1.
How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark autumn evenings come;
And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?
With the music of all thy voices, dumb
In life’s November too!
—
St. 1, v. 3. is: present used for the future, shall then be.
2.
I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O’er a great wise book, as beseemeth age;
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows,
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose!
—
St. 2. Not verse now, only prose: he shall have reached
the “years which bring the philosophic mind”.
3.
Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip,
“There he is at it, deep in Greek:
Now then, or never, out we slip
To cut from the hazels by the creek
A mainmast for our ship!”
4.
I shall be at it indeed, my friends!
Greek puts already on either side
Such a branch-work forth as soon extends
To a vista opening far and wide,
And I pass out where it ends.
—
St. 4. Greek puts already such a branch-work forth as will soon extend
to a vista opening far and wide, and he will pass out where it ends
and retrace the paths he has trod through life’s pleasant wood.
5.
The outside frame, like your hazel-trees—
But the inside-archway widens fast,
And a rarer sort succeeds to these,
And we slope to Italy at last
And youth, by green degrees.
6.
I follow wherever I am led,
Knowing so well the leader’s hand:
Oh woman-country, wooed not wed,
Loved all the more by earth’s male-lands,
Laid to their hearts instead!
—
St. 5, 6. He will pass first through his childhood, in England,
represented by the hazels, and on, by green degrees, to youth and Italy,
where, knowing so well the leader’s hand, and assured as to whither
she will conduct him, he will follow wherever he is led.
7.
Look at the ruined chapel again
Half-way up in the Alpine gorge!
Is that a tower, I point you plain,
Or is it a mill, or an iron forge
Breaks solitude in vain?
—
St. 7. Look: to be construed with “follow”.
8.
A turn, and we stand in the heart of things;
The woods are round us, heaped and dim;
From slab to slab how it slips and springs,
The thread of water single and slim,
Through the ravage some torrent brings!
9.
Does it feed the little lake below?
That speck of white just on its marge
Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow,
How sharp the silver spear-heads charge
When Alp meets heaven in snow!
10.
On our other side is the straight-up rock;
And a path is kept ‘twixt the gorge and it
By bowlder-stones, where lichens mock
The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit
Their teeth to the polished block.
11.
Oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers,
And thorny balls, each three in one,
The chestnuts throw on our path in showers!
For the drop of the woodland fruit’s begun,
These early November hours,
12.
That crimson the creeper’s leaf across
Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt,
O’er a shield else gold from rim to boss,
And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped
Elf-needled mat of moss,
13.
By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged
Last evening—nay, in to-day’s first dew
Yon sudden coral nipple bulged,
Where a freaked fawn-colored flaky crew
Of toad-stools peep indulged.
14.
And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge
That takes the turn to a range beyond,
Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge,
Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond
Danced over by the midge.
15.
The chapel and bridge are of stone alike,
Blackish-gray and mostly wet;
Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dike.
See here again, how the lichens fret
And the roots of the ivy strike!
16.
Poor little place, where its one priest comes
On a festa-day, if he comes at all,
To the dozen folk from their scattered homes,
Gathered within that precinct small
By the dozen ways one roams—
17.
To drop from the charcoal-burners’ huts,
Or climb from the hemp-dressers’ low shed,
Leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts,
Or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread
Their gear on the rock’s bare juts.
18.
It has some pretension too, this front,
With its bit of fresco half-moon-wise
Set over the porch, Art’s early wont:
‘Tis John in the Desert, I surmise,
But has borne the weather’s brunt—
19.
Not from the fault of the builder, though,
For a pent-house properly projects
Where three carved beams make a certain show,
Dating—good thought of our architect’s—
‘Five, six, nine, he lets you know.
20.
And all day long a bird sings there,
And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times;
The place is silent and aware;
It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
But that is its own affair.
—
St. 20. aware: self-conscious.
“. . .in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.”
—Hood’s ‘Sonnet on Silence’.
21.
My perfect wife, my Leonor,
O heart, my own, Oh eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path gray heads abhor?
— St. 21. He digresses here, and does not return to the subject till the 31st stanza, “What did I say?—that a small bird sings”. The path gray heads abhor: this verse and the following stanza are, with most readers, the CRUX of the poem; “gray heads” must be understood with some restriction: many gray heads, not all, abhor —gray heads who went along through their flowery youth as if it had no limit, and without insuring, in Love’s true season, the happiness of their lives beyond youth’s limit, “life’s safe hem”, which to cross without such insurance, is often fatal. And these, when they reach old age, shun retracing the path which led to the gulf wherein their youth dropped.
22.
For it leads to a crag’s sheer edge with them;
Youth, flowery all the way, there stops—
Not they; age threatens and they contemn,
Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,
One inch from our life’s safe hem!
23.
With me, youth led. . .I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by firelight, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Mutely, my heart knows how—
—
St. 23. With me: the speaker continues,
youth led:—we are told whither, in St. 25, v. 4, “to an age
so blest that, by its side, youth seems the waste instead”.
I will speak now: up to this point his reflections have been silent,
his wife, the while, reading, mutely, by fire-light,
his heart knows how, that is, with her heart secretly responsive
to his own. The mutual responsiveness of their hearts is expressed
in St. 24.
24.
When, if I think but deep enough,
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without rebuff
Response your soul seeks many a time,
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff.
25.
My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?
26.
My own, see where the years conduct!
At first, ‘twas something our two souls
Should mix as mists do; each is sucked
In each now: on, the new stream rolls,
Whatever rocks obstruct.
27.
Think, when our one soul understands
The great Word which makes all things new,
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?
28.
Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!
—
St. 28. “The conviction of the eternity of marriage meets us
again and again in Browning’s poems; e.g., ‘Prospice’,
‘Any Wife to any Husband’, ‘The Epilogue to Fifine’.”
The union between two complementary souls cannot be dissolved.
“Love is all, and Death is nought!”
29.
But who could have expected this
When we two drew together first
Just for the obvious human bliss,
To satisfy life’s daily thirst
With a thing men seldom miss?
30.
Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again,
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall!
31.
What did I say?—that a small bird sings
All day long, save when a brown pair
Of hawks from the wood float with wide wings
Strained to a bell: ‘gainst noonday glare
You count the streaks and rings.
—
St. 31. Here he returns to the subject broken off at St. 21.
32.
But at afternoon or almost eve
‘Tis better; then the silence grows
To that degree, you half believe
It must get rid of what it knows,
Its bosom does so heave.
33.
Hither we walked then, side by side,
Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,
And still I questioned or replied,
While my heart, convulsed to really speak,
Lay choking in its pride.
34.
Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,
And pity and praise the chapel sweet,
And care about the fresco’s loss,
And wish for our souls a like retreat,
And wonder at the moss.
35.
Stoop and kneel on the settle under,
Look through the window’s grated square:
Nothing to see! For fear of plunder,
The cross is down and the altar bare,
As if thieves don’t fear thunder.
36.
We stoop and look in through the grate,
See the little porch and rustic door,
Read duly the dead builder’s date;
Then cross the bridge that we crossed before,
Take the path again—but wait!
37.
Oh moment one and infinite!
The water slips o’er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How gray at once is the evening grown—
One star, its chrysolite!
38.
We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
Till the trouble grew and stirred.
— St. 37, 38. “Mr. Browning’s most characteristic feeling for nature appears in his rendering of those aspects of sky, or earth, or sea, of sunset, or noonday, or dawn, which seem to acquire some sudden and passionate significance; which seem to be charged with some spiritual secret eager for disclosure; in his rendering of those moments which betray the passion at the heart of things, which thrill and tingle with prophetic fire. When lightning searches for the guilty lovers, Ottima and Sebald {in ‘Pippa Passes’}, like an angelic sword plunged into the gloom, when the tender twilight with its one chrysolite star, grows aware, and the light and shade make up a spell, and the forests by their mystery, and sound, and silence, mingle together two human lives forever {‘By the Fireside’}, when the apparition of the moon-rainbow appears gloriously after storm, and Christ is in his heaven {‘Christmas Eve’}, when to David the stars shoot out the pain of pent knowledge and in the grey of the hills at morning there dwells a gathered intensity {‘Saul’},—then nature rises from her sweet ways of use and wont, and shows herself the Priestess, the Pythoness, the Divinity which she is. Or rather, through nature, the Spirit of God addresses itself to the spirit of man.”—Edward Dowden.
39.
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,
And life be a proof of this!
40.
Had she willed it, still had stood the screen
So slight, so sure, ‘twixt my love and her:
I could fix her face with a guard between,
And find her soul as when friends confer,
Friends—lovers that might have been.
41.
For my heart had a touch of the woodland time,
Wanting to sleep now over its best.
Shake the whole tree in the summer-prime,
But bring to the last leaf no such test!
“Hold the last fast!” runs the rhyme.
42.
For a chance to make your little much,
To gain a lover and lose a friend,
Venture the tree and a myriad such,
When nothing you mar but the year can mend:
But a last leaf—fear to touch!
43.
Yet should it unfasten itself and fall
Eddying down till it find your face
At some slight wind—best chance of all!
Be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place
You trembled to forestall!
44.
Worth how well, those dark gray eyes,
That hair so dark and dear, how worth
That a man should strive and agonize,
And taste a veriest hell on earth
For the hope of such a prize!
45.
You might have turned and tried a man,
Set him a space to weary and wear,
And prove which suited more your plan,
His best of hope or his worst despair,
Yet end as he began.
46.
But you spared me this, like the heart you are,
And filled my empty heart at a word.
If two lives join, there is oft a scar,
They are one and one, with a shadowy third;
One near one is too far.
47.
A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.
48.
The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done—we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood.
49.
How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment’s product thus,
When a soul declares itself—to wit,
By its fruit, the thing it does!
— St. 49. “Those periods of life which appear most full of moral purpose to Mr. Tennyson, are periods of protracted self-control, and those moments stand eminent in life in which the spirit has struggled victoriously in the cause of conscience against impulse and desire. With Mr. Browning the moments are most glorious in which the obscure tendency of many years has been revealed by the lightning of sudden passion, or in which a resolution that changes the current of life has been taken in reliance upon that insight which vivid emotion bestows; and those periods of our history are charged most fully with moral purpose, which take their direction from moments such as these. . . . In such a moment the somewhat dull youth of ‘The Inn Album’ rises into the justiciary of the Highest; in such a moment Polyxena with her right woman’s-manliness, discovers to Charles his regal duty, and infuses into her weaker husband, her own courage of heart {‘King Victor and King Charles’}; and rejoicing in the remembrance of a moment of high devotion which determined the issues of a life, the speaker of ‘By the Fireside’ exclaims,— ‘How the world is made for each of us!’” etc.—Edward Dowden.
50.
Be hate that fruit, or love that fruit,
It forwards the general deed of man,
And each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan;
Each living his own, to boot.
51.
I am named and known by that moment’s feat;
There took my station and degree;
So grew my own small life complete,
As nature obtained her best of me—
One born to love you, sweet!
52.
And to watch you sink by the fireside now
Back again, as you mutely sit
Musing by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Yonder, my heart knows how!
53.
So, earth has gained by one man the more,
And the gain of earth must be heaven’s gain too;
And the whole is well worth thinking o’er
When autumn comes: which I mean to do
One day, as I said before.
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