Caliban Upon Setebos General

Question 1

What influence does the Tempest have on the poem?

Answer 1

• Caliban’s imprisoned isolation arrests his experience of a positive centralising human relationship
• his sphere of observation, therefore, is limited to beings who appear to give a meek murmuring surrender to Setebos’ arbitrary dictum: “Loving not, hating not, just choosing so”, or reinforce Setebos’ despotism like Prospero

Question 2

What did Browning say on the subject of God?

Answer 2

“there is more in God than in man”

Question 3

What have historians retrospectively labelled the mid-Victorian era?

Answer 3

experiencing a “crisis of faith”

Question 4

Does either the Tennyson or Browning poem indicate a “crisis of faith”?

Answer 4

• neither are perturbed by scientific findings
  (Tennyson’s recovery of faith, Browning’s subtle criticism of scientific reductivism)
• both poems indicate that our lives are woven into a plan we cannot understand and to subject God to empirical evidence is to produce an image fraught with human ignorance