As scholars often note, the Victorian period was known for its didacticism, particularly the struggle between faith and moral decay. While the Romantics idealized their world, the Victorians questioned their surroundings, choosing to politicize their literature in ways that were reactionary against the societal norm. Although the polemics of Victorianism were prevalent in poetry, fiction, philosophy, and nonfiction, their influence was never felt more strongly than in the questionable and often satirical morality of Robert Browning's narrators. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Of all Victorian poetry, Robert Browning's verse is the one that most rebukes moral conventions. Using historical figures as models for his critiques of the present, Browning mastered the art of the monologue and soliloquy, two styles of poetry particularly useful for critiquing the character traits of his contemporaries. While poets like Matthew Arnold or Alfred, Lord Tennyson focused their polemics against ideas – the human misery in “Dover Beach” and the philosophies of life posed in “Ulysses” – Browning wrote against individual entities and personalities, particularly the nobles and the religious. Browning's indictment of Anglican Church officials can be found through the aberration of his narrators in "The Bishop Orders His Tomb in Saint Praxed's Church" and "Soliloquy from the Spanish Cloister." Browning depicts these narrators as vain and vindictive personalities, character traits antithetical to those of a Spanish bishop or monk. In “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed Church,” the reader sees a frail man on his deathbed whose only concern is his posterity. Traditionally, Renaissance bishops were concerned with spiritual matters, favoring heavenly reward over all earthly delights. Bishop Browning, however, is so preoccupied with earthly matters that all heavenly matters seem nil to him. He is proud of the "agate", "granite", "basalt" and "marble" that will build his tomb, something he considers worthy of veneration. This tomb contrasts sharply with the place where Christ was buried, a place traditionally considered sterile and empty of anything superfluous. Although a grave, especially a premortem, is known for its lack of personality, the bishop points the reader in a different direction. According to his meanderings, his tomb is an object which will attempt, in essence, to make him as immortal as the divinity for whom he claims to have lived his life. The bishop's contempt for afterlife matters is also present in egalitarianism. with which he heals the dead. At the end of the poem, the bishop says: “Old Gandolf, against me, with his onion core / How he still envied me, so beautiful was she! » His depiction of Gandolf's corpse indicates the egalitarian frame of mind with which he views the physicality of death; however, this performance follows more than 100 lines of self-celebration. Although death itself acts as an equalizer, the bishop's tomb acts as the celebrant of a singular life, something antithetical to both the Church's and the times' concepts of morality Victorian. When he asks himself: “Am I alive, am I dead?” ", he essentially confuses death with life. His life has become so extravagant that the costs of salvation are overshadowed by the costs of his past. This troubled vision of paradise highlights its.