Poems
Life In A Love
Never—-
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.
But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again,—-
So the Chase takes up one’s life ‘ that’s all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me—-
Ever
Removed!
- Voice and Perspective: The speaker is insistent, self-reflecting, and emotionally raw, typical of Browning’s psychologically complex personas; unlike the calculated speakers in The Bishop Orders His Tomb, this voice reveals vulnerability without irony or disguise.
- Theme of Pursuit: The central metaphor of an unending chase frames love as a persistent effort rather than a mutual exchange; the beloved resists (“the loth”), making the pursuit itself the definition of the speaker’s existence, not fulfillment.
- Emotional Paradox: The poem treats rejection not as defeat but as fuel; failure reaffirms the speaker’s purpose, suggesting that meaning is found in striving, a reversal of conventional romantic resolution.
- Religious Undertone: The relentless pursuit echoes spiritual devotion more than earthly romance, reminiscent of metaphysical poets like Donne, but stripped of divine assurance—here, faith is placed in an absent or indifferent beloved.
- Contrast with Other Works: Unlike Meeting at Night or Love Among the Ruins, which portray consummated or transcendent love, this poem dwells in perpetual nearness without contact, emphasizing process over climax, a rarer stance in Browning’s romantic pieces.
- Victorian Context: While many of Browning’s contemporaries idealized union and moral clarity in love poetry, this work embraces asymmetry and emotional imbalance, challenging sentimental norms of the era.
- Modern Resonance: Though written before 1900, its focus on unfulfilled desire and the valorization of effort prefigures modernist preoccupations with alienation and Sisyphean struggle, as seen later in Eliot or Beckett.
- Less-Discussed Angle: The poem can be read as an early articulation of obsessive attachment rather than devotion—psychoanalytically, the speaker’s identity depends on the chase, making cessation equivalent to self-erasure.
- Place in the Author’s Oeuvre: Among Browning’s shorter lyrics, this stands out for its emotional transparency and lack of persona; it feels more personal than dramatic, suggesting a rare glimpse into private feeling rather than performed psychology.
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.
