch some fleeting echoes of Keats's melody in 'Pippa Passes'; it is almost a commonplace that some measure of Shelleyan fancy is recognizable in 'Pauline'. But the poetic individuality of Robert Browning was stronger than any circumstance through which it could be fed. It would have found nourishment in desert air.
The spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima's haggard face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself. Pale as the white satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go down.
There is one of them, a glaring one, in Pippa Passes; and, as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole beauty of Pippa Passes to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself.
But when it is remembered that between these lie the most vivid and intensely dramatic series of short poems in English, those grouped in the unfortunately diverse editions of his works under the rubrics 'Men and Women, 'Dramatic Lyrics, 'Dramatic Romances, 'Dramatis Personæ, and the rest, as well as larger masterpieces of the broad appeal of 'Pippa Passes, 'A Blot on the 'Scutcheon, or 'In a Balcony, it is hard to understand, and will be still harder fifty years hence, why Browning has not become the familiar and inspiring poet of a vastly larger body of readers.
"Look at Pippa," she said, "she is determined to walk with us, and equally determined not to seem to need our company, as if she had come out of her own accord, and was surprised to find us in her garden."
A passage quoted by Mrs Orr from a letter written a little more than a year before his death is steeped in colour; when Pippa Passes becomes the prey of the annotating editor it will illuminate his page: "Every morning at six I see the sun rise.... My bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few sea-gulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins."
In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is very likely right. He is certainly right in thinking Mas they formerly stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes.
The First Assistant loaned him Browning that afternoon, and he read "Pippa Passes." He thought Pippa must have looked like the Probationer. The Head was a bit querulous that evening. The Heads of Training Schools get that way now and then, although they generally reveal it only to the First Assistant.
The same great theme, the radiating and redeeming power of innocence and purity, was carried over from the first story to the second. The ministry of the baby and the ministry of the fifteen-year-old bride is the same in both. Like the Great Stone Face in Hawthorne's story or like little Pippa in Browning's poem, they awaken the better nature of those about them. As Mr.
The merciless criticism which greeted Sordello had a wholesome effect on Browning, as is shown in the better work of his second period. Thus, the first number of this wonderful series, published in 1841, contains Pippa Passes, which is, on the whole, the most perfect of his longer poems; and another number contains A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, which is the most readable of his dramas.
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