ABSTRACT
W. M. Rossetti, who first printed this quatrain, explained: ‘Mr Browning has favoured me with this amusing absurdity, retailed to him by Leigh Hunt. It seems that Hunt and Shelley were talking one day (probably in or about 1817) concerning Love-Songs; and Shelley said he didn’t see why Hate-Songs also should not be written, and that he could do them; and on the spot he improvised these lines of doggerel’ (Rossetti 1870 ii 602). If, consciously or unconsciously, the woman of line 4 was Eliza Westbrook, as is suggested by ‘ditch’ (the Serpentine?) and by the implied rhyme avoided in ‘brute’, the date of the improvisation may well have been January 1817.
