How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix
1845 poem by Robert Browning / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"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"—although the nature of that good news is never revealed. Two of the riders' horses collapse en route; the narrator alone makes it to Aix with the news, and rewards his horse with a drink of wine.
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In the words of William Rose Benet, it is "noted for its onomatopoetic effects".[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])