The Full Text of “A Face”
1If one could have that little head of hers
2Painted upon a background of pale gold,
3Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!
4No shade encroaching on the matchless mould
5Of those two lips, which should be opening soft
6In the pure profile; not as when she laughs,
7For that spoils all: but rather as if aloft
8Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff’s
9Burthen of honey-coloured buds to kiss
10And capture ’twixt the lips apart for this.
11Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround,
12How it should waver on the pale gold ground,
13Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts!
14I know, Correggio loves to mass, in rifts
15Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb
16Breaking its outline, burning shades absorb:
17But these are only massed there, I should think,
18Waiting to see some wonder momently
19Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky
20(That’s the pale ground you’d see this sweet face by),
21All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye
22Which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink.
The Full Text of “A Face”
1If one could have that little head of hers
2Painted upon a background of pale gold,
3Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!
4No shade encroaching on the matchless mould
5Of those two lips, which should be opening soft
6In the pure profile; not as when she laughs,
7For that spoils all: but rather as if aloft
8Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff’s
9Burthen of honey-coloured buds to kiss
10And capture ’twixt the lips apart for this.
11Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround,
12How it should waver on the pale gold ground,
13Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts!
14I know, Correggio loves to mass, in rifts
15Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb
16Breaking its outline, burning shades absorb:
17But these are only massed there, I should think,
18Waiting to see some wonder momently
19Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky
20(That’s the pale ground you’d see this sweet face by),
21All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye
22Which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink.
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“A Face” Introduction
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"A Face" is Robert Browning's subtly unnerving reflection on male attitudes toward female beauty. The poem's speaker reverently describes a lady's lovely face, imagining that she'd have made a perfect model for an old master of the Italian Renaissance. His worship of her face, however, reduces her to nothing more than a face: he'd prefer that she never move, never age, and never laugh, and that she instead remain a deathlessly decorative image for him to enjoy. The poem first appeared in Browning's 1864 book Dramatis Personae, a groundbreaking collection of dramatic monologues.
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“A Face” Summary
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If you could have her sweet little head painted against a pale, gilded background, like the Italian Renaissance painters used to do! She'd have no shadow intruding on the incomparable beauty of her lips, which would be softly opening in her elegant profile. Not opening the way they do when she laughs—that would spoil everything!—but as if above her head a blooming hyacinth, the flower she loves so much, had leaned its stem of honey-gold blossoms down to kiss her and catch between her parted, waiting lips. And her slender neck, so fine I could encircle it with just three fingers: it would look frail and lovely on the pale gold background as it rose up to a chin as exquisite as a freshly-plucked fruit. I know that the painter Correggio likes to fill the cracks in his painted heavens with the faces of angels, circle upon circle, bursting the boundaries of the skies, bright with flaming shadows. But I think that in this picture, those faces would only be waiting there to see something miraculous emerging, coming to maturity, slowly fading against the sky (the pale gold background against which you'd see this lovely face). Meanwhile, heaven itself would become like one giant eye, too afraid to blink in case it missed this glorious sight.
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“A Face” Themes
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Female Beauty and Male Misogyny
The speaker of "A Face" admires a lady's beauty: she's so lovely, he declares, that she should have been painted by the Italian Renaissance master Correggio. But his obsessively detailed description of what her imaginary portrait would look like has a sinister edge. In his vision of female perfection, the speaker reduces this lady to nothing but "A Face,' and one whose only purpose is to please those who see it. Men's fascination with women's beauty, this poem subtly suggests, sometimes barely masks an impulse to overlook—or even to destroy—women's humanity.
On the one hand, this speaker sounds outright worshipful as he describes the lady. No one short of Correggio, he gushes, could capture her delicate, "matchless" beauty, her "fruit-shaped," perfect chin. To him, she looks like an idealized Renaissance angel, and he's lost in admiration for her.
But that admiration is couched in demands and restrictions. Imagining the Old Master portrait that can never be, the speaker insists that the painted lady hold her lips in a pretty pout, as if (in an absurdly sentimental vision) she were about to deeply kiss a flower. If she were to "laugh[]," however, it would "spoil[] all." In this vision, the ideal lady has no feelings or expressions beyond a vague, dreamy sensuality. The imaginary painted version of her captures her physical beauty while keeping her silent and still: perfect, if you ask this speaker.
Ominously, the speaker's admiration even seems to conceal violent impulses. The speaker begins the poem by thinking how lovely it would be if he "could have that little head of hers"—in the form of a painting, of course, he hastens to add, but there's a distinct and startling image of decapitation in that first moment. Later, describing her exquisite neck, he points out that it would take only "three fingers" to "surround" it, an image at once of feminine fragility and of male hands, throttling.
The speaker's impulse to worship this woman's beauty, in other words, is also an impulse to choke her, possess her, and control her. The "Face" he claims to adore is also one whose humanity he semi-secretly longs to master or erase, and his fascination is a demand that the lady be just as he would like her to be: under his control.
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Art and Immortality
Gazing upon a lovely woman's face, this poem's speaker wishes that he "could have that little head of hers" for himself. The way to do that, of course, would be to have it "painted upon a background of pale gold"—to take her head not with an axe, but with a brush. The best part? Such a painting wouldn’t be subject to aging and decay, as the real-life lady is. Art, to this speaker, is a way of capturing, possessing, and immortalizing otherwise fragile and fleeting beauties.
If the Italian Renaissance artist Correggio had painted this lovely lady, the speaker says, he'd have been sure to include a host of admiring angels in the background. Those divine faces would make seem as if "all heaven" were "condensed into one eye," watching intently in fear that it will "lose the wonder, should it wink." The imagined bug-eyed angels embody the speaker's own fascination with the beautiful face he wishes he could preserve in paint—and his anxieties about that face. Blink, and its beauty might vanish: human loveliness is fleeting.
That's part of why the speaker prefers to imagine the lady as a painting, not a flesh-and-blood woman. As a human being, she's doomed to fade; as a painting, "that little head of hers" can last forever, as the poem’s allusion to the deathless art of the long-dead Correggio implies. The speaker’s fascination with Italian Renaissance portraiture in particular underscores his longing for a beauty that can last all down the centuries. In a painting, there need be no ominous “shade encroaching on the matchless mould / Of those two lips”: the movement of the sun (and thus of time itself) couldn’t touch the lovely lady.
Art, in this poem, is not just a loving response to beauty, but an anxious response to the threat of death and decay. A “fruit-shaped, perfect chin,” like actual fruit, won’t stay ideally ripe forever—but a painted one will keep indefinitely.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Face”
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Lines 1-3
If one could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold,
Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!"A Face" begins with a daydream. The poem's speaker longs for a painting that never existed: an Italian Renaissance portrait of a woman whose beauty he finds irresistible.
He's clearly a guy who knows something about Italian art. He desires, not just any Old Master, but a work in the style of the "Tuscan's early art"—that is, in the style of a master from old Florence, the greatest city-state in Tuscany and the nerve center of the Renaissance. He may even be thinking of one Tuscan in particular: Giotto, whose unprecedentedly naturalistic religious paintings were often said to have marked the dawn of the Renaissance. Giotto frequently used the "background of pale gold" the speaker desires, a fine layer of gilding meant to gleam mysteriously by church candlelight.
The imagery of that pale gold background suggests that the speaker sees the lady's “little head” as something almost sacred. Her beauty, he specifies, should be framed like a venerated saint’s. For that matter, her face is worthy of depiction by an immortal artist, a long-dead great whose work lives on. The speaker romanticizes not just this lady’s beauty, but the art of the Renaissance, an era that many 19th-century European thinkers (like this speaker) admired.
The tone here isn't pure awe and delight, however. Pay careful attention to the enjambment in the first lines:
If one could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold,For a split second, the line break makes it sound as if the speaker wants to have this lady's head in a more Henry VIII sort of way—a way that might involve not a paintbrush, but an axe. Even the simple word "have" feels a little uneasy in that light. The speaker longs not just for a record of this lady's beauty, but a way to possess her beauty. And the rather condescending tone of "that little head of hers" suggests that he might not have thought too much about what the lady herself might feel. The dear, she shouldn’t worry her pretty little head about anything.
All in all, these first lines suggest that this erudite, aesthetically sensitive speaker loves this lady's beauty, not the lady herself. To him, in fact, her feelings, her independence, even her identity might not matter much: she's "A Face," not a person. As this dramatic monologue develops, this speaker will subtly, sinisterly join Browning's catalogue of dangerous men, admirers who want to possess and control what they claim they love.
The speaker will expound on his imagined, ideal painting of this lady’s face in 22 lines of iambic pentameter—that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "If one | could have | that lit- | tle head | of hers." This form makes him sound as if he’s delivering a Shakespearean soliloquy—a suitably Renaissance-y tone for a man with Renaissance-y tastes.
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Lines 4-7
No shade encroaching on the matchless mould
Of those two lips, which should be opening soft
In the pure profile; not as when she laughs,
For that spoils all: -
Lines 7-10
but rather as if aloft
Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff’s
Burthen of honey-coloured buds to kiss
And capture ’twixt the lips apart for this. -
Lines 11-13
Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround,
How it should waver on the pale gold ground,
Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts! -
Lines 14-16
I know, Correggio loves to mass, in rifts
Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb
Breaking its outline, burning shades absorb: -
Lines 17-22
But these are only massed there, I should think,
Waiting to see some wonder momently
Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky
(That’s the pale ground you’d see this sweet face by),
All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye
Which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink.
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“A Face” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
The poem’s imagery summons up the dreamy, "pale gold" perfection of Renaissance art and the ripe, "fruit-like" loveliness of a young woman—fragile visions of beauty cracked around the edges by hints of violence.
The speaker's imagined portrait of the lady draws on a thorough knowledge of Italian Renaissance art. He returns and returns to the idea that all her beauty should be displayed against a "background of pale gold"—words that might evoke the otherworldly gilded backdrop of a painting by the Renaissance artist Giotto or the "pale ground" of a Botticelli sky. This ethereal color frames the lady as if she were a saint, suggesting that there's something transcendent about her loveliness. She can’t appear against any old landscape: her beauty must look as if it's part of another, better world.
In his imagination, the speaker experiences the lady's beauty not just as a sight, but as the hint of a delectable flavor. His vision of "honey-coloured" hyacinth buds pressing themselves against the lady's mouth doesn't just paint a picture of golden blossoms but also of a sweet, nectar-scented kiss. Similarly, her "fruit-shaped" chin is round, soft, and ripe—and ripe for the plucking, too. Clearly, the speaker would love to take a bite out of this lady, to devour her with his mouth, not just his eyes.
He's fascinated by her delicacy, too. When he pictures her "lithe neck," suggesting it's so small that "three fingers might surround" it, he's clearly exaggerating, as the reader who tries making a circle with their first three fingers can see—one couldn't encompass a baby's neck that way, let alone even the most petite of adult women's. This image thus does several things at once. It suggests that the speaker has an impossibly idealized vision of this lady; it conjures up an exquisitely small portrait, in which three fingers might actually encircle the painted neck; and it introduces an unnerving hint of violence. An easy neck to grip is an easy neck to throttle.
These images suggest that the speaker's worshipful fascination—the lady is a perfect saint, a virginal Madonna, a dainty angel—goes hand in hand with a barely contained desire to gobble her up.
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Allusion
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Enjambment
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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"A Face" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- The Tuscan
- Encroaching
- Matchless mould
- Yon
- Hyacinth
- Burthen
- 'Twixt
- Lithe
- Correggio
- Mass
- Rifts
- Orb
- Momently
- Wink
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Here, the speaker may be alluding to the artists of Renaissance Florence (in Tuscany) in general or to a Tuscan painter in particular—likely Giotto, who was famous for naturalistic religious paintings on gilded backgrounds.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Face”
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Form
"A Face" is one of Robert Browning's trademark dramatic monologues: poems written in the voice of a particular character, like monologues from a play. Many of Browning's speakers are out-and-out villains; this speaker is more subtly dangerous, a quietly misogynistic guy who feels the perfect woman is an ageless and silent one.
His reflections on female beauty and deathless art take the form of a single long stanza. Its 22 lines of iambic pentameter (that is, lines of five da-DUMs in a row: "If one | could have | that lit- | tle head | of hers") make it sound rather like a speech from Shakespeare, giving the speaker's voice some appropriately Renaissance-y gravitas. An unpredictable rhyme scheme cuts across that tone a little, however; the changing patterns of the rhymes follow the swell of the speaker's feelings rather than sticking to any inherited form. The poem's shape thus combines classic grandeur with wild emotion.
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Meter
"A Face" is written in iambic pentameter: that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. But as in a lot of iambic poetry, the speaker doesn't stick to perfect iambs all the way down. Here's how the meter sounds in the first three lines:
If one | could have | that lit- | tle head | of hers
Painted | upon | a back- | ground of | pale gold,
Such as | the Tus- | can’s ear- | ly art | prefers!The first line here is perfect iambic pentameter; the next two switch things up for the sake of emphasis, drama, and naturalism. Both lines 2 and 3 start with a front-loaded trochee (the opposite foot of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm). And line 2 pushes its last two stresses into one foot to create a spondee, two strong beats in a row (DUM-DUM), giving slow, reverent weight to that "pale gold" background.
This familiar rhythm might raise echoes of a Shakespeare soliloquy or a passage from Milton—and thus feels like an appropriately Renaissance-y meter for a speaker fascinated by the old Italian masters.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's strange rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABABCDCDEEFFGGHHIJJJJI
This impulsive, unpredictable pattern cuts across the poem's iambic pentameter. There's neither the grandeur of blank verse nor the lulling music of a regular pattern here.
At first, the scheme sounds a lot like the alternating rhymes of an English sonnet's first stanzas—perhaps wrong-footing readers, leading them to expect that a familiar pattern will emerge. Then, the speaker jumps into energetic couplets—lots of couplets, eight lines' worth. Finally, as the poem builds to a crescendo with the speaker's vision of painted angels gazing at the lady's face, there's that strange IJJJJI sequence, as focused as heaven's unwinking stare.
The rhyme scheme, in other words, is more emotive than it is formal, moving with the speaker’s feelings as he gets lost in his imaginary portrait.
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“A Face” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is an aesthete (or beauty-lover) well-versed in the art of the Renaissance, with a particular taste for the luminous golden visions of Correggio. His allusions to the eras and techniques of Renaissance art suggest he's an erudite fellow who knows his Giotto from his Cimabue.
He's also, quietly, a bit of a misogynist. He sees the woman whose beauty he ostensibly celebrates more as a decorative object than a human being; she'd be more perfect as a deathless picture than a mortal person, he suggests. All through the poem, he talks about her, not to her.
His desire for her to hold still and be pretty (and to stop laughing, for heaven's sake, that "spoils all"!) even leads him to some veiled fantasies of murder: he measures out the lady's delicate neck with his fingers as if preparing to do some throttling, and he daydreams about what it would be like to possess "that little head of hers" in a way that at first sounds more like a longing to decapitate than to paint.
Like more than one of Browning's dangerous male speakers, then, this fellow seems tempted to destroy what he claims he loves. Death and art, after all, are the only two forces that can arrest aging and decline.
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“A Face” Setting
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"A Face" doesn't have a clear setting. Readers can guess that the speaker, a connoisseur of Renaissance art, is probably meant to be a 19th-century contemporary of Browning's. (Lots of Victorians were Renaissance enthusiasts; the era was in fashion.) But the poem takes place less in his world than in his imagination.
Picturing how a painter of the Italian Renaissance would have depicted the beautiful lady at whom he aims this poem, the speaker gets lost in a vision of her imagined portrait, dreaming up a "pale gold" background and a host of worshipful angels looking on. The "Face" of the title becomes less the face of the living lady and more the idealized, deathless version of her that might appear in an old master's dreamworld.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Face”
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Literary Context
The English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) was most famous in his time for not sounding much like a poet. His contemporaries were confused by his most distinctive works: his dramatic monologues, in which he inhabited a character like an actor playing a part. Even Oscar Wilde, a big Browning fan, famously said that "[George] Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning." The Victorian literary world was much more at ease with the melancholy lyricism of Tennyson or the elegance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Browning's wife, and a much more famous poet at the time) than with the novelistic storytelling of Browning's work.
But it's on his earthy, vibrant dramatic monologues that Browning's enduring reputation rests. His best-known poems form a veritable rogues' gallery, with narrators from a corrupt bishop to a murderous Italian duke to an equally murderous lover. By allowing these hideous men to speak for themselves, Browning explored the darker corners of human nature—and took a particular interest in the ways that people justify their terrible deeds. Villains, Browning's monologues suggest, don't tend to think that they're villains. Browning's poetry wasn't all theatrical murder and greed, though; he also wrote tenderly about heroism, homesickness, and heartbreak.
"A Face" was first published in the 1864 collection Dramatis Personae, a collection whose great dramatic monologues would go on to influence writers from Henry James to Jorge Luis Borges to A.S. Byatt. Its speaker, though more subtly villainous than, say, Porphyria's lover, is nonetheless another dangerous man for Browning's collection: a guy whose admiration for a woman's beauty interweaves with a denial of her humanity.
Historical Context
This poem's learned evocations of Italian Renaissance art draws on Browning's long relationship with Italy. He traveled extensively there as a young man, and in 1846 he outright moved to Florence so he could marry his beloved Elizabeth Barrett. (The couple couldn't marry in England because Elizabeth's tyrannical father was not a fan of the match; he would have preferred to keep Elizabeth and her famous, increasingly lucrative poetry under his own roof.)
In its portrait of a man whose apparent worship is a subtle kind of misogyny, "A Face" also responds to a big Victorian issue: what was known as the Woman Question. During the 19th century, a sentimental and oppressive ideal of womanhood dominated British culture. Women were meant to be pious, self-sacrificing, sweet-faced wives and mothers—and if they weren't that, they must be either burdensome spinsters (also expected to live exclusively for others) or fallen women.
As the century wore on, a tide of early feminism rose up against these reductive and oppressive ideals. Women began to demand education, independence, and political power. And woman artists of the era, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to George Eliot to the Brontë sisters, became famous both for their great art and for their portraits of thinking, capable women.
Both of the Brownings would comment on the Woman Question in their art. Robert wrote psychologically subtle dramatic monologues in which men oppress women in the guise of "loving" them; Elizabeth wrote a book-length epic poem, Aurora Leigh, about a woman fighting to become an artist.
Perhaps rather pointedly, Browning inscribed a copy of this poem to Emily Patmore, the wife of the poet Coventry Patmore and the inspiration for "The Angel in the House"—Coventry's poem of the same name, which depicted an idealized Victorian wife.
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More “A Face” Resources
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External Resources
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Paintings by Correggio — Get an idea of the kind of sensual Renaissance portraiture the speaker imagines in this overview of Correggio's work.
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Dramatis Personae — See images of the poem as it first appeared in Browning's important 1864 collection Dramatis Personae.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Browning's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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More on Browning — Visit the Victorian Web to learn more about Browning.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Browning
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