6 thoughts on “POETS Day! Mrs. Browning’s Husband

  1. an a/b/c/c/b/a rhyme scheme

    The first time I read Inferno, like, *REALLY* read it… next to a copy of the text in the original Italian, it pointed out that the rhyme scheme was:

    A/B/A
    B/C/B
    C/D/C
    D/E/D

    And so the rhymes kept climbing, as the reader kept climbing, and so both walked out of Hell together.

    I went into that saying “holy crap, this guy was nuts” and walked out of it saying “okay, Italian is cheating because everything rhymes with everything anyway”.

    But now that I am in my dotage I know that the important part of the rhyme is not whether the script can be described as A/B/A/B but whether someone can describe it as something like “the murmuring of innumerable bees”. See that phrase? No rhymes. But it carries with it a pillow, almost like a pet bed, for you to come in and lie down in. Like a croissant.

    Tennyson is the guy who understood how to pick the lock into the brain.
    Not Browning. Browning merely said “I can do that!” when he read Donne.

    And, while he had the insight, he could not, in fact, do that.Report

    1. My bad. I have to actually type these in as copy and paste introduces all manner of layout problems – line breaks disappear and stanzas get merged etc. Once it’s posted I’m not sure I can go in and fix it but I’ll send a note to Andrew. I know he can. Thanks for the heads up.Report

      1. My bad. I have to actually type these in as copy and paste introduces all manner of layout problems – line breaks disappear and stanzas get merged etc.

        Surely there’s something simple that can insert the <br> and <sp> tags automatically, or do copy-and-paste with the equivalent. We’re not stuck in the 1990s…Report

Comments are closed.