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News Good Poem Brought Ghent Browning Galloping Historical

"How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" is a poem by Robert Browning (1845) notable for its galloping rhythm, which mimics horses' hoofbeats. It tells a breathless story of a vital but unspecified message being delivered.

How they Brought the good news from Ghent to Aix is a poem by Robert Browning (1845) written to evoke the rhythm of galloping horses. It's a first-person narrative about an urgent midnight errand with an unspecified message.

Front How they Brought the good news from Ghent to Aix
Back A poem
Robert Browning
1845
To evoke the rhythm of horses galloping

How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" is a poem by Robert Browning published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845.[1] The poem, one of the volume's "dramatic romances", is a first-person narrative told, in breathless galloping meter, by one of three riders; the midnight errand is urgent—"the news which alone could save Aix from her fate"—but the nature of that good news is never revealed. The poem is "noted for its onomatopoetic effects. It describes a purely imaginary incident", observed William Rose Benet.[2] Browning himself remarked in a letter, "There is no historical incident whatever commemorated in the poem. . . . a merely general impression of the characteristic warfare and besieging which abound in the annals of Flanders".[3] Undaunted, an editor of Browning suggested the historical event of the Pacification of Ghent in 1576.[4]

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