Robert Browning - The Complete Poems of Robert Browning - 22 Poetry Collections in One Edition

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So, the year’s done with

(Love me for ever!)

All March begun with,

April’s endeavour;

May-wreaths that bound me

June needs must sever;

Now snows fall round me,

Quenching June’s fever —

(Love me for ever!)

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I.

NAY but you, who do not love her,

Is she not pure gold, my mistress?

Holds earth aught — speak truth — above her?

Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,

And this last fairest tress of all,

So fair, see, ere I let it fall?

II.

Because, you spend your lives in praising;

To praise, you search the wide world over;

Then why not witness, calmly gazing,

If earth holds aught — speak truth — above her?

Above this tress, and this, I touch

But cannot praise, I love so much!

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MORNING, evening, noon and night,

“Praise God!; sang Theocrite.

Then to his poor trade he turned,

Whereby the daily meal was earned.

Hard he laboured, long and well;

O’er his work the boy’s curls fell:

But ever, at each period,

He stopped and sang, “Praise God!”

Then back again his curls he threw,

And cheerful turned to work anew.

Said Blaise, the listening monk, “Well done;

“I doubt not thou art heard, my son:

“As well as if thy voice to-day

“Were praising God, the Pope’s great way.

“This Easter Day, the Pope at Rome

“Praises God from Peter’s dome.”

Said Theocrite, “Would God that I

“Might praise him, that great way, and die!”

Night passed, day shone,

And Theocrite was gone.

With God a day endures alway,

A thousand years are but a day.

God said in heaven, “Nor day nor night

“Now brings the voice of my delight.”

Then Gabriel, like a rainbow’s birth,

Spread his wings and sank to earth;

Entered, in flesh, the empty cell,

Lived there, and played the craftsman well;

And morning, evening, noon and night,

Praised God in place of Theocrite.

And from a boy, to youth he grew:

The man put off the stripling’s hue:

The man matured and fell away

Into the season of decay:

And ever o’er the trade he bent,

And ever lived on earth content.

(He did God’s will; to him, all one

If on the earth or in the sun.)

God said, “A praise is in mine ear;

“There is no doubt in it, no fear:

“So sing old worlds, and so

“New worlds that from my footstool go.

“Clearer loves sound other ways:

“I miss my little human praise.”

Then forth sprang Gabriel’s wings, off fell

The flesh disguise, remained the cell.

’Twas Easter Day: he flew to Rome,

And paused above Saint Peter’s dome.

In the tiring-room close by

The great outer gallery,

With his holy vestments dight,

Stood the new Pope, Theocrite:

And all his past career

Came back upon him clear,

Since when, a boy, he plied his trade,

Till on his life the sickness weighed;

And in his cell, when death drew near,

An angel in a dream brought cheer:

And rising from the sickness drear

He grew a priest, and now stood here.

To the East with praise he turned,

And on his sight the angel burned.

“I bore thee from thy craftsman’s cell,

“And set thee here; I did not well.

“Vainly I left my angel-sphere,

“Vain was thy dream of many a year.

“Thy voice’s praise seemed weak; it dropped —

“Creation’s chorus stopped!

“Go back and praise again

“The early way — while I remain.

“With that weak voice of our disdain,

“Take up Creation’s pausing strain.

“Back to the cell and poor employ:

“Resume the craftsman and the boy!”

Theocrite grew old at home;

A new Pope dwelt in Peter’s dome.

One vanished as the other died:

They sought God side by side.

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I.

THE GREY sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed in the slushy sand.

II.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!

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ROUND the cape of a sudden came the sea,

And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim —

And straight was a path of gold for him,

And the need of a world of men for me.

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SAID Abner, “At last thou art come!

”Ere I tell, ere thou speak, —

“Kiss my cheek, wish me well!” Then I wished it,

And did kiss his cheek.

And he, “Since the King, O my friend,

”For thy countenance sent,

Nor drunken nor eaten have we;

Nor until from his tent

Thou return with the joyful assurance

The King liveth yet,

Shall our lip with the honey be brightened,

— The water be wet.

“For out of the black mid-tent’s silence,

A space of three days,

No sound hath escaped to thy servants,

Of prayer nor of praise,

To betoken that Saul and the Spirit

Have ended their strife,

And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch

Sinks back upon life.

“Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved!

God’s child with his dew

On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies

Still living and blue

As thou brak’st them to twine round thy harp-strings,

As if no wild heat

Were now raging to torture the desert!”

Then I, as was meet,

Knelt down to the God of my fathers,

And rose on my feet,

And ran o’er the sand burnt to powder.

The tent was unlooped;

I pulled up the spear that obstructed,

And under I stooped;

Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, —

All withered and gone —

That extends to the second enclosure,

I groped my way on

Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open;

Then once more I prayed,

And opened the foldskirts and entered,

And was not afraid

And spoke, “Here is David, thy servant!”

And no voice replied.

At the first I saw nought but the blackness;

But soon I descried

A something more black than the blackness;

— The vast, the upright

Main prop which sustains the pavilion, —

And slow into sight

Grew a figure against it, gigantic,

And blackest of all; —

Then a sunbeam, that burst thro’ the tent-roof,

Showed Saul.

He stood as erect as that tent-prop;

Both arms stretched out wide

On the great cross-support in the centre

That goes to each side:

So he bent not a muscle, but hung there

As, caught in his pangs

And waiting his change, the king-serpent

All heavily hangs,

Far away from his kind, in the pine,

Till deliverance come

With the spring-time, — so agonized Saul,

Drear and stark, blind and dumb.

Then I tuned my harp, — took off the lilies

We twine round its chords

Lest they snap ‘neath the stress of the noontide

— Those sunbeams like swords!

And I first played the tune all our sheep know,