By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Robert Browning (1812-89) was a prolific poet, so whittling down his poetic oeuvre to just ten defining poems is going to prove a challenge. With that in mind, it’s best to view the following list of Browning’s ten best poems as indicative – there are many other classic Robert Browning poems around. Still, these are our particular favourites, and, we hope, none is out of place in a Browning top ten.
‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.
Glad was I when I reach’d the other bank.
Now for a better country. Vain presage!
Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? Toads in a poison’d tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage …
A grotesque quasi-medieval dramatic monologue detailing the quest of the titular Roland, this poem was produced in an attempt to overcome writer’s block: in 1852 Browning had set himself the New Year’s Resolution to write a new poem every day, and this vivid dreamscape is what arose from his fevered imagination.
Browning borrowed the title from a line in Shakespeare’s King Lear; the character of Roland as he appears in Browning’s poem has in turn inspired Stephen King to write his Dark Tower series, while J. K. Rowling borrowed the word ‘slughorn’ from the poem when creating the name of her character Horace Slughorn.
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!
So begins this classic Browning poem. The title singing the praises of the English countryside is less well-known than the poem’s opening line: ‘Oh, to be in England’. Browning reminds us that we often only manage to pin down what we love about our home country when we’re out of it: Browning spent much of the 1850s living in Italy, with his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Browning also wrote another poem on this theme, ‘Home Thoughts, from the Sea’.
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands …
Probably Robert Browning’s most famous (and widely studied) dramatic monologue, ‘My Last Duchess’ is spoken by the Duke of Ferrara, chatting away to an acquaintance (for whom we, the reader, are the stand-in) and revealing a sinister back-story lurking behind the portrait of his late wife, the Duchess, that adorns the wall.
This poem is a masterpiece because it does what Browning’s dramatic monologues do best: invites us into the confidence of a speaker whose conversation reveals more about their personality and actions than they realise. We have analysed this poem, section by section, here.
Come in! — the Mayor cried, looking bigger:
And in did come the strangest figure!
His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red …
Although this is a very well-known poem, it’s not quite so familiar to readers as a Robert Browning poem – it has the air of anonymity about it, like a nursery rhyme. This is for good reason: Browning based the poem on a medieval German legend. Nevertheless, Browning’s retelling is the version most familiar to English readers.
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break …
One of Browning’s most disturbing poems – and it’s up against quite a bit of competition – ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is spoken by a murderer, a man who strangles his lover with her own hair. It was one of Browning’s first great poems, published in 1836 (as ‘Porphyria’) when the poet was still in his mid-twenties.
It was also one of his earliest experiments in the dramatic monologue, a form which he and Alfred, Lord Tennyson developed in the 1830s. Despite the poem’s reputation as one of Browning’s finest dramatic monologues, it – like much of Browning’s early work – was largely ignored during his lifetime.
I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.
Zooks, what’s to blame? you think you see a monk!
What, ’tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley’s end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?
So begins this, the first of two poems on this list to feature a medieval monk, and the first of two to feature a painter – ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ sees the titular friar being accosted by some guards one night, and ending up drunkenly telling them – and us – about his whole life. In a poem like ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ one can clearly see why Ezra Pound was influenced by Browning’s dramatic monologue, with their plainness of speech and the bluff, no-nonsense manner of Browning’s characters.
‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’.
Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps –
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
This is another dramatic monologue, spoken by a Spanish monk who chooses to confide in us, the reader, about the monastery where he lives and works – and especially his dislike for a fellow monk, Brother Lawrence. Victorian poetry is seldom more deliciously catty than it is here. Follow the link above to read the poem and our stanza-by-stanza analysis.
But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
Yet another dramatic monologue (detecting a theme among Robert Browning’s best poems yet?), ‘Andrea del Sarto’ was inspired by the real-life Renaissance painter Andrea d’Angolo. Browning may have been using the figure of Andrea del Sarto – who had let other things get in the way of his artistic ambitions – as a way of commenting on his own sense of failure as a poet, having struggled to achieve critical or commercial success for decades.
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand …
This short poem about a lover travelling for a nocturnal tryst with his beloved is very different from many of the other classic Robert Browning poems on this list. But its use of sexually suggestive imagery to describe the ‘pushing prow’ of the boat as it enters the cove is stamped with Browning’s bold, progressive style.
Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
‘Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon …
One of the first poems to respond to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, this 1863 poem is – you’ve guessed it – another dramatic monologue, spoken by the native, Caliban, from the magical island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Setebos is the invented name for the deity Caliban worships, believing Setebos to be the Creator of all things (the name is mentioned in Shakespeare’s play; one surprising legacy is that one of the moons of the planet Uranus was named after Setebos).
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
Reblogged this on shamansland.
I think I mentioned before R. Browning was the unlikely poet who sparked a 16yr old’s interest in poetry when he was on my school syllabus in the early 1960s. I liked the device of his dramatic dialogues and thought his poems sounded modern (ironic that he was by then regarded as old-hat and articifial!).
Very interesting! Thanks!
Spanish Cloister must win a prize for having one of the most unusual first words of any poem….absolutely love it, definitely one of Browning’s funnier works (he can be a little melancholic at times…..).
I remember a friend telling me how a poetry lecturer (who was quite softly spoken and well-mannered) reading that out in a lecture – by all accounts, it was quite a leap from his gentle voice to that attention-grabbing ‘G-r-r-r!’
In ‘Child Roland’ Browning uses a word that he doesn’t really understand – though not to the same devastating effect as he does in ‘Pippa Passes’ – a ‘slug-horn’ really does sound like a particularly nasty kind of of horn that the occupants of a Dark Tower might well use instead of a door-bell, but the word is actually derived from the Gaelic sluagh-ghairm (meaning war-cry), which became the modern ‘slogan’. He was probably misled by Chatterton.
He is also, in ‘My Last Duchess’, being rather unfair to Alfonso D’Este, the fifth Duke of Ferrara. His young wife did indeed die only two years after their marriage, but it could well have been from TB rather than poison. The unfortunate Duke was probably suspected at the time, and obiously right into the nineteenth century, because of his grandmother’s reputation, although poor Lucrezia Borgia never poisoned anyone either…
Good point about the real-life Duchess of Ferrara – will amend the post to make that clear.