Poems
My Star
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.
- Tone and Diction: Simple diction and conversational tone contrast with elevated subject matter, a technique Browning often employs to ground emotional intensity in personal experience.
- Imagery and Symbolism: The star’s shifting colors suggest emotional or spiritual change; the similes (spar, dart, bird, flower) blend mechanical and natural imagery, unusual for Victorian celestial symbols.
- Personal Vision vs. Collective Perception: The speaker values private meaning over shared observation—his star’s worth lies in personal revelation, not astronomical fact, echoing themes in Browning’s exploration of individual faith.
- Relationship to Other Works: Unlike Childe Roland or The Bishop Orders His Tomb, this poem avoids irony and excess; it is quieter, aligning more with his late lyrics that favor intimacy over theatricality.
- Historical Context: While most Victorian poets used stars for moral or religious allegory (e.g., Tennyson’s cosmic order), this poem resists didacticism, focusing instead on subjective connection.
- Less-Discussed Angle: Rather than a metaphor for romantic love, the star may represent artistic inspiration—its flickering akin to creativity, visible only to the perceiving mind.
- Modern Resonance: Though pre-20th century, its emphasis on individual truth prefigures modernist subjectivity, especially in privileging personal meaning over objective reality.
- Linguistic Features: “Dartles” is a nonce word, combining motion and light; such coinages appear in Browning’s other works and reinforce immediacy, though here the archaic feel is minimal.
- Place in Oeuvre: Less anthologized than his dramatic monologues, this poem stands out for its brevity and lyrical clarity, offering a rare moment of unmediated emotional expression in his often-dense body of work.
Robert Browning
(7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax.
His early long poems Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were acclaimed, but his reputation dwindled for a time – his 1840 poem Sordello was seen as wilfully obscure – and took over a decade to recover, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846, he married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved to Italy. By her death in 1861, he had published the collection Men and Women (1855). His Dramatis Personae (1864) and book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) made him a leading poet. By his death in 1889, he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. Societies for studying his work survived in Britain and the US into the 20th century.
