Poem Of The Week: 'Meeting At Night' By Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Meeting at Night

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

The narrator’s odyssey in Robert Browning’s seductive poem is directed by love and yearning. With a momentum assured by the prospect of consummation, and underwired by a loose formal framework of rhyming tetrameters, the journey across sea, strand and fields seems to hasten as the anticipated moment hoves into view.

Browning’s great skill is to infuse the voyage with complementary atmosphere: the languid delivery of the opening lines is a joy to navigate: the syntactical locution of the moon’s looming, and the inertia of the ‘slushy sand’; the questing prow, and the beautifully-realised ‘fiery ringlets’ of the moon’s reflection on the waves.

Each image finds an harmonic counterpart in the second sestet - from the narcotic vapours of the ‘sea-scented beach’, to the lighted match whose blue flame is a microcosm of the illuminated sea, and in whose steady ‘spurt’ is contained a universe of hope, joy and reconciliation. As the lovers meet, the spoken word is drowned in an oceanic access of love; the intrusion of reality at 'joys and fears' will briefly be subsumed in knowing silence.

‘Meeting at Night’ is taken from The New Oxford Book of English Verse, published by the Oxford University Press.