APRIL POETRY NEWSLETTER TWO

ROBERT BROWNING

Browning was born in London in 1812. Although he studied at the University of London he was as much self-taught as formally educated and he dropped out of his studies after a year. His early work included a long narrative poem called Sordello which to most Victorians was completely impenetrable. Jane Carlyle famously read the entire poem– nearly 6,000 lines – and insisted she did not know  whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book.

Browning also wrote verse dramas including Pippa Passes which is the source of his unfortunate and innocent use of the word ‘twat’ which he believed to be a word describing a nun’s wimple rather than an obscene word for the vagina. Apparently, James Murray and the other early editors of the OED enquired about the source of the poet’s knowledge of this indelicate word, and Browning directed them to the 1660 poem Vanity of Vanities:

“They talk’t of his having a Cardinalls Hat:
They’d send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat.”

Poor man- you can see how it happened.

In 1844 he read a volume of poems written by a reclusive invalid named Elizabeth Barrett and wrote her a fan letter. The two embarked on a celebrated courtship culminating in the couple eloping and secretly marrying in 1846. They spent much of the next fifteen years living in Italy, until Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in 1861. I always think Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning would make fabulous material for a Psychoanalytical conference as Browning stayed at home until he was 30 and his poems were published because his parents financed the publication. 

He and Barret Browning must have had some fascinating parental issues.

It wasn’t until the 1860s that Browning achieved widespread popularity and acclaim.

Three random and curious facts-

There is a town in Kentucky called Pippa Passes.

There is a possibility that Browning was of dual heritage. Browning's paternal grandmother, Margaret Tittle, who had inherited a sugar plantation in St Kitts, was rumoured (within the family) to have an African Caribbean heritage.

Oscar Wilde famously said of him that "Meredith was a prose Browning, and so was Browning" although in fact he greatly admired his work but felt  it was fiction -just not poetry.

METRE ETC

 ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ is in the anapaestic metre – that is, two light stresses followed by a heavy stress. As an example ‘As I sat with his head ’twixt my knees on the ground’, the heavy stresses fall on ‘sat’, ‘head’, ‘knees’, and ‘ground’: ‘As I sat with his head ’twixt my knees on the ground’. This anapaestic metre – more pedantically, anapaestic tetrameter – works effectively to convey the frantic speed of the ride.

In 1889, it became the first poem (spoken by the author) to be recorded on a phonograph, when Browning recited words from the poem into an Edison phonograph at a dinner party. Unfortunately, as we discovered when Paul played it he forgot the words to his own poem and was reduced to shouting his own name into the cylinder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_They_Brought_the_Good_News_from_Ghent_to_Aix

The film about an overland horse race is called Hidalgo (Spanish for gentleman). I know little of horses, but in the film he does seem significantly disapproving and self righteous as might befit a Spanish aristocrat.

Below is a parody written by   R. J.Sellar and Walter C. Yeatman who wrote Ten Sixty Six and All That – the Horrible Histories of our day. I loved it when I was a child and thought people might enjoy this. If you have a tender nature and fear it may ruin the poem for you please ignore. Personally I enjoy both, apart from the horse abuse.

How I brought the good news from Aix to Ghent or Vice Versa

I sprang to the rollocks and Jorrocks and me,

And I galloped, you galloped, we galloped all three.

Not a word to each other: we kept changing place,

Neck to neck, back to front, ear to ear, face to face:

And we yelled once or twice, when we heard a clock chime,

“Would you kindly oblige us, is that the right time?”

As I galloped, you galloped, he galloped, we galloped,

ye galloped, they two shall have galloped: let us trot.

I unsaddled the saddle, unbuckled the bit,

Unshackled the bridle (the thing didn’t fit)

And ungalloped, ungalloped, ungalloped, ungalloped a bit.

Then I cast off my buff coat, let my bowler hat fall,

Took off both my boots and my trousers and all –

Drank off my stirrup-cup, felt a bit tight,

And unbridled the saddle: it still wasn’t right.

Then all I remember is, things reeling round,

As I sat with my head ‘twixt my ears on the ground –

For imagine my shame when they asked what I meant

And I had to confess that I’d been, gone and went

And forgotten the news I was bringing to Ghent,

Though I’d galloped and galloped and galloped and galloped and galloped

And galloped and galloped and galloped. (Had I not would have been galloped?)

ENVOI

So I sprang to a taxi and shouted “To Aix!”

And he blew on his horn and he threw off his brakes.

And all the way back till my money was spent

We rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled –

And eventually sent a telegram.

EXTRA POEM

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The sonnet John Keats revised as he waited for the ship to sail for Italy.

FINALLY

Poem Programme for the next weeks –

April 22^nd. Angie

April 29^th. Elizabeth

May 6^th. Damien

May 13^th. Liz

Ann has chosen the poem for April 15^th.

Best Wishes

Elizabeth