Now!

Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, -- so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense,
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me --
Me, sure that, despite of time future, time past,
This tick of life-time's one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet,
The moment eternal -- just that and no more --
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core,
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!

-Robert Browning

Meeting at night

The gray 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, through its joys and fears,
Then the two hearts beating each to each!

-Robert Browning

Confessions

What is he buzzing in my ears?
‘Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?’
Ah, reverend sir, not I!

What I viewed there once, what I view again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table’s edge,―is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.

That land sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O’er the garden-wall : is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?

To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labeled ‘Ether’
Is the house o’ertopping all.

At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl : I know, sir, it’s improper,
My poor mind’s out of tune.

Only, there was a way . . . you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except :
They styled their house ‘The Lodge.’

What right had a lounger up their lane?
But, by creeping very close,
With the good wall’s help,―their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to Oes,

Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic, there,
By the rim of the bottle labeled ‘Ether’,
And stole from stair to stair,

And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir―used to meet :
How sad and bad and mad it was―
But then, how it was sweet!

-Robert Browning