One of the most popular poets of the Romantic Era, Fra Lippo Lippi is among the most widely studied dramatic monologues by Robert Browning.The poem was included in his 1855 collection of poetry Men and Women.The poem raises questions about the nature of art and presents the dilemma of the artist.

Fra Lippo Lippi is an 1855 dramatic monologue written by the Victorian poet Robert Browning which first appeared in his collection Men and Women. Throughout this poem, Browning depicts a 15th-century real-life painter, Filippo Lippi. The poem asks the question whether art should be true to life or an idealized image of life. The poem is written in blank verse, non-rhymingiambic pentameter.

A secondary theme of the dramatic monologue is the Church's influence on art. Although Fra Lippo paints real life pictures, it is the Church that requires him to redo much of it, instructing him to paint the soul, not the flesh. ('Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!'). Aside from the theme of the Church and its desires to change the way holiness is represented artistically, this poem also attempts to construct a way of considering the secular with the religious in terms of how a 'holy' person can conduct his life. Questions of celibacy, church law, and the canon are considered as well by means of secondary characters.

External links[edit]

• Full text of the published poem is available at: U of Toronto Library

Complete Text

I wonder how you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?
For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalized me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.
Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellow fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,
Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles, -blind and green they grope
Among the honey meal: and last,
Everywhere on the grassy slope
O traced it. Hold it fast!
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air-
Rome’s ghost since her decease.
Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers!
How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O’ the wound, since wound must be?
I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs, - your part my part
In life, for good and ill.
No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth, - I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak-
Then the good minute goes.
Already how am I so far
Our of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?
Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The Old trick! Only I discern-
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

Summary

This represents one of Browning’s more abstract poems.Returning to some of the themes developed in “Porphyria’sLover,” albeit in a very different context, “Two inthe Campagna” explores the fleeting nature of love and ideas. Thespeaker regrets that, just as he cannot ever perfectly capture anidea, he cannot achieve total communion with his lover, despitethe helpful erotic suggestions of nature. Though our hearts be finite,we yearn infinitely; the resulting pain serves as a reminder ofhuman limitations.

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Form

“Two in the Campagna” divides into five-line stanzas,the first four lines in tetrameter and the final line in trimeter.The stanzas rhyme ABABA, although, because thelines are enjambed (sentence breaks do not necessarily coincidewith line breaks), the rhyme undergoes a certain weakening. Sectionsof the poem come in fairly regular iambs, but this often breaksdown: just as the poet can’t quite capture either his ideas or his lover,he can’t quite conquer language either.

Commentary

The “Campagna” refers to the countryside around Rome.Until the middle of the twentieth century it grew fairly wild andunclaimed. Because its swampy areas nurtured mosquitoes carryingmalaria, the conventional English tourist largely avoided the Campagna,leaving it to the Italian peasants, who farmed sections of it. However,in nineteenth-century literature the Campagna also symbolized asort of alternative space, where rules of society did not applyand anything could happen; we see this notion expressed in suchworks as Henry James’s Italian-set novels and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s TheMarble Faun. In this poem, the Campagna seems to suggestto the speaker that he can in fact transcend his human limitationsto put his subtle ideas into poetry or see the world through hislover’s eyes. However, in suggesting this the wild space merelyplays a cruel trick; teased and disappointed, the speaker is leftmore melancholy than ever.

The comparison between love and art comments on the difficultyof interpersonal communication. Just as the speaker can never reallysee through his lover’s eyes, so too can he never communicate thesubtle shadings of his thoughts through his poetry. Experience liesbeyond the grasp of language. Yet—as the existence of this poemitself attests—we can approximate experience, however inaccurately,and these approximations are not without their significance andvalue. Indeed, it is perhaps our awareness that poetry, like love,is necessarily imperfect that lends it its beauty. Irony, too—oneof the most sophisticated forms of communication—results from ourhuman failings, as the poem’s conclusion shows; “The old trick”both thwarts and enables poetry.