"Artemis Prologizes" seems to have been selected to close this
little opening sequence of poems on the poet, because that fragment
of a larger projected work could find place here almost as if it
were a poet's exercise in blank verse. Its smooth and spacious
rhythm, flawless and serene as the distant Greek myth of the hero
and the goddess it celebrates, is in striking contrast with the
rougher, but brighter and more humanly colloquial blank verse of
"Bishop Blougram's Apology," for example, or the stiff carefulness
of the "Epistle" of Karshish. It might alone suffice, by comparison
with the metrical craftsmanship of the other poems of "Men and
Women," to assure the observant reader that never was a good workman
more baselessly accused of metrical carelessness than the poet who
designedly varies his complicated verse-effects to suit every inner
impulse belonging to his dramatic subject. A golden finish being in
place in this statuesque, "Hyperion"-like monologue of Artemis,
behold here it is, and none the less perfect because not merely the
outcome of the desire to produce a polished piece of poetic
mechanism.
Browning, perhaps, linked his next poem, "The Strange Medical
Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," with the calm
prologizing of the Hellenic goddess, by association of the "wise
pharmacies" of AEsculapius, with the inquisitive sagacity of
Karshish, "the not-incurious in God's handiwork.
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