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A Grammarian's Funeral
Shortly After the Revival of Learning in Europe
by Robert Browning
Publication date	1855
Lines	148

"A Grammarian's Funeral" is a poem by Robert Browning, first published in his 1855 collection, Men and Women.

The poem is from the point of view of the grammarian's students. Their master has just died, and they take his body for interment on a high mountain. As they go singing, his casket on their shoulders, they recount the his life story, how he put aside poetry for learning, and, ignoring earthly desire and life's fleeting opportunities, spent his later years writing on the fine points grammar. Even when old age had slowed him, he carried on, refusing to set aside the work for life's pleasures even onto death.

The traditional view of A Grammarian's Funeral is that it applauded lives spent in academic drudgery. Some more recent views take other positions; that Browning meant us to view the grammarian's choice, to devote himself to study rather than to life, as ill-advised.

Poem

The poem is narrated from the perspective of students of a recently-deceased grammarian. He will not be interred among the common clay in the local cemetery; instead they take him to a sepulcher on a high peak, and they proceed singing, marching ceremoniously with their master's casket on their shoulders, taking him to his resting place.

Critical response

This discontent manifested itself politically; third-party candidates seeking reform were common in the mostly-agricultural West and South in 1888, an election which saw Republican Benjamin Harrison displace incumbent president Grover Cleveland. Of the third-party candidates at the state or local level who ran as reformers, not many succeeded, as voters more often selected a mainstream-party candidate who promised to support similar policy changes. In July 1890, the first People's Party was founded in Kansas, that fall its candidates secured four congressional seats and control of the lower house of the state legislature; its legislators then elected the first United States Senator from the Populist Party (as it came to be called), William A. Peffer. In the South, party loyalties were tied up in issues of states' rights and fears that an electoral split would allow the Republican Party, to which most African Americans were loyal, to return to power at the state level and empower that minority. Nevertheless, leaders of the Farmer's Alliance (as many elements of the Populists were known in their early days) in several southern states boasted that their positions now commanded majority support in the legislature. They demanded greater government intervention in the economy, included) subsidized loans to farmers, government ownership of the railroads (often charged with too-high rates), and direct election of senators, and the elimination of the Electoral College for election of the president and vice president by popular vote.