I think it’s harder to write happy poetry than sad poetry, or at least hard to do it in a way that will raise the reader’s heart, because the temptation is always to put on a sour face as if you know better than everybody else — better than all those silly people who go into raptures because the sky is blue and the grass is green. Sentimentality, right? Don’t fall for it, dear Readers. The Devil has his sentimentalists too. The difference between the cynic and the optimist isn’t that the one is clear-eyed and honest and the other is all got up in perfume and pretty flowers. Both of them are sentimentalists! Hope is the real deal; optimism, I’ve said, is the confidence-man with the gold tooth. Cynicism is one part envy and another part peevishness and eight parts sour stomach.
So today, for our Poem of the Week we have two songs from one of the happiest characters in English literature. Here’s how she came about. One day, the poet Robert Browning was walking by himself in a wooded area on the edge of London, and he wondered what it might be like, to be someone nobody knew anything about, living an obscure life, but “exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it,” as one of his biographers puts it. So he invented a character, a girl named Filippa, called Pippa for short, and let the setting be Asolo, a jewel of a small town at the southern foot of the Italian Dolomites. Pippa is just a girl who works in the local silk mills — and Asolo is still known for its lace.
When Browning’s play opens, it’s dawn, and Pippa is springing out of bed, rejoicing in the rose-red of the sky, and resolving not to squander a single “wavelet” of the day, a single “mite of my twelve-hours’ treasure.” She treats the day as a holiday, and wonders which of the “Four Happiest Ones” in Asolo are better off than she is. One is a great woman named Ottima, in an adulterous affair with her lover, Sebald. Then there’s a young pair, Jules and Phene, getting married today, and, says Pippa, “what care bride and groom / Save for their dear selves”? Then “Luigi and his mother,” devoted to each other’s good, and when they talk, she says, they are “calmer than lovers, and yet more kind than friends.” Luigi wants to fight for Italy’s freedom from Austria, and his mother wants to dissuade him. Last is the “Monsignor,” actually a bishop, who has come to Asolo to say Masses for his brother who has just died. Of him, Pippa says,
God bless in turn
That heart which beats, those eyes which mildly burn
With love for all men! I, tonight at least,
Would be that holy and beloved priest.
So Pippa says she will pass by each of the four today, “and see their happiness, / And envy none.”
In each case, the “Four Happiest Ones” are shown to us embroiled in intrigues, hatreds, treachery, not always of their own devising — the bishop, for example, is being blackmailed by the very man who brought about his brother’s death. Pippa knows none of these things. But somehow, when she passes, singing, what she happens to be singing fits perfectly with the dramatic situation we’ve just witnessed, and, unwittingly, she changes the mind and the heart of some person walking unsteadily along the precipice of destruction. That’s the irony of the play, in all four cases, building up to the most impressive of all, that of the bishop.
Do not underestimate the power of a good soul contented with her lot, simple, meek, yet as true and solid as one of those mountains overlooking the village of Asolo. I’ve sometimes jested that we’d all be far better off if we went bowling more often — or took up whistling airs from Puccini while we’re walking down the street — or lay on our backs in the warm grass to look up at the sky. Imagine that it’s your duty to do that — your duty, to be happy in the gift of the world, and to remember to feast!
So here are the two songs. The first is what she sings before she goes out into the street. Here Pippa says that there is “no last nor first” with God, and no small events or great events, because they’re all God’s works, though she doesn’t know, and we don’t know yet, that she’ll be having a profound effect on the people who overhear her songs, people who desperately need to hear what she happens to be singing. A happy coincidence? Not if we heed Pippa’s second song, which she is singing when she passes by the window of Ottima and Sebald. And I guarantee you, dear Readers, that you’ll have heard the last two lines.
First song: All service ranks the same with God: If now, as formerly he trod Paradise, his presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work -- God's puppets, best and worst, Are we; there is no last nor first. Say not "a small event!" Why "small"? Costs it more pain that this, ye call A "great event," should come to pass, Than that? Untwine me from the mass Of deeds which make up life, one deed Power shall fall short in or exceed! Second song, sung as she passes Ottima's window, heard by Ottima and her lover Sebald: The year's at the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in his heaven -- All's right with the world!
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