Robert Browning, ‘Cleon’ (1855)

‘Cleon’ was first published in Men and Women (1855): a lengthy dramatic monologue put into the mouth of a fictional Greek poet from the first century AD. In the poem he is writing a letter, replying to an epistle he has just received (along with various gifts) from another fictional character, Protus. Cleon is a famous poet, musician and artist. Protus is a ‘tyrant’ — a word that in Greek simply means ‘absolute ruler’ and doesn’t have the negative connotations of the modern English tyranny. Both are, in one sense, simply representative figures: Famous Poet, Absolute Ruler. We know this because Cleon’s name means ‘Famous’ (from the Greek κλέος, fame) and Protus’ name means ‘First’, in the sense of top-man, leader. These two fictional names are balanced by two real first-century names mentioned right at the end of the poem — I’ll come to those in a bit.

What we have is in three parts, with a coda. First Cleon writes to Protus thanking him:

Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily, that o’erlace the sea
And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps “Greece”) —
To Protus in his Tyranny: much health!

They give thy letter to me, even now:
I read and seem as if I heard thee speak.
The master of thy galley still unlades
Gift after gift; they block my court at last
And pile themselves along its portico
Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee:
And one white she-slave from the group dispersed
Of black and white slaves (like the chequer-work
Pavement, at once my nation’s work and gift,
Now covered with this settle-down of doves),
One lyric woman, in her crocus vest
Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands
Commends to me the strainer and the cup
Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine.
Well-counselled, king, in thy munificence!
For so shall men remark, in such an act
Of love for him whose song gives life its joy, —
Thy recognition of the use of life;
Nor call thy spirit barely adequate
To help on life in straight ways, broad enough
For vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest.
Thou, in the daily building of thy tower, —
Whether in fierce and sudden spasms of toil,
Or through dim lulls of unapparent growth,
Or when the general work ’mid good acclaim
Climbed with the eye to cheer the architect, —
Didst ne’er engage in work for mere work’s sake —
Hadst ever in thy heart the luring hope
Of some eventual rest a-top of it,
Whence, all the tumult of the building hushed,
Thou first of men might’st look out to the East:
The vulgar saw thy tower, thou sawest the sun.
For this, I promise on thy festival
To pour libation, looking o’er the sea,
Making this slave narrate thy fortunes, speak
Thy great words, and describe thy royal face —
Wishing thee wholly where Zeus lives the most,
Within the eventual element of calm.

Cleon is writing from the Sporades, ‘the sprinkled isles’ (that’s what the name means: σποράδην ‘in a scattered or sprinkled manner’) and the light waves are actually whispering Ἑλλάς, which is a better onomatopoeia for waves breaking on a shingly shore — though ‘Greece’ isn’t too bad. This opening gives us the time of day: late afternoon, for Cleon’s westward-sited mansion is purpled (‘royal’) with the rays of the setting sun. And we get some sense of what his fame has brought him: a large house, with a garden filled with fountains, a portico, a courtyard floored with fine black-and-white tiles. Amongst the gifts Protus is sending Cleon is a valuable cup and a number of slaves, some black and some white. One of the latter, a woman in a yellow woollen tunic, is reading aloud Protus’ letter to Cleon.

Cleon starts his reply by assuring him that, as a poet (a man for whom writing poetry ‘gives life its joy’), he will publicly praise Protus for his generosity, his spirit, and also for the great tower he is having built on the Greek mainland. This, it seems, has been subject to some construction delays, and (reading between the lines) the ordinary people are objecting to it, presumably to its cost and ugliness — but Cleon assures Protus he understands the point of the tower, which is to give the tyrant a literal place of elevation, to actualise his social elevation as ‘the first of men’ — as Protus: ‘Thou first of men might’st look out to the East:/The vulgar saw thy tower, thou sawest the sun.’

So far we have what Browning knew very well was a standard Greek situation: Greek rulers liked to have poets praise them, as Pindar, back in the sixth-century BC, wrote praising odes to the wealthy Heiron of Syracuse, thereby growing rich himself with the tyrant’s payment.

After this prelude we get the main body of the poem, which I won’t quote in its entirety (the poem is online in many places, as here). We learn some more things about Cleon’s oeuvre: he has written an epic poem, which Protus liked so much he had it engraved on a hundred gold tablets — quite the bling-y gesture! — and he has written short songs so catchy and popular that fishermen sing them as they haul in their catches. He is also proud of his achievements in philosophy (‘I have written three books on the soul,/Proving absurd all written hitherto’). He has also composed music, in which he has ‘combined the moods’ and in doing so inventing a new one. The Ancient Greeks classified music by various ‘modes’: the Dorian mode which was ‘harsh and stirring’, the Phrygian mode which was ‘sensual’, the Lydian mode ‘sweet’, and so forth. By synthesising them all, Cleon has made something new, or so he claims. This leads him into a meditation on the ways modern (that is, 1st-century AD) Greeks are superior to their ancestors:

We of these latter days, with greater mind
Than our forerunners, since more composite,
Look not so great, beside their simple way,
To a judge who only sees one way at once,
One mind-point and no other at a time, —
Compares the small part of a man of us
With some whole man of the heroic age,
Great in his way — not ours, nor meant for ours.
And ours is greater.

The Greeks of the Heroic age were ‘simple’, but we are complex. From here Cleon launches into an elaborate and lengthy disquisition on evolution — as we would call it — or more precisely on cultivation.

Why stay we on the earth unless to grow?
Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out,
That he or other god descended here
And, once for all, showed simultaneously
What, in its nature, never can be shown,
Piecemeal or in succession; — showed, I say,
The worth both absolute and relative
…
The grapes which dye thy wine are richer far,
Through culture, than the wild wealth of the rock;
The suave plum than the savage-tasted drupe;
The pastured honey-bee drops choicer sweet;
The flowers turn double, and the leaves turn flowers;
That young and tender crescent-moon, thy slave,
Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds,
Refines upon the women of my youth.
What, and the soul alone deteriorates?

That last, rhetorical question says: the soul is more refined and sophisticated now, it has grown, evolved, become cultivated. Cleon admits that his poetry is not like Homer’s, his music not like Terpander’s, his paintings not like ‘Phidias and his friend’; but he insists, by combining them all into one artistic production, he has nonetheless gone beyond them:

I am not great as they are, point by point.
But I have entered into sympathy
With these four, running these into one soul,
Who, separate, ignored each other’s art.
Say, is it nothing that I know them all?
The wild flower was the larger; I have dashed
Rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup’s
Honey with wine, and driven its seed to fruit,
And show a better flower if not so large:
I stand myself.

From here Cleon develops a ‘progressive’ metaphysics in which, critics have suggested, Browning was either reflecting or perhaps satirising Comte. He phrases it as a series of questions:

Is this apparent, when thou turn’st to muse
Upon the scheme of earth and man in chief,
That admiration grows as knowledge grows?
That imperfection means perfection hid,
Reserved in part, to grace the after-time?
If, in the morning of philosophy,
Ere aught had been recorded, nay perceived,
Thou, with the light now in thee, couldst have looked
On all earth’s tenantry, from worm to bird,
Ere man, her last, appeared upon the stage —
Thou wouldst have seen them perfect, and deduced
The perfectness of others yet unseen.
Conceding which, — had Zeus then questioned thee,
“Shall I go on a step, improve on this,
Do more for visible creatures than is done?”
Thou wouldst have answered, “Ay, by making each
Grow conscious in himself — by that alone.
All’s perfect else: the shell sucks fast the rock,
The fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims
And slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight,
Till life’s mechanics can no further go —
… and so I choose
For man, thy last premeditated work
(If I might add a glory to the scheme),
That a third thing should stand apart from both,
A quality arise within his soul,
Which, intro-active, made to supervise
And feel the force it has, may view itself,
And so be happy.” Man might live at first
The animal life: but is there nothing more?
In due time, let him critically learn
How he lives; and, the more he gets to know
Of his own life’s adaptabilities,
The more joy-giving will his life become.

Zeus has overseen this development: from shells ‘sucking fast in rocks’ under the sea, to swimming fish, to sliding snakes, to walking beasts and then to flying birds. This is the perfection of the merely physical aspect of life (‘life’s mechanics can no further go’) but Zeus wasn’t finished: from there he turned to man, leaving behind ‘the lower and inconscious forms of life’ by evolving and developing the human mind and soul. This Cleon — in a deliberate call-back to his earlier praise of Protus’s tower — analogises to architecture: the soul is a pleasure house but also a ‘watch-tower and fortress’, ‘a tower that crowns a country.’ So, Cleon asks: what is the point of the tower? Is it just to climb to the top and admire the view?

And still the flesh replies, “Take no jot more
Than ere thou clombst the tower to look abroad!
Nay, so much less as that fatigue has brought
Deduction to it.” We struggle, fain to enlarge
Our bounded physical recipiency,
Increase our power, supply fresh oil to life,
Repair the waste of age and sickness: no,
It skills not! life’s inadequate to joy.

In other words: do we climb the tower of life just to die? Here Cleon grows mournful. Fear of death disturbs him. True, he concedes, we can say that something of the artist lives after him, or her: that ‘Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,/And Aeschylus, because we read his plays’. But that’s not enough for Cleon. Like Woody Allen, he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his works; he wants to achieve immortality by not dying. But this, it seems, is not possible. The view from the tower is: life is good but then it stops and there’s nothing more.

Cleon finds a bitter irony in the fact that, as his soul intensifies and grows with age, his body fades away and collapses: ‘every day my hairs fall more and more,/My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase.’ And when he faces the prospect of his own death, ‘the consummation coming past escape’ it strikes him with ‘horror’:

I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so over-much,
Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy:
… But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!

His God has not promised him an afterlife, and if such a thing were possible he would surely have done so. On that gloomy thought Cleon ends his letter, advising his correspondent to put a brave face on it:

Live long and happy, and in that thought die:
Glad for what was! Farewell.

In his last book — dictated from his own death-bed — Harold Bloom, discussing ‘Cleon’, says: ‘I wish Browning had ended the poem there.’ A strange thing to say, really, since the final 16 lines of the poem, which follow this ‘farewell’ and are presented as a coda, really are the point of the whole.

Cleon’s postscript replies to one other thing in Protus’s letter: a request from the tyrant that he pass on a message ‘to one called Paulus’ — Saint Paul that is, who, as the Acts of the Apostles makes plain, spent the AD 50s travelling around Greece and Asia Minor. He preached in Athens, on the Areopagus, and Browning takes a verse from that sermon (“As certain also of your own poets have said” — Acts 17:28) as the epigraph to the whole poem. Cleon, however, is unpersuaded by Paul:

Live long and happy, and in that thought die:
Glad for what was! Farewell. And for the rest,
I cannot tell thy messenger aright
Where to deliver what he bears of thine
To one called Paulus; we have heard his fame
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him —
I know not, nor am troubled much to know.
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all!
He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write.
Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;
And (as I gathered from a bystander)
Their doctrine could be held by no sane man. [‘Cleon’, lines 336–353]

Paul, we can see, has made the news, but in a small way. Cleon himself is unsure whether Paul is preaching the gospel of Christ, or whether Paul is Christ — an understandable confusion, in a way, since ‘Paul’ is a name and ‘Christ’ a title (χρῑστός, ‘the anointed one’, the one who has had the chrism applied to him — chrism a word from the same Greek root). But anyway, says Cleon: why do you want to speak with this Paul? It would ‘wrong’ our stoic Greek philosophy to ‘stoop’ to communication with a ‘mere barbarian Jew’. All that Cleon knows about Paul’s teaching comes from ‘certain slaves’ who stopped by his island and tried to convert the inhabitants . I wonder if Browning is intimating a sort of pun here: δούλος, slave, Παύλος, Paul (the name means small — unlike Cleon-Famous or Protus-first-of-men!) Cleon didn’t himself attend the sermon preached but, hearing about it second-hand, concludes that Christian doctrine ‘could be held by no sane man.’

The line ‘one called Paulus; we have heard his fame’ is surely Browning playing name-games again. Cleon means fame, after all. We could recast this line as ‘One called small; we have heard his Cleon’ — because, as the epigraph to the poem spells out, this Cleon is Paul’s, in the sense of being mentioned by Paul in his Aeropagus sermon, and quoted at the head of the poem [Acts 17:28]. And we have just heard his Cleon! — at length.

Here’s the context of that epigraph:

Acts 17: 22 Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. 23 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. 24 God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands … 28 For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

Paul goes on to preach the resurrection of the dead, which doctrine divides his Greek audience: ‘when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter. So Paul departed from among them.’

What ‘certain also of your own poets have said’ (ὡς καί τινες τῶν καθ’ ὑμᾶς ποιητῶν εἰρήκασιν) is: for we are also [God’s] offspring. Scholars have identified precisely which of the poets said so. It turns out it’s a half-line from the didactic hexameter work Phenomena by the 3rd-century BC poet Aratus: τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν; ‘for we too are his offspring’. I like to believe Browning knew this, and, since he is playing name-games in his poem, knew also that Aratus (from ἀράομαι aráomai, “to pray”) is a name that means either prayed against, hence accursed or prayed for, hence desirable. Which is pretty interesting in this context.

Harold Bloom assumes that we are to see Cleon as, basically, a crap-artist: a ‘poetaster’: ‘as mediocre a composer and painter as he is a poet’, whose metaphysical questions are ‘feeble’ [Bloom, Take Arms Against A Sea of Troubles (Yale 2020), 352–3]. I’m not sure we are, though. His metaphysics — though ‘wrong’ by Christian standards — are sophisticated and well-developed. It’s hard to see why a rubbish poet would have grown so rich. Pindar was no Christian, but he was a superb poet. And really, what Bloom objects to in the final 16-lines of ‘Cleon’ is what he calls Browning ‘bouncing into belief’. Bloom’s version of Browning is better exemplified by ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, a poem with which he (Bloom) was somewhat obsessed, over his long career. This is the Browning of difficulty, who writes (as Bloom said elsewhere) not art but the obstacles to art. Just before his account of ‘Cleon’ in Take Arms, Bloom again praises that poem: ‘a quester who hopes only to be fit to fail impos[ing] a will that romance cannot accommodate. That perfect a knowledge is daemonic. The poem is not Christian. For me, the grandest moment in the poem is its extraordinary negative epiphany’. After questing for the Dark Tower, Roland finally stumbles upon it, unexpectedly:

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counter-part
In the whole world. The tempest’s mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start. [‘Childe Roland’, lines 181–6]

Another tower, here, like the one in ‘Cleon’. It seems an overreach to insist, as Bloom does, ‘the poem is not Christian’, particularly if one is going straight on to quote this stanza, with its Biblical allusion (‘the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God’ Psalm 14:1). And Bloom’s reading of the end of ‘Cleon’ — ‘something in Browning may have sympathised with that final line: he is a labyrinth within a labyrinth and offers us no exist that will work’ [Bloom, 354] comes across as wishful thinking, really. Surely the last 16-line coda to ‘Cleon’ is the point of the poem.

That’s not to say the poem is saying something simple, of course: as it might be: ‘Cleon, for all his fame, wealth and fancy theorising is wrong; and too blind in his dark-tower-like heart to see the truth, even though it has been specifically brought to his island — death is not the end, there is resurrection from annihilation, but only to those who believe in Christ’. That would, if we could boil the poem down to it, render ‘Cleon’ a banality. The poem is Christian, as Browning himself was, but it’s Christian in a complex way.

Paul, in the New Testament, writes epistles in which he talks about God and death and atonement: he stresses the sacrifice of Christ as the route to redemption and eternal life, insists that Christ will return (within his lifetime) and has much to say about the role of women. Cleon writes an epistle in which these things are also present, although, starting from different premises, he comes to different conclusions . So he has a beautiful slave-woman at his disposal, not just to read to him and serve him wine but, we suppose, for his sexual gratification. Paul stresses the need for sexual continence, for modesty and propriety in women, and lays great emphasis on marriage (he says: it is better to marry than to burn — with lust, he means). Paul speaks of eternal life, of surviving death; Cleon speaks of the evolution of mortal life, from animals to man, but sees nothing beyond death. Paul declares; Cleon questions . Much of this dramatic monologue is framed as interrogatives (I can’t agree with Joseph A Dupras when he says that ‘Cleon has a closed, spherical mind which converts tradition into a bell jar’: I think he is a restless, inventing, querying and onward sort of person, and that this poem is him trying to work things out. Trying and failing. Better, though, to ask and fail honestly to answer, than accept a facile and mendacious solution). Other elements in the poem are Browning typologically, or pseudo-typologically, figuring that which Paul preaches. So Cleon is proud that his words are sung by Greek fishermen as they go about their work; but certain Jewish fishermen have become fishers of men, and the words they quote are from a greater poet. Similarly it’s not enough that Cleon has published a book about the soul; he has published three books, a trinitarian nod.

‘Cleon’ is not really a poem about religious pieties, or about the difficult credulities of faith. It is, rather, a poem about conversion. It is, I think, about what Adam Phillips, in the title of his 2021 book, calls Wanting to Change. Paul’s role is not that of Christ (as Cleon’s fuzziness in eliding the two names implies) —for Christ is the incarnate God and Paul is a proselytiser, a missionary, trying to persuade the unpersuaded to change their ways and follow Christ. Paul’s job is to convert people. People like Cleon.

In his discussion of religious conversion, Phillips starts from his experience as a psychoanalyst — itself a process in which a person, knowingly or not is looking to ‘convert’ — from misery, or neurosis, or disaffection — into another faith, a happier, non-neurotic, sane faith.

… as I gathered from a bystander
Their doctrine could be held by no sane man.

Sane in Greek is ὑγιής (hugiḗs) ‘sound in mind: wise, wholesome’, ‘sound, healthy, hearty, strong’. Huge-ius versus paulus: Big versus small. And, actually, Phillips’ book separates the ‘sane’ persuasion process of psychoanalysis from what he sees as the regressive danger of ‘conversion’. This latter might pretend to offer renewal, but only ‘in the service of sustaining the very thing that is supposedly being replaced. For Phillips, conversion ‘changes everything by keeping everything the same’: regression to helplessness, dependence, over-identification with an all-knowing Other — our primal parents, in psychoanalytic terms; God in religious ones. Still, as Phillips cannily notes, conversion is a three-way dynamic:

The scenario is triangulated — there are the converters and the person being converted … [and] the witnesses of conversion.

In terms of Browning’s poem that is: Paul, the reluctant Cleon — and us, reading about the pair of them. Phillips goes on:

We may, as onlookers, identify with both the converters and the converted; indeed at its most extreme, the whole scene might send a depth charge into our own histories; our histories of having been fashioned and self-fashioned, changed and stultified through our relations with others. We might be like people returning to the scene of the crime, which is sometimes the crime of people knowing what’s best for us, or of our knowing what’s best for them. Because in the conversion drama we are, in a sense, re-experiencing extreme versions of seduction and persuasion and pedagogy; of influencing and being influenced. [Phillips, On Wanting to Change, 108–9]

Part of what makes ‘Cleon’ a great poem , a much greater than Bloom (Browning fan though he was) can admit, is precisely this: that it positions us in this third-person role, invites us to think that we know what’s best for its speaker — Cleon should embrace Pauline Christ and leave his timor mortis behind, look forward to eternal life! — whilst at the same time compelling us to understand how patronising, how limited this attitude of ours is. Not that Cleon should surrender himself to God (for, as the poem makes abundantly plain, Cleon believes in a wise-all powerful God: on a spiritual level he worships Zeus, and on the material plain he pays homage to Protus) but that Cleon should surrender himself to us, should take our advice. ‘Fool!’ we tell him. ‘Can’t you see that this Paulus you dismiss is the answer to all your problems?’ The arrogance of it!

One final quotation from Phillips:

People only convert to what they think matters to them. Everyone is in pursuit of the good but no one can agree on what the good is. In this view everyone has good intentions (we can say of the converter: ‘he means well’). Those who convert people are promoting the good, their good; they are promoting virtue, their virtue. And then Donald Winnicott, the twentieth-century English paediatrician and psychoanalyst of dissenting stock, can say, in a book appropriately entitled Playing and Reality, that ‘madness is the need to be believed.’ [Phillips, 113–4]

What matters to Cleon? That he survive his own death? We could, I suppose, read ‘Cleon’, the poem, as a kind of prologue — we might argue that there is an implied, uwritten epilogue in which Cleon abandons his sense of ‘sanity’ and converts to Christianity, as Dionysius the Areopagite did after hearing Paul preach (Dionysius went on to become the first Bishop of Athens). Madness is the need to be believed. Cleon has plenty of ‘good’ in his life — actual goods (possession, chattel slaves and so on) but also virtue: merit (fame), skill, beauty. But the poem is an epistle, a communication, an attempt to persuade Protus — in a sense to convert him. Is this sanity? ‘Winnicott,’ Phillips glosses, ‘is saying here that when we depend on other people to believe us it is a sign of our (temporary) madness; that is to say, a sign of something unintelligible and excessively disturbing, a sign of profound unhappiness and deprivation. He believes we are endangered by people who want to convert us … people who believe in conversion believe in intractable certainties; and with this comes the assumption that only certainties are dependable.’ But Browning knows very well that the apparent ‘dependency’ of Cleon upon his patron Protus isn’t the real dynamic here. After all, nobody remembers Heiron of Syracuse; everyone has heard of Pindar.

In an essay from 2001, the poet and translator Dick Davies talks about stumbling upon ‘Cleon’:

It’s not one of Browning’s best-known pieces, and either I had never read it before or the memory of doing so had evaporated completely. It’s a fairly typical Browning performance: an apparent dramatic monologue, in a blank verse whose rhythms and idiosyncrasies reveal almost as clearly as the poem’s content the speaker’s character. We hear him, and place him, with more and more assurance as the poem goes on. And as the technique holds few surprises, so too does the revealed nature of the speaker: he is very much a Browning type — an artist of considerable but not quite enough talent, one who has at best a precarious hold on posterity and our attention; whose interest for us must lie largely in his unperceived (by him) vulnerability.

Davies makes the interesting connection between this Browning poem and Cavafy.

There are two obvious differences; one is the descriptive language of the poem, which offers a kind of Alma-Tadema/Frederic Leighton version of the ancient world (one senses lots of roses, and pretty slaves bearing goblets of wine, and languid limbs about the place), and the other is the poem’s length. Cavafy is sensuous, but always specific and never coy in his sensuality, and he is virtually always terse. Even so, with these two caveats, the overall situation, and the fictional portrait that emerges, seem firmly to belong somewhere near the centre of Cavafy’s very distinctive poetic world.

This seems to me very interesting. It’s a way, despite the de haut en bas dismissiveness of the Alma Tadema/Leighton reference (I’m philistine enough to find those elements in the poem — which are certainly there — bonuses, not blots), of respecting the poem’s ambiguous eloquence. Indeed, boldly, Davies suggests that one of Cavafy’s poems is a kind of sly sequel to Browning’s ‘Cleon’, of the kind I speculated above: ‘Cavafy too has a poem about a Kleon,’ says Davies. ‘His poem is presented as the epitaph on Kleon’s tomb, which is a brief first person narrative of the dead man’s biography’:

I’m Ignatios, lector, who came to his senses very late:
but even so, in that way I lived ten happy months
in the peace, the security of Christ. [Cavafy ‘Tomb of Ignatios’ (trans, by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)]

It is this open-endedness of Browning’s poem that is so potent — Herbert Tucker, in what remains one of the best books about Browning, describes him as a poet of disclosure rather than enclosure. ‘Cleon’ discloses. It is a poem about the sanity of conversation that contains within it the germ of conversion’s insanity. It is a very great poem.