The Work
'Saul' is a dramatic monologue by Robert Browning, first published in incomplete form in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) and completed and republished in Men and Women (1855). In its final form the poem runs to 335 lines in nineteen sections. It is spoken by the young David, who has come to Saul's tent at the king's request to soothe his madness with music, as the narrative of 1 Samuel 16:14-23 describes. But Browning's poem expands this brief biblical incident into a sustained meditation on the nature of love, the logic of desire, and the necessity of Incarnation.
The poem begins with the world of creation - David summons Saul first through songs of natural life, the vineyard, the harvest, the march of armies - then moves through songs of human achievement and glory, then through the specific blessings of Saul's own life, then reaches the moment in which David asks himself what more he can give the king. He discovers that the only gift adequate to Saul's suffering is the gift of a love that overcomes death - and that this gift requires a divine giver. The poem is Browning's most ambitious biblical meditation and one of the finest Victorian treatments of the Hebrew Bible.
Biblical Engagement
1 Samuel 16:23 - 'And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him' - is the biblical text Browning dramatizes and expands. The brief reference to David's harp-playing becomes, in the poem, a complete philosophical and theological argument: the music is not merely soothing but redemptive, and David's discovery of what redemption requires is the poem's argument.
Isaiah 53:3 - 'He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him' - resonates in Browning's portrait of Saul in his affliction. Saul's suffering is not merely psychological but participates in the larger suffering of humanity, which the Servant Songs present as the context for divine redemption. When David sings of Saul's greatness and his grief, he is singing the condition that requires an answer greater than any human can give.
Psalm 23:1 - 'The LORD is my shepherd' - grounds the poem's movement from natural to supernatural love. The shepherd boy David knows the love of the shepherd for the sheep; he knows the love of the friend for the king; but the poem's climax discovers that these loves, however real, are inadequate to the depth of Saul's need. Only a love that is not merely human - a love that is creative of the very capacity to love - can finally answer.
Author and Context
Robert Browning (1812-1889) was raised in a dissenting Protestant household with a father whose library included the Bible, classical literature, and the books that formed his son's extraordinary learning. Browning's faith was unorthodox but real: he was deeply committed to the truth of the Incarnation, understood not as a doctrinal proposition but as the supreme expression of the logic of love. His engagement with the Bible was literary rather than devotional - he read it as the supreme text of human experience, the book that contained the widest range of human response to the divine.
The poem was begun in 1845, in the middle of his correspondence and courtship with Elizabeth Barrett. The first version (nine sections) broke off at the moment of David's vision of a divine love that transcends death; Browning apparently needed another decade to work out how to articulate the vision. The completed 1855 version shows the influence of his marriage, his residence in Italy, and his deepening engagement with the Incarnation as the answer to the problem of suffering.
Browning was familiar with the tradition of biblical commentary and midrash, and 'Saul' participates in the midrashic tradition of imaginative expansion of scriptural narrative - filling in what scripture leaves unsaid, exploring the inner life of the characters at the moment the text describes.
The Argument from Desire
The poem's central philosophical movement is what C.S. Lewis, in The Weight of Glory and Surprised by Joy, would later call the 'argument from desire': if human beings have a capacity for a love that no human object can satisfy, this capacity itself is evidence that a satisfying object exists. David's love for Saul is real and powerful; but it is inadequate to Saul's need. David discovers that he wants to give Saul more than any human being can give - life after death, total renewal, complete joy. This wanting - this capacity for a love that exceeds its own ability to fulfill - is itself evidence that such a love exists.
The poem thus anticipates Lewis's apologetics by nearly a century, using the same logic: the shape of human desire is evidence of divine provision. Browning articulates this as David's proto-incarnational vision: 'See the Christ stand!'
Themes
The poem meditates on the relationship between human and divine love, between natural beauty and supernatural redemption, between the provisional consolations of music and art and the final consolation of divine grace. It is also a poem about the nature of kingship: Saul is a king who cannot save himself, and the king who comes after him will be the king who saves all.
Reception
'Saul' was widely admired in Victorian England and America. Gerard Manley Hopkins praised its theological seriousness; Matthew Arnold criticized its optimistic theology. In the twentieth century it was frequently taught alongside Tennyson's In Memoriam as the Victorian period's most ambitious poetic engagement with faith and doubt.
Legacy
Browning's 'Saul' is the fullest Victorian poetic treatment of the Hebrew Bible and one of the most serious literary engagements with the argument from Incarnation in the English tradition. Its influence on C.S. Lewis - who knew the poem well - has been traced by scholars; its proto-Lewisian argument from desire connects Victorian Romantic theology to twentieth-century Christian apologetics.