Narrative Poems

In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some European travel and the following year found himself in Rome during the short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came Amours de Voyage, an epistolary verse novel written in hexameters, in which a young scholar visits Italy during the uprising and falls in love with a fellow English tourist.

In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at Clough’s poem as an expression of its author’s rootlessness and the crisis of faith that characterised the age, and the ways in which it undercuts the grand Byronic promise of its title and meter to unfold an Austenian story of subtle social snobbery and young romantic failure.

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Read more in the LRB:

Fergus McGhee: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt https://lrb.me/npep1001

Christopher Clark: God Bless Italy https://lrb.me/npep1002

Stefan Collini: Matthew Arnold https://lrb.me/npep101003

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a kind of dream’, Browning recalled. ‘I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day.’ The result, inspired by a line spoken by Edgar (as Poor Tom) in Act III of King Lear, is a grim, hallucinatory quest poem that exemplifies Browning’s talent for what G.K. Chesterton called ‘the poetry of mean landscapes’.

In this episode, Seamus and Mark read Browning’s mysterious poem as a rejection of the resources and consolations established by the Romantics. They then turn to an earlier narrative poem, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (1843), in which Browning uses a comical, Byronic tone to tell the story of another prophetic figure.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep901

Matthew Reynolds: https://lrb.me/npep902

Donald Davie: https://lrb.me/npep903

According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he was inspired to write his own account.

In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss Keats’s talent for sublime banality, the competing readings of the lover, Porphyro, and the poem's repurposing of Spenserian allegory for a contemporary love story.

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Read more on Keats in the LRB:

John Bayley: https://lrb.me/npep801

Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep802

Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/npep803

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s interest in rural poverty as much as the natural world. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the two poems as part of the literary revolution brought about by the Lyrical Ballads, in which everyday language is used to depict marginal lives without sentiment, guided by Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.’

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Marilyn Butler on The Lyrical Ballads: https://lrb.me/npep702

Jonathan Wordsworth: Wordsworth in Love: https://lrb.me/npep701

Seamus Perry on 'The Prelude': https://lrb.me/npep703

Colin Burrow on Wordsworth: https://lrb.me/npep704

‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and chastisement of Scottish masculinity ever since its publication, but the attitude of its narrator remains elusive throughout. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s moral and stylistic turns, its influence on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and what it owes to the Augustan perfectionism of Pope.

They then turn to a much darker example of Romantic narrative poetry, George Crabbe’s ‘Peter Grimes’ (published in his collection The Borough in 1810), and explore the bracing realism and psychological insight in the story of a cruel Suffolk fisherman who destroys the apprentices placed in his care.

This episode also features a bonus conversation with Andrew O’Hagan, who reads extracts from 'Tam o’ Shanter' and explains why the poem’s reliably contradictory narrative voice is so useful for anyone learning to write stories.

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Read more in the LRB:

Karl Miller: Peeping Tam: ⁠https://lrb.me/npep501⁠

Neal Ascherson on Burns's life: ⁠https://lrb.me/npep502