My love is here. Where are you, dear old friend?
How rolls the Wairoa at your world's far end?
This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.
The three poems, _Caliban on Setebos, Rabbi Ben Ezra_, and _A Death
in the Desert_, should be read in that order; for there is a logical
order in the thought. The first is God as an amphibious brute would
imagine him: the second is noble Hebrew theism: the third is the
Christian God of Love. Whilst the second is the finest poem of the
three, the first is the most original. The word "upon" is ironical:
it is Caliban's treatise on theology. We read Caliban on God, as we
read Mill on Political Economy: for Caliban, like many a human
theologian, does not scruple to speak the last word on the nature of
the Supreme Being. The citation from the Psalms is a rebuke to gross
anthropomorphism: Caliban, like the Puritans, has simply made God in
his own image.
The difference between Shakespeare's and Browning's Caliban is
simply the difference between Shakespeare and Browning.
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