a Browning poem: not the light?

How astute, Theophrastus!

Browning would love that you caught on. The poet of the poem here in these lines is talking back to his “dear” friend Festus (perhaps not so different as one of the friends of Job). And this adviser seems to suggest Tradition be the poet’s guide. But the latter reconsiders the advice “from without” — Festus’ voice and the very external voice of the poet striving and struggling against motives — as you put it — “for accolades”; Browning puts the lines you quote within a long quotation of this “still voice from without.” Then, as you know, there is another voice still, and more voices then. (The last several lines I give below — the ones after the lines you’ve given — seem to echo St. Paul and Christ and the whispers of the Holy Ghost.)

Browning wrote these lines when he was only 22 or 23 years old. Maybe the youth, the young poet, was struggling for accolades. But he started writing English verse when he was 12, and had learned Latin, Greek, and French by the time he was 14. And he published his first works pseudonomously. He was probably an atheist already by the time he wrote Paracelcus. This sort of dramatic monologue—the symbolism, the diction and rhythm, the Socratic dialectic twist, the rhetoric—had a huge impact on the poetry of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.

Given what Frost supposedly and famously said about poetry being what’s lost in translation, I wonder how much of this dramatic monologue might be rendered in French or in Japanese?! With this poem particularly, doesn’t one have to account for the motives and the means of the poet? And don’t these change from verse to verse, as you’ve shown with your three lines?

The poem shares one’s struggles with various motives for enlightenment, how and why “to know”; here’s a bit more that includes, that contextualizes and complicates, your three lines:

You were beside me Festus as you say
You saw me plunge in their pursuits whom Fame
Is lavish to attest the lords of mind
Not pausing to make sure the prize in view
Would satiate my cravings when obtained
But since they strove I strove Then came a slow
And strangling failure We aspired alike
Yet not the meanest plodder Tritheim schools
But faced me all sufficient all content
Or staggered only at his own strong wits
While I was restless nothing satisfied
Distrustful most perplexed I would slur over
That struggle suffice it that I loathed myself
As weak compared with them yet felt somehow
A mighty power was brooding taking shape
Within me and this lasted till one night
When as I sate revolving it and more
A still voice from without said “See’st thou not
Desponding child whence came defeat and loss
Even from thy strength Consider hast thou gazed
Presumptuously on Wisdom’s countenance
No veil between and can thy hands which falter
Unguided by thy brain the mighty sight
Continues to absorb pursue their task
On earth like these around thee what their sense
….

Know, not for knowing’s sake,
But to become a star to men for ever;
Know, for the gain it gets, the praise it brings,
The wonder it inspires the love it breeds
Look one step onward and secure that step.”
And I smiled as one never smiles but once
Then first discovering my own aim’s extent
Which sought to comprehend the works of God
And God himself and all God’s intercourse
With the human mind I understood no less
My fellow’s studies whose true worth I saw
But smiled not well aware who stood by me
And softer came the voice — “There is a way —
Tis hard for flesh to tread therein imbued
With frailty hopeless if indulgence first
Have ripened inborn germs of sin to strength:
Wilt thou adventure for my sake and man’s
Apart from all reward?” And last it breathed —
“Be happy my good soldier; I am by thee
Be sure even to the end!” I answered not
Knowing Him As He spoke, I was endued
With comprehension and a steadfast will;
And when He ceased, my brow was sealed His own.