Victorian Verse - Meeting at Night - Robert Browning

Another of Browning’s lyrical poems, published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) and written during his courtship of EBB.  The poem imagines a lover travelling towards a secret meeting with his beloved, and, given the clandestine nature of Browning’s and EBB’s relationship, the poem is autobiographical in its evocation of the emotions of the lovers, if not the geography of their meetings – which took place in London and not in a farmhouse near the sea.  

The sea is often a metaphor for transformation or new beginnings.  This journey may reflect the significant upset to both their lives as a result of their meeting as well as the promise of a new life together.  Also, Browning spent some years before they met travelling in Europe, and so would have returned home to England by boat.  The description of the landscape suggests pleasure in being “home” as well as eagerness to be reunited with the beloved, echoing the sentiments of “Home-Thoughts…”.

The poem is written in loose iambic tetrametres, a common metre for lyrics as it retains the sing-song rhythm and line-length of earlier songs, as well as propelling the movement forward.  Browning varies the metric feet, as in his other poems, to create particular effects – emphasising certain words.  The rhyme scheme – abccba –is chiastic.  It reverses at the midpoint of the sestet and each stanza is enclosed (sometimes called “envelope structure”) by the first and last rhyme. 

I 

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. 

The poem opens with a description of the approaching land (although the entrance of the lover is delayed until the penultimate line of the stanza) that is highly visual in its imagery and the colour palette – grey, black, yellow – similar to that of paintings called “Nocturnes” or “Night Music”.  An example by James McNeill Whistler, a Victorian painter, can be found here.  The open sea and shore are depicted also through the placing of strong beats on “grey sea”, “long … land” and the repeated “l” which draw out the line.  This is echoed in the succeeding line with “long and low”.

The speed of the lines picks up as the boat heads to land, with the use of a more regular iambic beat and with the cc rhyme scheme.  The moon lights up the sea so that the wavelets created by the boat are tipped with golden fire.  “Ringlets” were also a fashionable way for Victorian women to curl their hair; taken with the “startled” and “from their sleep”, this is a foreshadowing of the lovers’ meeting.  Also, EBB had long hair, described as “a shower of dark curls” by a friend, Mary Russell Mitford, in 1830.  There is also a distinctly erotic image in the “pushing prow” and “slushy sand”, highlighted by the alliteration and the use of the word “quench”.  To “quench” in blacksmithing means to plunge a bar of molten iron into cold water to temper (harden) it. 

The arrival of the boat is represented by the rhyming “sand” with the “land” in the first line; it has reached its destination.

II 

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! 

This sensuous imagery continues with the “warm sea-scented beach”.  The rhythm retains its more regular iambic beat as the lover hurries across the fields towards his objective.  The eagerness is conveyed by the abrupt transition from the appearance of the farm (in the distance, as he says “to cross” – he has not yet crossed the three fields) to the tap on the window pane, as if the lover has simply flown across the intervening distance.  His arrival is heralded by the striking of a match in the darkness; a tiny detailed action in contrast to the scale of the sea and landscape until now, as the separation of the lovers gives way to intimacy.  Again, the placing of the rhyme “scratch“ and “match” conveys consummation.  His lover speaks to him quietly, happy, but also mindful of the need for secrecy.  But the beating of their two hearts, as they hold each other, is louder than her voice – that is something which they cannot constrain.  This time the final rhyme is a contrast between their separation by the “beach” and their coming together “each to each”, where their hearts beat as one.