Wednesday, 21 September 2016

Victorian Verse - Home-Thoughts, from Abroad - Robert Browning

This is Browning’s most famous lyric poem.  In classical times, a lyric poem was originally a poem set to music played on a lyre, a form of small harp, but came to be applied to any (short) poem which has as its theme love, or explores and expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet.  It is essentially non-narrative; there is no story being told.  The poem shows Browning’s debt to the Romantics – the poetic movement that immediately preceded the Victorians, of whom the main exponents were Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats.  The central theme of their poetry is the transcendent power of Nature and the value and authenticity of human emotions and feelings in the face of an increasingly rational and scientific approach to the world.  They are spiritual, but not religious.  The detailed references to the observed world and the emotional response to nature are hallmarks of the Romantic approach.

Browning’s poem was published in 1845 in “Dramatic Romances and Lyrics”, number VII in a series of pamphlets containing plays and poems under the collective title “Bells and Pomegranates” – a reference to the Bible in which Aaron (Moses’s brother) is described as having a robe hemmed with ornaments of this shape.  Browning explained his choice of this reference as: the hem of the robe of the high priest” to indicate “the mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought.” 

Browning travelled to Italy for the first time in the late 1830s and again in the early 1840s.  In spite of the message of the poem, Browning was very fond of Italy and he and Elizabeth made their home there after their marriage, although they returned to England for family visits.  The poem evokes the sights and sounds of the English countryside and is infused with nostalgia.  Note how the irregular metric pattern is used to match the poet’s emotions.  Note also the characteristic use of enjambment and caesura

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there, 
And whoever wakes in England 
Sees, some morning, unaware, 
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf 
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, 
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 
In England—now! 

The poem opens with an exclamation, as if the emotion of longing has spilled out of him spontaneously.  The word “there” is odd – in fact, it is often misquoted as “here”.  After all, it is April in Italy as well.  So, a contrast is made immediately – April in Italy is of quite a different quality, almost not like April at all.  He is, of course, comparing the more temperate climate of England with the Mediterranean climate of Italy, to the latter’s disadvantage.  In England, spring comes stealthily (“unaware”), the leaves appearing as if overnight on the elm-trees and the surrounding bushes and the chaffinch (a small, pink-breasted songbird) has begun singing. 

The octet is in trimetres for the first three lines, but as the emotion grows and he warms to his subject, the lines lengthen to tetrametres.  He ends it with another exclamation, using a dimetre, as if his emotions have overwhelmed him and he cannot go on.  The rhyme scheme is regular – ababccdd – which again matches the growing excitement as the rhymes become more closely packed.

However, one thought leads to another, as May follows April, the subject of the next octet:

And after April, when May follows, 
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! 

The references here are to two birds – the whitethroat and swallow - which migrate to England in the spring to breed – another symbol of how England’s seasons change.  The two lines form an incomplete sentence, as if his memories are tumbling from him uncontrolled. 

Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge 
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover 
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge— 
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture! 

The poet asks us to “Listen!” to the sound of a thrush in his garden (“my blossomed “).  The scene is described in detail, as if recalling an actual event:  the thrush is sitting at the end of a spray of the pear-tree, which is growing in a hedge (perhaps the boundary of his garden) and leaning over into the neighbouring field, where it drops its “Blossoms and dewdrops” onto the clover crop below.  Browning uses the subordination of this long sentence, between “Hark!” and “That’s the wise thrush;” to lead us through the image of the blossoming pear-tree in the hedge, up and out over the field to where the thrush perches on the out-flung branch.  Browning’s observation is accurate – the song thrush (turdus philomelus) prefers to sing perched at the end of a branch.  Its song is characterised by the repetition of notes and phrases.  The thrush is “wise” because it repeats itself to make sure it doesn’t forget its song - and so that we do not presume that it cannot reproduce the first, glorious outpouring of its melody.

The lines are now in the longer iambic pentametres as his vision of England expands.  The rhyme scheme subtly alters, but remains regular, the rhyming couplets now used for emphasis:  aabcbcdd.

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, 
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew 
The buttercups, the little children's dower 
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! 

The recollections continue in the final quatrain, with its rhyming couplets, with the image of a late “hoar” frost, or possibly the whiteness of the dew is being likened to hoar-frost, covering the fields.  However, by midday it will have warmed up and burnt off the dew, or frost, and the buttercups will open.  The bright yellow buttercups are described as a gift or dowry to children – from the sun, possibly, as they reflect its yellow light.  A favourite game of children used to be to test if you “liked butter” by holding a buttercup under the chin to see if it reflected yellow.  It usually does, as the inside of a buttercup petal is shiny and light reflective.  The buttercup is compared with the exotic “melon flower”, which is also yellow and much larger than a buttercup.  The melon is a member of the same botanical family as cucumbers and squash but they do not grow naturally in England as it is too cold. 

There is some xenophobia here perhaps.  The Colonial British (although Italy was never a colony) prided themselves on their restraint and order; they saw themselves as “civilising” the peoples they came into contact with.  Browning dismisses the “gaudy” melon flower for being too exotic, too extravagant and showy, preferring the unassuming native wildflower of England.  However, Browning was well-travelled and cosmopolitan, and, at this time, had little reason to love the “British Public”; the reaction to his poetry, and in particular the long poem “Sordello” published in 1840, was generally negative and was criticised for its obscurity.  This criticism effectively hampered his career for years - after 1844 he published very little until late in life, and many of the poems now recognised as being his greatest (apart from the epic “The Ring and the Book” (1869) pre-date his marriage and emigration to Italy. 

Lines from this poem have been referenced by many poets, showing its enduring, and endearing, influence over time.  It ranked number 42 in the Nation’s 100 Favourite Poems poll carried out by the BBC (“My Last Duchess” was at 69); there is a song by the same name by Clifford T Ward published in the 1970s; a poem by the novelist John Buchan; Carol Anne Duffy, the poet Laureate, named her autobiographical collection of love poems “Rapture” and quotes the poem in her dedication; Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” references it; Rupert Brooke, poet of the First World War, echoes its sentiments in “The Soldier”.

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