Meeting at Night
19 pages • 38-minute read
Robert BrowningMeeting at Night
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Background
Authorial Context: Robert Browning’s Poetry
“Meeting at Night” is a snapshot of a romantic relationship between a man and a woman at one moment in time, conveying their excitement at meeting each other for a night of love. Browning does not reflect further on the nature of their relationship. However, Browning was a keen and thoughtful observer of romantic male-female relationships, and in other poems, he explored a number of different scenarios that unfold in love between men and women.
In Browning’s 1855 dramatic monologue “By the Fire-Side,” a male speaker sits by the fireside while his wife sits reading by his side. The man indulges in a happy reminiscence of the magical moment when they first gave each other their hearts: “Oh moment, one and infinite!” (Browning, Robert. “By the Fire-Side.” All Poetry. 1855. Line 181). He then declares that she “filled [his] empty heart at a word,” and he will remember this moment always, for in it “[s]o grew [his] own small life complete, / As nature obtained her best of [him]— / One born to love you, sweet!” (“By the Fire-Side.” Lines 53-55). This is the kind of deep mutual love, the poem states, that leads to marriage and lasts a lifetime; it is a union that cannot be broken: “We were mixed at last / In spite of the mortal screen” (“By the Fire-Side.” Lines 234-35). The poem was inspired by a visit that Browning made with his wife to a ruined mountain chapel in the area near Bagni di Lucca in Italy in 1853.
“Two in the Campagna” was also inspired by an Italian setting, when Browning and his wife visited the plains and pasture lands of the Campagna di Roma. This is also a love poem related by a first-person male speaker, but unlike “By the Fire-Side,” the man expresses frustration because he longs for an even deeper union with his female companion than he is able to attain: “I would that you were all to me, / You that are just so much, no more” (Browning, Robert. “Two in the Campagna.” Poetry Foundation. 1855. Lines 36-37). He refers to this gap or separation between them as a “wound” (“Two in the Campagna.” Line 40) and continues,
I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs,—your part my part
In life, for good and ill (“Two in the Campagna.” Lines 41-45).
However, this complete union of two souls—a lofty, idealistic goal—is not possible. In spite of the depth of their love, they must, to an extent, remain separate human beings, and in the last two lines, the speaker discerns “[i]nfinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn” (“Two in the Campagna.” Lines 59-60).
“A Lover’s Quarrel” takes yet another angle on love: the emotional turbulence when lovers do not see eye to eye on something. Love is not always a smooth experience. The poem comprises the reflections of a man whose lover left him three months previously. He still loves her and looks back fondly on the happy, playful, laughter-filled times they had together not so long ago. They truly loved each other, but then, one winter evening, they quarreled. He gives no details of what the quarrel was about, but it seems that angry words were exchanged. The poem ends on an optimistic note, though. Now that spring is approaching, he entertains hope that she will forgive him for his part in the dispute and return to him.
These three poems all express a high-minded approach to love and do not offer the strong hint found in “Meeting at Night” (in the image of the “pushing prow” [Line 5] that enters the “slushy sand” [Line 6] of the shore) of sexual love. However, on other occasions, Browning used sexual imagery to convey the notion that physical love is as much a part of the experience as the emotional feelings. In the lyric poem “Women and Roses” (1852), for example, the speaker refers to beautiful women metaphorically as roses, and he associates a garden of roses with love, as in the following simile based on the behavior of bees:
Deep, as drops from a statue’s plinth
The bee sucked in by the hyacinth,
So will I bury me while burning,
Quench like him at a plunge my yearning,
Eyes in your eyes, lips on your lips!
Fold me fast where the cincture slips,
Prison all my soul in eternities of pleasure (Browning, Robert. “Women and Roses.” All Poetry. 1852. Lines 28-34).
A cincture is a girdle or belt worn by women. The irony of the poem is that this much-desired experience is unobtainable to the speaker. He metaphorically describes women of the past, present, and future, but they are all beyond his reach—quite unlike the fortunate (and determined) speaker in “Meeting at Night.”
Literary Context: The Victorian Era and Beyond
When Browning published “Meeting at Night” in 1845, Queen Victoria had been on the British throne since 1837, and the beginning of the Victorian period in literature is usually dated five years before that, in 1832. This was the year that the Great Reform Act was passed, and the major Romantic poets were either dead or long past their best work. However, during the 1840s, the influence of the Romantics remained strong. Browning was an admirer of Percy Bysshe Shelley, while Matthew Arnold, soon to emerge as a major force in Victorian literature, was a follower of William Wordsworth, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, already a leading poet, was strongly influenced by John Keats. However, the new age also had its own defining characteristics. It is often noted for its adherence to a puritanical code that emphasized middle-class respectability, which included a repressive attitude to sexual behavior and its depiction in literature. Earnestness coupled with the need to be edifying were frequent watchwords of Victorian literature, although novelists such as William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens were also appreciated for the humor in their work. Some of the poets forged for themselves a little more leeway in terms of sexual explicitness, especially Algernon Swinburne, who wrote bold lyrical poems such as “Love and Sleep” and others in Poems and Ballads (1866). Browning was not quite bound by the strictures of the age either and was more daring than most: Subtle sexual imagery can be found not only in “Meeting at Night” but also in “Popularity,” The Ring and the Book, and “Caliban Upon Setebos,” not to mention the violent erotic imagery in “Porphyria’s Lover,” a dramatic monologue in which a mentally unwell man strangles his lover.
It may be, however, that “Meeting at Night” is best seen in a wider context than the era in which it was written. Browning presents a secret, perhaps illicit meeting of passionate lovers at night, which is not a new theme in literature. In Romeo and Juliet (1595), William Shakespeare’s titular characters must meet in secret because of the feud between their families. Romeo, like the male lover in “Meeting at Night,” must leave at first light the next morning (as shown in the companion poem, “Parting at Morning”).
More specifically, the lovers in Browning’s poem are separated by a sea, which the man must cross to reach his beloved. This calls back to the Greek myth of Hero and Leander, in which Leander is enamored of the lady Hero, who lives in Sestos, on a peninsula in Europe. Leander lives on the other side of the Hellespont, a narrow strip of water. Every night, he swims the Hellespont to reach Hero, as she shines a light from her tower to guide him. It is a dangerous undertaking that eventually costs him his life when Hero’s torch goes out and he drowns. In English literature, the tale, minus its tragic ending, is told by Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe in his late 16th-century erotic short epic poem Hero and Leander. Browning’s speaker is capable enough to acquire a boat for the sea crossing, which means that he avoids the inconvenience of showing up naked and wet at his lover’s door (as Leander does in Marlowe’s frequently amusing account of the lovers’ adventures). Also, Marlowe, with more space available in his short epic, describes his subjects’ lovemaking in rich if sometimes comic detail, while Browning, confining himself to a 12-line poem to tell his nameless lovers’ story, leaves all that to the reader’s imagination. The reader is left to fill in the blanks about what happens after the tapping on the window and the striking of the match.
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