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…let him never come back to us;There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain,Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,Never glad confident morning again.
The man castigated by Browning in the poem for being the inspirational leader lost to young radical poets was William Wordsworth. Browning wrote this when he was 32. As an older man, perhaps having undergone similar changes, he partially retracted it. ‘I did in my hasty youth’, he wrote in a letter of 1875, ‘presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model’ (Browning 1845:61). In 1845, when he wrote the poem, he felt affronted by Wordsworth’s change of political and poetic persona from revolutionary eighteenth-century innovator to established Victorian Poet Laureate, the more so because of a sense of being betrayed by the best:
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,Made him our pattern to live and to die!
However, denunciation or not, Browning’s lines ‘…the glimmer of twilight,/ Never glad confident morning again’ echo the lines of Wordsworth’s famous ‘Ode’, in which he describes the loss of the ‘visionary gleam’: