Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister / Robert Browning



Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister is a dramatic monologue written by Robert Browning, first published in his collection Dramatic Lyrics (1842). It is written in the voice of an unnamed Spanish monk. The poem consists of nine eight-line stanzas and is written in iambic tetrameter. The plot of the poem centers around the speaker's hatred for Brother Lawrence, a fellow monk in the cloister.

The speaker notes the trivial ways in which Brother Lawrence fails in his Christianity, and then plots to murder or damn the soul of Brother Lawrence. However, the poem ends before the speaker can finish.

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--

In three sips the Arian frustrate;

While he drains his at one gulp!

Oh, those melons! if he's able

We're to have a feast; so nice!

One goes to the Abbot's table,

All of us get each a slice.

How go on your flowers? None double?

Not one fruit-sort can you spy?

Strange!--And I, too, at such trouble,

Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

There's a great text in Galatians,

Once you trip on it, entails

Twenty-nine district damnations,

One sure, if another fails;

If I trip him just a-dying,

Sure of heaven as sure can be,

Spin him round and send him flying

Off to hell, a Manichee?

Or, my scrofulous French novel

On grey paper with blunt type!

Simply glance at it, you grovel

Hand and foot in Belial's gripe;

If I double down its pages

At the woeful sixteenth print,

When he gathers his greengages,

Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

Or, there's Satan!--one might venture

Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave

Such a flaw in the indenture

As he'd miss till, past retrieve,

Blasted lay that rose-acacia

We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine...

'St, there's Vespers! Plena gratia

Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r--you swine!

Analysis
The poem deals with themes of pride, jealousy, and moral hypocrisy. It develops the character of the speaker as a covetous monk, who hates Brother Lawrence only because he wants what his fellow monk has. The speaker attempts to present reasons and justifications for his hate. In the second stanza he attempts to paint Lawrence as prideful, in the third as having possessions beyond his means (such as his own drinking goblet). In the fourth, he attempts to accuse Brother Lawrence of having licentious thoughts toward women, showing only his own capacity for such thoughts. The list only grows until we reach the seventh stanza in which we view a revelation of the speaker's character- he is not only a jealous man, but an evil man as well, resolving that he wants to find a way to condemn Brother Lawrence's soul to hell. He thinks up a plan to trick Brother Lawrence into reading a French novel (implied to be sexual), damning the Brother's soul immediately. Amusingly, we as readers are left wondering how the speaker knows the contents of the French novel if he is such a pious monk. Failing the novel ploy, the speaker resolves that he could always sell his own soul to the devil to also condemn Lawrence's- then the poem ends as the speaker is distracted by the call to Vespers.