How Robert browning`s dramatic monologue in "A Grammarian`s Funeral" & "The Last Ride Together" captures the doubts of Victorian England ?
Life in Victorian england, for most people, was a hard trudgeing through a life of poverty. Certainly, there is dramatic irony to suggest that the grammarian chose poorly in dedicating his life to study over living. The triumphant tone the speaker uses makes humorous the descriptions of the grammarian's afflictions. He talks of how the grammarian grew "bald too, [with] eyes like lead" (line 53), how tussis (a cough) afflicted him, and how his life was "cramped and diminished" (line 38). The disconnect between the content and the high-spirited tone suggests that the speaker is unaware of how terrible the life he describes actually was. Further, the disciples' goal – which is to remove the corpse far away from the everyday life that the grammarian eschewed – requires much toil as they carry him, an apt metaphor for the ineffectiveness of the grammarian's life choice. In the same way that the grammarian had to sacrifice so much for his relatively obscure goal, so are these men now pushing themselves into a difficult task simply to leave the man's body up on a mountain.
