One Degree of Separation

Here is a poem by Robert Browning, and the "Shelley" of the first line is Percy Bysshe Shelley, famous British Romantic poety who died young and whom Browning, of a later generation, would have seen as a poetic hero:

Memorabilia

1
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems and new!

2
But you were living before that,
And also you are living after;
And the memory I started at--
My starting moves your laughter.

3
I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
'Mid the blank miles round about:

4
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A molted feather, an eagle feather!
Well, I forget the rest.

A note in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume Two (Fifth Edition), p. 1250 says, "Browning reports that he once met a stranger in a bookstore who mentioned having talked with Shelley. 'Suddenly the stranger paused, and burst into laughter as he observed me staring at him with blanched face. . . . I vividly remember how strangely the presence of a man who had seen and spoken with Shelley affected me.' "

So to some extent, the poem is about "degrees of separation," in this case only one degree, between us and someone we think of as almost super-human, or at least special: a great artist, a great performer, someone who has achieved much, someone with a lot of power. The stranger thinks Browning's reaction is funny because, after all, the stranger is simply talking about having talked once to another human being.

The "six degrees of separation" concept is meant, I think, to show how interconnected everyone is, at least in some mathematical way, even in a global society of--what are we at now, seven billion" (And of course, the imagination can make no distinction between one billion and ten billion; at some point, the imagination shuts down.) Perhaps the concept also makes ordinary, nondescript people think that they are always only six degrees away from--what? Celebrity? "Immortality"?

An author whose work I've spent a lot of time studying is Langston Hughes. Three times I've had an experience similar to Browning's. I got to meet and to speak briefly with the jazz musician, Billy Taylor, who knew Hughes. I also heard photographer Roy DeCarava speak at a conference; he and Hughes had collaborated on a book. And at the same conference, I met a woman who had visited Hughes once, not long before he died. She described how he lit one cigarette after another and how the ashes fell on his clothes and how he casually brushed the ashes off while he talked. For some reason, I cherished that odd detail; maybe it helped make Hughes "plain," to borrow Browning's word. I'm sure at some point I got the vacant look that Browning got in front of the stranger in the bookstore, as I thought to myself, "Wow, I'm talking to someone who talked to Hughes, a poet I really admire, and one of the few writers, dead now, I would have liked to meet."

Back to Browning's poem: I love the shift in stanza three. It seems like a complete change of subject, and it may be disconcerting to some readers, but of course Browning is merely developing a comparison, and we soon find out that picking up an eagle's feather is a bit like meeting the stranger who spoke to Shelley: it's something to hang on to, a talisman. And the eagle-feather works nicely a place-holder for Shelley, who wrote Prometheus Unbound and Mont Blanc, and whose imagination soared to great idealistic heights. Of all the Romantics, William Blake included, Shelley probably took the most chances, tried most to make poetry do as much as it could, worried least about looking before he lept.

Browning is of course best known for his dramatic monologues, including "To His Last Duchess," but I also like this smaller lyric, "Memorabilia," which was published in 1855. Shelley drowned accidentally off the coast of Italy in 1822. He was only 30. Langston Hughes died in Spring of 1967, at age 65. I had not heard of him or of his poetry yet. I started high school in the fall of that year. The first African American writer whose work I remember reading was James Baldwin. I found a copy of The Fire Next Time in the back of a classroom and read it straight through. I do not have a vivid memory of when I first encountered Hughes's work.

Shifting presumptuously to a first-name, zero-degree-of-separation basis, let us say "Well done!" to three departed poets who achieved so much so differently: Percy, Robert, and Langston. Calling Browning "Bob" would, I believe, cross the line, however.