Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day as Meditational Verse

Abstract: Robert Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day has eluded generic identification. One possible solution to this critical problem is to view the poem as falling within the tradition of meditational verse. Evidence for such a reading may be drawn from a look at the origin of the poem as well as the literary relationship between Browning and John Donne. This essay offers a reading of the poem that focuses on identifying and illustrating its characteristics as a meditation. ********** As Barbara Ryerse has recently noted, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day stands alone as an "exceptional piece" within the Browning canon (49). We have little to go on from Browning himself that would clarify either his purpose or his meaning in the work. Critics have frequently looked for explanations stemming from Browning's own life, and indeed there is some evidence that the poem may be at least in part confessional. A letter written on July 31, 1845, by Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning illuminates the origin of the poem: "Did you hear," she asks playfully, "that I was one of 'those schismatiques of Amsterdam' whom your Dr. Donne would have put into the dykes?" She then proceeds to express her preference for the simplicity of the Dissenters' chapel over all of the "dogmas and doxies." Browning responds, "Can it be ... you are a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels? And you confess this to me--whose father and mother went this morning to the very Independent Chapel where they took me, all these years back, to be baptized" (Letters 140-41). Basing their conclusions on this passage as well as other bits and pieces from the correspondence, including a letter of May, 1846, in which Elizabeth urges Robert to speak in his own voice, a number of scholars have advanced a biographical reading of the poem. Among these is William Clyde DeVane, who calls the work "Browning's attempt to use the 'white light' of his own personality, rather than the 'broken lights' of the characters through whom he had spoken hitherto" (196-97). J. M. Cohen asserts that "clearly Browning was recalling some feeling of imminent revelation he had himself known, perhaps in his childhood" (66). We might also easily note that Robert was in a particularly reflective mood at the time since his much-loved mother had died just nine days before his only son was born. W. Hall Griffin and Harry Minchin explain the emotional tone of the poem by pointing out that "Browning's thoughts had lately been recalled by sorrow to his home in England, and to his mother's religious faith" (176). Clyde Ryals links the events in Browning's own life with the subject matter of the poem by musing that it was "perhaps inevitable" that "he should turn to religion for [his] subject" (94). He goes further: "Browning no doubt wished to heed his wife's advice and speak in his own voice when in the summer of 1849 she set him the task of composition to relieve his sorrow and idleness" (95). E. LeRoy Lawson, while admitting the distance between poet and speaker, claims that Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day is one of Browning's "more autobiographical" poems (94). Addison Bross identifies the search for belief in the poem with Browning's own search (21). Constance Hassett views the poem as confessional at the very least, if not strictly autobiographical (58). William E. Harrold states rather tentatively, "The experimental structure in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, which combines the dream vision with dramatic scenes, dialogue, and narrative, allows the poet to speak more personally than in many of the stricter monologues" (90). Richard Kennedy and Donald Hair also see the poem through the lens of confession and suggest that the poet's creative purpose was a "reexamination of his faith" (188). Andrew Tate argues that in Christmas-Eve Browning conducts a "search for authentic religious experience" and concludes that the poet, through his speaker, "reconciles himself to an aspect of his [Protestant] heritage" (49). …