-- 69. the lone desert-bird: the ruff may possibly be referred to. See Webster, s.v. --
First he said, “If a man declared to me, This my son Valens, this my other son, Were James and Peter,--nay, declared as well This lad was very John,--I could believe! --Could, for a moment, doubtlessly believe: { 75} So is myself withdrawn into my depths, The soul retreated from the perished brain Whence it was wont to feel and use the world Through these dull members, done with long ago. Yet I myself remain; I feel myself: { 80} And there is nothing lost. Let be, awhile!”
-- 76. withdrawn into my depths: into the depths of his absolute being, of the “what Is”; see the doctrine of the trinal unity of man which follows. --
{ This is the doctrine he was wont to teach, How divers persons witness in each man, Three souls which make up one soul: first, to wit, A soul of each and all the bodily parts, { 85} Seated therein, which works, and is what Does, And has the use of earth, and ends the man Downward; but, tending upward for advice, Grows into, and again is grown into By the next soul, which, seated in the brain, { 90} Useth the first with its collected use, And feeleth, thinketh, willeth,--is what Knows: Which, duly tending upward in its turn, Grows into, and again is grown into By the last soul, that uses both the first, { 95} Subsisting whether they assist or no, And, constituting man’s self, is what Is-- And leans upon the former, makes it play, As that played off the first: and, tending up, Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man { 100} Upward in that dread point of intercourse, Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him. What Does, what Knows, what Is; three souls, one man. I give the glossa of Theotypas.}
-- 82-104. The supposed narrator, Pamphylax, gives in these bracketed verses, on the authority of an imagined Theotypas, a doctrine John was wont to teach, of the trinal unity of man-- the third “person” of which unity, “what Is”, being man’s essential, absolute nature. The dying John is represented as having won his way to the Kingdom of the “what Is”, the Kingdom of eternal truth within himself. In Luke 17:20-21, we read: “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the Kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” In harmony with which, Paracelsus is made to say, in Browning’s poem, “Truth is within ourselves; . . . there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness”; etc. See pp. 24 and 25 of this volume. { In this etext, see Chapter I, ‘The Spiritual Ebb and Flow, etc.’, of the Introduction. Excerpt is shortly before the poem ‘Popularity’.} “Life, you’ve granted me, develops from within. But INNERMOST OF THE INMOST, MOST INTERIOR OF THE INTERNE, GOD CLAIMS HIS OWN, DIVINE HUMANITY RENEWING NATURE” (Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’). Mrs. M. G. Glazebrook, in her paper on ‘A Death in the Desert’, read at the 48th meeting of the Browning Society, Feb. 25th, 1887, paraphrases these lines: “The first and lowest { soul} is that which has to do with earth and corporeal things, the animal soul, which receives primary sensations and is the immediate cause of action --‘what Does’. The second is the intellect, and has its seat in the brain: it is superior to the first, but dependent on it, since it receives as material the actual experience which the animal soul supplies; it is the feeling, thinking, willing soul --‘what Knows’. The third, and highest, is the spirit of man, the very principle of life, the divine element in man linking him to God, which is self-subsistent and therefore independent of sensation and knowledge, but nevertheless makes use of them, and gives them existence and energy--‘what Is’.” --