Robert Browning as an Optimistic Poet

 

Browning is a moralist and a religious teacher. His optimism is based on life's realities. Life is full of imperfection but in this very imperfection lies hope, according to Browning's philosophical views. Actually, the philosophy of Browning is the philosophy of a man looking at the world with more than a glimmer of hope in his eyes. He holds a very distinct place among the writers of the Victorian Age. He is an uncompromising foe of "Scientific Materialism". He preaches God and universality as the central truth of his philosophy of life.

As an optimist, he portrayed almost all kinds of people from different stages of society in his poems. He had gone so far as to study the relationship between Man and the entire world. His poems are full of courage and inspiration for those people of the world. We can prove Browning as an optimist more clearly from the following analysis.

Browning is a man with hope for the fate of humans. Actually, his hope is not for this world, but for the next world too. He believes that the soul of a human being is immortal. After death, there will be an action for Man by God named salvation in which he will be rewarded or punished for his deeds from his birth to his death. As, in his “The Last Ride Together”, he said-

We fall to rise, are baffled to fight better

Sleep to wake”

As we have already known that Browning has a strong belief in the immortality of the soul. According to him, only the human body dies, but the soul lives on in the infinite, the place of God. Again in “The Last Ride Together”, the speaker of the poem says that after death his and his beloved’s soul will enter and meet into eternity and will stay there eternally.

“The instant made eternity,

And Heaven just prove that I and she

Ride, ride together, forever ride?”

There is no doubt that Browning has firm faith in the divinity of God. His characters, especially the speakers are compressed with the belief in God. He addressed God and immortality as the central truth of his philosophy of life.

Besides, he does not mean that there is no suffering or evil in the world at all. Evil is actually a moral condition in the way of man’s improvement. It is a man who cannot be successful without an enemy. It is only awareness and failure that will help man in his advance toward perfection.

In his poems, Browning asks man to keep himself drowned in an imperishable struggle. Because success will come only through hard work. He puts stress on continuous human effort. He also believes that hard work with a definite goal is much better than a struggle that has no aim. Once a man has learned to struggle, there will be no goal that he cannot achieve.

“Andrea Del Sarto” is the kind of poem in which Browning lays emphasis on the role of human struggle. No man can achieve the peak of a hundred per cent perfection, but he should keep his struggle go on so that he may reach somewhere near perfection. As Andres says-

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?”

So, after the above discussion, we can conclude that Browning’s strong optimistic faith is very notable in the Victorian age. If we scan all the English poets, we may not find as many complete, conscious, magnificent men with a sense of optimism as Robert Browning.