A Grammarian's Funeral Lect 21
A Grammarian's Funeral Lect 21
A Grammarian's Funeral Lect 21
Robert Browning
Lecture 21
About the poet
• Born in 1812 and died 1889.
• major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his
mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological
portraiture.
• dramatic monologue is a form invented and practiced
principally by Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante
Rossetti, and other Victorians.
• In a dramatic monologue, a poem must have a speaker
and an implied auditor, and that the reader often
perceives a gap between what that speaker says and
what he or she actually reveals (irony).
• A dramatic monologue, to paraphrase M.H. Abrams,
is a poem with a speaker who is clearly separate
from the poet, who speaks to an implied audience
that, while silent, remains clearly present in the
scene. (This implied audience distinguishes the
dramatic monologue from the soliloquy—a form also
used by Browning—in which the speaker does not
address any specific listener, rather musing aloud to
him or herself).
• The purpose of the monologue is to develop the
character of the speaker and explore the
consciousness of the speaker and the inner workings
of the mind.
• The poem describes the influence of renaissance
knowledge.
About the poem
• "A Grammarian's Funeral," which was published in
Men and Women in 1855, is whether it is better to
live one's life or to understand one's life.
• It is a classic literary theme that the two cannot be
simultaneously chosen.
• The speaker of this poem is a disciple of an
accomplished grammarian who has recently died.
• The speaker gives a eulogy for their master, telling
how "he lived nameless“ in pursuit of mastering his
studies, which focused on Greek grammar.
Analysis of the poem
Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Unlettered: ignorant
Sepulture: tomb
All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels;
Clouds overcome it;
No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's
Circling its summit.
Prate: to boast
Fain: pretend
Oh, such a life as he resolved to live,
When he had learned it,
When he had gathered all books had to give!
Sooner, he spurned it.