Integrated Elements of Sex and Sensuality in the Poetry of Robert Browning: A Critical Approach (2014)

Browning's greatness lies in the fact that he has sailed against the current. The current or cult of the 19th century was to avoid love for morality; the writers and philosophers of his age considered that the love of a man or a woman or physical love or love of any kind that is related from a man to woman or vice versa is a hindrance to achieving some spiritual heights, while other Victorians considered the body as an obstacle in the path of spiritual emancipation. Robert Browning gave proper significance to the claims of body and justified it with the help of his poetic creations. The present paper is an attempt to critically focus, assess and estimate the integrated elements of sex, sensuality, and the claim of flesh as an eternal human physical need in his most celebrated poems.Love and sex, for Browning, were the peak of activities, of which human beings are capable, thus, he devoted his most intense and perfect consideration to it. Unlike the romantic poets, he created his world of love lyrics like a practiced lover and he did not stick to a specific subject, rather he touched and treated almost all the colors of love imbued in sex. Browning's subject was neither happy nor unhappy love but love as an experience, a love that includes both the ends of ideal, spiritual and physical love, and sees a line of horizon whose reality was bound up with its permanence; his greatest love poetry is quite reflective of idealism in love as well as the physical charm of love.Browning pours out the most hidden feelings of his heart. At the time when he and Elizabeth established friendship, nobody could have expected that this union would flourish into perfection in all respects. The poet unfolds that they had got united in love knot and their union of flesh could bring infinite pleasure to successfully quench the basic instinct of human body leading to an unforgettable experience of love. But they could not have guessed that their union would become so complete.Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine,Your heart anticipate my heart,You must be just before, in fire,See and make me see, for you part,New depths of the divine!But who could have expected thisWhen we two drew together firstJust for the obvious human bliss,To satisfy life 's daily thirstWith a thing men seldom miss? (By the L 136-145)Thus, the following lines of the poem express fully all the marital fullness and full satisfaction between Browning and Elizabeth as theyWalked having hither we walked then,side by side,Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,And still I questioned or replied,while my heart convulsed to really speak,lay choking in its pride. (By the L 161-165)Evelyn Hope, Prospice, One More, By the Fireside, ALover's Quarrel, Life in a Love, Love in a Life, Cristina, and A Woman's Last Word are the pearls of Browning's treasure of poems, bringing out the idea of union of the soul and flesh; some poems express these unions through marital love and some through the relations of the lover and the beloved. The poem Prospice describes the perfect marital love between the husband and the wife, in which after the demise of the beloved, the husband wishes to reunite with the soul and body of his beloved wife:Then a light, then they breast,O thou soul! I shall clasp thee again,And with God be the rest. (Prospice, L 26-28)In fact, Browning's justification for the claims ofbody's role on the canvass of broad picture of life, that too in married life, is very fresh and striking because it combines both opposites and unites the moral with sex or the soul with sex, whereas according to the Victorian beliefs, body and flesh and basic human instincts too were an obstacle to spiritual progress and emancipation. On the contrary, sailing against the Victorian current, he extolled in writing the due significance of the claims of sex and body:Where sexuality is concerned, Victorian poets take risks, and Browning is one of the most adventurous. …