This is another dramatic monologue by Robert Browning, and this time it’s about Venice. I wrote an essay on this poem, which was published in the very last issue of “Parnassus: Poetry in Review” (2019). Here are a couple of claims I made about it:

‘It is one of Browning’s most striking and memorable dramatic monologues, which provides a good deal of immediate pleasure – especially (as might be expected, given the subject-matter) for the ear – even before one begins to consider its many subtleties and ambiguities. Much of the poem’s power arises from the shifting relationship between the speaker and his addressee, the dead but by no means departed composer. If the poem tells a story, it is essentially that of the undermining of the speaker’s presuppositions. These are primarily about Venice, and it is Venice itself, as filtered through Galuppi’s music, that undermines them. However, Venice comes to stand for a great deal: by the end of the poem, some of the major aesthetic and cultural shifts of the nineteenth century have been explored.’

And towards the end of my essay:

‘The final words of the poem—“I feel chilly and grown old”—suggest that the speaker can draw no useful lesson from reflecting on the vanity of Venetian pleasure-seekers; all that Galuppi’s music has taught him is that he is destined to become “dust and ashes” without even having savoured the delights enjoyed by eighteenth-century Venetians. Without, one might say, having lived.’

The main thing to say, of course, is that it is a wonderfully enjoyable poem, with a striking metrical pattern – – and I hope I’ve brought across some of its music in my reading. 

“Shylock’s bridge with houses on it”