Robert Browning

[Jay]

Does not... if you were not speaking about the baseball cap .
Do you wear any cap/hat/whatever?
ahem, hijacking Stan's thread...

[Stanislaw]

Hijacking it back, but staying on jays topic: usually I wear a berret or a tilly.

[Scheherazade]

I dont wear any headgear... my hair is so thick (matching my thick head ), it is impossible to find something to tuck my hair in...

[Stanislaw]

head band, like the good ole hippies?? lol

[Jay]

Scher... what about a helmet?

[mono]

I have to wear my beanie cap! Due to such cold weather, especially lately, my head (with extremely short, jet black hair) gets cold so easily.

[Jay]

http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/rbpoem.htm - though I'm more of Elizabeth fan
http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet37.html

[Stanislaw]

Cool, didn't realize those were around.

[ennison]

Browning is Victorian but reads like a modern. He plugged away at what he wanted to do until eventually he was recognised. His dramatic monologues can present difficulties for the reader since there is seldom a preamble or gloss to help. Being an autodidact his learning was frequently of a type different from the mainstream so his readers had to work hard to follow his story / thinking.(Perhaps even more today). Dramatic monologues allowed him to get inside the psychology of his characters and to speak to us 'in character'. The duke speaking in 'My Last Duchess' is an amazing study in pride, arrogance and misogyny. I feel that I've never quite grasped 'Porphyria's Lover' other than vaguely feeling that love here has gone very far wrong. But where the duke is bad, the speaker here is mad.Tennyson (another poetic giant) took some inspiration for 'Maud' from the latter poem.
The difference between Monologue and dramatic monologue is that the latter has a listener within the poem. So in 'Fra Lippo Lippi' the audience is the city watch whose job it is to stop any suspicious characters at night. In 'My Last Duchess' it is the marriage broker. The speaker's relationship to the audience within the poem is one of the questions we have to answer for ourselves and it modifies our relationship with the speaker.
Elizabeth, 'The Portugese' was a smashing poet herself and their marriage a happy one.

Here's the first stanza of 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' for Browning fans and those who want a taste:

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
It's edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

And of course

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's hats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

Which shows his lighter side but which is also based on a little known tale of a mass kidnapping in Germany. That kind of inspirational source was very much a mark of Browning, the polymath who'd had free reign in his father's massive library as a child.

[ennison]

Don't know why the lines are fully blocked. I typed them indented as in my copy. I'm just a learner at this routine. Apologies.

[Logos]

ennison, if you use the <INDENT></INDENT> tags (but with square brackets) by clicking this icon:
it looks like this:

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

and if you use the <CENTER> </CENTER> tags but again with square brackets by clicking on this icon
it looks like this:

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

Unless you want total control over formatting, use the <PHP> tags by clicking this icon

or the <CODE> tages, which comes out looking like this:

          My first thought was, he lied in every word,
           That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
             Askance to watch the working of his lie
              On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
               Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
                 Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

vB Code List

http://www.online-literature.com/for....php?do=bbcode
.
.

[ennison]

Thank you logos.

[lavendar1]

Though I do love the both of them, I wonder...cynically, I suppose, what Browning's real intentions were -- did he really love his wfe, or did he marry her (an established poet) to 'use' her status to promote himself?

[pandora]

Browning's most striking poem is "My last Dutchess" i think

[ennison]

Well since she a bed-ridden invalid walked from her father's house to be his wife I reckon that intelligent woman was moved by the power of love and he too. I don't see how their poetry did anything but complement one and other.