The Laboratory Science Quotes

We think Browning is giving us a kind of skeptical look at science here. Not that he's saying all science is bad, or even necessarily that what's going on here is science. Still, in this poem, the laboratory is the place where bad things happen. That location, which we see in the title, is almost immediately compared to a devil's workshop. So it's hard to imagine that this poem doesn't have something to say about the possible dangers of scientific work.

Even though this line doesn't have much to do with the big emotional themes in the poem (jealousy, revenge, death, etc.), it's full of the kind of details that makes the whole thing come alive. In a way, the work of science, of mixing and testing in the laboratory, is like the canvas that the rest of the themes are painted on. All this grinding and mashing helps to anchor the poem, to give it a convincing sense of place.

Our speaker is unusually curious about how this is all going to get done. She's not just swinging by to pick up a ready-made poison. She wants to see how it's made, what the ingredients are. She even wants to learn the vocabulary, to know the names of things. This fascination with scientific instruments and materials is definitely tied up in her revenge fantasy, but we think it makes her a more interesting and multi-dimensional character, too.

This is about a scientific instrument, a vial ("phial"), but mostly we just think it's a really cool line. What a great use of the word "soft." It's a classic poetry moment—the thing she's talking about probably isn't really soft, but it gives us a really clear sense of the effect it has on people. We imagine a soothing, ocean blue liquid, almost glowing in the bottle, hypnotizing the speaker with its beauty.

Again, we loop back to the dirtiness, the "horror" of the laboratory. It's a place for ugly secret work, far away from the other location we hear about, the glittering fantasy world of the court, "the King's." If anyone at the court saw her dancing with the dust and grime of the laboratory on her, they'd be horrified. Again, this underlines the generally negative role that science and laboratory work plays in this poem.