Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea.  And just as these strange things meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world.  When, in one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception.

“The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,
The simplest of creations, just a sac
That’s mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives
And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,
If simplified still further one degree.”

(SLUDGE.)

These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the Everlasting.

There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but which is definitely valuable in Browning’s poetry, and indeed in all poetry.  To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself.  It is difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without becoming too grotesque.  But we should all agree that if St. Paul’s Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations.  Now it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it.  If we say “a man is a man” we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, “that man is a two-legged bird, without feathers,” the phrase does, for a moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in his presence.  When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of wonder provoked by the grotesque.  “Canst thou play with him as with a bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?” he says in an admirable passage.  The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning.