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 This
week is fairly brief. That's because I'm in Liverpool, England at
the moment, and I asked the Editor of The Mediadrome (who in a good
hour was born) (anybody recognize the Quote of the Week?) to run
one of the earlier ones, in the hope that none of our loyal readership
would notice that we were cheating them.
But no!
So I decided
to do a rather brief piece based on a single poet: Robert Browning
(1812 - 1889). He was born in Camberwell, and educated by private
tutors. His parents were wealthy enough to allow him to travel and
to be a poet as if it were a [real] profession. (Hah! I remark,
bitterly!). He became known to literary figures such as William
Wordsworth and Landor after the publication of Paracelsus
in 1835, but he was unrecognized by the public until Men and
Women appeared twenty years later.
He was therefore
almost unknown when, in 1846, he eloped with Elizabeth Barrett (1806
- 1861). Her family lived at 50, Wimpole Street in London, and were
not altogether happy with this turn of events. He called her his
'Little Portuguese', and she wrote a 44 sonnets for him under the
title Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), so some people
believed they were translations!. For the next fifteen years they
lived in Italy, where much of Browning's best work was  inspired
and composed. After Elizabeth's death in 1861 he lived mainly in
London. He achieved fame with The Ring and the Book which
was published over the period 1868-9. He died in Venice, and was
buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. (This biography was
chiefly drawn from Browning: A selection by W. E. Williams,
from the series The Penguin Poets, published by Penguin Books;
this volume appeared first in 1954). In his introduction, Williams
remarks that: "In Browning's lifetime, and for many years afterwards,
there existed numerous Browning Societies. Their chief aim was to
elucidate the philosophic subtleties, which were thought to be concealed
in the master's work; …" "What they found was nobody's business,
least of all Browning's. He was not a deep thinker …But Browning
was a great and original poet." "Original because he brought to
English poetry some remarkable innovations of style; and great because
he used those innovations to illuminate many kinds of human behaviour.
…he could, with the poet's instantaneous intuition, reveal in a
flash the motives which make men and women behave the way they do."
We have already
used number of Browning's poems in these articles in The Mediadrome.
Our archive lists five items, but in fact we have used rather more
- A Grammarian's
Funeral, for example, and quotes from many others! I would
like to use The Pied Piper of Hamelin, but it's too long
for a Poem of the Week! Then there's Rabbi Ben Ezra:
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith 'A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid!'
But I have decided
to use The Patriot:
an Old Story; one of his funny poems about the internal politics
of ecclesiastical houses (I could have picked The Bishop Orders
His Tomb, but instead I am picking a long-time favorite of mine):
Soliloquy
of the Spanish Cloister. The last poem this week was written
very close to Browning's death: it is the Epilogue
to his final book, Asolando.
No more wine? then we'll push back chairs and talk.
A final glass for me, though: cool, I' faith!
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