Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

Robert Browning (Dramatic Monologue)

Welcome, everyone, to Word and Song! I will be posting poems every week, with some discussion, and — if you would like more — my reading or “acting” of the poem, because I’ve come to learn that people understand poetry a lot better when they can read it and hear it, than when they read it alone. In any case, most of the poems I’ll be posting were meant to be recited and heard; their authors had that mind.

Robert Browning certainly had that in mind when he wrote this riotously humorous and shrewdly ironic sendup of a Spanish monk who is eaten up with envy. He has to live with Brother Lawrence, a really nice and cheerful fellow whom the other monks look upon as a saint, and he probably is, but that doesn’t make it any easier for our monk to live with him! He can’t stand him for his goodness, which sometimes is so sweet, so innocent, so generous, that our envious monk can’t begin to understand him. Notice that the monk “projects” onto Brother Lawrence his own vices, his own motives…