ROBERT BROWNING'S POEM LIFE IN A LOVE

 

On the 21 st day of the Blog chatter’s #WRITEAPAGEADAY, Here is a poem with love as the major theme.

 

Poet:  ROBERT BROWNING

Poem:   LIFE IN A LOVE

 

   Escape me?

   Never—

   Beloved!

  While I am I, and you are you,

  So long as the world contains us both,

   Me the loving and you the loth,

  While the one eludes, must the other pursue.

   My life is a fault at last, I fear:

I   It seems too much like a fate, indeed!

  Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.

   But what if I fail of my purpose here?

I   It is but to keep the nerves at strain,

   To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,

   And, baffled, get up and begin again,—

   So the chase takes up one's life, that's all.

   While, look but once from your farthest bound

   At me so deep in the dust and dark,

   No sooner the old hope goes to ground

  Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,

I  I shape me—

   Ever

   Removed!

 

  Robert Browning the passionate singer of love, youth and the world of sense. Each has attracted its little coterie of admirers. He is a poet of not merely the greatest of the artistic value but of the greatest human value. Browning is the most vital and compelling genius and a dramatic singer of love and life.

  In Browning’s poetry love is an ideal as well as a present actuality, and being an ideal its satisfaction is ever incomplete- “infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn” – hence the divine restless of human heart. The elusiveness of love is more fancifully dealt within life in a love.

   Certain aspects of love have been more finely rendered by other poets; but in range of matter Browning has no superior. His art as a poet of love suffers limitations to that extent, but the underlying inspiration is the greater. For his outlook on love is the outlook of a man who puts it in front of any other thing in life, as a force for sanctifying and strengthening the soul.