Lines 1-4 dive straight into the speaker's attack on the "Lost Leader," accusing the leader of wrongdoing without identifying him or explaining the situation that led to this seeming betray. This abrupt opening conveys the force of the speakers' emotions, as if they (note the plural "us" in line 1) are so indignant that they don't have time to explain everything.
Browning also skimps on explanation because the poem alludes to people and events that most of his readers were already familiar with. As he acknowledged, "The Lost Leader" was intended as a criticism of his fellow poet William Wordsworth:
- In his youth, Wordsworth had been considered a leader among radical writers and intellectuals supporting the cause of democracy in Europe.
- As he aged, he grew more conservative, started defending the British monarchy, and finally accepted the job of Poet Laureate from the Queen herself.
Thus, Browning's speaker accuses the "Leader" of betraying his cause for a little "silver" (money) and a ceremonial "riband" (ribbon). The silver here alludes to the "thirty pieces of silver" for which Judas betrays Jesus in the Bible.
Lines 3-4 expand on the theme of selling out, setting up an antithesis between social status and artistic integrity:
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
In other words, the leader (Wordsworth) has gained the "one gift" that fate (personified as the goddess of "fortune") denied his former comrades: recognition by the establishment. In the process, however, he's lost all the other gifts that fortune lets writers "devote" to her as offerings: inspiration, talent, and so on. In a terrible tradeoff, he's now a successful public figure but a washed-up artist.
These opening lines establish the dactylic meter that will continue throughout the poem. Dactyls are metrical feet consisting of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables: "DUM-da-da." Each line contains four such feet (usually with one or two syllables trimmed off the last foot), so the poem is set in dactylic tetrameter:
Just for a | handful of | silver he | left us,
Just for a | riband to | stick in his | coat—
Dactylic verse is unusual in English and creates a forceful, galloping rhythm—appropriate to the hard-charging tone of this poem, which seems to rush forward and hurl accusations.
Both the meter and the anaphora of the first two lines (the repeated "Just for a") place strong emphasis on the word "Just." This is a way of emphasizing how little the leader sold out for: just a bit of money and a ribbon!