Dramatis Personæ

Robert Browning

Category: Verse

Genres: Poetry,Philosophy,Religion

Level 8.963:37 h

Dramatis Personae is a poetry collection by Robert Browning. It was published in 1864. The poems in Dramatis Personae are dramatic, with a wide range of narrators. The narrator is usually in a situation that reveals to the reader some aspect of his personality. Instead of speeches that are intended for others' ears, most are soliloquies. They are generally darker than the poems found in Men and Women, his previous collection, and along with The Ring and the Book these poems embody a turning point in Browning's style.

Dramatis Personæ

Name: Dramatis Personæ
Author: Robert Browning

by
Robert Browning

Introduction

The volume bearing the title Dramatis Personæ was published in 1864 and the contents remained unchanged in subsequent editions except that two short poems were added in the edition of 1868. The first poem was however originally entitled James Lee. The first six stanzas of the sixth section of the poem were first printed in 1836 in Mr. Fox’s The Monthly Repository, and bore the title merely Lines, with the signature Z.

James Lee’s Wife

I
James Lee’s Wife Speaks at the Window

Ah, Love, but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun’s away,
And the bird estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky’s deranged:
Summer has stopped.

Look in my eyes!
Wilt thou change too?
Should I fear surprise?
Shall I find aught new
In the old and dear,
In the good and true,
With the changing year?

Thou art a man,
But I am thy love.
For the lake, its swan;
For the dell its dove;
And for thee — (oh, haste!)
Me, to bend above,
Me, to hold embraced.

II
By the Fireside

Is all our fire of shipwreck wood,
Oak and pine?
Oh, for the ills half-understood,
The dim dead woe
Long ago
Befallen this bitter coast of France!
Well, poor sailors took their chance;
I take mine.

A ruddy shaft our fire must shoot
O’er the sea:
Do sailors eye the casement — mute
Drenched and stark,
From their bark —
And envy, gnash their teeth for hate
O’ the warm safe house and happy freight —
Thee and me?

God help you, sailors, at your need!
Spare the curse!
For some ships, safe in port indeed,
Rot and rust,
Run to dust,
All through worms i’ the wood, which crept,
Gnawed our hearts out while we slept:
That is worse.

Who lived here before us two?
Old-world pairs.
Did a woman ever — would I knew! —
Watch the man
With whom began
Love’s voyage full-sail, — (now gnash your teeth!)
When planks start, open hell beneath
Unawares?

III
In the Doorway

The swallow has set her six young on the rail,
And looks seaward:
The water’s in stripes like a snake, olive-pale
To the leeward, —
On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind.
“Good fortune departs, and disaster’s behind,” —
Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!

Our fig-tree, that leaned for the saltness, has furled
Her five fingers,
Each leaf like a hand opened wide to the world
Where there lingers
No glint of the gold, Summer sent for her sake:
How the vines writhe in rows, each impaled on its stake!
My heart shrivels up and my spirit shrinks curled.

Yet here are we two; we have love, house enough,
With the field there,
This house of four rooms, that field red and rough,
Though it yield there,
For the rabbit that robs, scarce a blade or a bent;
If a magpie alight now, it seems an event;
And they both will be gone at November’s rebuff.

But why must cold spread? but wherefore bring change
To the spirit,
God meant should mate his with an infinite range,
And inherit
His power to put life in the darkness and cold?
Oh, live and love worthily, bear and be bold!
Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange!

IV Along the Beach

I will be quiet and talk with you,
And reason why you are wrong.
You wanted my love — is that much true?
And so I did love, so I do:
What has come of it all along?

I took you — how could I otherwise?
For a world to me, and more;
For all, love greatens and glorifies
Till God’s aglow, to the loving eyes,
In what was mere earth before.

Yes, earth — yes, mere ignoble earth!
Now do I mis-state, mistake?
Do I wrong your weakness and call it worth?
Expect all harvest, dread no dearth,
Seal my sense up for your sake?

Oh, Love, Love, no, Love! not so, indeed!
You were just weak earth, I knew:
With much in you waste, with many a weed,
And plenty of passions run to seed,
But a little good grain too.

And such as you were, I took you for mine:
Did not you find me yours,
To watch the olive and wait the vine,
And wonder when rivers of oil and wine
Would flow, as the Book assures?

Well, and if none of these good things came,
What did the failure prove?
The man was my whole world, all the same,
With his flowers to praise or his weeds to blame,
And, either or both, to love.

Yet this turns now to a fault — there! there!
That I do love, watch too long,
And wait too well, and weary and wear;
And ‘t is all an old story, and my despair
Fit subject for some new song:

“How the light, light love, he has wings to fly
At suspicion of a bond:
My wisdom has bidden your pleasure good-by,
Which will turn up next in a laughing eye,
And why should you look beyond?”

V
On the Cliff

I leaned on the turf,
I looked at a rock
Left dry by the surf;
For the turf, to call it grass were to mock:
Dead to the roots, so deep was done
The work of the summer sun.

And the rock lay flat
As an anvil’s face:
No iron like that!
Baked dry; of a weed, of a shell, no trace:
Sunshine outside, but ice at the core,
Death’s altar by the lone shore.

On the turf, sprang gay
With his films of blue,
No cricket, I’ll say,
But a warhorse, barded and chanfroned too,
The gift of a quixote-mage to his knight,
Real fairy, with wings all right.

On the rock, they scorch
Like a drop of fire
From a brandished torch,
Fall two red fans of a butterfly:
No turf, no rock: in their ugly stead,
See, wonderful blue and red!

Is it not so
With the minds of men?
The level and low,
The burnt and bare, in themselves; but then
With such a blue and red grace, not theirs, —
Love settling unawares!

VI
Reading a Book, under the Cliff

“Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no?
Which needs the other’s office, thou or I?
Dost want to be disburdened of a woe,
And can, in truth, my voice untie
Its links, and let it go?

“Art thou a dumb, wronged thing that would be righted,
Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!
No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith, requited
With falsehood, — love, at last aware
Of scorn, — hopes, early blighted, —

“We have them; but I know not any tone
So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow:
Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
If they knew any way to borrow
A pathos like thy own?

“Which sigh wouldst mock, of all the sighs? The one
So long escaping from lips starved and blue,
That lasts while on her pallet-bed the nun
Stretches her length; her foot comes through
The straw she shivers on;

“You had not thought she was so tall: and spent,
Her shrunk lids open, her lean fingers shut
Close, close, their sharp and livid nails indent
The clammy palm; then all is mute:
That way, the spirit went.

“Or wouldst thou rather that I understand
Thy will to help me? — like the dog I found
Once, pacing sad this solitary strand,
Who would not take my food, poor hound.
But whined and licked my hand.”

All this, and more, comes from some young man’s pride
Of power to see, — in failure and mistake,
Relinquishment, disgrace, on every side, —
Merely examples for his sake,
Helps to his path untried:

Instances he must — simply recognize?
Oh, more than so! — must, with a learner’s zeal,
Make doubly prominent, twice emphasize,
By added touches that reveal
The god in babe’s disguise.

Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!
Himself the undefeated that shall be:
Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test, —
His triumph, in eternity
Too plainly manifest!

Whence, judge if he learn forthwith what the wind
Means in its moaning — by the happy prompt
Instinctive way of youth, I mean; for kind
Calm years, exacting their accompt
Of pain, mature the mind:

And some midsummer morning, at the lull
Just about daybreak, as he looks across
A sparkling foreign country, wonderful
To the sea’s edge for gloom and gloss,
Next minute must annul, —

Then, when the wind begins among the vines,
So low, so low, what shall it say but this?
“Here is the change beginning, here the lines
Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
The limit time assigns.”

Nothing can be as it has been before;
Better, so call it, only not the same.
To draw one beauty into our hearts’ core,
And keep it changeless! such our claim;
So answered, — Nevermore!

Simple? Why this is the old woe o’ the world;
Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.
Rise with it, then! Rejoice that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul’s wings never furled!

That’s a new question; still replies the fact,
Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;
We moan in acquiescence: there’s life’s pact.
Perhaps probation — do I know?
God does: endure his act!

Only, for man, how bitter not to grave
On his soul’s hands’ palms one fair good wise thing
Just as he grasped it! For himself, death’s wave;
While time first washes — ah, the sting! —
O’er all he’d sink to save.

Dramatis Personæ

byRobert Browning

Introduction

James Lee’s Wife

I James Lee’s Wife Speaks at the Window

II By the Fireside

III In the Doorway

IV Along the Beach

V On the Cliff

VI Reading a Book, under the Cliff

by
Robert Browning

I
James Lee’s Wife Speaks at the Window

II
By the Fireside

III
In the Doorway

V
On the Cliff

VI
Reading a Book, under the Cliff