Mesmerism - Analysis

A scolding that keeps tipping into admiration

Pound’s central move in Mesmerism is to complain about Robert Browning’s difficult, knotted style while admitting—almost against the speaker’s will—that this difficulty comes from a startling kind of insight. The poem opens like an accusation: Browning is a old mesmerizer who ties his meaning up in seventy swadelin’s, forcing the reader into exhausting vigilance—a hang’d early riser—just to catch sense as it wriggles into place. Yet the poem can’t keep its contempt steady. Even the mockery has a backhanded respect in it: only someone powerful could be accused of mesmerism, of making the reader follow his hands and miss the trick.

Reading as a chase: worm-turning and a cat in the butt

The speaker frames Browning as an artist who hides plain thought inside ugly containers. The image of worm turning suggests that meaning arrives in the poem at the last second, in a small twitch of life you’ll miss if you’re not watching. Then comes the blunt, almost heckling cry, Cat’s i’ the water butt!—a phrase that sounds like nonsense until the speaker glosses it: Thought’s in your verse-barrel. The insult is that Browning’s mind is there, but it’s stored like something fermenting in a barrel, requiring the reader to pry, sniff, and interpret. The tension here is sharp: the speaker demands clarity—Tell us this thing—but also insists the “thing” is present and worth believing once extracted. The poem’s irritation is really the irritation of someone who feels compelled to keep reading.

The poem’s turn: from “jump to your sense” to “what a sight”

Midway, the voice shifts from insisting Browning should Jump to your sense to blurting out, almost awed, God! what a sight you’ve got of our insides. That exclamation is the hinge: the speaker admits Browning sees something others don’t. Even the insults start carrying praise. Browning is Mad as a hatter but surely no Myope: crazy in manner, not blind in perception. He is Broad as all ocean—huge in range—yet oddly leanin’ man-kin’ards, as if he’s always tilting toward humanity, not away from it. Pound makes the reader feel the same reluctant conversion: you begin by wanting to shake the poet into plain speech, and end by conceding the poet’s speech is strange because his vision is too wide to sit politely.

The volcanic heart and the “sound” windpipe

When the poem decides to praise, it chooses images of force and eruption, as though Browning’s difficulty is the cost of pressure. The Heart is big as Vesuvius’s bowels; his words are wing’d like sparks, and they Eagled and thundered like a storm god. This doesn’t soften Browning into a “clear” poet; it argues that his language is explosive because his inner life is explosive. And then Pound adds a crucial correction: despite all the wheezing and noise—he earlier compares Browning to a head-cold Calliope—the instrument is still Sound, with a wind that carries past corruption. The contradiction resolves into a claim: the surface can be clogged, but the underlying voice is healthy—morally and imaginatively intact.

Crafty dissector, gold-grabber: admiration with teeth still in it

The ending keeps the poem from becoming simple homage. Browning is toasted as Old Hippety-Hop—a comic bounce of a man, all accents and awkward leaps—yet he’s also True to the Truth’s sake, a phrase that insists his core loyalty is to what he thinks is real, not to elegance. At the same time, Pound won’t let him off the hook: crafty dissector hints at a mind that cuts people open, and You grabbed at the gold admits appetite, ambition, maybe even opportunism. Still, the speaker grants a final absolution: Browning had no need to pack cents into his little verses, because what matters is the larger faculty—Clear sight’s elector! The last praise is odd and almost grudging: clear sight is what “elects” him, chooses him, sets him apart, whether or not his style behaves.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If Browning truly has such clear sight into our in’ards, why does the poem keep demanding he speak plainly, as if plainness were the real virtue? Pound’s praise implies the opposite: that some truths arrive only through rough, barrel-staved language, and that the reader’s irritation may be the price of being seen.