An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry by Robert Browning
page 149 of 525 (28%)
page 149 of 525 (28%)
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"Oh, live and love worthily, bear and be bold! Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange." IV. `Along the Beach'. -- It does not appear that she anywhere in the poem addresses her husband, face to face. It is soliloquy throughout. In this section it does appear, more than in the others, that she is directly addressing him; but it's better to understand it as a mental expostulation. He wanted her love, and got it, in its fulness; though an expectation of all harvest and no dearth was not involved in that fulness of love. Though love greatens and even glorifies, she knew there was much in him waste, with many a weed, and plenty of passions run to seed, but a little good grain too. And such as he was she took him for hers; and he found her his, to watch the olive and wait the vine of his nature; and when rivers of oil and wine came not, the failure only proved that he was her whole world, all the same. But he has been averse to, and has resented, the tillage of his nature to which she has lovingly devoted herself, feeling it to be a bondage; "And 'tis all an old story, and my despair Fit subject for some new song:" such as the one with which she closes this soliloquy, representing a love which cares only for outside charms (which, later in the poem, we learn she has not) and looks not deeper. V. `On the Cliff'. -- Leaning on the barren turf, which is dead to the roots, and looking at a rock, flat as an anvil's face, |
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