"How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" begins with the promise of adventure. The speaker plunges readers into the very moment when he "sprang to the stirrup," leaping on his horse to carry "Good News" on a hundred-mile journey between the city of Ghent in Belgium and the city of Aix, just over the German border. This lively in media res beginning suggests that the speaker of this dramatic monologue is telling a tale he's told many times before, and getting right to the good stuff.
In only a few lines, readers get a pretty clear picture of the poem's setting. Alongside the cities in the title, the distinctive names of the speaker's companions "Joris" and "Dirck" make it clear that this poem is taking place in Belgium. And the idea of delivering an urgent message on horseback—and rushing past "the watch," a guard posted at the city walls—suggests that this isn't the poet Browning's contemporary 19th-century Belgium, but some more romantic era, long ago.
In other words, the scene is set for an old-fashioned tale of derring-do, a high-spirited adventure on horseback. A crucial message needs to be delivered, and the speaker will be one of the men to deliver it. The stakes are high.
And yet, the stakes are also unclear! There's not the slightest hint of what the speaker's urgent message is. The setting suggests that this might be a military message, maybe news that will avert a battle or some other calamity—but the speaker doesn't give any further details. All readers know is that, whatever the message is, it's "Good News," and news the riders must rush to deliver.
Their urgency is reflected in the poem's very form. From the moment the speaker and his friends "spr[i]ng to the stirrup," the poem's sounds and shapes match their "galloping" speed through vivid onomatopoeia.
One of the clearest examples is the poem's polyptoton on the word "gallop" itself—a word that sounds just like the swift hoofbeats it describes. Variations on "gallop" appear no fewer than five times in this first stanza alone, and three of those repetitions turn up in just one line:
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
The speaker's insistent repetitions seem to say that there was really an awful lot of galloping going on that fateful night. His asyndeton here makes that point even clearer: amidst all this action, there's no time to pause for conjunctions!
The meter gallops, too. Written in anapestic tetrameter—lines of four anapests, metrical feet with a da-da-DUM rhythm—the poem has a driving beat that imitates the speaker's wild ride. Even the rhyme scheme here feels urgent: couplets propel the reader from one line to the next, each new rhyme rushing towards its partner.
It's no wonder, then, that the "watch" cries "'Good speed!'" to the riders as they rush out the gates of Ghent. Exhilarating speed will drive this whole poem.
But it's also meaningful that the watch's cry "echoe[s]" off the city walls as the speaker and his companions rush through—and that this echo only repeats one word, "'Speed!'" This will also be a story about metaphorical echoes: about storytelling, memories, and forgetting. The things the speaker remembers about his ride, readers will soon discover, aren't necessarily what one might expect—and the things he seems to forget are surprising and important, too.