Robert Browning – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers’, one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, is a fine love poem about her courtship and eventual marriage to her fellow poet, Robert Browning.

Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers
Plucked in the garden, all the summer through
And winter, and it seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers,
So, in the like name of that love of ours,
Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold days I withdrew
From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers
Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,
And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,
Here’s ivy!— take them, as I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,
And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine.

A Short Analysis of Robert Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Oh, to be in England’: the opening line of Robert Browning’s poem praising England while abroad has become more famous than the poem’s actual title, ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’. Before we proceed to an analysis of the poem’s language and meaning, here’s a reminder of it.

A Short Analysis of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is one of Browning’s first great poems, written when he was in his early twenties. It is also one of the first great dramatic monologues in English verse, the 1830s being the decade in which Browning and Tennyson developed the genre, penning a series of classic poems which see the poet adopting a persona and ‘staging’ a soliloquy given by an (often unreliable) speaker. Here, the speaker is the titular lover of the girl, Porphyria.

10 of the Best Robert Browning Poems Everyone Should Read

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.

A Very Short Biography of Robert Browning

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Robert Browning (1812-89) is, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the most famous and widely studied poet of the Victorian era. Yet for the first two decades that he was writing, he was virtually ignored by the public. In this post we offer a very short biography of Browning, a brief introduction to his life and work, touching upon the most curious and interesting aspects.

Robert Browning was born in London in 1812. Aged 14, he wrote a poem, ‘The Dance of Death’, in which Ague, Consumption, Fever, Madness, and Pestilence compete for the title of man’s worst foe; this early poem features many of the macabre hallmarks of his later poetry, dealing with death, murder, and ugliness (physical and moral) as it so often does.