Open my heart and you will see, 

Graved inside of it, ‘Italy’.

So wrote the poet Robert Browning.

Perhaps my favourite poet of all time is Robert’s wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, especially her love poems, of which Robert was the subject. So I am well familiar with this Victorian poet, whose dramatic verses are part of the very fabric of English literature.

Browning was born and grew up in London, England, but he spent much of his later life in Italy, and he died in Venice.  Sadly, during his lifetime Browning’s critics were harsh for what they deemed his desertion of England, but these days he is much respected as an English poet.

Browning described Italy as ‘his university’. He loved the culture, the art and the architecture there, and his experiences in Italy greatly coloured his works. For example, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’ are poem based on the lives of Italian painters, and ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ is based on the idea that the speaker is playing a toccata by a Venetian composer.

One of my favourite Italian-inspired poems by Browning is called ‘In a Gondola’.

In a Gondola

The moth’s kiss, first!

Kiss me as if you made believe

You were not sure, this eve,

How my face, your flower, had pursed

Its petals up; so, here and there

You brush it, till I grow aware

Who wants me, and wide open I burst.

The bee’s kiss, now!

Kiss me as if you enter’d gay

My heart at some noonday,

A bud that dares not disallow

The claim, so all is rendered up,

And passively its shattered cup

Over your head to sleep I bow.

In just 14 lines, Browning creates such passion that it is easy to see why to this day we see a gondola ride as the very epitome of romance. Such a poem also reminds us that high passion and eroticism have long been encapsulated in literature; the erotic novels of the twenty-first century did not start the phenomenon! But there is something so bewitching, so moving, about how a poet of yesteryear described intimacy: the rhythm, the simplicity, the vocabulary – just beautiful.