Robert Browning 'Porphyria's Lover'

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the last line of this poem? Is the speaker surprised, relieved disappointed? On the page they are all possible. Even the best reader has to choose. And for that reason I have been avoiding this poem for far too long.

Browning was the master of the dramatic monologue. And he perfected what we might loosely call ‘performative dissonance’. What is being said, is qualified or contradicted or undermined by the way it is being said. It’s an endemic characteristic in 19th Century fiction, from Gogol to Poe to Le Fanu to James.

It’s harder to achieve in a single monologue which has to create its own context. The effect is most famously achieved in ‘My Last Duchess’ where the message the speaker thinks he’s sending, and the one we receive, are so very different. He took it as far as it could go in “The Ring and the Book’ where the reader is presented with different versions of the same story.

In this case the effect is created much more simply, because what the speaker does and says are so far out of the normal definitions of sane behaviour. The problem is how to make him sound believable. If you are paying attention to the first half you can be forgiven for thinking you’re in familiar romance story territory. Then comes the swerve.

One of the familiar critical games to play with this poem is to try and gender the speaker from evidence within the poem. If you put aside the assumption the speaker is male, you will find no evidence within the poem to prove this. On the other hand, that’s also true for any number of first person poems. Browning exploits this common feature as part of the overall creepiness of the poem. (Creepiness is a very technical term…)

Basil Bunting's 'What the Chairman Told Tom'.

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts, 
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

You can enjoy this poem as a joke, or as a caricature of a very common attitude towards poetry. It’s not work in the way being a bus conductor is work, and if the ten year old son can do it and rhyme, and the school teacher thinks that the poetry isn’t good, after all, school teachers know about this stuff, what claim does the poet have to any type of excellence, let alone any financial reward.

But beyond the grim humour is something else. The issue of public funding for the arts, and poetry especially. The Chairman, for all his bluster, has a point, or a series of points. And if instead of dismissing him as an uneducated and unsympathetic whatever, you try and refute or answer his points, you might find the exercise not as straight forward as it seems.

I’ve always assumed the Tom In Question is Tom Pickard, but I have no evidence to support that.

This is taken from the excellent Bloodaxe edition of Bunting’s Complete Poems.

Charlotte Mew's 'The Farmer's Bride'

This poem is taken from ‘Modern Women Poets’ edited by Deryn Rees-Jones (Bloodaxe 2005). It’s an excellent anthology, as is the companion volume of analysis, ‘Consorting with Angels’.

I know very little about Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) despite my attempts to learn more. But I admire this poem because it creates the Farmer’s Bride through the incomprehension of the farmer. A modern writer would probably be more stident, condemn the farmer as an animal, and bore the reader.

But Mew suggests his incomprehension is genuine. His feeling that something unnatural is happening is grounded in his version of what is natural which is reflected in the animals and changing seasons around him. The poem both accepts this and criticises it as limited.

The poem allows the reader to sympathise with both characters.

This makes it far more interesting, and thought provoking, than something which beats the reader with slogans.

Bruce Dawe's 'And a Good Friday Was Had By All'

This is taken from Bruce Dawe’s ‘Sometimes Gladness’ a book I’d recommend to anyone.

When I first came to Australia, I knew nothing about a thing called ‘Australian Poetry’. But as an English teacher of English dropped into an Australian high school mid semester I discovered I was supposed to be teaching a unit on Australian Poetry. I raided the school’s stack of poetry books and took them home and read them with a desperation tinged with panic. This poem was the first one I found that I admired.

You could spend a lot of time turning this poem over to consider how you as reader are meant to react to the speaker. He is a soldier doing his job. On this particular Friday his job is to crucify people: ‘Nothing personal you understand….’. or what the title implies about all the people mentioned in the poem.

'Ulysses' by Alfred Lord Tennyson

This is one of the great dramatic monolgues in English. It’s easy to be carried along by the speaker’s undimmed enthusiasm for exploration (mental or physical) and his reluctance to give into old age. The last two lines are justly famous. But in this poem, as in the best of Browning’s, what is being said is undercut by how it is said. If you pay attention, the poem is having its cake and eating it; admiring the exuberant old explorer, while allowing you to see his arrogance and selfishness.