Hello Friends,
This blog is my response to a task assigned to us by our Prof.Dr.DilipSir on Victorian Poet Robert Browning and here let's have a look at the poem "Love in a Life" by Robert Browning.
'Love in a Life’ by Robert Browning is a short two stanza poem that is separated into two sets of eight lines, or octaves. The lines are structured with a consistent rhyme scheme that follows the pattern of ABCDDABC, alternating end sounds in the second stanza. The repetition used in the arrangement of the lines mimics the circular actions of the speaker himself. As he searches he goes in one door and out the other, always close behind, but not quite catching, his lover. By the end of the poem he still hasn’t found her, this alludes to the possibility that his “quest” will go on for some time to come.
The most important theme of the piece is separation. Browning’s speaker, who might be the poet himself, spends the text looking for his lover. She has disappeared somewhere in their home and he is determined, no matter how long it takes, to find her.
The meter of the pome is also well structured. The lines are grouped together, with two tercets and one couplet making up each stanza. Browning formatted the first tercet in dimeter, the second in tetrameter, and the couplet in pentameter. This means that the lines contained either two, four or five sets of two beats.
‘Love in a Life’ was originally published in his volume, Men and Women, in 1855. The book included a number of other poems written on similar themes, all of which were dedicated to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, his wife.
‘Love in a Life’ by Robert Browning tells of a speaker’s seemingly endless quest to find his lover within the numerous rooms of their shared home.
The poem begins with the speaker stating that he is on a journey to find his lover in their house. He is going from room to room, “hunt[ing]” for “her.” He speaks to his heart, telling it not to worry, as they will soon find her. The speaker constantly feels as if he’s about to catch up to his lover. He can smell her on the curtains and sense her presence on the furniture.
In the second stanza he states that although he has not yet succeeded, he plans to. He is going to continue to search and as it is only “twilight” there are still many doors to open and rooms to enter.
Analysis of Love in Life
Stanza One
"Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her—
Next time, herself!—not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch’s perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew:
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather."
In the first stanza of ‘Love in a Life’ the speaker begins by describing how he hunts for his lover throughout the rooms of their house. The first three lines are quite short, but extremely powerful and assertive. The speaker’s tone in these lines is determined and confident. He knows he’s going to find the person he’s looking for.
In line four the speaker turns to address his own heart. It is as if he started to worry about the search and needed a moment to calm himself down. He tells his heart that “thou shalt find her.” There is nothing to fear in this situation as long as they remain strong. So far, while the speaker and his heart have been searching, they’ve only come across “the trouble behind her.” They have only seen the remnants of her presence. Whether that is the smell of the couch or the wave of a curtain. “Next time,” the speaker declares, he and his heart will find “herself!”
Everything they pass, from the curtains to the glass, holds something of the speaker in them. There are remnants of her passing presence. These descriptions are used to better describe the impact she has on the speaker’s mind. He is able to see her everywhere because they are so close and “inhabit together” the house he is searching.
Stanza Two
"Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune—
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest,—who cares?
But ’tis twilight, you see,—with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"
In the second set of lines the speaker explains how while he searches, doors open, and there are only more doors behind them. As “door succeeds door” the day “wears,” or drags on painfully. Each time he opens a door he hopes that something will change, but it has yet to. His fortune is in the balance.
His travels through the house ranging from “the wing to the centre.” There is nowhere he is ignoring but he still can’t seem to catch up to her or find her. The speaker is clearly frustrated at this point and exclaims over the apparent fact that when “she goes out” he enters. He describes the search he is participating in as a “quest.” This increases his own feelings of nobility in what he is doing. The speaker also knows that this search is likely going to take his “whole day” and professes not to care.
In fact, in the following lines of ‘Love in a Life’, he alludes to his intention to search all night. He states that it is only “twilight” and there is plenty of time left to search the “closets…and alcoves.” There are “suites to explore” and any number of other places she could be hiding.
🛩Robert Browning
Today Browning's critically most esteemed poems include the monologues Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, and My Last Duchess. His most popular poems include Porphyria's Lover, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, the diptych Meeting at Night, the patriotic Home Thoughts from Abroad, and the children's poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. His abortive dinner-party recital of How They Brought The Good News was recorded on an Edison wax cylinder, and is believed to be one of the oldest surviving recordings made in the United Kingdom of a notable person (a recording of Sir Arthur Sullivan's voice was made about six months earlier).
Browning is now popularly known for such poems as Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and also for certain famous lines: "Grow old along with me!" (Rabbi Ben Ezra), "A man's reach should exceed his grasp" and "Less is more" (Andrea Del Sarto), "It was roses, roses all the way" (The Patriot), and "God's in His heaven—All's right with the world!" (Pippa Passes).
Probably the most adulatory judgment of Browning by a modern critic comes from Harold Bloom: "Browning is the most considerable poet in English since the major Romantics, surpassing his great contemporary rival Tennyson and the principal twentieth-century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy, and Wallace Stevens. But Browning is a very difficult poet, notoriously badly served by criticism, and ill-served also by his own accounts of what he was doing as a poet. [...] Yet when you read your way into his world, precisely his largest gift to you is his involuntary unfolding of one of the largest, most enigmatic, and most multipersoned literary and human selves you can hope to encounter."
Browning became in his later years that curious phenomenon, the Victorian sage—widely regarded for his knowledge and his explorations of philosophical questions of great resonance in Victorian life. He witnessed the creation (by F.J. Furnivall in 1881) of the Browning Society, dedicated to the study of the poet’s work and thought. Just before his death in 1889, Browning finally published the other poem written for young Willie Macready, “The Cardinal and the Dog.” This 15-line poem, like “The Pied Piper,” originated in one of the legends recounted in Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World. It tells how Cardinal Crescenzio, a representative of the pope at the Council of Trent, was frightened by the apparition of a large black dog that only he could see, after which he became seriously ill; on his deathbed he again saw the dog. The poem has elicited little critical response and has seldom been anthologized; its interest today lies primarily in its role as a warm-up to “The Pied Piper.”
Anyone as widely adulated as Browning was during the later years of his life is bound to suffer a decline in critical valuation. Along with other Victorians, Browning was dismissed by influential figures among the modernists, including T.S. Eliot (although Ezra Pound paid tribute to Browning as one of his literary fathers). Following World War II, however, Browning’s reputation has been salvaged by a more objective generation of critics who note his poetic failings but also trace his influence on the poetic forms and concerns of his 20th-century successors. Through all the vicissitudes of critical reputation, however, Browning’s major contribution to the canon of children’s literature, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” has retained its popular audience.
At the time of his death in 1889, he was one of the most popular poets in England.
☆ Poems by Robert Browning
Two in the Campagna 1855
My Star 1855
Love in a Life 1855
Life in a Love 1855
Song from Paracelsus 1835
Wanting is — What? 1883
Love in a Life 2016
Epilogue 2017
Now 2016
The Pied Piper of Hamelin 1842
My Last Duchess 1842
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister 1842
Rabbi Ben Ezra 1864
Meeting at Night 1845
1,788 Words.
Works Cited:
1. "Analysis of Love in a Life by Robert Browning." Poem Analysis, 3 Feb. 2020, poemanalysis.com/robert-browning/love-in-a-life/.
2. "Poems by Robert Browning." Poets.org | Academy of American Poets, 20 Apr. 1999, poets.org/poems/robert-browning.
3. "Robert Browning." - Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, 9 July 2002, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning. Accessed 13 Feb. 2021.
4. "Robert Browning." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-browning.