Thursday, March 16, 2023

"Memorabilia" by ROBERT BROWNING


Memorabilia


Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you?

And did you speak to him again?

How strange it seems, and new!

 

But you were living before that,

And you are living after,

And the memory I started at

My starting moves your laughter!

 

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own

And a certain use in the world no doubt,

Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone

'Mid the blank miles round about:

 

For there I picked up on the heather

And there I put inside my breast

A moulted feather, an eagle-feather

Well, I forget the rest.



Enjoy the poem with beautiful music.


poem video👇

https://youtu.be/rOIbfBVsrJ0







Who wrote the poem "Memorabilia"?


Robert Browning (May 7, 1812 – December 12, 1889)

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright in the Victorian era and was widely known for his dramatic monologues. His father was a bank clerk and assembled a personal library of 6,000 books, which became the foundation of Browning’s education. He married the eminent Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in 1846, and the couple moved to Italy and lived there until the wife’s death in 1861. He began to attain literary fame in his 50’s and was widely respected in his later years. 




"Memorabilia" explanation


In the poem, the speaker describes his encounter with someone who met Percy Bysshe Shelley, the great Romantic poet whom Browning admired but couldn’t meet in person. Although this incident meant a lot to the speaker, the person who met Shelley doesn’t seem to share the excitement. The speaker compares the encounter with picking up an eagle feather walking on a moor, a small remnant of the literary giant’s traces felt through someone else’s short experience.



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