120 lines of blank verse in English. I will read one of his successful lyrics instead.
Browning imagines a page-boy in love with a queen, and, while tending her hounds and hawks, complaining of this hopeless passion and overheard by her.
"Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When—where—
How—can this arm establish her above me,
If fortune fixed her as my lady there,
There already, to eternally reprove me?
('Hist!'—said Kate the Queen;
But 'oh!'—cried the maiden, binding her tresses,
''Tis only a page that carols unseen,
Crumbling your hounds their messes!')
Is she wronged?—To the rescue of her honour,
My heart!
Is she poor?—What costs it to be styled a donor?
Merely an earth to cleave, a sea to part?
But that fortune should have thrust all this upon her!
('Nay, list!'—bade Kate the Queen;
And still cried the maiden binding her tresses,
''Tis only a page that carols unseen,
Fitting your hawks their jesses!')"[1]
The turn of rhythm on "when—where—how" is so felicitous that it seems madness for a poet to dream of adding another stanza which, as coming second, should be more perfect.
Yet when we read—
"Is she wronged?—To the rescue of her honour,
My heart!
Is she poor?—What costs it to be styled a donor?"—
we breathe free, and glory in his triumph.
Yet this song is not in the Oxford Book of English Verse, where under Browning's name several obviously inferior things appear.
- ↑ Pippa Passes, Part II.
