“A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!”

T E Brown

- The Manx National Poet

Published in

UK Heritage Holiday Island

3 min readSep 2, 2013

Thomas Edward Brown (5 May 1830 – 29 October 1897), commonly referred to as T.E. Brown was a Manx poet, scholar and theologian.

Brown was born in Douglas. His father, the Rev. Robert Brown, shared with the parish schoolmaster in tutoring the clever boy until, at the age of fifteen, he was entered at King William’s College. Here his abilities soon declared themselves, and hence he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, where his position as a servitor cost him much humiliation, which he remembered to the end of his life. He won a double first, however, and was elected a fellow of Oriel in April 1854, Dean Thomas Gaisford having refused to promote him to a senior studentship of his own college, on the ground that no servitor had ever before attained to that honour. Although at that time an Oriel fellowship conferred a deserved distinction, Brown never took kindly to the life, but, after a few terms of private pupils, returned to the Isle of Man as vice-principal of his old school. He had been ordained deacon, but did not proceed to priest’s orders for many years.

Thomas Edward Brown, the Manx poet: an appreciation

Brown is best known for his posthumous 1900 Collection of Poems of TE Brown, a volume of narrative poetry written in Anglo-Manx dialect.

Brown’s 1871 poem, Betsy Lee, evokes in its rhythms and tones the spirit of the Manx narrator who recites the tale of local girl, Betsy. For generations of Manx people, the narrator’s descriptions have encapsulated the childhood delight of an archetypal, Manx summer’s day:

Now the beauty of the thing when childher plays is
The terrible wonderful length the days is.
Up you jumps, and out in the sun,
And you fancy the day will never be done ;
And you’re chasin’ the bumbees humin’ so cross
In the hot sweet air among the goss,
Or gath’rin’ bluebells, or lookin’ for eggs,
Or peltin’ the ducks with their yalla legs,
Or a climbin’ and nearly breakin’ your skulls,
Or a shoutin’ for divilment after the gulls,
Or a thinkin’ of nothin’, but down at the tide
Singin’ out for the happy you feel inside.
That’s the way with the kids, you know,
And the years do come and the years do go,
And when you look back it’s all like a puff,
Happy and over and short enough.

Link to recitation of Betsy Lee (Part 1) — http://youtu.be/l5Vpoxlckwo

TE Brown became the Isle of Man’s National poet in 1930.

Probably the image of which Brown is most well known to islanders

Brown’s more important poems are narrative, and written in the Anglo-Manx dialect, with a free use of pauses, and sometimes with daring irregularity of rhythm. A rugged tenderness is their most characteristic note; but the emotion, while almost equally explosive in mirth and in tears, remains an educated emotion, disciplined by a scholar’s sense of language. They breathe the fervour of an island patriotism (humorously aware of its limits) and of a simple natural piety. In his lyrics he is happiest when yoking one or the other of these emotions to serve a philosophy of life, often audacious, but always genial.