Poems
A Woman’s Last Word
Let’s contend no more, Love,
Strive nor weep:
All be as before, Love,
—-Only sleep!
II.
What so wild as words are?
I and thou
In debate, as birds are,
Hawk on bough!
III.
See the creature stalking
While we speak!
Hush and hide the talking,
Cheek on cheek!
IV.
What so false as truth is,
False to thee?
Where the serpent’s tooth is
Shun the tree—-
V.
Where the apple reddens
Never pry—-
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.
VI.
Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!
VII.
Teach me, only teach, Love
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought—-
VIII.
Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.
IX.
That shall be to-morrow
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight:
X
—-Must a little weep, Love,
(Foolish me!)
And so fall asleep, Love,
Loved by thee.
- Gender Dynamics: The speaker’s submissive posture contrasts with the more defiant female voices in “The Laboratory” or “Porphyria’s Lover,” reflecting Victorian domestic ideals yet complicating them through ironic undertones (“Think thy thought”).
- Conflict Resolution Through Silence: Where many Browning monologues escalate tension through argument, here conflict dissolves into evasion (“Only sleep!”), positioning silence as both surrender and strategic retreat.
- Biblical Imagery: The Eden allusion (“Lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I”) departs from Browning’s frequent use of Christian symbolism to critique dogma; here it personalizes fallibility within intimacy, not doctrinal debate.
- Metaphorical Duality: Hawk-and-bird imagery (“Hawk on bough!”) and serpent references compress marital strife into primal oppositions, a stylistic economy rare in Browning’s typically elaborated metaphors.
- Negotiation of Power: The plea “Be a god… Be a man” reveals tension between desire for transcendence and mundane comfort, paralleling works like “Andrea del Sarto” but prioritizing relational stability over artistic or spiritual ambition.
- Formal Restraint: ABCB quatrains with alternating tetrameter/trimeter create lullaby-like rhythm, diverging from Browning’s preference for irregular meters that mirror conversational chaos.
- Victorian Domestic Context: The poem’s surface compliance with feminine self-effacement masks quiet defiance, akin to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets but lacking their overt rebellions against patriarchal norms.
- Archaic Diction: Using “thou” and contractions like “’ere” heightens formality, framing the plea as ritualized performativity rather than spontaneous emotion—a layer absent in Browning’s more colloquial monologues.
- Temporal Ambiguity: The deferred resolution (“to-morrow / Not to-night”) undercuts the poem’s closure, suggesting cyclical conflict, a technique subtler than the unresolved endings of “Childe Roland.”
Robert Browning
(7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) 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.
His early long poems Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were acclaimed, but his reputation dwindled for a time – his 1840 poem Sordello was seen as wilfully obscure – and took over a decade to recover, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846, he married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved to Italy. By her death in 1861, he had published the collection Men and Women (1855). His Dramatis Personae (1864) and book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) made him a leading poet. By his death in 1889, he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. Societies for studying his work survived in Britain and the US into the 20th century.
