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Fragments into New Creation 

Anthony Weale

Read: the poem Abt Vogler by Robert Browning

 A number of Browning’s dramatic monologues concern artists, especially painters and musicians, reflecting  on their philosophies and their religious faith, or doubt. Browning’s syntax is often convoluted. In Abt Vogler, however, while there is typical obscurity, there is also unusual clarity. The speaker, an unremembered 18th century composer and organist, famed for his improvisations, says unambiguously that music approaches heaven more nearly than any other art form. Nonetheless, for all the exaltation he feels, he falls short and the music is impermanent. Only in heaven is there perfection and permanence.

In Advent, when we think about last things, judgement and redemption, the poem meditates on the relation between heaven and earth and on the relation between what we do, its imperfection and yet its importance in seeking God and so allowing his love to seek us. Striving, through the creative impulse of the musician, is seen as a metaphor for life.

In creating music, the composer/performer has come close to God-’earth had attained to heaven’. However, the music evaporates; it is transient and imperfect. ‘On the earth, the broken arcs, in the heaven the perfect round.’ Nonetheless, the speaker takes heart. ‘What is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence for the fulness of our days?’. ‘The high that proved too high. the heroic for earth too hard... are music sent up to God’.

The calm coda at the end after the palace of music has disappeared shows that an equilibrium has been reached, both as the creative musical effort is completed and as the ageing composer reflects on his life.

This year when we have been compelled to think more than usual about mortality, Abt Vogler speaks very directly. Immediately, he reminds us of what we have lost in the absence of music. ‘Here is the finger of God’ and ’out of three sounds he frames not a fourth but a star’. More generally, he reminds us that our journey is to God, but that however hard we try we need the saving love of Jesus to enable us to reach this end. However feeble our efforts, God in Christ can take all we do and turn its fragments into new creation. 

We should also reflect that it is not only, and indeed not normally, that reaching out to God comes through the exalted moment imagined by Browning. Rather. we should remind ourselves that the broken arcs, symbolised in the broken priest’s host, are found in the daily round.