Poems
De Gustibus—
Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
(If our loves remain)
In an English lane,
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice—-
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,—-
The happier they!
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the bean-flowers’ boon,
And the blackbird’s tune,
And May, and June!
II.
What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurl
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O’ the grave, and loose my spirit’s bands,
And come again to the land of lands)—-
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree—-’tis a cypress—-stands
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o’ercruste
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water’s edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, for ever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there’s news to-day—-the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:
—-She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary’s saying serves for me—-
(When fortune’s malice
Lost her—-Calais)—-
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, “Italy.”
Such lovers old are I and she:
So it always was, so shall ever be!
– Imagery: Juxtaposes England’s ephemeral beauty (poppies, hazel coppice) against Italy’s rugged permanence (iron-spiked cypress, crumbling frescoes). Sensory decay (scorpions, melons) underscores impermanence.
– Form: Irregular stanzas and shifting rhymes mirror fragmented devotion to disparate locales. Conversational tone offsets Romantic-era formalism.
– Historical Context: References Bourbon King Ferdinand II’s 1848 assassination attempt, embedding political unrest within personal nostalgia. Victorian-era Italophilia intersects with Risorgimento tensions.
– Comparative Analysis: Unlike Browning’s dramatic monologues, this lyric leans confessional. Shares “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad”’s idealized Italy but subverts it with dystopic decay.
– Perspective: Speaker addresses a fellow “lover of trees,” creating dialectic between English tranquility and Italian harshness. Ghostly observers underscore memory’s persistence.
– Symbolism: The cypress—both sentinel and grave marker—fuses life/death. “Graved” Italy in the heart suggests love as mortal wound, unlike England’s transient romance.
– Cultural Commentary: Queen Mary’s lost Calais parallels the speaker’s displaced Italian longing, critiquing imperial nostalgia. The melon-bringer’s casual news undercuts political gravity.
– Emotional Tone: Nostalgia avoids sentimentality via stark details (baked cicala, blistered walls). Lighthearted English courtship contrasts Italy’s “crumbling” fervor.
– Underlying Tension: The poem’s title (“about tastes”) ironically masks territorial fixation. Browning’s own Italian exile inflects the unresolved dual allegiance.
– Stylistic Experiment: Fragmentary syntax (“red-rusted, / Rough iron-spiked”) mirrors decay. Abrupt shifts from romance to violence disrupt Victorian poetic seamlessness.
– Obscurity: Often overshadowed by Browning’s dramatic works, it distills his preoccupation with place-as-identity. Its bifurcated structure prefigures modernist fragmentation.
– Gender Dynamics: Female figures (lover, melon-bringer) serve as fleeting symbols of vitality, contrasting male speaker’s static, haunted fixation.
Robert Browning
(7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax.
His early long poems Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were acclaimed, but his reputation dwindled for a time – his 1840 poem Sordello was seen as wilfully obscure – and took over a decade to recover, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846, he married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved to Italy. By her death in 1861, he had published the collection Men and Women (1855). His Dramatis Personae (1864) and book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) made him a leading poet. By his death in 1889, he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. Societies for studying his work survived in Britain and the US into the 20th century.
