National Poetry Month: Robert Browning

We had to read this poem in 11th grade Humanities, and I remember that this was the time I started getting into poetry – I mean, stuff I was discovering on my own, not just the Irish stuff I always heard at home, my inheritance basically. This was the year I discovered Sylvia Plath, and Robinson Jeffers, and Edna St. Vincent Millay – and I started “getting it” – meaning: I was figuring out how to read a poem, how to focus my attention on it, hone in … which is not always an easy thing to do. And Robert Browning’s “Meeting at Night” transported me – something about the adjectives in the first four lines … they’re just perfect – but also kind of unexpected. The startled waves, and “fiery ringlets”, the yellow moon, the grey sea … I grew up in the Ocean State and knew all about the moodiness of the sea, the beauty of it … Browning’s language here fed my soul. It pleased me. Maybe that’s a weird word to use … but it’s true.

Meeting at Night

I.
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

II.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

“Tennyson and Browning did not immediately hit it off, though a few years later at the publisher Edward Morton’s dinner table (three months before Browning’s elopement with Elizabeth Barrett( they became friends, and though not intimate they remained friends – meeting in France, Italy and England – for the rest of their lives. Tennyson had not relished Browning’s consonantal cacophony since he read Sordello in 1840. But both men swallowed hard and spoke well of one another’s verse, dedicating poems to each other. Browning liked Tennyson’s verse better than Tennyson liked Browning’s.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”

“The obscurity, to which he must in large degree plead guilty, was, curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it was only impatience.” — G.K. Chesterton, “The Victorian Age”

“There are as many versions of him as there are solutions to his murder story. Was he a sublimated anal-erotic, an ordinary entertaining chap, a deep thinker, a charlatan? Such variety illustrates his view that individual imaginations deal individually with a given reality. This individuality and human diversity he explored, so some contend. Or were his dramatic monologues simply a trying on of a succession of insubstantial masks? In either case, Browning declares: ‘Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.’ It is a point of departure: What was that mouth like? What truths does it tell?” — Michael Schmidt

“Browning is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness.” — Matthew Arnold

To Robert Browning – by Walter Savage Landor

There is delight in singing, though none hear
Beside the singer; and there is delight
In praising, though the praiser sit alone
And see the praised far off him, far above.
Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world’s,
Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walked along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse. But warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze
Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

“Like Donne, whom he admired, Browning plucks at our sleeve with a startling phrase, plunges us in medias res, ignites our curiosity time and again. He satisfies our curiosity. His syntax can be effectively mimetic, scurrying in breathless clauses to a climax, or pacing with dignity, or deliberating ponderously, as the action, rather than the character, requires.” — Michael Schmidt

“I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the old servant [Gerard] begin his tale upon the scene [II, i]; and be taken by the throat, or drawn upon, by his master, in its commencement. But the tragedy I never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you tell Browning that I have seen it [ms.], tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.” — Charles Dickens, after reading the manuscript of Browning’s “A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon”, 1842

And here is Robert Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth Barreett, 1845:

January 10th, 1845
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, — and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write, –whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius and there a graceful and natural end of the thing: since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me — for in the first flush of delight I though I would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration — perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of herafter! — but nothing comes of it

all — so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew … oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat and prized highly and put in a book with a proper account at bottom, and shut up and put away … and the book called a ‘Flora’, besides! After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time; because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought — but in this addressing myself to you, your

own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogher. I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart — and I love you too: do you know I was once seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning “would you like to see Miss Barrett?” — then he went to announce me, — then he returned … you were too unwell — and now it is years ago — and I feel as at some untorward passage in my travels — as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel

on crypt, … only a screen to push and I might have entered — but there was some slight … so it now seems … slight and just-sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be!

Well, these Poems were to be — and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself.
Yours ever faithfully
Robert Browning

More on Robert Browning here.