Today’s Poem: Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

The first fine careless rapture

Joseph Wolf, Chaffinch, c. 1840 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

by Robert Browning

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!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops — at the bent spray’s edge —
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
— Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
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Here, the day after the May 7 birthday of Robert Browning (1812–1889), Today’s Poem — an expression of longing for the English April — may feel a little behindhand. But then, we’re a little behindhand in considering Robert Browning at all at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Since the end of January last year, we’ve looked at three poems — “A Man’s Requirements,” “My Letters, All Dead Paper,” and “Grief” — by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), who married Robert Browning in 1846. If we haven’t given the same attention to her husband, the reason is chiefly that so many of his most famous poems are relatively long.

Technically, of course, it’s not as though we don’t have room to print long poems. Print isn’t even the right word. Cyberspace, where we publish, has no word count. But when we began this venture, we had in our minds the idea of newspaper poetry, the gesture of putting poems in front of people every day, along with the weather report, the comics, and the classifieds. Because in a newspaper space is limited, this poetry would of necessity be concise.

So although from time to time we have played a little fast and loose with the brevity paradigm — cyberspace, again, has no word count — we’ve tended generally toward shorter poems. We’ve tended toward Mrs. Browning, author of Sonnets from the Portuguese, rather than Mr. Browning of the dramatic monologue. We’ve also featured the relatively obscure Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who distilled Browning’s signature genre into the compressed space of the sonnet.

Michele Gordigiani, Robert Browning, 1858 (Wikimedia Commons)

But this week holds Robert Browning’s birthday, and it’s springtime. What better moment to turn our attention to Browning’s famous, much-quoted, and admittedly brief lyric, “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad?” The poem appears in Browning’s 1845 “Second Series” of poetry pamphlets, collectively entitled Bells and Pomegranates; the “First Series,” published in 1841, marks the appearance of perhaps his most famous dramatic monologue, “My Last Duchess,” under the simple heading, “Italy.”

Browning had first visited Italy, the implicit setting for “Home Thoughts,” in 1838 and had returned for a sojourn in 1844, the year before his rapturous correspondence with and courtship of Elizabeth Barrett of Wimpole Street, London. From the period of that first tour, Italian scenes — particularly scenes of Italian art — took up residence in his imagination. He would, after his marriage, take up permanent residence in Florence, among those very scenes. Yet “Home-Thoughts,” dating from sometime between that previous year’s visit and the publication of the “Second Series,” belongs to a yearning for something else: the natural beauties of the English springtime.

In an octave rhymed ababccdd, followed by a twelve-line stanza rhymed aabcbcddeeff, the poem seems to anticipate, or else to respond to, a conversation in letters between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett early in 1845. Browning, writing from bucolic Surrey, has alluded to the coming spring — even in February, “the birds know it,” he writes. Barrett, city-bound and languishing in indifferent health, responds that for her,

unhappily, the snowdrop is much the same as the snow — it feels as cold underfoot — and I have grown sceptical about “the voice of the turtle,” the east winds blow so loud. April is a Parthian with a dart, and May (at least the early part of it) a spy in the camp. That is my idea of what you call spring . . . A little later comes my spring; and indeed after such severe weather, from which I have just escaped with my life, I may thank it for coming at all. How happy you are, to be able to listen to the “birds” without the commentary of the east wind, which, like other commentaries, spoils the music.

Barrett also affirms that to read a poet’s work is to know something of the man himself. “Is it true, as you say, that I ‘know so “little”’ of you? And is it true, as others say, that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature, . . . that in the minor sense, man is not made in the image of God? It is not true, to my mind.”

In Today’s Poem — whether it’s meant explicitly as an answer to Barrett or not — we glimpse the Robert Browning who would describe, in yet another letter to his future wife, his recollection of petting a garden spider: memory of an experience of the natural world, formalized as an experience in language. We see, in other words, a mind that can shift its field of the concern from art to natural philosophy, from the monumental and enduring to the insignificant and ephemeral — and back again.

Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that that mind could hold those things together, as a unity that would drive his own art. In “My Last Duchess,” the duchess, ephemeral in life as the spring flowers, is juxtaposed with her presentation as an artistic composition, far more satisfactory to the poem’s speaker than the disposable girl herself. It’s from that tension between the fleeting unpredictability of life and the monumental fixity of art that that poem derives its urgency.

“Home Thoughts” engages something of the same tension, though in this case the focus is the springtime as composed in the imagination, juxtaposed only at the end with the “gaudy melon flower” that decorates the speaker’s setting in the present. Here the natural philosopher is noticing things, as in his letter he narrates the structure of the garden spider’s web.

The poem’s metrical movements, roving among trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter, contribute to the sense of one looking around, shifting his gaze from one sight to another. But he notices these sights, in all their minutiae, in absence and memory. The looking-around experience itself is artifice, a prosodic construction.

The poor prosaic melon flower could never compete with an entire idealized English spring landscape, where it’s notably not raining, and where even the thrush is an artist, carefully rephrasing his “first fine careless rapture.” But then this is precisely what the poet himself is doing, the same thing he intuitively does in the intimacy of a letter to his beloved: the ephemerata of memory and longing, transfigured as ars poetica.

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