Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)

by Robert Browning

  Spring Song

  Published 1886 in The New Amphion (‘The Book of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair’); then incorporated (without the title) as the concluding lines of ‘Parleying with Gerard de Lairesse’ (Parleyings, 1887), introduced as follows:

  Here’s rhyme

  Such as one makes now, – say, when Spring repeats

  That miracle the Greek Bard sadly greets:

  ‘Spring for the tree and herb – no Spring for us!’

  Let Spring come: why, a man salutes her thus:

  The lyric has been placed out of chronological sequence in order to end the volume. It undoubtedly refers in some sense to Elizabeth Barrett, but not in specific detail: she is buried at Florence under a marble monument, not under a ‘mound’ in what is clearly an English churchyard. In a letter to Browning during their courtship Elizabeth Barrett referred to an untitled draft of ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’ as Browning’s ‘spring-song’. Browning is known to have re-read the courtship letters late in life.

  Chronology

  1812 Born 7 May in Camberwell, son of Robert Browning, clerk in Bank of England, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann.

  1812 Birth of Sarianna, RB’s only sibling.

  1820–26 Weekly boarder at Revd Thomas Ready’s school in Peckham.

  1823–4 Becomes friends with Eliza and Sarah Flower, wards of W. J. Fox, Unitarian minister, political radical and editor of the Monthly Repository, which will publish early poems by RB in the mid 1830s.

  1826–8 Privately educated at home; writes a volume called Incondita (= trifles) but destroys it; two poems (‘The Dance of Death’ and ‘The First-Born of Egypt’) survive in copies made by Sarah Flower, who says RB was fourteen when he wrote them.

  1828 Attends courses in Latin, Greek and German at London University (founded 1827, now University College London) but leaves May 1829.

  1830 Contributes to the Trifler, an amateur literary magazine.

  1832 Sees the famous actor Edmund Kean in one of his last performances as Richard III, and conceives a ‘foolish plan’ to ‘assume & realise I know not how many different characters’ (poet, novelist, composer, etc.); writes Pauline, supposedly the first product of this plan.

  1833 Pauline published anonymously (Saunders & Otley), paid for by RB’s aunt Mrs Silverthorne; reviewed favourably in Monthly Repository; a copy sent by Fox to John Stuart Mill for a review which never appeared eventually finds its way back to RB, who responds to Mill’s comments with copious annotations of his own. Not a single copy of the poem is sold, and RB does not acknowledge his authorship until the threat of pirate publication forces him to include Pauline in the Poetical Works of 1868.

  1834 March–June: Travels to Russia as unpaid secretary on diplomatic mission.

  Begins writing Sordello, but lays it aside when a friend suggests the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus as subject for a poem.

  September: Begins work on Paracelsus.

  1835 Publication of Paracelsus (Effingham Wilson); RB’s father funds this and all his son’s volumes, except Strafford, until 1846. The poem has considerable critical success, notably with the actor-manager W. C. Macready, who persuades RB to write for the stage.

  1836 Helps the critic John Forster complete his prose Life of Strafford and again lays Sordello aside to write his own tragedy, Strafford.

  1837 Strafford published (Longman) and produced at Covent Garden on 1 May, with Macready in title role; closes after five performances.

  1838 Travels by sea to Trieste, then Venice and nearby ‘delicious Asolo’, together with other locations mentioned in Sordello.

  1839 Macready rejects RB’s second play, King Victor and King Charles.

  1840 Sordello published (Moxon, RB’s publisher until after 1846); received with near-universal derision. Macready rejects The Return of the Druses, despite RB’s strenuous efforts to make it acceptable. Browning family moves from Camberwell to New Cross, Hatcham, in Surrey.

  1841 Publication of Pippa Passes, first in series of cheap, paper-bound pamphlets with series title Bells and Pomegranates (RB later explained that these terms derived from a passage in the Bible and were intended to symbolize an alternation or mixture of ‘grave and gay, singing and sermonizing’). Macready reluctantly accepts A Blot in the ’Scutcheon for the stage.

  1842 March: Publication of King Victor and King Charles, no. 2 of Bells and Pomegranates.

  July: RB reviews a biography of Tasso in the Foreign Quarterly Review but turns the review into an essay defending the eighteenth-century poet and forger Thomas Chatterton; this ‘Essay on Chatterton’ is RB’s only formal piece of prose criticism apart from the ‘Essay on Shelley’ published ten years later.

  November: Publication of Dramatic Lyrics, no. 3 of Bells and Pomegranates, RB’s first collection of shorter poems, including ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’.

  1843 January: Publication of The Return of the Druses, no. 4 of Bells and Pomegranates.

  February: Publication of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, no. 5 of Bells and Pomegranates; the play is finally produced at Drury Lane but closes after three performances and ends RB’s friendship with Macready.

  1844 Offers Colombe’s Birthday to Charles Kean, son of Edmund Kean and Macready’s leading rival, but negotiations break down and RB publishes the play as no. 6 of Bells and Pomegranates; he never attempts to write for the stage again (his last two plays, published in 1846, were not offered to a theatre).

  July: Travels by sea to Naples, and also visits Rome and Florence for the first time.

  December: Returns to find flattering reference to his poetry in Elizabeth Barrett’s recently published Poems. EB, six years older, financially independent though living under her father’s roof, and far better known as a poet, was a reclusive invalid, but RB was already an admirer of her work and their mutual friend John Kenyon encouraged him to write to her.

  1845 10 January: Writes to Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Dear Miss Barrett, I love your poems with all my heart … and I love you too.’ The correspondence develops into a courtship, with letters and meetings (beginning on 20 May) increasing in frequency and intimacy, the latter carefully kept from EB’s domineering father, Edward Moulton Barrett, who had a deep aversion to the thought of any of his children (of either sex) marrying.

  November: RB publishes his second collection of shorter poems, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, no. 7 of Bells and Pomegranates, including ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, ‘The Lost Leader’ and ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’.

  1846 February: Publication of Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, two plays which together make up no. 8 of Bells and Pomegranates, the last in the series.

  10 September: EB’s father announces that the family is moving out of their London residence in Wimpole Street while it is repainted; alarmed at the thought of being separated, RB and EB decide on an immediate clandestine marriage, which takes place on 12 September at St Marylebone Church; a week later they leave for Italy, arriving at Pisa on 14 October. Mr Barrett renounces his daughter, refuses to answer her letters or acknowledge the birth of his grandson, and dies unreconciled to her in 1857.

  1847 RB and EB move to Florence, eventually settling in Casa Guidi on the south bank of the Arno, their home until EB’s death except for visits to England and Paris in 1851–2, 1855–6 and 1858.

  1849 Publication of RB’s Poems in two volumes, RB’s first collected edition, though omitting Strafford and Sordello; issued by Chapman & Hall, EB’s publishers, who continue to publish RB until 1868, except for a volume of selections issued by Moxon in 1865.

  8 March: Birth of the Brownings’ only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (nicknamed ‘Penini’, then ‘Pen’); ten days later RB’s mother dies.

  EB shows RB the sonnets she wrote during their courtship, eventually published as Sonnets from the Portuguese (title suggested by RB).

  1850 Publication of EB’s collected Poems including Sonnets from the Portugue
se, and of RB’s Christmas-Eve and Easter Day.

  1851 Publication of EB’s Casa Guidi Windows, a reflection of her (and RB’s) support for the Italian movement for unity and independence, the ‘Risorgimento’. RB’s father becomes embroiled in a breach-of-promise suit.

  1852 RB’s father is forced to leave England to avoid paying damages and settles with Sarianna in Paris. RB writes introduction to a volume of Shelley’s letters (all but two of which turn out to be forged); now known as the ‘Essay on Shelley’, RB’s second and last formal piece of prose criticism.

  1855 Publication of Men and Women, consisting of fifty-one poems including ‘Love Among the Ruins’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ and the dedication to EB, ‘One Word More’. RB had counted on the volume restoring his reputation; the disappointing reviews (and sales) plunge him into a deep depression.

  1856 Publication of EB’s Aurora Leigh, a critical (and commercial) success. A legacy from John Kenyon gives the Brownings financial security.

  1857 Death of EB’s father.

  1860 Publication of EB’s Poems before Congress.

  1861 29 June: EB dies at Casa Guidi. A month later RB leaves Florence with Pen; he settles in London, with holidays in Scotland, France, Switzerland and, in later years, Italy again, though never Florence.

  1862 Publication of EB’s Last Poems, selected and edited by RB.

  1863 Publication of Selections from the Poetical Works, chosen by RB’s friends John Forster and B. W. Procter, and of Poetical Works (3 vols.), including Strafford and Sordello. Further volumes of selections are published in 1865 (Moxon), 1872 and 1880 (Smith, Elder).

  1864 Publication of Dramatis Personae, including ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, ‘A Death in the Desert’, ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ and ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’. For the first time in RB’s career, a second edition is called for. Starts work on The Ring and the Book.

  1866 Death of RB’s father in Paris; Sarianna moves to London and lives with RB.

  1867 Awarded honorary MA by Oxford University and honorary fellowship by Balliol. The Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, is a friend, and RB wants Pen to enter Balliol, but Pen fails the examination and eventually matriculates at Christ Church (1869); from 1874 he studies painting and sculpture and pursues a minor artistic career until his father’s death.

  1868 Publication of Poetical Works (6 vols., Smith, Elder, RB’s publishers for the remainder of his career).

  1868–9 November-February: Publication of The Ring and the Book in four instalments, each volume containing three books of the poem; RB at last achieves critical acclaim and a measure of commercial success.

  1869 A friendship with Louisa, Lady Ashburton, leads to her proposing that they marry; RB refuses (‘my heart [is] buried at Florence’), after which Lady Ashburton lets it be known that she refused him, the version accepted by RB’s biographers until the mid 1980s.

  1871 Publication of Balaustion’s Adventure, a narrative poem incorporating a ‘transcript’ (RB’s preferred term for ‘translation’) of Euripides’ Alcestis; reaches several editions. Publication of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society, a long dramatic monologue spoken by the Prince, a thinly disguised portrait of the recently abdicated Emperor Napoleon III.

  1872 Publication of Fifine at the Fair, a long dramatic monologue spoken by Don Juan; RB calls it his ‘most metaphysical and boldest’ poem since Sordello. Second edition of The Ring and the Book published.

  1873 Publication of Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, a narrative poem based on a recent sensational court-case in Normandy.

  1875 Publication of Aristophanes’ Apology, a long dramatic monologue spoken by the heroine of Balaustion’s Adventure but containing lengthy interpolations by Aristophanes and incorporating another ‘transcript’ of Euripides, this time the Heracles. Publication of The Inn Album, a narrative poem set in England with a melodramatic plot.

  1876 Publication of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper: with Other Poems, a collection of shorter poems; the title poem is a satire on RB’s critics.

  1877 Publication of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, with a preface in which RB defends the extreme literalness of his translation.

  1878 Publication in one volume of La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic, the first a philosophical elegy in memory of RB’s friend Annie Egerton Smith, who had died suddenly while on holiday in the Alps with RB and Sarianna, the second a comic poem about the literary pretensions of two figures from a village in Brittany.

  1879 Publication of Dramatic Idyls, a collection of shorter poems including ‘Martin Relph’, ‘Ivàn Ivànovitch’ (founded on a legend about a woman who threw her own children to the wolves pursuing her sleigh, which RB had heard in Russia forty-five years before) and ‘Ned Bratts’.

  1880 Publication of Dramatic Idyls, Second Series (prompted by critical and commercial success of previous volume), including ‘Clive’ and ‘Pan and Luna’.

  1881 Browning Society founded.

  1882 Awarded honorary degree of DCL by Oxford University.

  1883 Publication of Jocoseria, a collection of shorter poems including ‘Ixion’ (an attack on the doctrine of eternal punishment) and ‘Never the Time and the Place’.

  1884 Awarded honorary degree of LLD by Edinburgh University. Publication of Ferishtah’s Fancies, philosophical and religious poems spoken by the Persian sage Ferishtah alternating with shorter lyrics; the volume is one of RB’s most successful and goes into several editions.

  1887 Publication of Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, comprising an indirect autobiography in which the poet ‘parleys’ with obscure figures from the past who were important not just in their day but in his own childhood and early youth, among them the poet Christopher Smart, the painter Francesco Furini and the musician Charles Avison.

  1888–9 Publication of Poetical Works, 16 vols.

  1889 12 December. Browning dies in Venice, on the publication day of his final volume Asolando. Difficulties about burying him in EB’s grave in Florence (the cemetery is officially closed) could probably have been overcome, but Pen accepts instead an offer of a grave in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

  Further Reading

  For a broader survey, see the chapter on ‘Studying Browning’ in John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, Robert Browning, London, 1996 (Longman Studies in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature).

  1. EDITIONS

  The Ring and the Book, ed. R. D. Altick, Harmondsworth, 1971 (Penguin English Poets)

  The Poems of Browning, ed. J. Pettigrew and T. J. Collins, 2 vols., Harmondsworth, 1981 (Penguin English Poets)

  Poetical Works of Robert Browning, general editor I. Jack, Oxford, 1981– (in progress) (Oxford English Texts)

  Robert Browning: The Poems, ed. J. Woolford and D. Karlin, London, 1991– (in progress) (Longman Annotated English Poets)

  Robert Browning: An Edition of the Major Works, ed. A. Roberts, Oxford, 1999 (Oxford Authors)

  2. CORRESPONDENCE

  The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. P. Kelley, R. Hudson and S. Lewis, Winfield (Kansas), 1984– (in progress; vols. 1–15 so far issued, to 1847)

  The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F. G. Kenyon, 2 vols., London, 1897

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, ed. L. Huxley, London, 1929

  Letters of Robert Browning, ed. T. L. Hood, London, 1933

  Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed in their Letters, London, 1937

  Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. E. C. McAleer, Austin (Texas), 1951

  New Letters of Robert Browning, ed. W. C. DeVane and K. L. Knickerbocker, London, 1951

  Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, ed. P. Landis, Urbana (Illinois), 1958

  Browning to His American Friends, ed. G. R. Hudson, London, 1965


  The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846, ed. E. Kintner, Cambridge (Mass.), 1969

  Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs Thomas Fitzgerald 1876–1889, ed. E. C. McAleer, Cambridge (Mass.), 1969

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs David Ogilvy 1849–1861, ed. P. Heydon and P. Kelley, London, 1974

  Browning’s Trumpeter: The Correspondence of Robert Browning and Frederick F. Furnivall 1872–1889, ed. W. S. Peterson, Washington D.C., 1979

  More Than Friend: The Letters of Robert Browning to Katherine de Kay Bronson, ed. M. Meredith, Waco (Texas) and Winfield (Kansas), 1985

  Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: A Selection from the Courtship Correspondence, ed. D. Karlin, Oxford, 1989

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Her Sister Arabella, ed. S. Lewis, Winfield (Kansas), 2002

  3. BIOGRAPHY

  Mrs (Alexandra Sutherland) Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning, London, 1891

  W. H. Griffin and H. C. Minchin, The Life of Robert Browning, London, 1910; 2nd edn, 1938

  Betty Miller, Robert Browning: A Portrait, London, 1952

  Maisie Ward, Robert Browning and His World, 2 vols., London, 1967–9

  William Irvine and Park Honan, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet, New Haven (Conn.), 1974