“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” Summary

• Argh!—there you go, my hated enemy! Yeah, go right ahead and water your lousy flowers. If hatred could kill people, Brother Lawrence, good God, mine would surely kill you. Oh, what's that, your ornamental shrub needs a trim? Ooh, no, you'd better take care of that rosebush first! Aw, does its pot need a good watering? May you shrivel up in the fires of Hell!

  At dinner, we sit next to each other—yes, yes, hello, cheers. I have to listen to all your brilliant observations about the weather and the seasons: Oh, the cork trees aren't doing well; I don't think we're going to get any oak galls; how do you say "parsley" in Latin? Well, how do you say "hogface" in Greek?

  Oh yes, you have to have your plate polished and carefully stowed away on your own private shelf, along with a brand-new spoon and a private cup that you wash like it's a communion chalice before it's fit to touch your precious lips—a goblet marked "L" for "Lawrence." (Hee hee! One of his lilies just broke!)

  Brother Lawrence is such a saint, isn't he? When the lovely Dolores and Sanchicha hang out on the river bank outside the convent telling stories and washing their hair—their beautiful shining black hair, thick as a horse's mane—don't I see Brother Lawrence's dull eyes glowing as lustfully as a pirate's? (Or, well, I would, anyway, if he didn't hide his lust so well!)

  When he's done eating dinner, he never ever leaves his knife and fork crossed on his plate, so far as I recall—the way I do, in honor of Jesus. I also always remember to praise the Holy Trinity by drinking my orange juice in three symbolic sips, thus basically spitting in the eye of those who believe in the Arian heresy that denies Christ's divinity; Brother Lawrence just gulps it down all at once!

  Oh, how nice, he's going to give us a treat when his melons have ripened. The Abbot will have a melon all to himself, and the rest of us will get a slice. How are those melon vines doing, Brother? None reproducing? Not even one little fruit growing? How odd, considering how much trouble I've taken to kill all the flowers when no one is looking!

  There's a fantastic Bible verse in Paul's letter to the Galatians: it lists 29 different ways you can be damned, one sure to get you if another doesn't. What if I were to trip Brother Lawrence up with this passage when he lies on his deathbed, just when he's sure he's on his way to heaven, and send him reeling into Hell for being a heretical Manichean?

  Ooh, or I could use my nasty old book of French erotica, with its cheap paper and cruddy print. If you take the merest peek at it, you'll find yourself in the Devil's snares. What if I happened to dog-ear the particularly juicy page 16 and hide it in the sieve he uses to gather plums?

  Or there's always a direct appeal to Satan! I could offer my soul to him, but leave a cunning loophole in the contract, so that he wouldn't realize I could get out of the deal until he'd already destroyed that rose-acacia that Brother Lawrence is so very proud of...(Maybe I'll summon Satan with some magic words right now.) Hy, Zy, Hine—oh, shh, the bells for evening prayers are ringing! Full of Grace, hail, Virgin!—argh, you dirty pig!

“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” Themes

• 

  Hatred, Hypocrisy, and Self-Loathing

  The speaker of Robert Browning’s poem, a friar in a Spanish monastery, takes a violent dislike to one of his religious brothers. Brother Lawrence, he insists, is a lustful, selfish, smug creep who deserves to go straight to Hell. However, as in many of Browning's dramatic monologues, the speaker is only telling on himself: in reality, all his accusations reflect his own failings and sins. The speaker's obsessive hatred for Brother Lawrence, the poem suggests, is a hypocritical projection of his own envy and self-disgust.

  Everything that readers see of Brother Lawrence suggests he's a perfectly nice guy, a gentle gardener who likes to talk about his plants and share his melon crop with the community. In the speaker's eyes, though, Lawrence is a despicable sinner who eyes the local ladies as lustfully as a "Barbary corsair" (that is, one of a notorious band of pirates).

  Yet it seems that Brother Lawrence's lust is all in the speaker’s imagination. He just knows he'd see a naughty "glow" in his rival's eyes, he says, if only Lawrence would ever "let it show!"—the implication being that Lawrence never does. What's more, all of the speaker’s furious accusations make it clear that he's actually the one who’s ogling those ladies. He's the one lingering long enough to hear "Brown Dolores" and "Sanchicha" telling stories to each other, and he knows exactly the "blue-black, lustrous" thickness of their hair. In accusing Brother Lawrence, the speaker ironically reveals his own less-than-pious feelings.

  In fact, all of the speaker's schemes against Brother Lawrence reveal his own pettiness and sinfulness. When he's not meanly spoiling things in Lawrence's garden, the speaker busily plots his rival's downfall, going so far as to imagine that he might somehow make a deal with the devil to ensure that Lawrence suffers. There's an obvious irony there—and in the speaker's idea that he might trick Lawrence into eternal damnation by slipping him a page from his own contraband supply of racy "French novel[s]." Everything the speaker imagines doing to Lawrence, in other words, involves infecting this apparently clean-living and genial man with the speaker's own grubby sins.

  Perhaps, the poem hints, the speaker hates Brother Lawrence so very much because Brother Lawrence really isn’t any of the nasty things the speaker is: lustful, prissy, cruel. The speaker’s loathing for Brother Lawrence thus emerges from hypocritical self-deceit. There’s nothing so hateful as your own sins, nothing so infuriating as someone who doesn’t seem to possess any of them, and nothing so unappetizing as facing the fact that you’re the one in the wrong.

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• 

  False Piety and Empty Religious Ritual

  The speaker of "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" has many complaints about how his hated enemy Brother Lawrence practices their shared religion. By all indications, though, the speaker doesn’t have much of a grasp of what that religion actually means. Obsessed with correctness and fiddly mannerisms, he seems to have missed the idea that Christianity might be supposed to teach faith, hope, and love rather than rituals and routines. In this poem, shallow displays of piety are a smokescreen for hypocrisy and sin, and dogmatic adherence to religious practices says nothing about what kind of a person you are.

  The speaker prides himself on his correct display of Christian manners. Unlike his hated enemy Brother Lawrence, he brags, he always remembers to leave his fork and knife in the shape of the cross "in Jesu's praise," and to drink his orange juice in "three sips" in honor of the Holy Trinity. The very pettiness of these rituals—which aren't even part of formal Christian practice, just folk tradition—suggests that the speaker is hung up on the idea that religious faith is mostly about fussy little mannerisms.

  Similarly, he's obsessed with nitpicky points of doctrine. In one of his many revenge fantasies, he plots to trip Brother Lawrence up with a difficult "text in Galatians" (that is, a Bible reading) on Lawrence's deathbed. If Lawrence reads the complicated verse the wrong way, it could be interpreted as heretical; of course, the speaker concludes, Lawrence would get sent straight to Hell for such a slip. To this speaker, religious faith (and the fate of your very soul) is more about narrow, rigid correctness than about ethics, or about trust in a loving God, for that matter.

  Whatever faith means to the speaker, it's certainly got nothing to do with being a good person. He spends most of his time playing mean tricks on Brother Lawrence (for instance, pinching off the flowers on Lawrence’s beloved melon plants), daydreaming about how he might get him sent to Hell, and lusting after the ladies washing their hair at the water trough out front. His religious belief, such as it is, hasn't given him any self-awareness, compassion, virtue, or capacity for reflection.

  Treating religious faith mostly as a set of rituals and booby traps, the hypocritical speaker reveals the limits of both his character and his piety, coming across as nothing more than a nasty child. An obsession with the forms of religion, the poem hints, can be a handy cover for a stunted, spiteful, selfish, and deeply irreligious attitude.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”

• Lines 1-8

  Gr-r-r—there go, my heart's abhorrence!
  Water your damned flowerpots, do!
  If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
  God's blood, would not mine kill you!
  What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
  Oh, that rose has prior claims—
  Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
  Hell dry you up with its flames!

  "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" begins with one of the most famous moments of onomatopoeia in English poetry: a guttural "Gr-r-r." This growl (and Browning's fondness for onomatopoeia in general) displeased some Victorian literary types, who saw such noise-making as brutish and unpoetic. That, of course, is exactly the point here. By starting this poem with a growl, Browning suggests that his speaker—a monk in a Spanish monastery—is more a beast than a holy man.

  The speaker's outburst is directed at one "Brother Lawrence," a fellow monk he watches from the shadow of the cloister (a sheltered walkway surrounding the garden at the heart of the monastery). Brother Lawrence doesn't seem to be doing anything so very objectionable: he's tending flowers, taking gentle care of his roses and myrtles. But the speaker registers his every move with venomous sarcasm:

  What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
  Oh, that rose has prior claims—
  Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
  Hell dry you up with its flames!

  The speaker, these lines suggest, hates every single thing Brother Lawrence does; his most innocuous action is reason enough for the speaker to damn him. This disproportionate hatred tells readers a lot more about the speaker than it tells them about Brother Lawrence. As is so often the case in Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, the speaker here will unwittingly tell on himself, revealing his own pettiness, nastiness, and self-deception with every word he says.

  The poem's percussive trochaic tetrameter—that is, lines of four trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm—feels as insistent as the speaker's hatred. Listen to the rhythm of the stanza's last two lines:

  Needs its | lead en | vase filled | brimming?
  Hell dry | you up | with its | flames!

  Notice how stresses shape line 8's meaning as well as its rhythm. When the speaker mutters "Hell dry | you up | with its | flames," the trochaic meter stresses the word "you," connecting the speaker's curse to the roses that Brother Lawrence is so carefully watering: in essence, he's saying May you be as shriveled and burnt in Hell as your roses are well-watered on earth.

• Lines 9-16

  At the meal we sit together;
  Salve tibi!
   I must hear
  Wise talk of the kind of weather,
  Sort of season, time of year:
  Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely
  Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt;
  What's the Latin name for "parsley"?
  What's the Greek name for "Swine's Snout"?

  

  

  

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• Lines 17-24

  Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
  Laid with care on our own shelf!
  With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
  And a goblet for ourself,
  Rinsed like something sacrificial
  Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps—
  Marked with L. for our initial!
  (He-he! There his lily snaps!)

  

  

  

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• Lines 25-32

  Saint,
   forsooth! While brown Dolores
  Squats outside the Convent bank
  With Sanchicha, telling stories,
  Steeping tresses in the tank,
  Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
  —Can't I see his dead eye glow,
  Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
  (That is, if he'd let it show!)

  

  

  

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• Lines 33-40

  When he finishes refection,
  Knife and fork he never lays
  Cross-wise, to my recollection,
  As do I, in Jesu's praise.
  I the Trinity illustrate,
  Drinking watered orange pulp—
  In three sips the Arian frustrate;
  While he drains his at one gulp!

  

  

  

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• Lines 41-48

  Oh, those melons? If he's able
  We're to have a feast! so nice!
  One goes to the Abbot's table,
  All of us get each a slice.
  How go on your flowers? None double?
  Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
  Strange!—And I, too, at such trouble,
  Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

  

  

  

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• Lines 49-56

  There's a great text in Galatians,
  Once you trip on it, entails
  Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
  One sure, if another fails;
  If I trip him just a-dying,
  Sure of heaven as sure can be,
  Spin him round and send him flying
  Off to hell, a Manichee?

  

  

  

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• Lines 57-64

  Or, my scrofulous French novel
  On grey paper with blunt type!
  Simply glance at it, you grovel
  Hand and foot in Belial's gripe;
  If I double down its pages
  At the woeful sixteenth print,
  When he gathers his greengages,
  Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

  

  

  

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• Lines 65-72

  Or, there's Satan!—one might venture
  Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
  Such a flaw in the indenture
  As he'd miss till, past retrieve,
  Blasted lay that rose-acacia
  We're so proud of! 
  Hy, Zy, Hine
  'St, there's Vespers! 
  Plena gratia
  Ave, Virgo!
   Gr-r-r—you swine!

  

  

  

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“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” Symbols

• 

  Brother Lawrence's Garden

  Just about every flower Brother Lawrence grows has a symbolic meaning. Roses represent love, lilies purity (and often the Virgin Mary herself): this is a garden of virtues, not just delightful sights and smells. Brother Lawrence's affectionate, diligent care for his plants suggests that, while he's not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed, he might be truly saintly, tenderly cultivating both the world around him and his inner life.

  For that matter, readers might see something of no lesser garden than Eden itself in Brother Lawrence's cloister. This is a peaceful, fruitful paradise haunted by a dangerous serpent: the lurking speaker.

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“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Onomatopoeia

  Victorian poems (and poems in general, really) don't often start with growls. The speaker's first onomatopoeic outburst—"G-r-r-r"—thus feels startling, daring, and funny, flinging the reader straight into the speaker's world of petty grudges and gritted teeth. With three whole /r/s, this first "Gr-r-r" doesn't just set the poem's tone, but its pace, inviting readers to draw the sound out. The speaker, lurking in the shadows of the cloister, has little to do but savor his rage; his long growl suggests he might even perversely relish his hatred for his fellow monk.

  Other moments of onomatopoeia help to evoke the speaker's thin, whining voice. When he complains about Brother Lawrence's fastidious dish-washing, for instance, he begins with a "Whew!"—a sound readers might imagine in the sarcastically musical tone one would use to say, Oooh, aren't we fancy. Not long afterward, when Brother Lawrence has a minor gardening mishap, the speaker laughs at him: "He-he! There his lily snaps!" That "he-he" evokes a high-pitched giggle, a creepy little sound from a creepy little man.

  The speaker's growl reappears at the end of the poem, when he interrupts his halfhearted prayers to the Virgin Mary with a muttered curse: "Gr-r-r—you swine!" There's something ironic about a man who spends so much time grunting and growling calling someone else a "swine." Throughout the poem, the speaker's involuntary noises suggest he's a little man ruled by his own brutish lusts and rages.

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• Irony

  

  

  

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• Allusion

  

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

  

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“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Abhorrence
• God's blood
• Salve tibi
• Plenteous
• Cork
• Oak-galls
• Swine's Snout
• Burnished
• Fire-new
• Furnished
• Ere 'tis fit
• Chaps
• Forsooth
• Steeping tresses in the tank
• Lustrous
• As 'twere
• Barbary corsair
• Refection
• Jesu's
• In three sips the Arian frustrate
• Fruit-sort
• Close-nipped
• Galatians
• Manichee
• Scrofulous
• French novel
• Grovel
• Belial's gripe
• Sixteenth print
• Greengages
• Ope a sieve and slip it in't
• Indenture
• Blasted
• Hy, Zy, Hine
• 'St
• Vespers
• Plena gratia, ave, Virgo!

• Hatred—here used to mean something more like "the person I hate most."

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”

• Form

  "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is one of Robert Browning's famous dramatic monologues—that is, poems spoken in the voice of a character, like speeches in a play. As in so many of those monologues, the speaker here tells on himself: as he fumes about how awful his fellow monk Brother Lawrence is, he reveals only that he himself is a spiteful, small-minded creep.

  His outburst of rage is built from nine octets (or eight-line stanzas) with a thumping trochaic meter and a crisp alternating rhyme scheme. The poem's combination of a tight, measured stanza shape and sheer length evokes the pressures inside and outside the speaker. Enclosed in this monastery, sitting next to Brother Lawrence at dinner every night, he can't escape his own rage; anger curdles and overflows into his every waking moment.

• Meter

  "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" uses emphatic, stress-first trochaic tetrameter. That means that the lines are built from four trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:

  Gr-r-r—there | go, my | heart's ab- | horrence!

  This line alone just about explains why Browning might have chosen this meter: if you want to start a poem with a "Gr-r-r," it behooves you to start it with a punchy stress, too. Urgent trochees in shortish lines make it sound as if the speaker is consumed with rage as he fumes about Brother Lawrence and his lousy garden.

  Notice, too, how that first growl sets the poem's pace. If you really draw the "Gr-r-r" out, then the rest of the words seem to want to be read unhurriedly, at a steady boil of hate.

  To emphasize the speaker's hatred and disgust even further, Browning often uses catalectic lines—that is, lines that drop a syllable, most often the last one. Listen to the speaker's unforgettable closing words in line 72, for instance:

  Ave, | Virgo! | Gr-r-r—you | swine!

  By ending on a single stressed syllable rather than a full trochee, Browning makes the speaker's final insult—"swine"—ring out with special vehemence.

• Rhyme Scheme

  An insistent rhyme scheme locks readers into the speaker's rage. The pattern runs like this:

  ABABCDCD

  All those tight alternating rhymes evoke the claustrophobia of a grudge. The speaker's hatred for Brother Lawrence is all he can think about (well, nearly—he can also think about pretty ladies washing their hair for at least a few lines). The rhymes, like his thoughts, don't stray far from a narrow path.

  This rhyme scheme also helps to set the poem's darkly funny tone. The story of a monk plotting his innocent religious brother's downfall could have been a harrowing and gothic one, but the poem's language (and the speaker's petty foolishness) make this into a comedy. In witty rhymes like abhorrence / Lawrence and horsehairs / corsair's, Browning is clearly having fun, springing little surprises on the reader.

“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” Speaker

• The poem's speaker, a monk in a Spanish monastery, unforgettably introduces himself with a growl. That first "Gr-r-r" tells readers much of what they need to know about him: this supposedly holy man is in truth a guy who spends most of his time fuming, consumed with hatred for his fellow monk Brother Lawrence.

  At first, readers might find this hatred confusing. Brother Lawrence sounds like a pretty mild character. Sure, he's no scholar: he doesn't know "the Latin name" for his plants, which an educated Catholic monk certainly should. But though he has his limitations, all readers see him doing is tending a flower garden, carefully washing his own dishes, and growing melons to share with his fellow monks.

  The speaker's hatred for Brother Lawrence, readers gather, has a lot more to do with the speaker's own self-loathing than with anything Brother Lawrence has done. Everything the speaker accuses Brother Lawrence of is a projection of his own failings. It's he who lusts after the local girls "Sanchicha" and "Dolores" when they wash their hair outside the cloisters, he who's insufferably fussy about table manners, he who has a pathetically childish grasp of his own religion, he who has a well-thumbed naughty "French novel" hidden in his monastic cell. What he can't stand isn't so much Brother Lawrence as his own weakness.

  His most fundamental and dangerous failing, then, is his self-deception: his inability to recognize and admit to his own pettiness, lust, and sinfulness.

“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” Setting

• The poem is set in the cloister—that is, the inner garden surrounded by covered walkways—of a Spanish monastery. Though such a monastery is in some ways a timeless setting, the mention of a "scrofulous French novel," a naughty work printed in "blunt type," suggests that the poem takes place in Browning's own 19th century, or at least not long before; the 18th century is likely the earliest time the speaker could have gotten his mitts on such a publication.

  In the heart of the cloister, Brother Lawrence, the speaker's loathed enemy, grows vegetables and flowers, tending melons, myrtle bushes, and a prized rose-acacia alongside more practical money-making crops like cork trees and oak galls. The speaker lurks at the edge of this peaceful, fertile garden like a viper under a leaf, gloating every time his rival has a minor gardening mishap.

  Perhaps something of the speaker's fury comes from the very fact that he's cloistered—a word that has come to mean "shut away from the world," not just "living in a building with cloisters." A monastery seems like altogether the wrong place for the petty, lustful speaker, whose faith seems to have offered him little more than a set of trivial table manners to fuss over and a sense that one might be able to make profitable bargains with Satan. On the other hand, Browning hints that a monastery is exactly where you'd expect to find characters like this speaker. This is only one of several Browning poems to suggest that Catholic culture might not always bring out the best in a guy.

Literary and Historical Context of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”

Literary Context

The English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) was most famous in his time for not sounding much like a poet. His contemporaries were confused by his most distinctive works: dramatic monologues like this one, in which Browning inhabited a character like an actor playing a part. Even Oscar Wilde, a big Browning fan, famously said that "[George] Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning." The Victorian literary world was much more at ease with the melancholy lyricism of Tennyson or the elegance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Browning's wife, and a much more famous poet) than with the novelistic storytelling of Browning's work.

But it's on his earthy, vibrant dramatic monologues that Browning's enduring reputation rests. His most famous poems form a veritable rogues' gallery, with narrators from this spiteful monk to a murderous Italian duke to an equally murderous lover. By allowing these hideous men to speak for themselves, Browning explored the darkest corners of human nature—and took a particular interest in the ways that people justify their terrible deeds. Villains, Browning's monologues suggest, don't tend to think that they're villains. Browning's poetry wasn't all theatrical murder and greed, though; he also wrote tenderly about heroism, homesickness, and heartbreak.

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" first appeared in Browning's 1842 book Dramatic Lyrics, the third in an eight-volume series of Browning's works collectively titled Bells and Pomegranates. This collection would deeply influence 20th-century modernist poets like Ezra Pound. Browning still moves readers to this day: for instance, his life and work inspired contemporary writer A.S. Byatt to write her acclaimed novel Possession.

Historical Context

This poem's speaker is only one of a host of religious hypocrites in Browning's verse. Alongside figures like the greedy, venal Bishop of St. Praxed's and the much more sympathetic (but still not very monkish) Fra Lippo Lippi, the fuming Spanish monk here forms part of Browning's critique of corrupted Christianity.

Browning was not the only 19th-century British artist whose work criticized, questioned, or altogether rejected Christian hypocrisy. He was following in the footsteps of earlier Romantic-era writers like William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley (one of his early heroes). These poets condemned the oppressions of the organized Christian church and turned toward revolutionary nonconformism (in Blake's case) or out-and-out atheism (in Shelley's).

Browning's particular attention to dubious Catholic speakers might have been born from his years living in Italy, where he and his beloved wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning eloped in order to escape her possessive father. The couple lived there for many years; Browning had plenty of time to reflect on corruption in the Church that formed so integral a part of daily Italian life.

Browning never quite reveals his own religious commitments (or lack thereof) in his poetry. But the corrupt holy men of his dramatic monologues make it clear that, whatever he himself believed, he absolutely detested petty dogmatism and hypocrisy.

More “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem Aloud — Watch a staged performance of the poem.

  • The Mystery of "Hy, Zy, Hine" — Read some of the many theories about what on earth Browning might have meant by the nonsense words "Hy, Zy, Hine" at the end of the poem.

  • Dramatic Lyrics — Learn more about Dramatic Lyrics, the important collection in which this poem was first published.

  • A Brief Biography — Learn more about Browning's life via the British Library.

  • More Browning Resources — Visit the Victorian Web to find a trove of Browning lore.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Browning

  • A Face

  • A Light Woman

  • Among the Rocks

  • A Toccata of Galuppi's

  • A Woman's Last Word

  • Confessions

  • Epilogue

  • Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

  • How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

  • Life in a Love

  • Love Among the Ruins

  • Love in a Life

  • Meeting at Night

  • My Last Duchess

  • Pictor Ignotus

  • Porphyria's Lover

  • The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church

  • The Laboratory

  • The Last Ride Together

  • The Lost Leader

  • The Lost Mistress

  • The Patriot

  • The Pied Piper of Hamelin

  • Women and Roses