Wanting is — What?

1812 –

1889

                Wanting is — what?
                Summer redundant,
                Blueness abundant,
                — Where is the blot?
Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same,
— Framework which waits for a picture to frame:
What of the leafage, what of the flower?
Roses embowering with naught they embower!
Come then, complete incompletion, O comer,
Pant thro' the blueness, perfect the summer!
                Breathe but one breath
                Rose-beauty above,
                And all that was death
                Grows life, grows love,
                     Grows love!

This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on March 17, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive. This poem is in the public domain.

Porphyria’s Lover

THE rain set early in to-night,
     The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
     And did its worst to vex the lake:
     I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
     She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate

Robert Browning

1868

Epilogue

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to where—by death, fools think, imprisoned—
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,
—Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel
—Being—who?

Robert Browning

2017

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

Robert Browning

2016

Poems

Wanting is — What?

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Porphyria’s Lover

Epilogue

Now

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Wanting is — What?

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