Browning’s ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ (1855)

Andrea Sacchi, “Funeral Procession of a Bishop” (1640)

[Note: I did my PhD on Robert Browning, and for the first decade or so of my academic career I used to teach a ‘Special Author’ third-year course on him. So I’ve done a fair bit o’ Browning. But over the last quarter century I’ve moved on to teaching other things, and my Browning reading has fallen away. Recently, however, I’ve come back to him, for various reasons, some of which I may expatiate upon at a later point. For now what I’m doing is re-reading the dramatic monologues in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics and Men and Women. On this blog previously: my takes on ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church. Rome 15 — ’ (1845) and ‘Cleon’ (1855). There will be more.]

For a long time I thought Browning’s ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ (1855) was called ‘The Grammarian’s Funeral’. This is despite reading it repeatedly, and thinking about it a lot. Sloppy of me, really; except that there’s something in the poem that makes me think of its subject, its dead scholar, not as just another pedantic grammarian but as the epitome of all pedantic grammarians. The real deal.

The poem is a eulogy, written in lines that alternate long and short, sung or chanted by the disciples or students of the titular figure. He has died, and they are carrying his body up the mountain to bury it, or perhaps to immolate it on a pyre, or leave it there for the raptors to devour as Zoroastrians do. The subject of their funeral song devoted his life to scholarship and, arguably, to trivia. The most famous line in the whole lengthy piece is, I suppose, the judgment that, in life, the grammarian was ‘dead from the waist down’. No red-blooded, sexually active male he. He lived only for his scholarship. He has mastered ‘the book, to its last page’, supremely learned, ‘yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead.’ The life of the mind only, the body and all physicality atrophied. It is hard to see this as a life well lived — lacking the balance of mens sana in corpore sano — and critical interpretations of the poem have debated back and forth whether Browning is celebrating the grammarian’s life, or satirising it, mocking it, poking fun.

This scholar is revered by his students because he mastered scholarship — he settled all the grammatical questions: ‘settled Hoti’s business’, ‘properly based Oun/Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De.’ ‘Doctrine’ is a small joke, I suppose: doctrine makes us think of religious truth, where these tiny grammatical specifics have nothing of the importance, the transcendence or grandeur of divine revelation about them. Then again, a pedant, or grammarian might, say: doctrina actually means “teaching, instruction, learning, knowledge” (from doctor in the sense of “a teacher” — docere “to teach” — the sense in which I, holding a scholarly PhD, am a doctor, though not one you’d call upon to mend a broken bone, or ring-my-friend-I-said-you’d-call). But if this grammarian had mastered his dusty discipline, then why didn’t he stop? Well, as Frank Kermode says: ‘when Browning’s grammarian, grown old and bald and sick, was urged to get out of his cell and see a bit of life before he died, he replied that he still had work to do: “Grant I have mastered learning’s crabbed text,/Still there’s the comment.”’

So, some comment from this Dr Roberts (he helps youuu to understand) that starts with something that might look trivial even in the context of all this triviality — whether mocked by Browning or curiously celebrated. After all, aren’t all our mortal pursuits basically as trivial as the grammarian’s scholarship? When viewed sub specie aeternitatis? Maybe we should join his students in celebrating the life of this scholar. He had a task and he stuck to it. There’s something in that.

The poem opens with an epigraph that enables us to situate it, historically. We are ‘shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe.’ So, early Renaissance. Then it begins (I’m not going to quote the whole poem here; it’s available online in lots of places).

The form and prosody of this famous poem has occasioned a great deal of confusion among the scholars — which is odd, because it’s actually quite a straightforward form. 148 lines in three lengthy verse-paragraphs. The first:

Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
Each in its tether
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain,
Cared-for till cock-crow:
Look out if yonder be not day again
Rimming the rock-row!
That’s the appropriate country; there, man’s thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain, citied to the top,
Crowded with culture!
All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels;
Clouds overcome it;
No! yonder sparkle is the citadel’s
Circling its summit.
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning?
Our low life was the level’s and the night’s;
He’s for the morning.
Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,
‘Ware the beholders!
This is our master, famous, calm and dead,
Borne on our shoulders.

And here are the final thirty lines of the third:

That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.
That, has the world here should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed
Seeking shall find him.
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro’ the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti’s business let it be!
Properly based Oun
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.
Well, here’s the platform, here’s the proper place:
Hail to your purlieus,
All ye highfliers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews!
Here’s the top-peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:
This man decided not to Live but Know
Bury this man there?
Here here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.

So what form is this? ‘The long lines are iambic pentameters,’ say Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield, ‘and the short lines scan / x x / x like the conclusion of Greek and Latin hexameters’, which is wrong on both counts (Jack and Inglesfield do say, of the long lines, that ‘the first foot is usually inverted’; but even so). Robert L. Kelly thinks the prosody is deliberately deflating:

Browning’s chief satiric device in the poem is to undercut the appearance by the reality, the noble pretension by the ignoble fact, and the verse-form itself is his sharpest weapon. The unit of structure — a quatrain of five-measure iambics alternating two-measure dactyls — is intrinsically deflating.

Kelly’s assessment here is intrinsically bonkers. He is not talking prosody; he is talking his subjective sense of the rhythms of the poem (‘the heroic line marches strongly and steadily forward; the dactyl comes tumbling behind’) which, whilst impossible to gainsay (his personal subjectivity is his personal subjectivity, after all) can be criticised as prosodically inept. It boggles the mind, frankly, that anyone could read the long lines in this poem and think them iambic pentameters.

Does it matter? Well, I’m going to argue that it does. First off let’s get our prosody straight: in ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ Browning is writing Sapphics. To be sure, this is not the conventional short Sapphics, one hendecasyllabic line stressed — u — x — u u — u — — (where the ‘x’ is an anceps, which is to say: can be either long or short) followed by an Adonic, with the structure: — u u — –. Or to be precise, the short lines throughout the poem are all Adonics, just as in Sappho, or Catullus’s or Horace’s Sapphics; but the long lines are ten- rather than eleven-syllables. Still: if we crop the last syllable off the standard Sapphic line, many of the lines in Browning’s poem become regular short Sapphics (‘Thither our path lies, wind we up the heights’; ‘This is our master, famous calm and dead’; ‘He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft’; ‘Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note’; ‘Moaned he new measures, other feet anon’; ‘Earn the means first, God surely will contrive’; ‘All ye highfliers of the feathered race’ — I hesitate on ‘Here’s the town-gate reached: there’s the market-place’, which would require us to de-emphasise there’s to make it an abbreviated short Sapphic line, which would be odd given that we started off by emphasizing here’s). None of these are in any sense regular iambic pentamers. Now, many other lines here are not orthodox Sapphics by any measure, and Browning in this poem does like to follow an initial trochee with an iamb, but even when he does so he very rarely follows up with another three conventional iambs. No: he is ringing the metrical changes on the prosodic pulse of the Sapphic stanza.

To be clear: to call a verse form ‘Sapphics’ is not to tie-it to a single regularised prosodic pattern. Sappho wrote a fifteen-syllable long line followed by an Adonic; Horace, in those of his odes that follow the Sapphic pattern (which is most of them) wrote three hendecayllabic long lines followed by a short Adonic line. The key aspects of the long line is that it starts with a stressed syllable and follows it up with other trochees, spondees and dactyls. Renaissance poets made all sorts of variation upon this basic pattern. Browning’s alternate Adonic lines are all classically Sapphic, although his long lines vary from those that are more traditionally Sapphic to other varieties.

Sappho and Horace generally wrote three Sapphic lines to one Adonic, but this was not universal. Here’s a mid-nineteenth-century appraisal: ‘The Sapphic stanza, both in Greek and Latin, is composed of three Sapphics and one Adonic [although] the Adonic sometimes was irregularly subjoined to any indefinite number of Sapphics, so, on other occasions, the Sapphics were continued in uninterrupted succession, terminating as they had begun, without the addition of an Adonic even at the end, as in Boëthius.’ Browning’s metrical innovation is, after starting with a trochee, to mix iambs, dactyls and spondees in the longer line.

Does it matter? Well, it matters in the sense that the iambic pentameter in English is remarkable by its regularity, rocking the rhythm from off-beat to beat at the beginning of each line and then ticking through. In a Sapphic the line starts more assertively with a stressed syllable, and the drum-beat is more jazzy and variable running on from there, rather than the tssch-boom tssch-boom of a long run of iambs. Here, in what is, prosodically and musically, some of the best Sapphic verse ever written, are Swinburne’s ‘Sapphics’ (1866):

Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
Saw the reluctant

Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted,
Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder
Shone Mitylene;

Heard the flying feet of the Loves behind her
Make a sudden thunder upon the waters,
As the thunder flung from the strong unclosing
Wings of a great wind.

So the goddess fled from her place, with awful
Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;
While behind a clamour of singing women
Severed the twilight.

Browning isn’t doing anything as flawlessly imitative, or prosodically regular, as this. The point in ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ is rougher-edged, more (we could say) medieval and Gothic; Browning’s lines shift their emphasis from couplet to couplet (though, as I say, the Adonic is always regular). The first five lines might be scanned as follows:

– u u — u — u — — —

— — u — u — u — u —

— u — u u — u u u —

— — u — u — — — u —

— u u — u u — u — — —

This is period-appropriate, too. Where Classical Sapphics tend to regularity, medieval and Renaissance neo-Latin poets introduced much greater fluidity and variety into the form’s prosody:

Joseph Salathiel Tunison, “The Sapphic Stanza: A Tentative Study in Greek Metrical, Tonal and Dancing Art” (1896)

We can say that Browning, taking Buchanan’s mode, adapts it further: he swaps the second foot’s trochee for an iamb (mostly: sometimes for a spondee) and he abbreviates the three lines to one. The form has been evolving.

Tunison also notes [p.42]:

In fact, Horace, to fit the stanza to his purpose, was obliged to make an important restriction. The light, rapid movement of Sappho’s verse was much facilitated by the frequent, though not uniform, use of a trochee in the second foot of the three verses of the monostrophe. But the Roman poet required a slower, heavier movement; and so he made it a rule to use two long syllables invariably where Sappho would only have used them occasionally. He was followed by Statius and Prudentius, as well as by most of those who attempted verses in this form. Seneca, however, took Horace’s spondee to be, as in hexameter, interchangeable with a dactyl, and promptly put three syllables into some of the songs of his plays, thus completely destroying the line as Sappho meant it, but making no change that a Latin ear would be startled by after Horace. At the revival of learning there was much discussion of this matter, as there was upon nearly every other literary point, and Buchanan was censured for violating Horatian precedent in his version of the Ninetieth Psalm. He was defended by reference to the practice of two famous poets of his own age, now forgotten, Paulus Melissus and Michaelis Marullus, and to the more authoritative usage of Sappho herself.

Why does Browning cast a funeral-song in Sapphics? The ode was originally sung (Ancient Greek ᾠδή ōidḗ, “song”) and danced — one theory is that the tripartite structure of the ode, ‘strophe’, ‘antistrophe’ and ‘epode’, marked a specific ritual dance: the acolytes would sing the strophe dancing past the sacred altar, then come back on the other side singing the antistrophe, and so on until, at the end, they would dance in front of the altar singing the epode. Odes were also sung at wedding celebrations, and although there no surviving Sapphic or Horatian funeral odes it’s not a stretch to see how the form would work there.

In other words, this ode, sung by the students of the dead grammarian as they process with his bier, encodes movement: not a dance of joy, of course, but the motion of feet — actual feet, in time with metrical feet. It is, in other words, about motion. Each line starts with a stressed syllable — the foot stepping out (trochee, τροχαῖος, from τρέχω trékhō “run”, “run-on”). The movement is not a dead-march-from-saul plodding. There are spondees here, but the overall rhythm more often steps lightly through iamb, dactyl and anapaest. This is so because the grammarian’s business, grammar, is the way language moves, the way words combine and work in motion, to communicate meaning, and that’s the most important thing in the world.

Why only one short-sapphic line before we go to the Adonic? Perhaps because the way is narrow:

(Caution redoubled
Step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!) [lines 90–91]

It’s about moving on; not recklessly or headlong, but in a stately, ritualistic way, the proper way, the slow dance of death. And that in turn suggests that death itself is a moving on. The students, singing their ode, are connecting the life of their grammarian with what comes next. Whatever that is.

Look again at the examples of the grammarian’s pettiness of topic. For one thing, he settled Hoti’s business. That needed doing, because the Greek ὅτι is complex. It’s a conjunction that links a preceding clause with a postceding one, but according to three different possible connections: one, as a subordinating conjunction after verbs of perception and emotion, introducing a noun clause expressing a fact: ‘… that …’; two, in the same situation but with the clause that follows being in the indicative or optative, introducing ‘that’ as an indirect statement, or three, introducing a causal clause expressing a reason: ‘because, on account of’. It can also, if linked to a superlative, mean ‘as much as possible’. The Grammarian also ‘properly based οὖν’: another connective, meaning ‘ … then …’ if used in a temporal sequence, or ‘therefore’ in a causal sequence, as well as a word marking the continuation of a previously interrupted line of thought: ‘As I was saying…’ Then there’s the ‘enclitic De’. An enclitic is a morpheme that functions like a word, but never appears as an independent unit, being always attached to a following or preceding word — so the “’s” at the end of “Grammarian’s” in the title of Browning’s poem is an English enclitic, signifying possession. Ancient Greek has lots of enclitics, and they have the feature of adding at accent to the word to which they attach, when that word didn’t have an accent before: you can find out more about them here. The enclitic -δε is added to various Ancient Greek nouns [here’s a list of them all] to create a form of motion towards. An English equivalent might be ‘-wards’. We could say ‘he travelled in the direction of London’, or we could say ‘he travelled Londonwards’. In a letter to Tennyson of 2nd July 1863, Browning wrote, by way of explicating this poem: ‘There are tritons among minnows, even — so I wanted the grammarian to spend his last breath upon the biggest of the littlenesses: such an one is the enclitic ‎-δε, the “inseparable”.’

My point is that all of these are connectives; they are all about words working together in motion, linking one thing to another thing, moving something in a particular direction. What is the grammarian in motion towards? His final resting place, the top of the mountain.

Has he wasted his life? This is the question core to the poem. We deduce from the poem that he has not lived as fully, or varied, a life as some; he has damaged his health, repudiated sex, family and so on (‘dead from the waist down’). We might respect somebody who sacrificed all the finer things in life for some noble cause. But is the enclitic -δε really one such?

In a fascinating essay about Freud’s death, Adam Phillips suggests:

Freud was to suggest that the ways in which we tried to destroy our lives (and our life stories) were integral to our life stories. That we were always, as it were, tampering with the evidence of ourselves. Indeed, it was the function of what he would later call the death instinct to make narrative coherence impossible; to spoil our life stories and put a stop to them. To spoil the connections we, or other people, might wish to make. “The death instinct or destructive force,” his daughter Anna wrote, “serving the opposite aim (from the life instinct) of undoing connections and destroying life.” The death instinct was a mythical force that, by undoing connections and destroying life, also kept lives private. The life instinct was more on the side of the biographer: the death instinct — that “works silently”, Freud would say, in an ominous phrase — kept spoiling the material. The question of biography — of what one person might claim to know about another, on the basis of specific evidence — was linked for Freud with the question of who, or what, decided what a person’s real life story was. [Phillips, 71–72]

This question of privacy is crucial, I think. The Grammarian’s students adjudge him ‘dead from the waist down’, an account of his physical debility, and an assessment of his (as Freud might say) transference of libido entirely into intellectual, scholarly pursuits. But actually they don’t know what kind of sexual life, howsoever thwarted by circumstance, the Grammarian lived. Maybe it was rich, detailed, if (one supposes) internal. Sex is fundamentally about connection, after all; as is grammar. And words are sexier than bodies, as any seducer, or whisperer of sweet, hot nothings, knows. That toad at the ear of Eve was on to something.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I think one of the things ‘A Grammarians Funeral’ is about is: the death instinct. We might call it, a Grammar of Death. Everything is a copula, and what we connect, fundamentally, is living and dying. The final section of the poem reaches for something grand, sheets of flame and wheeling stars (Harold Bloom would say: the curtains of fire are Shelleyan, which might be) but the very last line of the poem brings us somewhere more strophe-and-antistrophe, or thesis-and-antithesis:

Here’s the top-peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:
This man decided not to Live but Know
Bury this man there?
Here here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.

‘Freud,’ Adam Phillips suggests, ‘needed the odd notion of a death instinct to explain the absolutely obscure apparent purposiveness of a life in which what looked like self-destructive behaviour was integral to the unconscious logic of that life (and so, of course, could never be amenable to psychoanalysis). People are not, Freud seems to be saying, the saboteurs of their own lives, acting against their own best interests; they are simply dying in their own fashion.’ Browning’s Grammarian’s death is styled, in this poem, as a strange kind of consummation, because he has spent his life simply dying in his own fashion.

In ‘bury this man there?’ the scornfully invoked there is: down in the valleys, with the vulgar herd. No says the poem, anticipating Nietzsche’s mountain-striding overman by half a century. Up here, with the lightnings and starbursts, is where this man deserves to be. But there’s a paradox: ‘loftily lying’ combines the high-up loft, ‘air’, ‘sky’ (cf German luft, as Luftwaffe, Lufthansa) with the low-down lying, the supine bottoming out of death. ‘Peace let the dew send!’ looks downward, with morning dew thickening the grass with moisture, but also upward: for the line is also ‘Peace let the dieu send’, a godly upward reaching.

But then, that’s a grammarian: Latin grammatica, short for ars grammatica, the transliteration of γραμματική τέχνη ‘art of letters’, and thus from γραμματικός (“of letters”). This in turn comes from γράμμα, “line of writing”, from γράφω: I write, I carve, I scratch. What else do we do, we writers, we grammarians, but write, scratch? What else is a grave, but a scratch in the surface of the earth, a plough-line into which we plant our seed, our corpse, to live, to die.