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Rating: 
Summary: A good reference!
Review: I am a fan of Robert Browning, and believe him to be one of the best Christian poets from the Victorian age.In the introductions to poems that I've read, the editor James Loucks, perhaps to be "objective," fails to even make the slightest mention of Browning's Christianity, or how that could have affected the themes of his poems. In Browning's earlier dramatic monologues such as "My Last Duchess," his characters are wholly villainous or otherwise two-dimensional. They don't have any redemptive qualities about them at all. However, in Browning's mature dramatic monologues, his characters have specks of redemptive qualities, and this makes them real, and even makes the characters human. In "an Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," Karshish meets Lazarus shortly before the fall of the Jewish Temple. Loucks says that "the title refers to an imaginary encounter between an itinerant Arab . . . long after [Lazarus] was raised from the dead by Jesus. Since the conflict experienced by Karshish -- that of positivism opposed to the will to believe -- was shared by many of Browning's contemporaries, the poem has a modern resonance" (127). He leads the reader to believe that Browning was trying to express and maybe even uplift the belief of unbelief, to praise his 'scientific' contemporaries, yet this is far from the case. Browning, a Christian, in part shows how the Incarnation, God becoming Man, could strongly twang the beliefs that Karshish has of God -- that the body entraps the soul, and that the soul and body are wholly separate and cannot be mixed. I will conclude with a quote from this poem where Karshish, in a redemptive moment, briefly opens his eyes to the power of the Incarnation: The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too--
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!" (lines 304-311)
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