Robert Browning's pervasive examination of religious authority and its shortcomings becomes evident in the very title of The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church. . The religious reference to Saint Praxed has ironic connotations, for while Saint Praxed herself was chaste, the monologue subverts her priestly demands and engages in sexual acts. Browning therefore highlights here the hypocritical nature of the religious figures of the time. While religious authorities of Browning's day espoused the values ​​of love of neighbor, The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church and The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister deconstruct these doctrines as further evidence of religious duplicity. Ironically referring to his own “Peace,” the bishop in the preceding poem exclaims “May God curse me!” ". Underlined by the exclamation point, the vituperative application of the Catholic deity against the bishop's archenemy, Gandolf, is depicted by Browning to demonstrate the lack of respect and contempt of supposedly pious figures for the stones cornerstones of their faith. Similarly, the narrator of the Spanish Cloister Soliloquy refers to Brother Lawrence as "Maniche", a non-vocative derogatory epithet used to denigrate Lawrence as an adherent of two religions, and therefore of inferior commitment to Christianity. . However, the narrator himself refers to "Galatians" to justify Lawrence's potential murder and is therefore used by Browning to undermine the use of biblical texts as authorities. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Alongside this deconstruction of religion, Browning's poems are linked by their depiction of moral decadence, clear in the first line of Confessions. The "buzzing" in the narrator's ears is actually an intertextual reference to Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. For this reason, the gerund used by Browning evokes a satanic presence in the narrator's deathbed confession and suggests an underlying malevolence in the narrator's being. In addition to this, the anapaestes in the line “Do I consider the world a vale of tears?” », revealing a discomfort in speaking about the subject in question, also serve to differentiate it from the other lines of the stanza. This demarcation is used by Browning to suggest that the narrator's perspective on life has entered a realm of otherness – solidified by the facetious nature of his anointing due to his lack of remorse – and signifying the moral decadence to come. The bishop's order for his tomb at St. Praxed's Church, while idiosyncratic, presents another example of this aforementioned decadence. The simile "Blue as a vein on the Madonna's breast...", sexualizes the Virgin Mary, and the final aposiopesis is added by Browning to signify an adventure in the sexual fantasy concerning the "Madonna", a totally morally empty notion for a religious person. figure. This mental and moral corruption is reflected in the language of the poem, as the bishop refers to a congregation as a "conflagration." Symbolic solecism, Browning here emphasizes that the bishop's inability to express himself properly coincides with his inability to recognize his immorality. A similar degree of self-centeredness and tarnished self-consciousness is evident in the Spanish Cloister Soliloquy. While trying to illuminate his devotion by speaking of his focus on "the praise of Jesus" in the fifth stanza, in the sixth stanza the narrator approaches Brother Lawrence's flowers and "holds them tight in.