Robert Browning Quotes
The rain set early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its best to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up and all the cottage warm.
She converted to the Catholic Religion and the monarch of Sweden then had to be a Protestant.
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him among the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax. His career began well, but shrank for a time. The long poems Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were acclaimed, but in 1840 Sordello was seen as wilfully obscure. His renown took over a decade to return, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett and went to live in Italy. By her death in 1861 he had published the collection Men and Women (1855). His Dramatis Personae (1864) and book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868-1869) made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation today rests mainly on his middle period. By his death in 1889, he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. Societies for studying his work formed in his lifetime and survived in Britain and the United States into the 20th century.