How Does Browning Tell the Story in 'the Patriot'?

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Browning’s poem ‘The Patriot’ is the familiar ‘old story’ of a man whom was once celebrated but has since fallen from grace and is now facing death by hanging. Browning structures his story in six stanzas, each of five lines, which each narrate a separate stage in the narrator’s rise and subsequent dramatic fall. Browning’s use of roman numerals helps to reinforce the linear chronology of the poem and to suggest a causal connection between the narrator’s actions, whilst in power, and his downfall. Browning’s choice of setting in the unspecified past, as suggested by the epigraph ‘an old story’ and the archaic vocabulary choices such as ‘Alack’ and ‘trow’ and an unspecified European city, as suggested by the ‘church-spires’ which ‘flamed’ with the flags of celebration that welcome the patriot in the opening stanza, make this narrative almost universally applicable to the rise and fall of leaders and icons, whether political, religious or cultural in any time or place. Indeed it could be argued that this poem reflects aspects of Browning’s own, often fruitless, pursuit of popular recognition and critical acclaim in his own lifetime. Additionally, Browning makes clear allusions to the story of Icarus and Jesus when the protagonist and narrator refers to his leap ‘at the sun’ in stanza three and subsequent public humiliation as he is made to walk to the scaffold as ‘rope cuts both my [his] wrists behind’ and his former followers ‘fling […] Stones at me [him] for my [his] year's misdeeds.’ These allusions further emphasise the timelessness of this story and create a narrative that is as much about the nature of these narratives themselves as the stories of individuals’ rise and fall. This is perhaps why Browning chooses to leave the narrator unnamed and the time and setting unspecified. Browning’s choice of these two allusions in particular also allow the reader to
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