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If, as Irish chaplain and scholar Stopford Brooke writes, nature, as the physical matter of the universe, is “one form to Browning of the creative joy of God” (62), it follows that Browning’s representations of nonhuman images in his poems may be related to his use of the imago dei motif. That is, creatures in Browning’s works are drawn within a theological construct or cosmology related to the orthodox and the unorthodox components of Browning’s faith. While, perhaps Browning has nowhere precisely defined his personal theology nor his personal response to the world of nature, I believe it is possible to discern principles of an ecotheology, a system of religious thought encompassing nonhuman forms,@ across many of his works and to ascertain, as Browning did, alternative possibilities for conceiving the nature of God. Looking at Browning’s spiritual vision from an ecotheological approach helps to address a puzzle set up by Thomas Hardy, and echoed by C. R. Tracy, of how it was possible that the imaginative, large-minded Browning could be so pedestrian a thinker on matters of theology.@

Theology aside, Browning’s prolific use of animal images has been noted in Brooke’s 1903 volume, still considered an indispensable study of Browning on nature. Brooke writes, “There is no poet whose love of animals is greater than Browning’s, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly described them”.@ Browning’s poetical landscapes, skies, and waters swarm with various birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish. Thomas P. Harrison discovered 162 instances of the words bird or birds in Browning and noted most of Browning’s avian species, such as swallows, doves, kingfishers, cuckoos, nightingales, sandpipers, storks, pelicans, martins, magpies, eagles, hawks, falcons, tits, warblers, finches, bullfinches, larks, quails, ravens, auks, cranes, cormorants, ospreys, dabchicks (little grebes), and the etymological ossifrage (bearded vulture) (393).@ As well Browning looks across wood-, meadow-, marsh-, desert- and shore-scapes to describe a great diversity of creatures, such as fox, mole, lynx, otter, badger, mouse, anteater, snake, and sloth. He does not exclude insects, as the grasshopper, cricket, wasp, bee, spider, cicada, fly, butterfly, and ant each find a place in his works.@ We might say of Browning as Dryden did of The Canterbury Tales, “here is God’s plenty!” (qtd. in Carlsen and Carlsen 82).

Perhaps Browning’s use of animal images finds its most lavish distribution in “Caliban upon Setebos,” (1864) in which Shakespeare’s figure, Caliban, half-beast, half-human, is one of many island creatures represented. Browning’s use of nonhuman images and the figure of Caliban seems to be a direct response to natural theology’s premise that God can be understood through observations of nature and human reason without allusion to scriptural revelation, as the poem’s epigraph, taken from Psalm 50.21, indicates: “Thou thoughtest I was altogether such a one as thyself,” the point being that one’s dominant ideology frames how one sees the nature of God. Browning, by endowing Caliban with a complex sentience and capacity for reason, raises questions relating to the spiritual and scientific climate of his day.

Various writers have argued about Browning’s purpose for writing the poem, most seeing it as a satire on either orthodoxy or natural theology.@ Caliban, an evolutionary hybrid, is capable of contemplating the nature of God like a human, yet Browning hints that Caliban is limited in his perspective as he constructs a picture of God that reflects his particular circumstances of bereavement, isolation, and captivity.

Caliban’s main evidence for his idea of his mother’s deity, Setebos, is drawn from his interactions with familiar objects on the island as well as from his memory of what his mother has told him.@ In the flora and fauna that surround him, he reads a sentient intention, as he stretches his legs in the mud of his cave, where small water lizards run across his body and a large pumpkin vine reaches down to “tickle [his] hair and beard” (5-7). The opening flowers entertain him by exposing bees inside their petals, and plants offer their fruit for him “to snap at, catch and crunch” (10-11). His perception of nature in this scene is pleasant, as nature seems to be giving freely to him of her sustenance and her companionship. As Caliban’s thoughts turn to Setebos; however, his pleasant feeling begins to wither, and he considers how the island god relates to nature’s suffering:

Hath spied an icy fish
                        That longed to ‘scape the rock-stream where she lived,
  And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
  A crystal spike ‘twixt two warm walls of wave (33-7)

In Caliban’s imagination, the fish eventually “sickens,” longing for life on the other side of the “crystal spike,” out of her fresh water habitat and into the salty ocean, but when she tries to “‘scape,” she finds it too hard to breathe and turns back to the cold stream. As Caliban considers the fish’s fate of feeling forever cut off from the “dim-delicious” paradise she sees on the other side of her ice wall, we are not sure he isn’t projecting his own dissatisfied feelings onto fish’s dilemma. Caliban reasons from the fish’s trouble to what he believes about Setebos through the “so He” refrain (found at the end of most passages). On the one hand, Caliban views Setebos as arbitrary and ambivalent, and on the other hand, as calculating and capricious, intentionally destroying crops and picking on him. These contrary ways of seeing Setebos expose Caliban’s confusion as he puzzles over a problem of creature suffering seemingly grounded in his own troubles.

For Caliban, relating to the fish and other creatures is but one way to understand Setebos. He also evaluates Setebos’s acts in the world through his own acts toward and against other species, speaking about himself in third-person voice:@

‘Sees, himself,
Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink,
Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both.
’Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball
On head and tail as if to save their lives:
Moves them the stick away they strive to clear” (257-62).

In this passage it is not clear whether Caliban’s behaviors are arbitrary or malicious, whether he simply reports his random behavior after the fact or whether he employs forethought and intention in stating and doing. What is clear is that he reasons from his own actions to those of Setebos, and the image of Setebos that emerges is cold and distant, - for he lives “i’ the moon” (25) - as well as cruel and jealous.@ This image of Setebos may reflect Caliban’s own state of abandonment (by his mother’s death) and social disadvantage, even as he admits to nature’s more playful and nurturing side, when she hides him from Prospero and sustains him.

Caliban ends his discourse on the nature of Setebos dissatisfied and afraid as he reads signs of the god’s displeasure in the sudden weather changes, and he instantly changes his posture: “Lo! Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!” (292). His attempts to allay punishment are extreme: “Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month/One little mass of whelks, so he may ‘scape!” (294-95). Ultimately Caliban constructs an imago dei from the relationships he forges on his island home.

Caliban’s attempt to read the character of God through his own character and behavior constitutes one side of Browning’s divided idea of God, noted by C. R. Tracy:

Browning believed that there are two diverse ways in which men think of God. In the first place He is a person, who knows both love and anger, joy and sorrow. In the second He is an infinite and omnipotent deity, whose nature is awful, mysterious, and beyond the powers of the imagination to define (491).

To Tracy, Browning’s religious works reflect an intentional distinction between anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic qualities of God. In a similar vein, William W. Fenn notes a natural comparison-contrast between “Caliban upon Setebos” and another of Browning’s nature poems, “Saul,” (published nine years earlier), stating that the two figures in the poems’ foregrounds, Caliban and David, provide opposing visions of the imago dei. “Caliban cruelly and wantonly pinches off the legs of passing crabs, David’s heart goes out in love and pity toward the stricken king, and each argues from himself to God” (462).

In contrast to Caliban’s arbitrary/capricious vision of God’s authority, Browning offers an alternative one, stemming from a kinship ethos between humans and nonhumans derived from the Torah.@ The poem “Saul” centers on a Davidic narrative in the first book of Samuel, reading, “And whenever the harmful spirit from God was upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand. So Saul was refreshed and was well, and the harmful spirit departed from him” (I Sam. 16.23). The text indicates that for reasons of King Saul’s disobedience, God sent a harmful spirit (in some versions a tormenting spirit) to the leader of his own nation, causing a kind of fit (in Browning’s terms a catatonic state or paralysis). As David plays his harp and sings, the spirit departs and Saul ‘s mind is gradually restored:

I say then, -- my song
While I sang thus, assuring the monarch, and ever more strong
Made proffer of good to console him—he slowly resumed
His old motions and habitudes kingly. (1-4)

Browning’s David begins his song to Saul with memories of David’s own early years herding his father’s sheep, emphasizing the sheep’s behavior and his interactions with them:

So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done.
  They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed
  Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream’s bed;
  And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star
  Into eve and the blue far above us,-- so blue and so far! (37-41).

David’s initial assurance that this song is “the tune all our sheep know” (36) reveals the close connection of the shepherd with his flock; the sheep are more than livestock, as “one by one” they move through the gate, indicating that each is counted. The sheep have been cared for and look as fresh in the evening as in the morning, their wool “untorn by bushes.” They have eaten and drunk to their fill in the fields surrounding the pen before returning to safety beneath an expanse of night sky and stars. In later passages there is mention of other animals populating the rural scene, such as a dove, a goat, and an eagle amid allusions to David’s shepherd lifestyle of musing and imaginative meditation:

Then fancies grew rife
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep
Fed in silence—above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie
‘Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip ‘twixt the hill and the sky
(135-39)

The surrounding scenes of tranquility and his role as caretaker of pasture animals feed David’s vision of kinship between humans and nonhumans. Roving with his sheep within a circle of familial and cultural heritage, David dreams freely with thoughts about life, “its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains,/And the prudence that keeps what men strive for” (144-45). The upward tendency of David’s thought is in contrast to Caliban’s fixation on the insects and grubs around him.

David’s song to Saul transitions from pastoral scenes to arid, sandy ones as he describes the desert species surrounding Saul’s camp in terms that retain a kinship theme, and he addresses the “quails on the cornland,” the crickets, and “the quick jerboa a-musing outside his sand house” (42-45), saying, “God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear, /To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here” (47-8). Browning represents David’s view of God as the father to one family of various creatures, which is his frame for understanding the relationship between humans and nonhumans in the world. To David, the imago dei represents moral agency and responsible care centered in his faith tradition and the belief that “all’s love, yet all’s law” (242). Resting on a traditional Jewish paradoxical theology of humans transcending nature even as they are participating in it, David generates a picture of an inclusive divine protectorship that encompasses even the wild animals. Traditional Jewish ecology embraces a paradox that humans need to recognize, as Michael Smart Fox writes, “our separateness in order to take responsibility, and . . . our creatureliness in order to apprehend our limits” (qtd. in Benstein 57).

David’s protectorship role is thrown into alto-relievo as he moves from the sheepfold to the tent of Saul, whose psychotic state, like that of the later Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar’s, has reduced the king to the level of nonhuman, producing a reversal in the typical relationship between king and vassal. Whereas Nebuchadnezzar devolves to an unintelligible state of crawling and eating grass like a beast, Saul has become as dreadful as a beast, a kind of “king-serpent,” stretched erect, “drear and stark, blind and dumb” (40-42). Even so, David acknowledges Saul’s authority even before the king’s mind and body are restored. Referring to the king as his father, David’s emotional response to Saul rises to a surprising crescendo: “…I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence, /As this moment, --had love but the warrant, love’s heart to dispense” (323).

David’s raptures subside once he acknowledges the impossibility of trading places with Saul or giving the king his own sound and stable mind. Rather, his humility before Saul in the tent reminds him of his fragility as a creature like any other under the authority of his father’s God. His recognition of the tension between his ambitious desires and his mere creatureliness influences his vision of God as the most benevolent being, and he ponders his own insufficiency in relation to his good will toward King Saul: Here, the parts shift?

Here, the creature surpass the Creator, --the end, what Began?
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man,
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can?” (268-70).

David concludes that his own love is not as great as God’s love even though he has helped to restore Saul. Ultimately, he believes, it is God who will bring Saul “safe in new light and new life” and “the next life’s reward and repose, by the struggles in this” (282, 286). David’s theodicy rests on his belief that the bliss in God’s kingdom, after the earthly life is over, will recompense Saul and the creatures for any pain they have endured in their earthly existence.

As such, David reads in nature’s turn of day and night a symbol of the cycle of pain and recovery: “Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth--/Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day’s tender birth” (324-25). The final passage contains a night-to-morning scene in which a sentient creation participates in David’s celebratory revelation: trees, wind, wild animals, birds, flowers, and brook proclaim together, “E’en so, it is so!” (335). In this passage Browning taps into a long-held Jewish tradition of the sentient universe offered by Everett Gendler, who writes that Hebrew psalmists assign conscious awareness to nonhuman and nonlife forms; so “[c]ows, camels, serpents, snails, elephants, eagles, mice, starlings, spiders, frogs, fish, cranes, butterflies, and even trees and grasses offer praise to their Creator and fill the universe with their hymns” (65) For David, “God is seen God/In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod” (249-50). So whether he looks within to himself or without to the creatures of the world, David will see God as benevolent provider to his kingdom, a quality reminiscent of the shepherd qualities David, himself, possesses.

In this final passage Browning also invokes a resolution to the Jewish wisdom tradition of humans questioning God found in books like Job and Ecclesiastes. Katharine J. Dell writes that contradiction is a commonplace element in Biblical wisdom literature. “The sense of dialectic runs through [these books] and . . . need not be regarded as two-way – divine/human – but three-way – divine/human/non-human,” indicating “openness to revision, elaboration and openness to change” (66). The contradiction dialectic between God and his subjects answers the theodicy dilemma for David in a more satisfying way than an explanation (or a half-monster’s wandering thoughts) can do because it is grounded in his belief in a relational deity, expressive and open. As he looks around the desert landscape, David reads his answer from a variety of forms, including his sense of divine support and the desert’s nonhuman inhabitants as they greet the morning in a “hushed” harmony, a tribute to the divine that the troubled Caliban neither recognizes or experiences.

Taken together, “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Saul” represent two parts of Browning’s commentary on God as a contrary or binary figure, like and not like humans at the same time, as constructed by the viewer. To Browning, the unknowable forms of God take knowable (but often paradoxical) shapes, and creatures apprehend these shapes according to their understanding and imagination And Browning, I believe, respects anthropomorphism as an agency of empathy between humans, nonhumans, and the divine.

Finally, whatever Browning ultimately believed about the imago dei, his representations of the divine through the eyes of various characters and creatures offer a still-orthodox theology through the standpoint of traditional Jewish thought while his continual questioning of theocratic power and justice demonstrates a less constricting theology he was willing to pursue.

Melissa Brotton is an assistant professor of English literature and the director of composition at La Sierra University in Southern California. Her primary research is in the area of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's juvenilia and ecopoetry. She contributed to the 2010 scholarly edition of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,edited by Sandra M. Donaldson and a global team of EBB scholars. Melissa's membership in the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment has provided her the occasion to study nineteenth-century literature as ecotheology. In her spare time, she rescues and re-homes street dogs.

Works Cited

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