Home-Thoughts, from Abroad, April in England

Robert Browning printed this poem in 1845 in Bells and Pomegranates, the cheap pamphlet series in which most of his early work appeared. Browning wrote the poem while traveling in Italy, which is why the title says abroad. It became one of the most quoted pictures of the English spring. Wikisource carries the 1845 printing.

Where this text comes fromBells and Pomegranates was a series of cheap paper pamphlets, and this poem first reached readers that way rather than in a book. The page linked below prints three numbered pieces under this one title; what you type is the first stanza of the first, and its second stanza, the wise thrush singing each song twice over, follows directly beneath it. Browning was homesick in Italy when he wrote it, which is the joke the title makes and the reason the English hedgerow is described with such precision.

What you might not noticeEngland closes the first line and stands one word from the end of the last, so the passage returns to where it started. The name turns up three times across eight lines. Source

What it trainsForty-four words arrive as one unbroken sentence, so the only punctuation you can rest on is a comma, and there are six of them. What makes this passage awkward is the dash in the last line, set with no space on either side: typed as a plain hyphen, it welds England and now into one eleven-character run, and the hand almost always inserts a space. The first compound, brush-wood, is spelled with the hyphen that modern English has dropped. Twelve capitals in 251 characters, eight of them opening verse lines, and a single exclamation mark to close.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource