Selections from the Poetical Works

Предња корица
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012 - 266 страница
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: But the wife smiled? His nerves are grown firmer: Mine he brings now and utters no murmur. Vcnienti occurnte morbo ! With which moral I drop my theorbo. SONG. 1 Nay but you, who do not love her, Is she not pure gold, my mistress? Holds earth aught?speak truth?above her ? Aught like this tress, see, and this tress, And this last fairest tress of all, So fair, see, ere I let it fall ? Because, you spend your lives in praising; To praise, you search the wide world over; Then why not witness, calmly gazing, If earth holds aught?speak truth?above her? Above this tress, and this, I touch But cannot praise, I love so much ! A SERENADE AT THE VILLA. That was I, you heard last night, When there rose no moon at all, Nor, to pierce the strained and tight Tent of heaven, a planet small: Life was dead, and so was light. Not a twinkle from the fly, Not a glimmer from the worm. When the crickets stopped their cry, When the owls forbore a term, You heard music; that was I. Earth turned in her sleep with pain, Sultrily suspired for proof: In at heaven and out again, Lightning !?where it broke the roof, Bloodlike, some few drops of rain. What they could my words expressed, O my love, my all, my one ! Singing helped the verses best, And when singing's best was done, To my lute I left the rest. So wore night; the East was gray, White the broad-faced hemlock flowers: There would be another day; Ere its first of heavy hours Found me, I had passed away. What became of all the hopes, Words and song and lute as well ? Say, this struck you: When life gropes Feebly for the path where fell Light last on the evening slopes, ? One friend in that path shall be, To secure my step from wrong;...

Друга издања - Прикажи све

О аутору (2012)

Robert Browning was the son of a well-to-do clerk in the Bank of England. He was educated by private tutors and from his own reading in his father's library and elsewhere. Browning's first publication was Pauline (1833). The work made no stir at all. The following year Browning went to St. Petersburg and from there to Italy. On his return to England in 1835 he published Paracelsus, a dramatic poem based on the life of the fifteenth-century magician and alchemist. Browning next attempted a play. Strafford was the first of the poet's dramatic failures; it ran only five nights at Covent Garden in 1836. An obscure and difficult poem, Sordello, appeared in 1840. It did a great deal toward giving Browning a reputation for being unintelligible and for limiting the circles of his readers. The most important event in Browning's life occurred in 1846, when he married Elizabeth Barrett. The marriage brought a new lightness and openness of voice to Browning's verse during the next 21 years, resulting in the great dramatic monologues of Men and Women in 1855 and the epic The Ring and the Book in 1867. It is not that these are the most beautiful poems of the Victorian Age, but they are the most perceptive; they reveal more clearly the men and women who speak the monologues, and the poet who conceived them, than any comparable works of the century. In the last two decades of his life Browning produced only a few great poems but much were grotesque and fantastic. He turned, too, to translations and transcriptions from the Greek tragedies; in spite of some powerful passages, these were not highly successful Robert Browning died in Italy in 1889. His body lies in Westminster Abbey.

Библиографски подаци