Home-Thoughts, from Abroad, the wise thrush

Robert Browning published 1845 360 characters hard

And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows— Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge— That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!

You type short passages of English classics and practice at the keyboard. The clock starts on your first key.

Or simply start typing.

Your record

Day streak

Time so far: 0
Words per minute: 0
Accuracy: 100%

Both tests need JavaScript

The tests read the keys you press, and without JavaScript they measure nothing. The text below and every article here read fine without it.

About this text

This is the second part of Home-Thoughts, from Abroad, printed in 1845. The thrush that sings each song twice over is the line most often quoted from Browning’s shorter poems. He married Elizabeth Barrett the following year and the pair settled in Florence. Wikisource carries the 1845 printing.

Where this text comes fromThis is the companion half, printed immediately after the first on the same 1845 page, and it moves the season on: April has finished and the poem is now in May, with the whitethroat and the swallows already at work. Where the opening half looks at branches and leaves, this one listens, which is why the thrush and the song it repeats end up carrying the poem. The two halves have been anthologized separately so often that many readers know one and not the other.

What you might not noticeThe thrush singing every song twice over is the most quoted line Browning wrote outside his dramatic monologues, and it survives in the 1845 pamphlet exactly as later editions print it. Source

What it trainsThree long dashes in 360 characters, and two of them end a line while the third cuts into the middle of one, so the rhythm is a series of arrivals rather than a flow. Getting the dash right matters here: the long dash and the hyphen arrive from one and the same key, so what counts is the number of strikes rather than the choice of mark. Two exclamation marks add Shift where the sentence structure does not warn you it is coming. The longest word, whitethroat, is eleven letters with no break in it, and dewdrops runs straight into a dash the same way England did in the first half of the poem.

From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource