(Download) "Two of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Pan Poems and Their After-Life in Robert Browning's "Pan and Luna" (The Dead Pan) (A Musical Instrument)" by Victorian Poetry # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Two of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Pan Poems and Their After-Life in Robert Browning's "Pan and Luna" (The Dead Pan) (A Musical Instrument)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 216 KB
Description
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Dead Pan" (1844) and "A Musical Instrument" (Cornhill Magazine, 1860) draw on the figure of the goat-god Pan to deal with aesthetic issues of poetic process and product, with theological issues of belief and godhead, and with complex cultural issues of sexual desire and violation of the woman. After her death, Robert Browning (RB) edited EBB's Last Poems, 1862 which included "A Musical Instrument." Much later, he, too, utilizes the figure of Pan in "Pan and Luna" (1880) and like EBB in "A Musical Instrument" revises the politics and dynamics of the classical and romantic chase, as well as the art which encodes the sexual encounter. In seeing the stories and the writing from the woman's point of view, the Brownings re-think and re-articulate traditional responses to the Pan material. In "A Musical Instrument," EBB foregrounds the role of the nymph Syrinx in the Pan myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses Book One, while in his "Pan and Luna," RB foregrounds the role of the moon goddess, Luna. RB's poem is as much about EBB's previous Pan poems as it is about Virgil's poetic version of Pan, the white fleece, and Luna in lines 391-393 from the third book of the Georgics. In his re-telling, RB interrogates transmissions and readings of this Pan myth, after he has written Pompilia's monologue in The Ring and the Book (1868). The story of Pompilia's marital rape and murder presents, among other things, Browning's responses to the current social outcry against domestic violence, (1) and his responses to EBB's treatment of Marian's rape in Aurora Leigh (1857). In the writing of "Pan and Luna," he remembers these violations and also Syrinx's in "A Musical Instrument." The dialogues on high art, power relations, and sexuality which the Brownings began in their courtship letters continue in their poetry during the sixteen years of marriage and even after Elizabeth's death. Obviously a small part of that dialogue, the poetic interactions in these three Pan poems provide the material for examination here.