"Meeting at Night" is a

Victorian Victorian or Victorians may refer to: 19th century * Victorian era, British history during Queen Victoria's 19th-century reign ** Victorian architecture ** Victorian house ** Victorian decorative arts ** Victorian fashion ** Victorian literatur ...

English love poem by

Robert Browning Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian literature, Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentar ...

. The original poem appeared in '' Dramatic Romances and Lyrics'' (1845) in which "Night" and "Morning" were two sections. In 1849, the poet separated them into the two poems " Meeting at Night" and " Parting at Morning". In the poem, the speaker is in urgency to meet his beloved and for this he has to travel through the sea at night to reach the beach where his lover is waiting. The poem (like others of the 1845 collection) was written during the courtship period of Browning with his future wife

Elizabeth Barrett Elizabeth Barrett Browning (née Moulton-Barrett; 6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Her work receiv ...

. Kennedy and Hair describe the poem as the "most sensual poem" he had written up to that time.

Background

John Kenyon, a distant cousin of

, presented a copy of Barrett's

1844 poems In the Philippines, 1844 had only 365 days, when Tuesday, December 31 was skipped as Monday, December 30 was immediately followed by Wednesday, January 1, 1845, the next day after. The change also applied to Caroline Islands, Guam, Marianas ...

to Sarianna Browning, sister of Robert Browning. Browning, discovering his name in print in the poem volume, wrote a letter to Barrett on January 10, 1845. Upon getting a reply he sent her the manuscripts of poems and plays of the '' Dramatic Romances and Lyrics'' for proofreading. The poems in ''Dramatic Romances and Lyrics'' were arranged in groups of two or three with the two love poems "Night" and "Morning" as complementary. They are described by Kennedy and Hair as "a compact dramatic narrative reflecting a decidedly masculine attitude toward love."

Themes

The poem is written in two stanzas of six lines each. The first stanza describes the excitement of a secret journey by a boat on the sea. The second stanza describes the joy of the meeting of the two lovers. The main theme of this poem is the urgency and desire for the lover to meet the beloved. Like its sister poem "Parting at Morning" which uses ''pronominal reference'' to attribute the gender of the person in the boat (as male), the poem never reveals the identity of the two lovers. It follows the

rhyme scheme A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other. An example of the ABAB rh ...

ABCCBA DEFFED.

Reception

There are two published accounts of this poem: one by

F. R. Leavis Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis ( ; 14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge, and later at the University of York. Leav ...

and another by Ronald Carter and Walter Nash. Kennedy and Hair explain that Browning's urgent love for Elizabeth Barrett had led him to write "the most sensual poem he had yet created."

References

{{Robert Browning Poetry by Robert Browning 1845 poems Love poems