Literature Network » Robert Browning

Moved to tears Which book, poem or play has made you cry more than any other? Continuing our series, the writer and critic John Gross chooses Robert Browning's A Toccata of Galuppi's

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20040215
Author:John Gross

IN PRINCIPLE I would have expected poetry that reduced me to tears to be simple and direct. A Toccata of Galuppi's, by Robert Browning, is intricate and sometimes rather difficult, but there is no poem I know more liable to make me dab my eyes. Galuppi was an 18th-century Venetian composer. The poem combines a brilliant evocation of his world with a haunting sense of its evanescence, and of the evanescence of life itself. Galuppi's pleasure-loving Venetians lived for the moment. The speaker of the poem is a serious-minded Victorian, but he can't

bring himself to scold them.

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