Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
English poet and husband of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up,
And be discharged, and straight wound up anew?
No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets:
May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.
We loved, sir — used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was —
But then, how it was sweet!
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!
Oh their Rafael of the dear Madonnas,
Oh their Dante of the dread Inferno,
Wrote one song—and in my brain I sing it;
Drew one angel—borne, see, on my bosom!
Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.
I judge people by what they might be,—not are, nor will be.
He is called an optimist; but the word suggests a calculated contentment which was not in the least one of his vices. What he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away: he enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour even in theology and metaphysics: like the Jongleurs de Dieu of St. Francis. He may be said to have serenaded heaven with a guitar, and even, so to speak, tried to climb there with a rope ladder.
Kiss me as if you made believe
You were not sure, this eve,
How my face, your flower, had pursed
It's petals up.
Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
Not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
Other heights in other lives, God willing.
I give the fight up: let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God.
How good is man's life, the mere living!
How fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses
Forever in joy!
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel?
But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men.
Jove strikes the Titans down
Not when they set about their mountain-piling
But when another rock would crown the work.
When is man strong until he feels alone?
A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact
Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,
And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since.
Give it me back! The thing's restorative
I'the touch and sight.
Say not "a small event!" Why "small"?
Costs it more pain that this ye call
A "great event" should come to pass
From that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!
In the morning of the world,
When earth was nigher heaven than now.
So, take, and use thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!