Summary: The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed s

1. Summary: The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed�s A fictional Renaissance bishop lies on his deathbed giving orders for the tomb that is to be built for him. He instructs his �nephews��perhaps a group of younger priests�on the materials and the design, motivated by a desire to outshine his predecessor Gandolf, whose final resting place he denounces as coarse and inferior. The poem hints that at least one of the �nephews� may be his son; in his ramblings he mentions a possible mistress, long since dead. The Bishop catalogues possible themes for his tomb, only to end with the realization that his instructions are probably futile: he will not live to ensure their realization, and his tomb will probably prove to be as much of a disappointment as Gandolf�s.

2. Summary: The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed�s Although the poem�s narrator is a fictional creation, Saint Praxed�s Church refers to an actual place in Rome. It is dedicated to a martyred Roman virgin.

3. Form This poem, which appears in the1845�volumeDramatic Romances and Lyrics,�represents a stylistic departure for Browning. The Bishop speaks in iambic pentameter unrhymed lines�blank verse. Traditionally, blank verse was the favored form for dramatists, and many consider it the poetic form that best mimics natural speech in English. Gone are the subtle yet powerful rhyme schemes of �Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister� or �My Last Duchess.�

4. Form The Bishop, an earthly, businesslike man, does not try to aestheticize his speech. The new form owes not only to the speaker�s earthy personality, but also his situation: he is also dying, and momentary aesthetic considerations have given way to a fervent desire to create a more lasting aesthetic monument.

5. Commentary Poetry has always concerned itself with immortality and posterity. Shakespeare�s sonnets, for example, repeatedly discuss the possibility of immortalizing one�s beloved by writing a poem about him or her. Here, the Bishop shares the poet�s drive to ensure his own life after death by creating a work of art that will continue to capture the attention of those still living. He has been contemplating the issue for some time, as shown by his discussion of Gandolf�s usurpation of his chosen burial spot. His preparation has spanned years: he reveals that he has secreted away various treasures to be used in the monument�s construction, including a lump of lapis lazuli he has buried in a vineyard.

6. Commentary The discussion as a whole reveals a fascinating attitude toward life and death: we come to see that the Bishop has spent so much of his time on earth preparing not for his salvation and afterlife, but for the construction of an earthly reminder of his existence. This suggests that the Bishop lacks religious conviction: if he were a true Christian, the thought of an eternal life in Heaven after his death would preclude his tomb-building efforts. Obviously, too, the Bishop does not expect to be remembered for his leadership or good deeds. And yet the monument he plans will be a work of magnificent art. Thus, as a whole, the poem reminds us that often the most beautiful art results from the most corrupt motives. Again, coming to this conclusion, Browning prefigures writers like Oscar Wilde, who made more explicit claims for the separation of art and morality.

7. Commentary Despite the Bishop�s rough speech and dying gasps, this poem achieves great beauty. Part of this beauty lies in its attention to detail and the cataloguing of the various semiprecious stones that are to line the tomb. Natural history provided endless fascination for the Victorians, and the psyche of the period gave special prominence to the notion of�collecting.Collecting offers a way to gather together objects of beauty without necessarily having to involve oneself in the act of creation. Instead, the collector can just gather bits of nature�s�or God�s�handiwork.

8. Commentary Indeed, this notion of collecting provides an analog for Browning�s employment of dramatic monologues like this one: in their way, they resemble found objects, the speeches of characters he has just �stumbled across.� The poems are thus neither moral nor immoral; they just�are.�By taking such an attitude Browning may be trying to move beyond speculations on the moral dangers of modern, city-centered life, focusing more on anthropological than philosophical or religious aspects of existence.

9. Commentary The poem ends with the Bishop�s vision of his corpse�s decay. The image hints at an underlying commonality of experience, a commonality more fundamental than any social power structures or aesthetic ambitions. While the notion of death as an equalizer may seem nihilistic, it can also prove liberating; for indeed, it relieves the Bishop, and implicitly Browning, of the burden of posterity.

10. Analysis Browning�s most important poetic message regards the new conditions of urban living. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the once-rural British population had become centered in large cities, thanks to the changes wrought by the�Industrial Revolution. With so many people living in such close quarters, poverty, violence, and sex became part of everyday life. People felt fewer restrictions on their behavior, no longer facing the fear of non-acceptance that they had faced in smaller communities;

11. Scandal Rags The mid-nineteenth century also saw the rapid growth of newspapers, which functioned not as the current-events journals of today but as scandal sheets, filled with stories of violence and carnality. Hurrying pedestrians, bustling shops, and brand-new goods filled the streets, and individuals had to take in millions of separate perceptions a minute. The resulting overstimulation led, according to many theorists, to a sort of numbness. Many writers now felt that in order to provoke an emotional reaction they had to compete with the turmoils and excitements of everyday life, had to shock their audience in ever more novel and sensational ways.

12. Browning�s shock tactics Thus violence became a sort of aesthetic choice for many writers, among them Robert Browning. In many of his poems, violence, along with sex, becomes the symbol of the modern urban-dwelling condition. Many of Browning�s more disturbing poems, including �Porphyria�s Lover� and �My Last Duchess,� reflect this notion.

13. Art and morality Many of Browning�s poems, which often feature painters and other artists, try to work out the proper relationship between art and morality: Should art have a moral message? Can art be immoral? Are aesthetics and ethics inherently contradictory aims? These are all questions with which Browning�s poetry struggles.

14. dramatic monologue In exploring these issues of art and modernity, Browning uses the dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue, to paraphrase M.H. Abrams, is a poem with a speaker who is clearly separate from the poet, who speaks to an implied audience that, while silent, remains clearly present in the scene. (This implied audience distinguishes the dramatic monologue from the soliloquy�a form also used by Browning�in which the speaker does not address any specific listener, rather musing aloud to him or herself). The purpose of the monologue (and the soliloquy) is not so much to make a statement about its declared subject matter, but to develop the character of the speaker.

15. Controversial Ideas For Browning, the genre provides a sort of play-space and an alternative persona with which he can explore sometimes controversial ideas. He often further distances himself by employing historical characters, particularly from the Italian Renaissance. During the Renaissance in Italy art assumed a new humanism and began to separate from religion; concentrations of social power reached an extreme.

16. Temporal Thus this temporal setting gives Browning a good analogue for exploring issues of art and morality and for looking at the ways in which social power could be used (and misused: the Victorian period saw many moral pundits assume positions of social importance). Additionally, the monologue form allows Browning to explore forms of consciousness and self-representation.

17. Enduring Art At least two of Browning�s finest dramatic monologues take their inspiration from moments in Shakespeare�s plays, and other poems consider the matter of one�s posterity and potential immortality as an artist. Because society had been changing so rapidly, Browning and his contemporaries could not be certain that the works of canonical artists like Shakespeare and Michelangelo would continue to have relevance in the emerging new world. Thus these writers worried over their own legacy as well. However, Browning�s poetry�has�lasted�perhaps precisely because of its very topical nature: its active engagement with the debates of its times, and the intelligent strategies with which it handles such era-specific material.

18. Criticism of the church The speaker of �The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed�s Church� is an Italian bishop during the late Renaissance. Through the speaker�s pompous, vain musings about monuments, Browning indirectly criticizes organized religion, including the Church of England, which was in a state of disarray at the time of the poem�s composition in the mid-nineteenth century.

19. Dramatic Monologues Dramatic monologues feature a solitary speaker addressing at least one silent, usually unnamed person, and they provide interesting snapshots of the speakers and their personalities. Unlike soliloquies, in dramatic monologues the characters are always speaking directly to listeners. Browning�s characters are usually crafty, intelligent, argumentative, and capable of lying. Indeed, they often leave out more of a story than they actually tell. In order to fully understand the speakers and their psychologies, readers must carefully pay attention to word choice, to logical progression, and to the use of�figures of speech, including any�metaphors�or analogies

20. Dramatic Monologues For instance, the speaker of �My Last Duchess� essentially confesses to murdering his wife, even though he never expresses his guilt outright. Similarly, the speaker of �Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister� inadvertently betrays his madness by confusing Latin prayers and by expressing his hate for a fellow friar with such vituperation and passion. Rather than state the speaker�s madness, Browning conveys it through both what the speaker says and how the speaker speaks. Grotesque Images

21. Grotesque Images Unlike other Victorian poets, Browning filled his poetry with images of ugliness, violence, and the bizarre. His contemporaries, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in contrast, mined the natural world for lovely images of beauty. Browning�s use of the grotesque links him to novelist Charles Dickens, who filled his fiction with people from all strata of society, including the aristocracy and the very poor

22. Grotesque Images Like Dickens, Browning created characters who were capable of great evil. The early poem �Porphyria�s Lover� (1836) begins with the lover describing the arrival of Porphyria, then it quickly descends into a depiction of her murder at his hands. To make the image even more grotesque, the speaker strangles Porphyria with her own blond hair.

23. Symbols Browning�s interest in culture, including art and architecture, appears throughout his work in depictions of his characters� aesthetic tastes. His characters� preferences in art, music, and literature reveal important clues about their natures and moral worth. For instance, the duke of Ferrara, the speaker of �My Last Duchess,� concludes the poem by pointing out a statue he commissioned of Neptune taming a sea monster

24. Symbols . The duke�s preference for this sculpture directly corresponds to the type of man he is�that is, the type of man who would have his wife killed but still stare lovingly and longingly at her portrait. Like Neptune, the duke wants to subdue and command all aspects of life, including his wife. Characters also express their tastes by the manner in which they describe art, people, or landscapes.

25. Evil and Violence Synonyms for, images of, and�symbols�of evil and violence abound in Browning�s poetry. �Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,� for example, begins with the speaker trying to articulate the sounds of his �heart�s abhorrence� (1) for a fellow friar. Later in the poem, the speaker invokes images of evil pirates and a man being banished to hell. The diction and images used by the speakers expresses their evil thoughts, as well as indicate their evil natures.

26. evil and violence Yet another example of evil and violence comes in �Porphyria�s Lover,� in which the speaker sits contentedly alongside the corpse of Porphyria, whom he murdered by strangling her with her hair. Symbols of evil and violence allowed Browning to explore all aspects of human psychology, including the base and evil aspects that don�t normally appear in poetry.

27. The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed�s The varying states of consciousness presented by Robert Browning in this fine dramatic monologue brilliantly pattern the various ways A Course in Miracles teaches us we see�or rather don�t see�the world and ourselves and others in it. Phantasmagoria is the word that keeps springing into mind as I attend to this poem

28. Irony I understand the psychologists are now advising us to attend to dreams rather than interpret them, and it seems like good advice here as we listen to the ramblings of the old scoundrel on his death bed surrounded by his sons�or nephews��ah, God I know not � This first prevarication occurs in line 3 after the bishop�s quotation of the �all is vanity� verse in line one.

29. first fourteen lines In the first fourteen lines, Browning introduces characters, themes, and artifices that have mattered to the old man: his children, evidence of their fair mother, vastly important to him because she represented his one victory over his projected enemy, Old Gandolf. The bishop�s sensuousness, his confusion, his appreciation of beauty and his dreamy musing on the nature f life and death, �Do I live, am I dead?� �Life�s a dream.� �Peace, peace seems all.�

30. line 15 In line 15, he rouses. The tomb with which he identifies his eternal self must be attended to. He, like Shelly�s Ozymandius, has identified the self with the artistic monument to self. The bishop has been plotting, lying and stealing, possibly even committing arson to hoard and store his treasures up on earth. For him it isn�t a matter of taking them with him when he goes. It is a matter of uniting literally with them in a sensuous, eternal reverie. �Life is short. Art is long.�

31. immortality through art. Here we are again: immortality through art. Shakespeare puts it thus in one of the sonnets: �So long as this shall live, then this gives life to thee.� The great minds of this world have not seen the obvious: no, this art is not life. It is not real. The �mirror up to Nature� is only the mirror up to thoughts that are not real because they do not, A Course in Miracles reminds us, reflect the only reality, God�s Love for us and our union with Him and with each other. The Bishop in effect parodies the Lord's command to Moses to build him a sanctuary: "According to all that I show thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle" (Exodus xxv.9)".

32. Sensuous blasphemy The bishop sees God sensuously in the shocking image of the Eucharist which he will oversee from his tomb abode: �see God made and eaten all day long.� The mishmash of the bishop�s thoughts reflects in the envisioned tomb with it choice Latin, sexual mythological images mixed up with confused religious images and himself lying there, as he says, hearing, seeing, feeling, through centuries The Bishop, persistently confuses matter and spirit in a most blasphemous manner, for having no true belief in Christian immortality, he yet tries to secure himself a kind of bizarre life after death.

33. Betrayal Line 101 is may be intended as a possible epiphany for the bishop; it certainly is for us as readers: �Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.� The bishop, however, loses this as soon as he says it and sputters into a kind or resignation that he can still arrange his sons in a procession as he bids them leave him. He sees himself after death gloating over his one victory over �old Gandolf,� the possession of his sons� beautiful mother. �As still he envied me, so fair she was � http://www.barbaramcmichael.com/bishoptomb.htm

34. Vanity The Bishop, who sees himself as "an object worthy of worship", wishes his tomb to be constructed of stones from the Tabernacle, moreover, which were types of Heaven. Furthermore, the very details, such as the nine pillars supporting his tomb, turn out to be allusions to passages in Exodus which were commonly read as prefigurative images of Heaven as well. "Without hope for personal salvation and with no faith in the Christian Resurrection, the Bishop reduces references to John the Baptist and the Madonna to nothing more than aesthetic comparisons for his beloved�lapis lazuli.�At the same time, taking over metaphors which emblematize salvation, he attempts to remake them into the letter of an earthbound immortality of sorts"(5).