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Tuesday
Today, if all goes well, Julia and I will be landing in England. Putting England and April together, of course, brings to mind Robert Browning’s beloved poem “Home Thoughts, from Abroad,” which begins, “Oh, to be in England, now that April’s here.”
In the coming days you can be sure to encounter references here to Wales, Ireland, and Scotland as well since Julia is on a roots quest tracking her mother’s family.. There’s was the Jones family, which she has traced back to Angelsey, Wales, and the Pickens family, of Scots-Irish origin, which lived at one point on the outskirts of Glasgow, at another in Belfast. We’ll also be visiting my own cousins, John and Sue Beech, who live in Coventry, England.
“Home Thoughts” may have been written by Browning soon after he moved to Italy with his invalid wife, poet Elizabeth Browning. One doesn’t realize until the final line that the virtues of an English spring are set up in contrast with Italian flowers that Browning considers too luxurious. The poet longs for simple elm leaves, pear blossoms, and buttercups and for a field “rough with hoary dew.” All are superior, he indicates, to “the gaudy melon flower.”
Judging from references to flowers in English poetry, I’m forced to conclude that there’s something ascetic in the national imagination. I think of Wordsworth’s “violet half hidden from the eye” and his “meanest flower that blows”; of Thomas Gray’s flower that is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air”; of Blake seeing heaven in a wild flower; and of Tennyson using a “flower in a crannied wall” to grapple with the great existential questions.
Anyway, we are soon the see the British isles in full bloom. I’ll report back what we see.
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 blossom’d 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!