Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
English poet and husband of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Oh child that didst despise thy life so much
When it seemed only thine to keep or lose,
How the fine ear felt fall the first low word
"Value life, and preserve life for My sake!"
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
The peerless cup afloat
Of the lake-lily is an urn some nymph
Swims bearing high above her head.
Why comes temptation, but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestaled in triumph?
God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
Sing, riding's a joy! For me I ride.
You should not take a fellow eight years old
And make him swear to never kiss the girls.
The curious crime, the fine
Felicity and flower of wickedness.
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive,—what time, what circuit first,
I ask not; but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time.
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!
Not for such hopes and fears
Annulling youth's brief years,
Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark!
Rather I prize the doubt
Low kinds exist without,
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.
Poor vaunt of life indeed,
Were man but formed to feed
On joy, to solely seek and find and feast;
Such feasting ended, then
As sure an end to men.
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.
There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest.
Womanliness means only motherhood;
All love begins and ends there.
Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised)
Linking our England to his Italy.
I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
I trust in God,—the right shall be the right
And other than the wrong, while he endures.
I trust in my own soul, that can perceive
The outward and the inward,—Nature's good
And God's.