Robert Browning, ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ (1845)

What’s most immediately striking about ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ is how insistent it is; how urgent, how forcefully it mimics the galloping onward rush of its subject. Sent the poem in manuscript during their courtship, Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Browning, ‘the word “galloping” is a good galloping word!’ and praised the way ‘you took the effect up & dilated it by repeating it over and over in your first stanza, doubling, folding one upon another the hoof treads.’ Onward! Hurry! Good speed, echoing speed.

I.
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and He;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all Three;
“Good speed!” cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;
“Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

II.
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.

III.
’Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near
Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear;
At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see;
At Düffeld, ’twas morning as plain as could be;
And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chime,
So Joris broke silence with, “Yet there is time!”

IV.
At Aerschot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,
And against him the cattle stood black every one,
To stare thro’ the mist at us galloping past,
And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,
With resolute shoulders, each butting away
The haze as some bluff river headland its spray.

V.
And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back
For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track;
And one eye’s black intelligence, — ever that glance
O’er its white edge at me, his own master, askance!
And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon
His fierce lips shook upward in galloping on.

VI.
By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, “Stay spur!
“Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault’s not in her,
“We’ll remember at Aix” — for one heard the quick wheeze
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees,
And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank,
As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank.

VII.
So left were we galloping, Joris and I,
Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky;
The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,
‘Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff;
Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white,
And “Gallop,” gasped Joris, “for Aix is in sight!”

VIII.
“How they’ll greet us” — and all in a moment his roan
Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone;
And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,
And with circles of red for his eye-sockets’ rim.

IX.
Then I cast loose my buffcoat, each holster let fall,
Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all,
Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear,
Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer;
Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or good,
Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood.

X.
And all I remember is, friends flocking round
As I sat with his head ’twixt my knees on the ground,
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine
Which (the burgesses voting by common consent)
Was no more than his due who brought the good news from Ghent.

The vivid repetiveness here, and the way Browning construes the dynamism of the poem’s events impressionistically rather than precisely — not least in the fact that we are never told what the ‘good news’ actually is that must be so precipitously carried to Ghent —leaves the poem open to a degree of ridicule. Sellar and Yeatman, of 1066 And All That fame, produced, in Horse Nonsense (1933), a magnificent parody of it:

How I brought the good news from Aix to Ghent or Vice Versa

I sprang to the rollocks and Jorrocks and me,
And I galloped, you galloped, we galloped all three.
Not a word to each other: we kept changing place,
Neck to neck, back to front, ear to ear, face to face:
And we yelled once or twice, when we heard a clock chime,
“Would you kindly oblige us, is that the right time?”
As I galloped, you galloped, he galloped, we galloped, ye galloped, they two shall have galloped: let us trot.

I unsaddled the saddle, unbuckled the bit,
Unshackled the bridle (the thing didn’t fit)
And ungalloped, ungalloped, ungalloped, ungalloped a bit.
Then I cast off my buff coat, let my bowler hat fall,
Took off both my boots and my trousers and all –
Drank off my stirrup-cup, felt a bit tight,
And unbridled the saddle: it still wasn’t right.

Then all I remember is, things reeling round,
As I sat with my head ’twixt my ears on the ground –
For imagine my shame when they asked what I meant
And I had to confess that I’d been, gone and went
And forgotten the news I was bringing to Ghent,
Though I’d galloped and galloped and galloped and galloped and galloped
And galloped and galloped and galloped. (Had I not would have been galloped?)

ENVOI
So I sprang to a taxi and shouted “To Aix!”
And he blew on his horn and he threw off his brakes.
And all the way back till my money was spent
We rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled
And eventually sent a telegram.

It would take a strong poem to survive that; but I think Browning’s original is a strong poem. The poem hurries us through so impetuously that it’s possible to miss that not the rider-narrator but the horse, Roland, is the hero here: three men and their mounts set out, only one lasts the full distance. The ride lasts from the middle of the night (‘moonset’) through the dawn (‘at Aerschot up leaped of a sudden the sun’) and then on through a hot day’s length (‘no cloud in the sky/The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh’) reaching Aix before sunset. That’s quite the ride: Ghent to Aix-la-Chapelle (modern Aachen) is some 200km, considerably more than twice the distance a strong horse might manage in a whole day’s ride — and that would not be at continual gallop. Forcing a horse to gallop continually for 200km would kill it, long before you reached your destination (as happens with Joris’s horse). A big, strong horse can reach ‘about 40 to 48 kilometres per hour (25 to 30 mph)’ at full gallop, which would cover the distance in some five hours. Is that the time frame the poem implies? From pre-dawn to midday? In other words, Roland is a breed of super-horse, a Sleipnir or Shadowfax rather than a regular nag. But perhaps that’s the point. It’s a legendary, a mythic ride, this. In the popular tradition, Dick Turpin rode his mighty horse Black Bess from York to London in a single night to provide himself with an unshakeable alibi: 350km, so a longer and faster dash than Browning’s Dutchman. Of course, the historical Dick Turpin never actually did anything so celeritous. This night ride was the invention of W. Harrison Ainsworth in his hugely popular novel Rookwood (1834). The impossibility of such a journey on horseback is the point of it: it wouldn’t provide Turpin a legal alibi otherwise. Elizabeth Barrett’s thoughts also went to Turpin on first reading the poem, though she made sure to praise her lover: ‘you have fairly distanced the rider in Rookwood here.’ Perhaps Browning’s Dirck recalls Turpin’s ‘Dick’. If you see what I mean. Although Dirck is not, in fact, a Dutch version of the name Richard, so perhaps not.

What is the good news that must be delivered by a certain, impending deadline (‘So Joris broke silence with, “Yet there is time!”’)? Something martial, presumably: ‘the whole weight/Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate.’ The word gallop derives etymologically (Middle English galopen, Old French galoper, Frankish *walhlaup) from a word meaning ‘battle run’ or ‘war leap’, the speed to which a horse would be spurred in a battlefield charge: from *wal ‘battlefield’ and *hlaup, ‘leap’ (the word wallop used to mean the same thing, ‘gallop’, although in English usage it has shifted its sense and now means a mighty punch or blow — but you can see the family resemblance). Tennyson’s later ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854) more directly recreates the rhythm of a galloping warhorse with a string of pounding, regular dactyls (‘Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward …’) Browning is more metrically sophisticated. Most of the lines in ‘How They Brought…’ start with an unstressed syllable, stepping up briskly to three pounding dactyls, each line capped with a further stressed syllable: i SPRANG to the STIRRup, and JORis, and HE;/i GALLoped, Dirck GALLoped, we GALLoped all ThREE. But that unstressed opener gives Browning metrical options. He can double-it up — ‘Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace’, or ‘And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chime’ — that shifts the rhythm back into anapests without losing ongoing momentum; or he can stress it, giving a line a double-punch opening (‘“Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through’). The prosody never loses pace, but neither is it as so clockwork-regular as to lose the sense of a living creature in motion.

Something military, then, is going on: and the narrator of the poem is charging with vital info that will ‘save’ the city of Aix, a different kind of ‘war-leap’ to the Light Brigade’s Crimean charge: military intelligence rather than military engagement. Then again, Aix means water, means springs, sacred water-sources (both the French Aix and the German Aachen derive ultimately from Latin aquae, ‘waters, sources’). No-one seems very sure where the name Ghent comes from, but an English cognate is Gaunt — Lancastrian prince John of Gaunt, given such eloquence in Shakespeare’s Richard II, was so-called because he was born in Ghent, not because he was unusually skinny. The English other meaning hovers about the word, I think; which styles the poem as a journey from skeletal gauntness to some manner of baptismal rebirth, to the waters; and not just that, but waters that are, in the poem’s final lines, turned into wine:

And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine

Who is the ‘He’ mentioned at the end of line 1? We might think him Dirck, except that the pronoun is capitalised, as if for God. There’s a small confusion in the opening lines, initially suggesting four riders — I [1] sprang to the stirrup, and Joris [2], and He [3]; I galloped, Dirck [4] galloped — until the line clarifies that they are only a trio: ‘we galloped all Three’. But this spectral other person haunts the frantic pilgrimage. As another poet was to write, eighty years later: ‘Who is the third who always walks beside you?’ The other is He. Whom?

‘Good News’ has, as a phrase, a mundane meaning; but of course it also has a religious meaning: Gospel, the English translation (gōd ‘good’ + spel ‘news’) of the NT Greek term εὐαγγέλιον, ‘good news’ (εὖ ‘good’ + ἄγγελος ‘messenger’ — this latter also the source of the word angel). If we take the poem as being, in some way, an evangelical piece, then what becomes remarkable is the sheer urgency of it: not just that the gospel has to reach Germany, but it has to do so immediately, without delay. In its first appearance, in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) Browning added a date, sort-of, to the title: ‘16 — .’ So a seventeenth-century poem, a little later than the initial spread of Protestantism across northern Germany and the Netherlands, but at the time of the counter-Reformation, when Protestantism was under threat. Pehaps that has something to do with the urgent good news to be delivered. Perhaps this is actually a poem about the terrible urgency of redemption: it cannot be delayed. In the great war of life, it is what will save us.

This may strike you as a far-fetched reading of the poem. But it cannot be denied that this is a work that tracks a journey out of darkness and into light; or that the riders, hearing a church bell chime, take comfort from that episcopal resonance, reassurance that ‘there is still time’. There are three riders: one named Joris — that is ‘George’ — and another Dirck: ‘Derek’ in English, both versions of the name Theodoric, the mighty Gothic inheritor of Roman rule, Christian emperor, patron of Boethius, one of the most influential of Christian philosophers. George is the (Turkish) knight of faith whom we English have claimed as our patron saint, whose red cross stands on our national flag. The speaker of the poem is not named, but it is not hard to see him as another knight of faith, urging his horse on towards the Kierkegaardian war-leap — gallop — into faith itself. In 1846, Kierkegaard wrote, ‘The leap becomes easier in the degree to which some distance intervenes between the initial position and the place where the leap takes off. And so it is also with respect to a decisive movement in the realm of the spirit’ [Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 326–27]. Two hundred kilometers is surely a big enough distance.