Post a response:
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The verse has always bothered me. Why the snail on the thorn? Snails are not kind to thorns, nor thorns - I imagine - to snails. Moreover, the internet informs me that "many larks eat snails." Is all really all that right with the world? Browning was certainly not above ironising Pippa's Panglossian optimism. And I think of Browning's younger contemporary Thomas Hardy, whose boyish Jude Fawley (one of the greatest and saddest boy characters in all of Victorian literature) laments "the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener." |