Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
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 blossomed 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.
This is one of Robert Browning’s best-known poems, much loved by readers who find in it a pure nostalgic longing for the English countryside, as experienced by those exiled from it. Step by step the speaker unfolds a picture that his own memory brings back to him. This is not a static picture, but one full of movement and new life, of bare branches coming into leaf and blossoms fluttering from fruit-tree boughs. Sensory appeal abounds, with birdsong building up to the sound of the thrush — pictured in full spate high on the right here, in an illustration in John Gould's landmark book of native species.
A Song-Thrush, from John Gould's Birds of Great Britain.
Click on the images on this page for more information.
There is colour, too. As the chill of night lifts from the grass, and daylight strengthens, the speaker knows that the buttercups will reveal their own shiny petals, inviting the attentions of the young — with a colour brighter in his mind's eye than the yellow of the melon-flower growing in his place of exile. Such is Browning's evocation of life flourishing across the board in his homeland, in all its beauty, promise and innocence, issuing an invitation to simple enjoyment. Like Wordsworth's "Daffodils" or Rupert Brooke's “The Soldier," the poem strikes us as first and foremost an intense response to nature, of the kind deeply familiar to the absent poet and his audience of compatriots, being brought vibrantly to mind and heart through the imagination.
This vibrancy justifies the poem's first appearance in a set of three short dramatic monologues, as Part I of the sequence that shared its title, in Browning's Dramatic Romances of 1845. Its overtly patriotic flavour also sits well here: the other two poems in the set were “Here’s to Nelson’s memory,” which had been published in Hood's Magazine in the previous year, and the undated lines starting “Nobly, nobly Cape St. Vincent...,” again in memory of Nelson. The subject of these two other "fragments," as shown to Elizabeth Barrett before the couple eloped (DeVane 165), was very much of the period — this was the time when Nelson's victories were being celebrated by the several stages of work on Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square: the statue had gone up in 1843, and the bronze reliefs and lions at its base were yet to come.
"Here's to Nelson's Memory," however, is quite different in tone from "Home Thoughts, from Abroad." It is a rousing song fuelled by "British beer," including the lines, "Nelson for ever — any time/ Am I his to command in prose or rhyme!" As the speaker downs his quintessentially English brew, he proudly recalls the great hero whose coat is preserved at Greenwich, its shoulder stained with tar where its wearer would lean against "the mizzen-rigging." This sailor-song, with its echo of old sea-shanties, was later moved away from the original set of three short lyrics and included instead in a group with the title "Nationality in Drinking," which uses the different alcoholic drinks associated with different countries to reflect on the national character of those who drink them. This indeed seems to be a more appropriate context for it.
Like "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad," however, the Cape St Vincent verse uses nature to express patriotism — although this is nature in a much more spectacular mode. Here, the fervour of patriotic feelings finds an echo not in the gentle spring countryside of distant home, but in the brilliance of sunset at sea in a foreign setting, its colour reflecting the subject — for the sky is as fiery as the battle at sea in one of Nelson's most famous victories. It is the colour too of the blood that was spilt then. This inspires the speaker to express his own determination to serve his country, in whatever way may be needed:
Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-West died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-East distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;
"Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?"— say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.
Here, nature is not just vibrant but dramatic; not innocent at all, but triumphant and awesome; not calling out to be roamed in again, but inspiring the speaker to heights of heroism, possibly even martyrdom. But the poet himself acknowledged an association between this and "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad": when that title was appropriated for the lines starting "Oh, to be in England" alone, these more electrifying lines were given a parallel title, "Home Thoughts, from the Sea."
Over the years, therefore, "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" has simply been taken as one of two patriotic poems, albeit poems in which patriotism is expressed in different ways. Browning's contemporaries clearly saw it as such. Elizabeth Barrett herself responded to its details, prefacing her useful suggestion to give it a title of its own by saying that "your spring-song is full of beauty, as you know very well" (qtd. in Browning 284). To Arthur Symons, writing later in the same century, again, this was "a beautiful poem"; he particularly appreciated "the magical and oft-quoted lines on the thrush" (70; note already the epithet, "oft-quoted"). Later still, when complexity was being actively sought out and admired, Derek Colville confirmed this view of the poem by dismissing it as one of those "superficial nature poems" in which Browning could "fulfill his imaginative versatility in a whole range of additional work demanding almost no introspective thought at all" (143).
"When Nature Painted all Things Gay," by Alfred Parsons (1847-1920), exhibited in 1887.
For a while, therefore, Browning's poem seemed enjoyable but rather lightweight, not unlike the conventional spring-time scene shown on the left, by Victorian landscape artist Alfred Parsons, a painter, illustrator and garden designer known for his "Englishness." Thus it escaped the kind of rigorous analysis to which the more obviously complex dramatic monologues like "My Last Duchess" were subjected. For all its popularity, it was not even included in the Oxford Authors "critical edition of the major works," edited by Adam Roberts and first published in 1997. This, despite the fact that the over 800-page Oxford collection contains a number of short lyrics, including "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning."
However, "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" has not escaped the attention of more recent critics. In particular, Alison Chapman senses both anxiety and irony in it. The speaker seems less than confident, she suggests, about his ability to communicate his meaning clearly. She notes "the strange 'you' [in l. 15] that seems to include the speaker, the 'wise thrush' that sings twice" (476). What was it that, apparently, failed to come across completely? Could it be the knowledge that these were the Hungry Forties, so that the poem's "vision of patriotism rests upon an England that is becoming quickly obsolete for most of its inhabitants" (476)? Could it be also that "Wordsworthian pastoral images" were now out-of-date, and less authentic than the “gaudy melon-flower” of another land, representing quite another mode of expression (476)? Chapman suspects so. Going further, she catches a note of contempt here, "a contempt for the poem itself, as a parody of Wordsworthian poetics. The poem turns itself inside out," she argues, "a lyric that parodies lyricism, and a declaration of patriotism that satirizes Englishness. Furthermore, it questions the very stability, location, and indeed existence of the lyric voice as anything but delusional" (477).
Membership card for the Anti-Corn-Law League, showing
the desperate petition of starving countryfolk.
This argument might seem a little too subtle. Browning's love of nature, the "sense of intimacy and camaraderie with the natural world" with which he grew up, is well documented, as is his responsiveness to "musical sound" (Morrison 188-89). Yet there are good grounds for Chapman's reading. In the first place, it is supported by William DeVane's belief that the poem was actually written not in Italy but in England, "during April, 1845, when Browning was recollecting and poetizing the experiences of his second Italian tour" (147): it was first published that November, along with "Home-Thoughts from Abroad," in the 1845 collection. This was not just a time when Nelson was in the news at home. It was also a period when Browning was highly critical both of Wordsworth and the politicians. Another of his well-known shorter poems, "The Lost Leader," with its disgust that someone both admired and influential should have succumbed to worldly reward and deserted the common man, appeared in the very same collection, and he admitted later that he did, in fact, have Wordsworth in mind here — DeVane describes the poem as a "youthful assault" on the Poet Laureate (37). And in "The Englishman in Italy," then entitled "England in Italy, Piano di Sorrento," Browning wrote ironically that same year about those at home who "meet gravely to-day / And debate, if abolishing Corn-laws / Be righteous and wise," an issue about which he himself, siding with the distressed rural communities, had no doubts at all (DeVane 158). He was not in the habit of using his poetry to broadcast his political views in any obvious way; but his youthful liberalism can certainly be discerned in other work of this time. As for distrust of the personal voice, that was evidently the impulse behind Browning's projection of the imaginary other's voice in his dramatic monologues. In this connection, it is worth remembering that in 1863 and thereafter "Home Thoughts, from Abroad," along with "The Lost Leader" from his 1845 pamphlet, was published under the heading of "Dramatic Lyrics" (the operative word here being "Dramatic").
"Home Thoughts, from Abroad" has been read, therefore, both as expressing homesickness for the English countryside, and, in our own times, as exhibiting unease about how this countryside was being treated, in verse as in life. No doubt the poem will continue to be loved by most people simply as nostalgic. Nevertheless, the more recent approach has much to recommend it, enhancing the poem's appeal to a twenty-first-century readership deeply concerned with the long-term future of the English countryside — and, by opening up questions about the poetic voice, helping to rescue one of Browning's most popular works from the critical sidelines.
Bibliography
Browning, Robert. The Poems of Browning. Edited by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin. Vol. 2. [1991] London: Routledge, 2014.
_____. Robert Browning: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Edited by Adam Roberts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Chapman, Alison. "Robert Browning’s Homesickness." Victorian Poetry 50, no. 4 (2012): 469-484. Project Muse. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vp.2012.0034
Colville, Derek. Victorian Poetry and the Romantic Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970.
DeVane, William Clyde. A Browning Handbook. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955. Internet Archive. Web. 12 April 2026.
Morrison, Kevin A. Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Symons, Arthur. An Introduction to the Study of Browning. 2nd ed. London: Cassell, 1887. Google Books. Web. 12 April 2026. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/An_Introduction_to_the_Study_of_Browning/YBlXAAAAYAAJ
Created 12 April 2026