Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day
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概要
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Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day is generally accepted as a Christian poem. We may focus our interest, therefore, mainly on Browning's practical faith as a Non-conformist or on his defence of Christianity against the 'Higher Criticism'. My attempt in this short essay, however, is to deal with the poem from a particular point of view, that of the dramatic monologue. The poem seems to me to have some importance from that standpoint. First, it was written between the time of the three long poems of his early period (1833-1840) and the maturer. Men and Women of 1855. It shows the process from the interior monologue of the Romantics to the new 'dramatic monologue', though we can see the germ of this trend even in his earliest poem, Pauline. Secondly, not only the direct impulses-internal or external-but a poetic impulse urged him to write the poem. For, as regards the subject-matter, he aims at the unity and harmony of the subjective and the objective, as he clearly states in his Essay on Shelley published a year after the poem. A poet strives to express his original idea or thought as exactly as possible, and then the individual and unique form or style is created. Browning, in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, developed his conception and form with the great theme 'love'. This peculiar 'love' is neither the love of God nor human love, yet both are involved in it. Love is like an axle to hold the balance between the two poles-God and Man. And yet it exists within and without the world to unite them. There also is the same pattern in man himself. In other words, it unites the self and the unself, the subject and the object. Browning tried to indicate, through symbols such as that of a dream and a shipwreck, through a vision of Christ, the balanced condition between the two; that is, he could find between them 'the dynamic equilibrium' in his unique form, the dramatic monologue.
- 東京女子大学の論文