2026-05-01
Response
The axiom I want to discard is that difficulty lives in the difficult poem. The retrieved passages keep circling a different claim: that difficulty is a property of the relationship between language and its material, not a property of the text's surface. Barrett Browning, writing criticism rather than verse, diagnoses Gregory of Nazianzus with "monotony of construction without unity of intention" — and that phrase is more precise about how difficulty actually works than most accounts of Prynne. Gregory's problem is not that his poems are hard to read but that their construction makes promises their intention does not keep. The reader labours not because meaning is withheld but because the grammar keeps gesturing toward a resolution the poem has no architecture to deliver. "The music turning heavily on its own axle, as inadequate to living evolution" — Barrett Browning. That word *axle* does exactly the kind of microstructural work the stimulus wants to track: it mechanises what should be organic, makes the verse a wheel rather than a body. Barrett Browning knows this is a diagnostic, not a metaphor. She is describing what happens when small functional elements — cadences, pauses, the machinery of transition — fail to produce the larger motion they imply.
Wordsworth sees this from the other side. His account of poetic language in Book V of *The Prelude* places difficulty not in the words but in the space between the words and what they house: "darkness makes abode, and all the host / Of shadowy things work endless changes" — Wordsworth. The difficulty is the darkness, but the darkness *makes abode* — it lives there, it is domestic, it belongs. And then the crucial turn: forms and substances "Present themselves as objects recognised, / In flashes, and with glory not their own" — Wordsworth. *Not their own*. The glory is borrowed. The recognition is intermittent. "Flashes" means the reader's access to meaning is discontinuous — you get it and lose it and get it again — and this is presented not as failure but as the condition under which poetic meaning operates at all. This is closer to Prynne than it looks. The difference is that Wordsworth frames discontinuous access as visionary and Prynne frames it as structural, but the reader's experience — the flash, the loss, the re-encounter — is the same. The small functional words ("there," repeated twice in Wordsworth's passage, doing pure deictic work, pointing into a space that has no referent outside the verse) are managing that discontinuity. They are not difficult words. They are the words that make difficulty habitable.
So here is what the contact produces: pleasure and refusal are not grammatical siblings. They are the same grammatical operation performing different social contracts. When Wordsworth's "there" points into darkness and calls it home, the reader follows because the gesture is hospitable — the difficulty is a mansion. When Rossetti's withholding operates through the same deictic instability ("Something not of the past, / Yet stirring memory" — Rossetti — the *something* that refuses to name itself, the *yet* that holds two temporal frames apart), the reader follows because the gesture is seductive — the difficulty is a closed door with light under it. Barrett Browning's Gregory fails not because his poems are difficult but because they are difficult without contract — the reader labours and the labour purchases nothing. No mansion, no secret, no flash. The functional words — the *there*, the *yet*, the *something*, the *here* that Dickinson uses to blow open retrospection — are not carriers of difficulty. They are the terms of the deal. They tell the reader what kind of difficulty this is, and therefore whether to stay.
He wrote thirty thousand verses, among which are several long poems, severally defective in a defect common but not necessary to short occasional poems, and lamentable anywhere, a want of unity and completeness. The excellencies of his prose are transcribed, with whatever faintness, in his poetry – the exaltation, the devotion, the sweetness, the pathos, even to the playing of satirical power about the graver meanings. But although noble thoughts break up the dulness of the groundwork, – although, with the instinct of greater poets, he bares his heart in his poetry, and the heart is worth baring, still monotony of construction without unity of intention is the most wearisome of monotonies, and, except in the case of a few short poems, we find it everywhere in Gregory. The lack of variety is extended to the cadences, and the pauses fall stiffly “come corpo morto cade.” Melodious lines we have often: harmonious passages scarcely ever – the music turning heavily on its own axle, as inadequate to living evolution. The poem on his own life (‘De vitâ suâ’) is, in many places, interesting and affecting, yet faulty with all these faults. The poem on Celibacy, which state is commended by Gregory as becometh a bishop, has occasionally graphic touches, but is dull enough generally to suit the fairest spinster’s view of that melancholy subject. If Hercules could have read it, he must have rested in the middle – from which the reader is entreated to forbear the inference that the poem has not been read through by the writer of the present remarks, seeing that that writer marked the grand concluding moment with a white stone, and laid up the memory of it among the chief triumphs, to say nothing of the fortunate deliverances, vitæ suæ. In Gregory’s elegiac poems, our ears, at least, are better contented, because the sequence of pentameter to hexameter necessarily excludes the various cadence which they yearn for under other circumstances. His anacreontics are sometimes nobly written, with a certain brave recklessness as if the thoughts despised the measure – and we select from this class a specimen of his poetry, both because three of his hymns have already appeared in the Athenæum, and because the anacreontic in question includes to a remarkable extent, the various qualities we have attributed to Gregory, not omitting that play of satirical humour with which he delights to ripple the abundant flow of his thoughts. The writer, though also a translator, feels less misgiving than usual in offering to the reader, in such English as is possible, this spirited and beautiful poem.Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “PART II”