Browning's Shorter Poems, page 139 by Robert Browning
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also the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
3. =Solomon=. Legends about Solomon and his power over the spirits of earth and air are common in Jewish and Arabic literature.
9 ff. =building=. The idea of building by music is an old one. See the classical story of Amphion and the walls of Thebes, Coleridge's Kubla Khan_, and Tennyson's _Gareth and Lynette, lines
272-274.
19. =rampired=. Furnished with ramparts.
23. The reference is to St. Peter's in Rome.
The musician's imagination takes fire from his playing, and his music seems like a glorious palace which he is building. The notes are conceived as spirits doing his bidding (stanzas i-iii). As he proceeds the images change, and heaven and earth seem to unite with him in his creative activity: light flashes forth, and heaven and earth draw nearer together. Now he sees the past, the beginnings of things, and the future; even the dead are back again in his presence. His imagination has anulled time and space. As he thinks of his art, it seems more glorious to him than painting and poetry: these work by laws that can be explained and followed, while music is a direct expression of the will, an act of higher creative power.
When the music ends he cannot be consoled by the thought that as good music will come again. So he turns to the one unchanging thing, "the ineffable Name." Thus he gains confidence to say, "there shall never be one lost good." All failure and all evil are but a prelude to the good that shall in the end prevail. So he returns in hope and patience to the C major, the common chord of life.
ART VOGLER is famous, not only for its confident optimism, but as an example of Browning's power of annexing a new domain--that of music--to poetry.
Where does the musician cease to speak of Solomon's building and begin to describe his own? Note, in stanza ii, how he speaks first of the "keys," and afterwards has in mind the notes; how he speaks of the bass notes as the foundation, and the u