Laurel · Robert Browning · Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning

Meeting at Night

iambic pentameter · 12 lines · from Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning

The gray sea and the long black land;And the yellow half-moon large and low;And the startled little waves that leapIn fiery ringlets from their sleep,As I gain the cove with pushing prow,And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;Three fields to cross till a farm appears;A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratchAnd blue spurt of a lighted match,And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Words in this poem

cove v. t.: To brood, cover, over, or sit over, as birds their eggs. [CF. F. couver, It. covare. See Covey.]
pane n.: The narrow edge of a hammer head. See Peen. [F. panne.]

Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

About this text

Meeting at Night is in the public domain. This text is taken from Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning, Project Gutenberg ebook #28041; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.

Cite as: Robert Browning, Meeting at Night, in Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning (1864), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #28041, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/browning-selections/meeting-at-night.html, id L25083.

Form and metre

Meeting at Night is 12 lines in 2 stanzas of 6 lines each. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 81%).

See other poems in iambic pentameter.

Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.

Rhyme words, stanza by stanza

The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.

1 A-BB-A land^A · low · leap^B · sleep^B · prow · sand^A
2 ABCCBA beach^A · appears^B · scratch^C · match^C · fears^B · each^A

Scansion, line by line

Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic pentameter. How this is done.

Line	Syl.	Stress
The gray sea and the long black land;	8	········
And the yellow half-moon large and low;	9	··/˘·····
And the startled little waves that leap	10	··/˘˘/˘···
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,	9	·/˘˘·····
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,	9	······/˘·
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.	9	······/˘·
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;	9	······/˘·
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;	9	·······˘/
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch	9	·········
And blue spurt of a lighted match,	8	·····/˘·
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,	10	··········
Than the two hearts beating each to each!	9	····/˘···

On this poem

These poems were published originally simply as "Night" and "Morning." The second of these love lyrics is somewhat difficult to interpret. If the man is speaking, the "him" in l. 3 must refer to the sun. In any case, after the isolation with the woman he loved as described in the first poem, there comes with the morning a sense of the world of action to which the man must return. The two poems are fully discussed in Poet-Lore, Volume VII, April, May, June-July. The poems are noteworthy for the fusion of human emotion and natural scenery and for the startlingly specific phrasing of the first quatrain.

The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.

More by Robert Browning

Dramatic Lyrics Men and Women Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning