"O lyric Love"

[Ed. Note: "O lyric Love" is the concluding passage of Book I of The Ring and the Book; in it, Browning describes his wife, who had died in 1861, as the muse who inspires him in creating this work. She had, in fact, encouraged him to write it. --Nelson]

O LYRIC Love, half angel and half bird,

And all a wonder and a wild desire,--

Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,

Took sanctuary within the holier blue,

And sang a kindred soul out to his face,--

Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--

When the first summons from the darkling earth

Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,

And bared tehm of the glory--to drop down,

To toil for man, to suffer or to die,--

This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?

Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!

Never may I commence my song, my due

To God who best taught song by gift of thee,

Except with bent head and beseeching hand--

That still, despite the distance and the dark,

What was, again may be; some interchange

Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought,

Some benediction anciently thy smile:

--Never conclude, but raising hand and head

Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn

For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,

Their upmost up and on,--so blessing back

In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,

Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,

Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!

Robert Browning

Prologue: Amphibian

THE fancy I had to-day,

  Fancy which turned a fear!

I swam far out in the bay,

 &nbps;Since waves laughed warm and clear.

I lay and looked at the sun,

  The noon-sun looked at me:

Between us two, no one

  Live creature, that I could see.

Yes! There came floating by

  Me, who lay floating too,

Such a strange butterfly!

  Creature as dear as new!

Because the membraned wings

  So wonderful, so wide,

So sun-suffused, were things

  Like soul and naught beside.

A handbreadth overhead!

 &nbps;All of the sea my own,

It owned the sky instead;

  Both of us were alone.

I never shall join its flight,

  For, naught buoys flesh in air.

If it touch the sea--good night!

  Death sure and swift waits there.

Can the insect feel the better

  For watching the uncouth play

Of limbs that slip the fetter,

  Pretend as they were not clay?

Undoubtedly I rejoice

  That the air comports so well

With a creature which had the choice

  Of the land once. Who can tell?

What if a certain soul

  Which early slipped its sheath,

And has for its home the whole

  Of heaven, thus look beneath,

Thus watch one who, in the world,

  Both lives and likes life's way,

Nor wishes the wings unfurled

  That sleep in the worm, they say?

But sometimes when the weather

  Is blue, and warm waves tempt

To free one's self of tether,

  And try a life exempt

From worldly noise and dust,

  In the sphere which overbrims

With passion and thought,--why, just

  Unable to fly, one swims!

By passion and thought upborne,

  One smiles to one's self--"They fare

Scarce better, they need not scorn

  Our sea, who live in the air!"

Emancipate through passion

  And thought, with sea for sky,

We substitute, in a fashion,

  For heaven--poetry:

Which sea, to all intent,

  Gives flesh such noon-disport

As a finer element

  Affords the spirit-sort.

Whatever they are, we seem:

  Imagine the thing they know;

All deeds they do, we dream;

  Can heaven be else but so?

And meantime, yonder streak

  Meets the horizon's verge;

This is the land, to seek

  If we tire or dread the surge:

Land the solid and safe--

  To welcome again (confess!)

When, high and dry, we chafe

  The body, and don the dress.

Does she look, pity, wonder

  At one who mimics flight,

Swims--heaven above, sea under,

  Yet always earth in sight?

Robert Browning

Pan and Luna

Si credere dignum est.--Virgil, Georgics, III, 390

[Ed. Note: The passage from Virgil's Georgics Browning refers to is translated by Dryden (whose translation Browning quotes) as follows:

'T was thus, with fleeces milky white, (if we

May trust report,) Pan, god of Arcady

Did bribe thee, Cynthia; nor didst thou disdain,

When call'd in woody shades, to cure a lover's pain.]

OH, worthy of belief I hold it was,

Virgil, your legend in those strange three lines!

No question, that adventure came to pass

One black night in Arcadia: yes, the pines,

Mountains and valleys mingling made one mass

Of black with void black heaven: the earth's confines,

The sky's embrace,--below, above, around,

All hardened into black without a bound.

Fill up a swart stone chalice to the brim

With fresh-squeezed yet fast-thickening poppy-juice:

See how the sluggish jelly, late a-swim,

Turns marble to the touch of who would loose

The solid smooth, grown jet from rim to rim,

By turning round the bowl! So night can fuse

Earth with her all-comprising sky. No less,

Light, the least spark, shows air and emptiness.

And thus it proved when--diving into space,

Stript of all vapor, from each web of mist,

Utterly film-free--entered on her race

The naked Moon, full-orbed antagonist

Of night and dark, night's dowry: peak to base,

Upstarted mountains, and each valley, kissed

To sudden life, lay silver-bright: in air

Flew she revealed, Maid-Moon with limbs all bare.

Still as she fled, each depth,--where refuge seemed--

Opening a lone pale chamber, left distinct

Those limbs: mid still-retreating blue, she teemed

Herself with whiteness,--virginal, uncinct

By any halo save what finely gleamed

To outline not disguise her: heavenwas linked

In one accord with earth to quaff the joy,

Drain beauty to the dregs without alloy.

Whereof she grew aware. What help? When, lo,

A succorable cloud with sleep lay dense:

Some pinetree-top had caught it sailing slow,

And tethered for a prize: in evidence

Captive lay fleece on fleece of piled-up snow

Drowsily patient: flake-heaped how or whence,

The structure of that succorable cloud,

What matter? Shamed she plunged into its shroud.

Orbed--so the woman-figure poets call

Because of rounds on rounds--that apple-shaped

Head which its hair binds close into a ball

Each side the curving ears--that pure undraped

Pout of the sister paps--that . . . once for all,

Say--her consummate circle thus escaped

With its innumerous circlets, sank absorbed,

Safe in the cloud--O naked Moon full-orbed!

But what means this? The downy swathes combine,

Conglobe, the smothery coy-caressing stuff

Curdles about her! Vain each twist and twine

Those lithe limbs try, encroached on by a fluff

Fitting as close as fits the dented spine

Its flexible ivory outside-flesh: enough!

The plumy drifts contract, condense, constringe,

Till she is swallowed by the feathery springe.

As when a pearl slips lost in the thin foam

Churned on a sea-shore, and, o'er-frothed, conceits

Herself safe-housed in Amphitrite's dome,--

If, through the bladdery wave-worked yeast, she meets

What most she loathes and leaps from,--elf from gnome

No gladlier,--finds that safest of retreats

Bubble about a treacherous hand wide ope

To grasp her--(divers who pick pearls so grope)--

So lay this Maid-Moon clasped around and caught

By rough red Pan, the god of all that tract:

He it was schemed the snare thus subtly wrought

With simulated earth-breath,--wool-tufts packed

Into a billowy wrappage. Sheep far-sought

For spotless shearings yield such: take the fact

As learned Virgil gives it,--how the breed

Whitens itself forever: yes, indeed!

If one forefather ram, though pure as chalk

From tinge on fleece, should still display a tongue

Black 'neath the beast's moist palate, prompt men balk

The propagating plague: he gets no young:

They rather slay him,--sell his hide to calk

Ships with, first steeped with pitch,--nor hands are wrung

In sorrow for his fate: protected thus,

The purity we loved is gained for us. So did girl-Moon, by just her attribute

Of unmatched modesty betrayed, lie trapped,

Bruised to the breast of Pan, half god half brute,

Raked by his bristly boar-sward while he lapped

--Never say, kissed her! that were to pollute

Love's language--which moreover proves unapt

To tell how she recoiled--as who finds thorns

Where she sought flowers--when, feeling, she touched--horns!

Then--does the legend say?--first moon-eclipse

Happened, first swooning-fit which puzzled sore

The early sages? Is that why she dips

Into the dark, a minute and no more,

Only so long as serves her while she rips

The cloud's womb through and, faultless as before,

Pursues her way? No lesson for a maid

Left she, a maid herself thus trapped, betrayed?

Ha, Virgil? Tell the rest, you! "To the deep

Of his domain the wildwood, Pan forthwith

Called her, and so she followed"--in her sleep,

Surely?--"by no means spurning him." The myth

Explain who may! Let all else go, I keep

--As of a ruin just a monolith--

Thus much, one verse of five words, each a boon:

Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon.

Robert Browning

"Man I am and man would be, Love"

MAN I am and man would be, Love--merest man and nothing more.

Bid me seem no other! Eagles boast of pinions--let them soar!

I may put forth angel's plumage, once unmanned, but not before.

Now on earth to stand suffices,--nay, if kneeling serves, to kneel:

Here you front me, here I find the all of heaven that earth can feel:

Sense looks straight,--not over,under,--perfect sees beyond appeal.

Good you are and wise, full circle: what to me were more outside?

Wiser wisdom, better goodness? Ah, such want the angel's wide

Sense to take and hold and keep them! Mine at least has never tried.

Robert Browning

"Verse-making was least of my virtues"

VERSE-MAKING was least of my virtues: I viewed with despair

Wealth that never yet was but might be--all that verse-making were

If the life would but lengthen to wish, let the mind be laid bare.

So I said, "To do little is bad, to do nothing is worse"--

     And made verse.

Love-making,--how simple a matter! No depths to explore,

No heights in a life to ascend! No disheartening Before,

No affrighting Hereafter,--love now will be love ever more.

So I felt "To keep silence were folly:"--all language above,

     I made love.

Robert Browning

Why I Am A Liberal

[Ed. Note: This sonnet is one of the few Browning wrote; it was his response to a request by Andrew Reid who asked a number of intellectual leaders to answer the question, "Why am I a liberal?" The answers were published in book form by Reid in 1885; Browning himself never included the poem in any of his published volumes. --Nelson]

"WHY?" Because all I haply can and do,

  All that I am now, all I hope to be,--

  Whence comes it save from fortune setting free

Body and soul the purpose to pursue,

God traced for both? If fetters, not a few,

  Of prejudice, convention, fall from me,

  These shall I bid men--each in his degree

Also God-guided--bear, and gayly, too?

But little do or can the best of us:

  That little is achieved through Liberty.

Who, then, dares hold, emancipated thus,

  His fellow shall continue bound? Not I,

Who live, love, labour freely, nor discuss

 &nbps;A brother's right to freedom. That is "Why."

Robert Browning

Prologue to Asolando

[Ed. Note: Asolando was Browning's last book; it was published on the day he died. --Nelson]

"THE Poet's age is sad: for why?

  In youth, the natural world could show

No common object but his eye

  At once involved with alien glow--

His own soul's iris-bow.

"And now a flower is just a flower:

  Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man--

Simply themselves, uncinct by dower

  Of dyes which, when life's day began,

Round each in glory ran."

Friend, did you need an optic glass,

  Which were your choice? A lens to drape

In ruby, emerald, chrysopras,

  Each object--or reveal its shape

Clear outlined, past escape,

The naked very thing?--so clear

  That, when you had the chance to gaze,

You found its inmost self appear

  Through outer seeming--truth ablaze,

Not falsehood's fancy haze?

How many a year, my Asolo,

  Since--one step just from sea to land--

I found you, loved yet feared you so--

  For natural objects seemed to stand

Palpably fire-clothed! No--

No mastery of mine o'er these!

  Terror with beauty, like the Bush

Burning but unconsumed. Bend knees,

  Drop eyes to earthward! Language? Tush!

Silence 't is awe decrees.

And now? The lambent flame is--where?

  Lost from the naked world: earth, sky,

Hill, vale, tree, flower,--Italia's rare

  O'er-running beauty crowds the eye--

But flame? The Bush is bare.

Hill, vale, tree, flower--they stand distinct,

  Nature to know and name. What then?

A Voice spoke thence which straight unlinked

  Fancy from fact: see, all's in ken:

Has once my eyelid winked?

No, for the purged ear apprehends

  Earth's import, not the eye late dazed.

The Voice said, "Call my works thy friends!

 &nbps;At Nature dost thou shrink amazed?

God it is who transcends."

Robert Browning

Epilogue to Asolando

[Ed. Note: This poem was the last Browning wrote. --Nelson]

AT the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,

  When you set your fancies free,

Will they pass to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned--

Low he lies who onced so loved you, whom you loved so,

     --Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!

  What had I on earth to do

With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?

Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel

     --Being--who?

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,

  Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

     Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time

  Greet the unseen with a cheer!

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,

"Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed,--fight on, fare ever

     There as here!"

Robert Browning