Answer to Question 1
- As does the speaker in Robert Brownings Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, Mews farmer-narrator reveals more than he realizes. Make sure that students understand what has caused the farmers bride first to shrink from her husband, then run away. They can find abundant evidence in the poem. The farmer admits in the first stanza that she was too young maybe when he married her, and that the courtship was brief. Clearly the bride was unprepared for sex, and this wellmeaning but unromantic man scared her off. Three years after the wedding shes still afraidof him and of all men (lines 2226).
Answer to Question 2
- While clearly frustrated and confused by her actions, he is quite sympathetic to her and remarkably tolerant of her behavior. In her biography of the poet, Penelope Fitzgerald suggests that he has just about reached the breaking point with her, though there is no overt indication in the text that he intends to force any change in the situation. Readers may respond more readily to other parts of Fitzgeralds commentary:
H. W. Nevinson,
The Nations literary critic, was only one of many to find the farmer much too sympathetic. A man can hardly imagine why the most sensitive of women should run out into the night to avoid him. . . . There is a curious dissociation in the poem because we are asked to pity both parties, the sweating farmer and the frightened girl, and even to see why it is that she has to be caught. . . .
The girl, too young maybe, is one of those magic figures of the pre1914 years (Kiplings
Jungle Book, W. H. Hudsons
Green Mansions), a talker to birds and animals. But this gives her (unlike Mowgli and Rima) no kind of power or advantage, it only makes her seem odd. She gets more understanding, but not much more sympathy, from the women than the men. In any case, these women have their own work to do, and certainly they make no objection to her being brought back. (pp. 103104)
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