Thus might you wrong some kingly alchemist,— Whose concern should not be with showing brass Transmuted into gold, but triumphing, Rather, about his gold changed out of brass, Not vulgarly to the mere sight and touch, But in the idea, the spiritual display, The apparition buoyed by winged words Hovering above its birthplace in the brain
— Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868)
Browning’s alchemist doesn’t transmute; he asserts that transmutation has already occurred — privately, spiritually, in language. The proof is the claim. Fifteen years before Jochanan Hakkadosh, Browning already knew the move: the solvent and the fraud it unmasks are the same operation, performed at different speeds. The alkahest strips lacquer by being lacquer.
Alkahest is a word Paracelsus made up. Pseudo-Arabic, coined in the 1640s to sound like it came from the same place as alchemy and algebra — but those words actually crossed from Arabic; alkahest only dressed for the trip. The universal solvent is a fabrication performing universality. And transmute entered English in the late fourteenth century meaning to change the appearance of something — the substance-change sense came a century later, an alchemical promotion the word gave itself. Browning’s alchemist triumphs about gold changed out of brass: does the verb know it’s confessing?
what effete results, From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes From such white heats!
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, First Book
The poet names the failure before naming the method: the heat was real, the gold wasn’t. EBB is doing something precise here — “wire-drawn” is a metallurgical term, the process of pulling metal through a die to thin it into wire, and she uses it for verse that has been technically processed but not transmuted. The white heat performed substance-change; the wire-drawing only changed the form. The word knows the difference even when the maker doesn’t.
Effete is not metallurgical. Latin effetus: ‘that has given birth’ — ex- + fetus, exhausted by bearing, not by processing. EBB’s pairing is gendered at the root: virile efforts, effete results — the potent male and the female spent from delivery. Virgil had it: verique effeta senectus (Aeneid 7.440) — old age past bearing truth. The wire-drawing is form; effete is the body after labor.
Blake already knew the accounting: Males immortal live renewd by female deaths. Not depleted by craft — renewed by someone else’s depletion. The effete body is the one that paid for the renewal.
Which puts a question back: when EBB pairs effete results with virile efforts, is she describing a poetics she has — the generative labor that costs the body — or one she is refusing? The word knows what it means. Does she?