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The earliest published poem by Robert Browning is “Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,” which purports to be the confession of a faithless lover to his beloved that he has committed certain sins obscurely hinted at in the poem, and is therefore no longer worthy of her love. The poem is in reality not the “fragment of a confession” of a lover, but the most open revelation of the psychic life of a young man who has just passed through the adolescent period and is emerging into manhood. William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, with his accustomed acuity, states that “Pauline has a unique significance because of its autopsychical hints.”1 Stedman, in his “Victorian Poets,” states that Browning is above all a subjective poet, “While Browning's earlier poems are in the dramatic form, his own personality is manifest in the speech and movement of every character of each piece. His spirit is infused, as if by metempsychosis, within them all, and forces each to assume a strange Pentecostal tone, which we discover to be that of the poet himself.”
If this be true of his dramatic poems, how much more true is it of Pauline, which is made up entirely of the stuff of the poet's phantasy!
If we set out to analyze the material of this remarkable poem, we must proceed according to the correct analytical method, which is also the best method of non-analytical literary criticism: we must first gather the “external evidence,” which corresponds to the “conscious material” of a psychonalysis.