Robert Browning Resources

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Educated mostly at home, Browning was an extremely bright child and a voracious reader who learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian by the time he was fourteen. He attended the University of London in 1828, the first year it opened, but left to pursue his own reading - his verse is full of references and allusions to other texts. 

In the 1830s he met the actor William Macready and tried several times to write verse drama for the stage. At about the same time he began to discover that his real talents lay in taking a single character and allowing him to discover himself to us by revealing more of himself in his speeches than he suspects - the characteristics of the dramatic monologue. 

He married fellow poet Elizabeth  Barrett in 1846 and a few days later they eloped to Italy (to escape her domineering father), where they lived until her death in 1861. The years in Florence were among the happiest for both of them, although Elizabeth was a much more successful poet during her lifetime. The Ring and the Book (1868-9), based on an "old yellow book" which told of a Roman murder and trial, finally won Browning considerable popularity. He and Tennyson were now mentioned together as the foremost poets of the age.l

Dramatic Monologue

Robert Browning is know especially for writing dramatic monologues. When this term applies to poetry it means a poem delivered as a first person monologue, in the voice of a character who is not the author.

This introduces us to the idea of the persona. The persona is a real or imaginary character, through whose voice the poem is delivered. The words of the poem are meant to be those uttered by a specific character to an audience in a particular dramatic situation, real or imaginary.

The audience may be defined or implied. The audience may be specifically addressed and obvious given the particular context of the poem, or it may be ill-defined and ambiguous.

Dramatic monologues tend to employ irony and ambiguity. Poets often wish to present the persona as a fully rounded complex character, with faults as well as virtues. As narrators do not willingly reveal their faults, this will often be done through irony so that faults are unintentionally exposed.

The dramatic monologue is particularly associated with Victorian era, the poets Tennyson and Browning developing it independently of each other. It enabled them to present complex perspectives in a dramatic way.

Examples

Browning used the form extensively. Particularly well known are My Last Duchess and Porphyria's Lover. In both of these he evokes an imaginary situation in a realistic historical context, in which the murders of the women in the titles are revealed to an implied audience. Readers are able to infer the motives for these acts by looking beyond the subjectivity of the justifications.

Lesson on 'The Patriot'

Useful Resources

For a Browning study guide, click here.

See Gradesaver.com for summaries and analysis of all Browning's poems.

Pied Piper of Hamelin Line by Line Breakdown

Pied Piper Breakdown.docx


Pied Piper of Hamelin analysis by Robert Green.
Pied Piper of Hamelin Reading: Here

Excellent Fra Lippo Lippi analysis with an exemplar essay on lines 1-44 here. An annotated version of the poem is on the Victorian Web which explains some of the unfamiliar words; also a very useful annotated PDF of the poem which explains the narrative methods is here.

How does Browning Tell The Story in Fra Lippo Lippi?

 

Porphyrias Lover from Letra Essencia

BBC Bitesize on Porphyria's Lover is here.

Porphyria’s lover from Helen Williams