Victorian Poetry

Of bodies turned to other forms I tell

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

So find, so fill full, so appropriate forms

—Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

As Guido prepares to be beheaded near the close of his second monologue in The Ring and the Book (1868–1869), he considers punishments alternative to the execution called for by the Pope. In place of his death sentence Guido imagines a more mythical meting out of justice:

  no punishment, no painChildish, preposterous, impossible,But some such fate as Ovid would foresee,—Byblis in fluvium, let the weak soul endIn water, sed Lycaon in lupum, butThe strong become a wolf for evermore!¹

This fantasy builds itself on a logic that subverts the Roman conception of justice: rather than punish the violent bloodlust that Count Guido Franceschini identifies in himself—a characteristic branded as animalistic, inhuman—this Ovidian fate would celebrate and confirm that trait. In this alternative ethics, wolfish people are not to be cured of or punished for their wolfishness but rather metamorphosed into the shape that best expresses that feature. If you can’t take the wolf out of the man, then you can take the man out of the wolf, Guido supposes: [End Page 237]

Let me turn wolf, be whole, and sate, for once,—Wallow in what is now a wolfishnessCoerced too much by the humanityThat’s half of me as well! Grow out of man,Glut the wolf-nature,—what remains but growInto the man again, be man indeedAnd all man? Do I ring the changes right?

(XI: 2056–2062)

There is a certain fitting quality that accompanies this shift from split identity to completeness: Guido is not only whole but “sate[d], for once” in becoming wolf. However, the energy of unfulfilled desire, coded here as hunger, quickly overextends itself into the exuberant indulgence of wallowing and glutting. To become a wolf, in these terms, is to release oneself from the strictures and rules of human activity and to relish the freedom of extreme behavior. This passage, as such, links the metaphorical transformation of man to wolf with a complex and subtle verbal shift that embodies the liberation of a ravenous being. Only after a moment of contemplation does it become clear that Guido envisions two alternatives of material form that articulate two different verdicts on his murderous behavior.²The Roman law finds him inhuman and determines to unman him through beheading: the execution corrects for a disjuncture between material form (man) and spiritual character (wolf), making incomplete the human body that lacks in human morality. Guido’s wish to be transformed into a wolf, conversely, removes the human vestiges within him and thereby exempts him from the rule of human law, leaving the insatiable beast to glut itself with animal autonomy.

This Ovidian vision of transformation should strike the reader of The Ring and the Book as familiar. Guido’s description of his half-mannish, half-wolfish nature—a split medium striving to “be whole”—fits precisely the pattern set out in the opening of the poem: it formulates a figure of distinct but melded halves that expresses the work’s combinate form. Indeed, as he does throughout the poem, Browning hides a hint in plain sight with Guido’s question whether he “ring[s] the changes right.” The primary symbol of the entire work, Browning’s “ring-thing” (I: 17), is itself a product of halves—an alloy of gold and wax, or fact and fiction—that finds completeness through a process of transformation:

  There’s one trick(Craftsmen instruct me) one approved deviceAnd but one, fits such slivers of pure gold [End Page 238]

As this was,—such mere oozings from the mine,. . .To bear the file’s tooth and the hammer’s tap. . .Ere the stuff grow a ring-thing right to wear.That trick is this: the artificer melts up waxWith honey, so to speak; he mingles goldWith gold’s alloy, and, duly tempering both,Effects a manageable mass

(I: 8–21...