Meeting at Night

Last updated

"Meeting at Night"
by Robert Browning
Thomas B. Read (American, 1822-1872) - Portraits of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.jpg
Elizabeth and Robert Browning in 1853
Written1845 (1845)
First published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics
LanguageEnglish
Full text
Wikisource-logo.svg Meeting at Night at Wikisource

"Meeting at Night" is a Victorian English love poem by Robert Browning. The original poem appeared in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) in which "Night" and "Morning" were two sections. In 1849, the poet separated them into the two poems "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning". In the poem, the speaker is in urgency to meet his beloved and for this he has to travel through the sea at night to reach the beach where his lover is waiting.

Contents

The poem (like others of the 1845 collection) was written during the courtship period of Browning with his future wife Elizabeth Barrett. Kennedy and Hair describe the poem as the "most sensual poem" he had written up to that time. [1]

Background

John Kenyon, a distant cousin of Elizabeth Barrett, presented a copy of Barrett's 1844 poems to Sarianna Browning, sister of Robert Browning. Browning, discovering his name in print in the poem volume, wrote a letter to Barrett on January 10, 1845. Upon getting a reply he sent her the manuscripts of poems and plays of the Dramatic Romances and Lyrics for proofreading. [2]

The poems in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics were arranged in groups of two or three with the two love poems "Night" and "Morning" as complementary. They are described by Kennedy and Hair as "a compact dramatic narrative reflecting a decidedly masculine attitude toward love." [1]

Themes

The poem is written in two stanzas of six lines each. The first stanza describes the excitement of a secret journey by a boat on the sea. The second stanza describes the joy of the meeting of the two lovers. The main theme of this poem is the urgency and desire for the lover to meet the beloved.

Like its sister poem "Parting at Morning" which uses pronominal reference to attribute the gender of the person in the boat (as male), the poem never reveals the identity of the two lovers. [3] It follows the rhyme scheme ABCCBA DEFFED. [4]

Reception

There are two published accounts of this poem: one by F. R. Leavis [5] and another by Ronald Carter and Walter Nash. [6] Kennedy and Hair explain that Browning's urgent love for Elizabeth Barrett had led him to write "the most sensual poem he had yet created." [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Barrett Browning</span> English poet (1806–1861)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poetry</span> Form of literature

Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.

A sestina is a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Villanelle</span> Fixed verse form; nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain

A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Browning</span> English poet and playwright (1812–1889)

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax.

The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590–96). Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is ABABBCBCC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ode to a Nightingale</span> Poem by John Keats

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language.

Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator and characters; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. Narrative poems do not need to rhyme. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be complex. It is normally dramatic, with various characters. Narrative poems include all epic poetry, and the various types of "lay", most ballads, and some idylls, as well as many poems not falling into a distinct type.

Dramatic monologue is a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character. M.H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:

  1. The single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment […].
  2. This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.
  3. The main principle controlling the poet's choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's temperament and character.

Muwashshah is the name for both an Arabic poetic form and a secular musical genre. The poetic form consists of a multi-lined strophic verse poem written in classical Arabic, usually consisting of five stanzas, alternating with a refrain with a running rhyme. It was customary to open with one or two lines which matched the second part of the poem in rhyme and meter; in North Africa poets ignore the strict rules of Arabic meter while the poets in the East follow them. The musical genre of the same name uses muwaššaḥ texts as lyrics, still in classical Arabic. This tradition can take two forms: the waṣla of the Mashriq and the Arab Andalusi nubah of the western part of the Arab world.

<i>Men and Women</i> (poetry collection)

Men and Women is a collection of fifty-one poems in two volumes by Robert Browning, first published in 1855. While now generally considered to contain some of the best of Browning's poetry, at the time it was not received well and sold poorly.

Dramatic Romances and Lyrics is a collection of English poems by Robert Browning, first published in 1845 in London, as the seventh volume in a series of self-published books entitled Bells and Pomegranates.

"Sabbath Morning at Sea" is a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning first published in 1839, which Sir Edward Elgar set to music in 1899 as the third song in his song-cycle Sea Pictures.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Home Thoughts from Abroad</span> 1845 poem by Robert Browning

"Home Thoughts, from Abroad" is a poem by Robert Browning. It was written in 1845 while Browning was on a visit to northern Italy, and was first published in his Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. It is considered an exemplary work of Romantic literature for its evocation of a sense of longing and sentimental references to natural beauty.

"A Child Asleep" is a song, with lyrics from a poem written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar in December 1909 and published in 1910 by Novello. It was first published by Browning in 1840.

"How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" is a poem by Robert Browning published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845. The poem, one of the volume's "dramatic romances", is a first-person narrative told, in breathless galloping meter, by one of three riders; the midnight errand is urgent—"the news which alone could save Aix from her fate"—although the nature of that good news is never revealed. Two of the riders' horses collapse en route; the narrator alone makes it to Aix with the news, and rewards his horse with a drink of wine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Lost Leader (poem)</span> 1845 poem by Robert Browning

"The Lost Leader" is an 1845 poem by Robert Browning first published in his book Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. It berates William Wordsworth for what Browning considered his desertion of the liberal cause, and his lapse from his high idealism. More generally, it is an attack on any liberal leader who has deserted his cause. It is one of Browning's "best known, if not actually best, poems".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Good-Morrow</span> Poem from 1633 by John Donne

"The Good-Morrow" is a poem by John Donne, published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets.

The StanzaicMorte Arthur is an anonymous 14th-century Middle English poem in 3,969 lines, about the adulterous affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, and Lancelot's tragic dissension with King Arthur. The poem is usually called the Stanzaic Morte Arthur or Stanzaic Morte to distinguish it from another Middle English poem, the Alliterative Morte Arthure. It exercised enough influence on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur to have, in the words of one recent scholar, "played a decisive though largely unacknowledged role in the way succeeding generations have read the Arthurian legend".

References

  1. 1 2 3 Richard S. Kennedy; Donald S. Hair (2007). The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life . University of Missouri Press. pp.  134–136. ISBN   978-0-8262-6552-4.
  2. Mary Sanders Pollock (1 January 2003). Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. pp. 61–62. ISBN   978-0-7546-3328-0.
  3. Poetics and Linguistics Association. Conference (2008). The State of Stylistics: PALA 26. Rodopi. pp. 19–21. ISBN   978-90-420-2428-1.
  4. Jeanie Watson; Philip McM. Pittman; Warren W. Wooden (January 1989). The Portrayal of Life Stages in English Literature, 1500-1800: Infancy, Youth, Marriage, Aging, Death, Martyrdom : Essays in Memory of Warren Wooden. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. p. 22. ISBN   978-0-88946-462-9. Robert Browning is doing in "Meeting at Night" [in two six-line stanzas, rhyming abccba]
  5. F. R. Leavis (1975). The living principle: "English" as a discipline of thought. Chatto & Windus. pp. 120–2. ISBN   978-1-56663-172-3.
  6. Ronald Carter; Walter Nash (8 January 1991). Seeing Through Language: A Guide To Styles Of English Writing. Wiley. pp. 123–9. ISBN   978-0-631-15135-7.