ROBERT BROWNING“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”

ROBERT BROWNING’S POETRY

Robert Browning

“

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

”

Complete Text

Gr-r-r

—

there go, my heart’s abhorrence!

Water your damned flower-pots, do!

If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,

God’s blood, would not mine kill you!

What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?

Oh, that rose has prior claims

—

Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?

Hell dry you up with its flames!

At the meal we sit together;

Salve tibi! I must hear

Wise talk of the kind of weather,

Sort of season, time of year:

Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely

Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt;

What’s the Latin name for “parsley?”

What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout?

Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished,

Laid with care on our own shelf!

With a fire-

new spoon we’re furnished,

And a goblet for ourself,

Rinsed like something sacrificial

Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps —

Marked with L. for our initial!

(He-he! There his lily snaps!)

Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores

Squats outside the Convent bank

With Sanchicha, telling stories,

Steeping tresses in the tank,

Blue- black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,

—

Can’t I see his dead eye glow,

Bright as ’twere a Barbary corsair’s?

(That is, if he’d let it show!

)

When he finishes refection,

Knife and fork he never lays

Cross-wise, to my recollection,

As do I, in Jesu’s praise.

I the Trinity illustrate,

Drinking watered orange-pulp

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