Monique R. Morgan. Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1111-3. Price: US$47.95

In her terrific new book, Monique R. Morgan demonstrates how lyric and narrative modes interact in four nineteenth-century poems: George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819-23), William Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868-69). Morgan argues that each of these poems use narrative techniques to achieve lyrical effects. As a result, they mingle the two modes in ways that register and explore their complex, often tense, relation. For Morgan, the lyrical mode in these poems manifests itself in an emphasis on figurative language, an associative rather than causal logic, the deliberate crafting of emotional and ethical responses in the reader, and, especially, the impression of a timeless present. This lyric temporality is shown to be supple and rich, but it is chiefly characterized by its suspension from sequential time and by its foregrounding of the time of discourse rather than the time of story. Each chapter offers compelling close readings that illuminate the operations and commitments of the poems while also effecting a theoretical intervention into debates within narratology and poetics. In so doing, this inventive study bridges the divides that too often separate Romantic from Victorian poetry and narrative from poetic theory. The vitality and force of this study lie in its painstaking and convincing readings, which are hard to convey in summary. Nevertheless, I will try to indicate briefly the contours and stakes of the argument of each chapter. Morgan’s first chapter demonstrates the various ways in which the narrator of Don Juan privileges the time of composition at the expense of the time of story. The labyrinthine plots of the poem, along with the tendency of the narrator to imply, comment upon, or sketch alternative plots and outcomes, foreground “a multitude of plot options” that exist simultaneously in the moment of discourse and diminish a sense of the plot as a sequence of events unfolding within narrative time (29). Similarly, the narrator’s digressions emphasize “the associational, rather than causal, logic characteristic of lyric” and generate a “focus on the constructedness of the poem” that “creates an awareness of time as a suspended moment of composition,” an awareness that is heightened by the poem’s many playful lists of similes (41). At the level of theme, the poem’s presentation of “time as something to be endured, coupled with the narrator’s act of writing to pass the time, creates an acute awareness of time as a suspended moment” (60). And at the level of the structure of the whole poem, Morgan argues that its “large-scale episodic structure” abides by an associational, lyrical logic that works to deny retrospection and reinforce the impression of timeless, lyric temporality. Morgan argues that Aurora Leigh juxtaposes the conflicting modes of lyric and narrative in order to demonstrate the reciprocal strengths and weaknesses of each, thereby justifying its own generic hybridity. This chapter examines the exceptionally complex, even internally contradictory, temporality of the poem, whose moment of narration itself extends within the sequential time of the plot. One consequence of Barrett Browning’s decision to narrate later books in the poem from a “close proximity to the described experience” is to borrow a tool from epistolary fiction to create a very lyric “illusion of experience blurred with discourse, of absolute simultaneity in a suspended moment” (135). For Morgan, Aurora Leigh associates lyric with emotional insight and links narrative to didactic politics, and it uses the interplay between the two to “develop subtleties of thought, but still put them in a social context to serve a rhetorical purpose” (148). In her final chapter, Morgan asserts that …