English Major Trivia

Today's Robert Browning's birthday. Although I was never all that big on Browning, he's inextricably wedged in my pile of English major knowledge. For one thing, I think every poetry survey touches on "My Last Duchess" or one of his other character/narrator poems. I can easily see why -- their conceit of speaking in the first-person is conveniently accessible to rudimentary explication. For another, there's "Porphyria's Lover," one of those poems with a somewhat sensational interpretation to be teased out an decoded; any suggestion of necrophilia, in a "serious" poem, is understandably appealing to adolescent sensibilities. 

As I read more of his work later in my academic years, I found that I preferred some of the poems that have no elaborate conceits or literary references. Simpler stuff like Now!

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!