Favourite poems 3 - Home Thoughts, from Abroad by Robert Browning

 

As I told you, Cro and I used to learn poems by heart as we walked around Martlesham Creek each morning during lockdown. As it was in April and May this one was very apt:

Poetry Magazine

July/August 2024Subscribe

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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!

The thing that you get when learning it to say to each other is that it takes on a spoken life which is quite different from its apparent life on the page.

Though the lines and stanzas appear to give it 'structure', it actually moves much more freely than that, leaping across line ends in the way that spontaneous speech does

You notice this too with good and bad productions of Shakespeare (and I suppose by this I do mean actually good and bad actors - surely the director didn't demand that you kill it stone dead). If the actor has really really learned the lines so that it sounds like their own words, it is like night and day compared to a lazy 'read out' version. We once saw the Propeller Theatre doing Twelfth Night and whoever was playing the Fool was absolutely the dogs bollocks. It just sounded like he had thought of each word just then in front of you. Pure magic.

But back to Browning - he manages to show you, through his mind's eye - because he's not in England, he's abroad remember - all the visual and kinetic and sonic glory of an English April. 

And happily, with a lucky hit of immunotherapy, Cro managed to see another Spring and was so grateful for it. We saw our first swallows on the Cleveland Way and saw the glories of Suffolk bluebell woods and boxing hares one more time together.

And not a melon flower to be seen.