With today’s poem, the Sun concludes Victorian Week, a look at some of the 19th-century poets unfairly dismissed by the sneer at the Victorians that their children, the Edwardians, left to us as a literary and historical legacy. Robert Browning (1812–1889) fits a little awkwardly in this category. His name still appears alongside Tennyson’s in lists of the era’s dominant poets, and his poetic skill, quirky phrasings, and linguistic density made him harder to dismiss than other Victorian poets. Still, with a birthday on May 7, Browning deserves to round off our week of Victoriana. In “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” written while the poet was in Italy, Browning gives a classic expression of the peculiar (and perduring) kind of English nature patriotism‚ contrasting the spring buttercups of England and the “gaudy melon-flower” of Italy, in rhymed lines varying metrical length.

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!

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.