The monologue is the dying confession of an Italian patriot mortally wounded
during the 1848 uprising against Austrian rule of the kingdom of
Lombardy-Venetia. It is difficult not to read it as (in one respect) a
critical commentary on the condition of Italy in the aftermath of 1848.
DGR's disillusionment was, in its own way, not unlike his father's. But DGR
explicitly generalized his attitudes into the kind of mordant critique
apparent in poems like
This rhetoric of allegory has another important interpretive consequence: it opens a poem like
These several interpretive procedures are further reinforced by a stylistic
tendency that characterizes nearly all of DGR's work. It is a stylistic
procedure that gets reinforced through the deployment of the dramatic
monologue genre. So one wants to see that even when DGR wrote socially
self-conscious poems, he typically approached his materials from an
“inner standing point”
. Consequently,
the critical insights developed in a poem like
When DGR revised the poem in October 1869 he told Swinburne that he had come to think it
the best of all my doings . . . I really do
believe in the passion and reality of this poem, now that I see it
again as a new thing, for I had no scrap of the old copies in this
case. It is the outcome of the Italian part of me, and I am glad it
is not lost.
” (see “The first nucleus of the [poem] was the
(very earliest thing in the whole book, and was the
simple and genuine result of my having passed my whole boyhood among
people just like the speaker of the poem. Browning by travel and
cultivation imported the same sort of thing into English poetry on a
much larger scale; but this subject, if any, was my absolute
birth-right, and the poem was conceived and in a manner begun long
before 1848 (the date afterwards put to it, as characteristic of
patriotic struggles,) and at a time when Byron and Shelley were
about the limits of my modern English poeticstudies”
According to WMR, the poem was written in 1848-1849 and substantially
completed at that time (
The interpolated
For further details on the poem's composition see the commentaries for the
DGR revised and corrected the poem in late October 1869 after the text was
exhumed from his wife's grave. On 30 October 1869 he wrote to Swinburne that
he had “now added to it about 130 lines, filling up
corners, and also a translation of the Italian song in
it
” (see
See Commentary for the 1870
First printed in the
The poem is set in the Austrian-occupied kingdom of Lombardy and Venetia during the 1848 Italian uprising against Austrian rule.
The poem is most in debt to Browning; one thinks as much of
DGR's comment about the poem, that it
“is the outcome of the Italian part of me, and I am
glad it is not lost”
points to the personal element in the poem. DGR's attitude toward
the events in Italy in 1848-1849 were substantially the same as his
father's. Both men deplored the installation of papal power and the setback
that Italian