Portrait by Michele Gordigiani
This session
was long awaited. Along with literature enthusiasts the world over the Kochi Reading
Group decided to honour the 200th birth anniversary of Robert Browning by a
session devoted to him.
Blessed with
a rich imagination, wide learning, and steeped in rhyme and metre, Browning’s
poems have the power to evoke sympathy even in an age that is the antithesis of
everything Victorians stood for. He is
best noted in literature for his dramatic monologues. The nearest we got to that were the poems Rabbi Ben Ezra and Home Thoughts from Abroad.
Sunil, Bobby, KumKum, Talitha
Many noted
the difficulties one has reading Browning’s poems, on account of their
allusiveness; the diction too is sometimes novel and requires a fair amount of re-reading
to grasp its full import. Yet the poet so often strikes gold that you wish to
mine all his poems.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
One cannot
forget his contribution to literature in rescuing Elizabeth Barrett from her
domineering father; and then persuading her to publish those private sonnets
she wrote to celebrate their love, later collected in a volume titled Sonnets from the Portuguese. It is fair
to say no one who has fallen in love, or wished to fall in love, in the past
150 years has escaped the allure of these sonnets.
Talitha, Zakia, Thommo
Here is a
picture of the group after the reading.
Talitha, Kavita, Zakia, Thommo, Bobby, KumKum, Sunil, Joe
