The Ongoing Testament in Browning’s ‘Saul’

THE ONGOING TESTAMENT IN BROWNING'S 'SAUL' ELIZABETH BIEMAN Browning's 'Saul' has not lacked a measure of critical attention in recent years, although to an admirer of the poem the measure is surprisingly slight - a number of book-length treatments of the Browning canon give it only passing mention. Two sympathetic and extended discussions of the poem are found in books published in the past few years, each directing attention to the poem for critical purposes which lie outside its confines, yet each illuminating 'Saul' in certain respects. Thomas J. Collins finds in its two-stage composition 'the conscious working out of the moralaesthetic theories explored by Browning in Christmas-Eve and EasterDay and the Essay on Shelley.' W. David Shaw, approaching it with attention to rhetoric, develops a sharp awareness of the process through which Browning involves his reader in the stuff of the poem. 'Saul' fares less well in the judgment of Roma A. King, Jr, whose strictures of 1957 set forth in a full chapter treatment still readily accessible in reprint - are not significantly modified in a more recent book' But seldom has 'Saul' been examined in one context which serves to throw the poem into sharp relief, to extend the appreciation of a discerning reader, and to counter the arguments of a detractor. That context is offered by the Bible. The Bible serves as obvious source for setting and narrative, and for the culminating vision of Christ, and as less obvious source for certain fine details and for many of the conceptual patterns out of which a highly complex poetic structure may be seen to emerge. 'Saul' proves a difficult poem to categorize, as anyone who has tried the customary labels - 'dramatic,' 'monologue,' 'lyric,' 'visionary' - has discovered? Dramatic potentially, through the interaction of the characters of David and Saul, it moves past drama to the representation of a single state of visionary consciousness, in David, at the end. A monologue technically, with David the speaker, it differs sharply at the outset from the pattern of Browning monologues by statting with the directly quoted words of another speaker, Abner. A lyric in one basic sense, in that it feigns the utterance of David, singer of psalms, it is not a lyric in the handbook sense of being a direct and subjective utterance of its creator: UTQ, Volume XLIII, Number 2, Winter 1974 152 ELIZABETH BIEMAN' it is less, perhaps, the purely personal vision of Browning at certain stages of his moral-aesthetic-theological development than has been supposed. The vision at the end, and in fact the vision which infonns the whole developing poem, is Browning's of course, but is not only his. It reBects the developing consciousness of the writers of the whole 'Bible, which Browning came to see afresh and to appropriate as his own during the years which encompassed the poem's double gestation. The poem itself played a part, in the process of taking its own shape, in shaping the mature consciousness of its creator. (,Mature' is not being used as synonym for 'Christian: but in recognition of the fact that after the early eighteen-fifties the work of Browning's maturity was more expliCitly Christian than theretofore. ) An analogy to the Bible emerges: as the Bible to Israel and the early Christian community, so 'Saul' - with the companion pieces indicated by Collins - to Robert Browning, man and poet. The various writings of the Bible emerged from their matrix in the communal life of the old and new Israels, and, once codified, the writings helped to shape the further consciousness of their creators seminally and constitutionally. As the tradition grew, God was understood as working in and through his chosen people to reveal himself to the world in the words of the Bible; so also the poetic imagination may be regarded as working in and through Browning to reveal divine truth in the words of 'Saul.' Cognizance of the creative process at work in the revelation to Israel and the early Christian community, spoken of traditionally as the activity of God, can throw light on the experience of reading 'Saul." The charges of discontinuity and inconsistency levelled at Browning when the...