The Browning Option

A while back I promised to speak more about different modes of fiction within poetry. I will now begin slowly to redeem that promise, beginning with my own personal favorite method of writing fictional poetry, what I have called the Browning option.

The irony of having named this method after Robert Browning in a blog about sonnets, given that his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was by far the more famous sonnet-writer in the family, is not lost on me. However, even if Robert Browning did not write (or at any rate publish) as many sonnets as his wife - or even many sonnets at all - the method I am about to discuss is highly associated with him, and may certainly be applied to sonnets as well as other forms of poetry. Robert Browning wrote dramatic monologues in verse; he created characters who spoke his poems for him. Browning never had a duchess, much less a "My Last Duchess" painted on a wall; nor did he ever have need to utter a "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister;" nor was he named "Andrea del Sarto." But he wrote all three poems from the perspective of others, named or unnamed, purely fictional or real but with invented words. These monologues are characteristic of Browning - not that he did not write anything else - and to emulate their style is a distinct option when attempting to write sonnets divorced from one's own perspective and feelings. Here I will discourse a little more generally on this style; due to the substantial different in length between a typical Browning dramatic monologue and a sonnet, I will not present any of Browning's poetry in full, but rather by reference. I strongly recommend his work, which is easily accessible (being out of copyright), but it lies a little beyond the scope of this specific blog.

Browning's monologues are, as one would expect from the name, poems that seem ready to be delivered by a speaker - who is not the poet. That means that they are usually in the first person, always with a clearly defined speaker, rather than impersonal or in the omniscient third person. They speak directly to whatever that speaker wishes to say, so you will not see any strains of "To Autumn" or "Ode to a Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning." The priority is on establishing personality - the insanity of "Porphyria's Lover," or the detachment of the duke in "My Last Duchess" - and telling a little slice of that personality's experience of the world. This can be very hard to discern in the fourteen-line space of a sonnet: this is part of why it was difficult to find an example from Browning's work that was clearly a dramatic monologue but also of such short length. This emphatically does not mean that such a poem could not exist, nor indeed that Browning did not write one; rather, it means that length permits much more certainty about the fictional nature of a poem.

One of the crucial ways in which Browning creates his characters is by the use of asides, parentheticals, and self-interruption to simulate speech patterns. Most poems present an uninterrupted whole without these effects, and the introduction of them causes the reader to think about the personality behind them. A similar effect can be created by the strong "I" of the poem that Browning uses; although a monologue need not be self-centered, many of Browning's best are, and the repeated assertion of the ego of the narrator is highly effective. This is the crucial effect; the introduction of the narrator as a character is central to the dramatic monologue, and any useful tool should be employed.

Another aspect of Browning's monologues that would indeed suit them for the sonnet form is the existence of a little change at the end. The revelations in "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess" are reserved for late moments of the poems, perfectly suited for the turn of a sonnet. Although there is substantial compression of space in a sonnet, the pattern of establishing a character at the start of the poem and then using that established character in an unexpected way at the end is perfectly suited to the form.

In summary, although the small size of a sonnet can be a hindrance, the dramatic monologue form typified by Robert Browning allows a substantial amount of freedom in the creation of fictional poetry. By establishing a narrative personality and then modulating that personality for effect, the poet can distance himself or herself from the poem itself while still providing a microcosm of a personality for the reader to interact with. If the effect can be navigated within the space of fourteen lines, the final twist characteristic of Browning's dramatic monologues is perfectly suited to the turn at the end of the sonnet form.