"The Lost Leader" is an 1845 poem by Robert Browning first published in his book Dramatic Romances and Lyrics . It berates William Wordsworth for what Browning considered his desertion of the liberal cause, [1] and his lapse from his high idealism. [2] More generally, it is an attack on any liberal leader who has deserted his cause. It is one of Browning's "best known, if not actually best, poems". [3]
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband [4] to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
—He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence;
Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devils'-triumph [5] and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life's night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain,
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly,
Menace our heart ere we master his own; [6]
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne! [7]
From an early age, Browning (b. 1812) had been an admirer of the (early) works of Wordsworth (b. 1770). [8] As Baker (2004) observes, Browning had sought to become "Wordsworth's radical successor", and his attitude towards Wordsworth was "a test model of a strong poet's quest for self-definition against an overbearing predecessor". The poem's lines "We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, / ... / Made him our pattern to live and to die!" refer to this. However, when he began to perceive Wordsworth sliding into conservative politics and the Church of England, he became increasingly disillusioned. [9] Wordsworth in his early days had been a youthful rebel, defended Paine's Rights of Man and the French Revolution, and been described by Coleridge as a 'semi-atheist', and by himself as a 'patriot of the world'. However, as England went to war against France, the condition in France deteriorated, the Reign of Terror came to be, and Robespierre was executed, Wordsworth became disillusioned, and, following Southey and Coleridge, "gave up his revolutionary dreams and settled down to the life of a recluse". [2]
Browning's poem Sordello , written between 1836 and 1840, was partly aimed as a "correction" of Wordsworth's politics and poetics, but neither the audience nor Wordsworth saw this; instead the poem acquired a reputation for incomprehensibility, and Browning was called "the madman who had foisted the unreadable Sordello upon the world". For his part, Wordsworth seems to have thought very little of Browning, and one of the few recorded statements he made about Browning was in a letter written to a friend on the occasion of Browning's wedding in 1846 to Elizabeth Barrett: [9]
Miss Barrett, I am pleased to learn, is so much recovered as to have taken herself a Husband. Her choice is a very able man, and I trust that it will be a happy union, not doubting that they will speak more intelligibly to each other than, notwithstanding their abilities, they have yet done to the public.
In 1813 Wordsworth obtained the position of distributor of stamps. This government position was already sufficient to induce Shelley to write a sonnet of mild reprimand, "To Wordsworth". [10] In 1842 he accepted a civil list pension of £300 from the government, and in 1843 when Southey died, he accepted the position of Poet Laureate. Browning saw this acquiescence to orthodox tradition—with its image of Wordsworth literally on his knees in front of the queen—as his "final surrender to the forces of conservatism". The poem arose from the resulting hatred and indignation, and was published in November 1845, in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics . [11]
The "handful of silver" is a reference to thirty pieces of silver, a phrase associated with betrayal or selling out. [1] The lines "he boasts his quiescence / Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire" referred to what Browning saw as one of Wordsworth's worst crimes as the lost leader, that of boasting his acquiescence and instructing the oppressed masses to patiently "crouch" and bear their burden instead of rising up in revolt. This Wordsworth had done in his 1833 poem called "The Warning". [11]
Wordsworth died five years later, in 1850. Browning later came to slightly regret the poem, and possibly even to see Wordsworth in a positive light again, [9] as he made a few minor revisions, moderating the poem's attack. However, Baker writes that "His attack on Wordsworth was not as unfair as some have claimed, and as Browning seems to have feared in later life", [11] and Robert Wilson Lynd writes, of Browning's views: [12]
We do not nowadays believe that Wordsworth changed his political opinions in order to be made distributor of stamps [...] Nor did Browning believe this. He did believe, however, that Wordsworth was a turncoat, a renegade—a poet who began as the champion of liberty and ended as its enemy. This is the general view, and it seems to me to be unassailable.
The poem was widely anthologised, and recognised for its direct attack. One editor wrote: [13]
The Lost Leader was originally written in reference to Wordsworth's abandonment of the Liberal cause, with perhaps a thought of Southey, but it is applicable to any popular apostasy. This is one of those songs that do the work of swords. It shows how easily Mr. Browning, had he so chosen, could have stirred the national feeling with his lyrics.
Another wrote that the verses "have more bad feeling than poetry". [14] Stephen Fry quotes the poem as an example of the use of dactylic metre to great effect, creating verse with "great rhythmic dash and drive". [15] The poem is not in pure dactylic tetrameter, but catalectic. [16]
There was much discussion on whether the poem was addressed to Wordsworth. In response to queries, Browning always made it clear that the poem was based on Wordsworth, but stopped short of saying that it was directly addressed to Wordsworth himself, instead saying that the portrait was "purposely disguised a little, used in short as an artist uses a model, retaining certain characteristic traits, and discarding the rest". Thus the poem was on the Lost Leader in the abstract, with Wordsworth being the most prominent concrete example. [17] In one ambivalent letter, he wrote: [18] [19]
I have been asked the question you now address me with, and as duly answered it, I can't remember how many times; there is no sort of objection to one more assurance or rather confession, on my part, that I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerated personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter's model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account; had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about 'handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon'. These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet, whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular face-about of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore. But just as in the tapestry on my wall I can recognize features which have struck out a fancy, on occasion, that though truly thus derived, yet would be preposterous as a copy, so, though I dare not deny the original of my little poem, I altogether refuse to have it considered as the 'very effigies' of such a moral and intellectual superiority.
The Lost Leader was used as the title of a book about Wordsworth by Hugh I'Anson Fausset in 1933. [20]
The Lost Leader is the title of a book of poems by Mick Imlah, published in 2008.
The poem was parodied by Fun (a Victorian competitor of Punch ) when the women of Girton College dissolved their Browning Society and spent the funds on chocolate. The lines began: "They just for a handful of chocolate left us / Just for some sweetmeats to put in their throats". [21] In one edition of the poem, the first line had been printed as "Just for a handle of silver he left us", which the proof-reader tried to justify on the grounds that as no one understood Browning, it would be all right. [22]
Nigel Birch attacked the Macmillan government with the words "Never glad confident morning again".
The title of Joe Haines's memoir of the final years of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government, Glimmers of Twilight, [23] alludes to the poem.
The poem is frequently alluded to by Horace Rumpole. [24]
The lines "We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, / ... / Made him our pattern to live and to die!" are framed as the deciding quiz bowl question in Nan Willard Kappo's Cheating Lessons, published in 2002.
An excerpt of the poem is featured in Cassandra Clare's Clockwork Angel published in 2010.
Different approaches to the poem—personal idiosyncratic approaches and those informed by historical context or metrical structure—are discussed as an introduction to "cognitive poetics". [25]
Bhagat Singh, an Indian Marxist Revolutionary and Indian Independence Freedom Fighter used this poem "The Lost Leader", pointing at Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian Nationalist Freedom Fighter, who turned to communalist politics in his last years.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd.
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began as a radical but became steadily more conservative as he gained respect for Britain and its institutions. Other romantics such as Byron accused him of siding with the establishment for money and status. He is remembered especially for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".
Walter Savage Landor was an English writer, poet, and activist. His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, and the poem "Rose Aylmer," but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity. As remarkable as his work was, it was equalled by his rumbustious character and lively temperament. Both his writing and political activism, such as his support for Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi, were imbued with his passion for liberal and republican causes. He befriended and influenced the next generation of literary reformers such as Charles Dickens and Robert Browning.
Caroline Anne Southey was an English poet and painter. She became the second wife of the poet Robert Southey, a prominent writer at the time.
"The Idiot Boy" is a poem written by William Wordsworth, a representative of the Romantic movement in English literature. The poem was composed in spring 1798 and first published in the same year in Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems written by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which is considered to be a turning point in the history of English literature and the Romantic movement. The poem investigates such themes as language, intellectual disability, maternity, emotionality, organisation of experience and "transgression of the natural."
The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known. They were named, only to be uniformly disparaged, by the Edinburgh Review. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written from 10 September to 14 December in 1815 in Bishopsgate, near Windsor Great Park and first published in 1816. The poem was without a title when Shelley passed it along to his contemporary and friend Thomas Love Peacock. The poem is 720 lines long. It is considered to be one of the first of Shelley's major poems.
— From Cantos 27 and 56, In Memoriam A.H.H., by Alfred Tennyson, published this year
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The poem was completed in two parts, with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood. The first part of the poem was completed on 27 March 1802 and a copy was provided to Wordsworth's friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who responded with his own poem, "Dejection: An Ode", in April. The fourth stanza of the ode ends with a question, and Wordsworth was finally able to answer it with seven additional stanzas completed in early 1804. It was first printed as "Ode" in 1807, and it was not until 1815 that it was edited and reworked to the version that is currently known, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality".
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772. The youngest of 14 children, he was educated after his father's death and excelled in classics. He attended Christ's Hospital and Jesus College, Cambridge. While attending college, he befriended two other Romanticists, Charles Lamb and Robert Southey, the latter causing him to eventually drop out of college and pursue both poetic and political ambitions.
Sordello is a narrative poem by the English poet Robert Browning. Worked on for seven years, and largely written between 1836 and 1840, it was published in March 1840. It consists of a fictionalised version of the life of Sordello da Goito, a 13th-century Lombard troubadour depicted in Canto VI of Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio.
Madoc is an 1805 epic poem composed by Robert Southey. It is based on the legend of Madoc, a supposed Welsh prince who fled internecine conflict and sailed to America in the 12th century. The origins of the poem can be traced to Southey's schoolboy days when he completed a prose version of Madoc's story. By the time Southey was in his twenties, he began to devote himself to working on the poem in hopes that he could sell it to raise money to fulfill his ambitions to start a new life in America, where he hoped to found Utopian commune or "Pantisocracy". Southey finally completed the poem as a whole in 1799, at the age of 25. However, he began to devote his efforts into extensively editing the work, and Madoc was not ready for publication until 1805. It was finally published in two volumes by the London publisher Longman with extensive footnotes.
The Curse of Kehama is an 1810 epic poem composed by Robert Southey. The origins of the poem can be traced to Southey's schoolboy days when he suffered from insomnia, along with his memories of a dark and mysterious schoolmate that later formed the basis for one of the poem's villains. The poem was started in 1802 following the publication of Southey's epic Thalaba the Destroyer. After giving up on the poem for a few years, he returned to it after prompting by the poet Walter Savage Landor encouraged him to complete his work. When it was finally published, it sold more copies than his previous works.
Roderick the Last of the Goths is an 1814 epic poem composed by Robert Southey. The origins of the poem lie in Southey's wanting to write a poem describing Spain and the story of Rodrigo. Originally entitled "Pelayo, the Restorer of Spain," the poem was later retitled to reflect the change of emphasis within the story. It was completed after Southey witnessed Napoleon's actions in Europe, and Southey included his reactions against invading armies into the poem. The poem was successful, and multiple editions followed immediately after the first edition.
Joan of Arc is a 1796 epic poem composed by Robert Southey. The idea for the story came from a discussion between Southey and Grosvenor Bedford, when Southey realised that the story would be suitable for an epic. The subject further appealed to Southey because the events of the French Revolution were concurrent to the writing of the poem and would serve as a parallel to current events. Eventually, Samuel Taylor Coleridge helped rewrite parts of the poem for a 1798 edition. Later editions removed Coleridge's additions along with other changes.
The Feast of the Poets is a poem by Leigh Hunt that was originally published in 1811 in the Reflector. It was published in an expanded form in 1814, and revised and expanded throughout his life. The work describes Hunt's contemporary poets, and either praises or mocks them by allowing only the best to dine with Apollo. The work also provided commentary on William Wordsworth and Romantic poetry. Critics praised or attacked the work on the basis of their sympathies towards Hunt's political views.
The Vision of Judgment (1822) is a satirical poem in ottava rima by Lord Byron, which depicts a dispute in Heaven over the fate of George III's soul. It was written in response to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey's A Vision of Judgement (1821), which had imagined the soul of king George triumphantly entering Heaven to receive his due. Byron was provoked by the High Tory point of view from which the poem was written, and he took personally Southey's preface which had attacked those "Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations" who had set up a "Satanic school" of poetry, "characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety". He responded in the preface to his own Vision of Judgment with an attack on "The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem", and mischievously referred to Southey as "the author of Wat Tyler", an anti-royalist work from Southey's firebrand revolutionary youth. His parody of A Vision of Judgement was so lastingly successful that, as the critic Geoffrey Carnall wrote, "Southey's reputation has never recovered from Byron's ridicule."
Robert Anderson (1770–1833), was an English labouring class poet from Carlisle. He was best known for his ballad-style poems in Cumbrian dialect.
"Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge" is a dirge of eleven stanzas by the Scots poet Robert Burns, first published in 1784 and included in the first edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. The poem is one of Burns's many early works that criticize class inequalities. It is known for its line protesting "Man's inhumanity to man", which has been widely quoted since its publication.
