O, to be in England... Robert Browning

Robert Browning, like Charles Dickens, was in Italy in the spring of 1845 when he wrote this poem

Home-thoughts, from Abroad

In 1845 Robert met the love of his life: Elizabeth Barrett Browning [EBB] 

But he had admired EBB from afar after reading her newly-published poems and had written his first letter to her on 10th January 1845 which began: 

'I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett' 

So he must surely have been thinking of Elizabeth, immobilised as she was by an unexplained illness when he wrote these lines. But he didn't meet EBB until May 1845. You can see how he imagines a person being in England and seeing and hearing the spring developing and growing. His verse in May is loaded with sensual imagery:

O, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the Elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England-now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom'd pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge-
That's the wise thrush; he sings his song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
-Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!