Home Thoughts from Abroad — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Home Thoughts from Abroad
The poems
What you need to know
Home Thoughts from Abroad by Robert Browning (1845): an Englishman abroad longing for an English spring, and how Browning uses exclamations, birdsong and a final put-down of a foreign flower.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Oh, to be in England / Now that April’s there', 'And whoever wakes in England', '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', 'That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over', 'The first fine careless rapture!', 'All will be gay when noontide wakes anew', 'Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!'.
Form and structure: two stanzas, April then May, with lines of different lengths, rhyme, dashes and exclamations that sound like longing spoken aloud, and a final line that turns back to where the speaker really is.
Language: a catalogue of English trees, blossom and birds, small details ('tiny leaf'), the thrush's song repeated twice over, and the 'gaudy melon-flower' as a dismissive picture of abroad.
Context: Browning (1812–1889), the Victorian poet of dramatic monologues; the poem written in 1845 while he was visiting northern Italy and published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics; and his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett in 1846 and move to Italy.
Compares well with: Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan (longing for a homeland), Hurricane Hits England (home remembered from far away), Adlestrop (the English countryside and birdsong) and Postcard from a Travel Snob (attitudes to home and abroad).
