A short excerpt from Snowbound: A Winter Idyl (1866):

Yet, haply, in some lull of life,
Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
The wordling's eyes shall gather dew,
Dreaming in throngful city ways
Of winter joys his boyhood knew;
And dear and early friends the few
Who yet remain shall pause to view
These Flemish pictures of old days;
Sit with me by the homestead hearth
And stretch the hands of memory forth
To warm them at the wood-fire's blaze!
And thanks untraced to lips unknown
Shall greet me like the odors blown
From unseen meadows newly mown,
Or lilies floating in some pond,
Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond;
The traveller owns the grateful sense
Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air.

Ahhh, the benediction of the air. Read the entire wonderful but old-fashioned-sounding 1865 poem by the great north of Boston newspaper editor and abolitionist here.

He made a lot of money from that poem. Whittier's home, to which the poem refers, stands in Haverhill, MA. It's a sentimental poem you can read to the kids - with feeling! Especially on a snowbound day.

To Jane

The keen stars were twinkling,
And the fair moon was rising among them,
Dear Jane.
The guitar was tinkling,
But the notes were not sweet till you sung them
Again.

As the moon's soft splendour
O'er the faint cold starlight of Heaven
Is thrown,
So your voice most tender
To the strings without soul had then given
Its own.

The stars will awaken,
Though the moon sleep a full hour later
To-night;
No leaf will be shaken
Whilst the dews of your melody scatter
Delight.

Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.

Shelley was not a typical Maggie's Farm sort of fellow. He was a fan of all of the hip and rebellious ideas of the early 1800s: vegetarianism, free love, atheism, (and anti-monarchism and related radical politics of the time), and he always seemed to be chasing 16 year-old girls.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 1919 (here's what a copybook is, and, by "markets," he means the political speakers in the marketplace of ideas)

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed, they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The Last Pain

This last pain for the damned the Fathers found:
"They knew the bliss with which they were not crowned."
Such, but on earth, let me foretell,
Is all, of heaven or of hell.

Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul,
May know her happiness by eye to hole;
He's safe; the key is lost; he knows
Door will not open, nor hole close.

"What is conceivable can happen too,"
Said Wittgenstein, who had not dreamt of you;
But wisely; if we worked it long
We should forget where it was wrong.

Those thorns are crowns which, woven into knots,
Crackle under and soon boil fool's pots;
And no man's watching, wise and long,
Would ever stare them into song.

Thorns burn to a consistent ash, like man;
A splendid cleanser for the frying-pan:
And those who leap from pan to fire
Should this brave opposite admire.

All those large dreams by which men long live well
Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell;
This then is real, I have implied,
A painted, small, transparent slide.

These the inventive can hand-paint at leisure,
Or most emporia would stock our measure;
And feasting in their dappled shade
We should forget how they were made.

Feign then what's by a decent tact believed,
And act that state is only so conceived,
And build an edifice of form
For house where phantoms may keep warm.

Imagine, then, by miracle, with me,
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.

Maggie's Farmers are fans of William Empson, more for his books than for his poetry. For many of us, his 7 Types of Ambiguity (written at age 22) opened a door to a new world. A commenter here claimed that his The Structure of Complex Words is the best book ever written. Better check it out.

Love's Deity

I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
    Who died before the god of love was born.
I cannot think that he, who then loved most,
    Sunk so low as to love one which did scorn.
But since this god produced a destiny,
And that vice-nature, custom, lets it be,
    I must love her that loves not me.

Sure, they which made him god, meant not so much,
    Nor he in his young godhead practised it.
But when an even flame two hearts did touch,
    His office was indulgently to fit
Actives to passives. Correspondency
Only his subject was; it cannot be
    Love, till I love her, who loves me.

But every modern god will now extend
    His vast prerogative as far as Jove.
To rage, to lust, to write to, to commend,
    All is the purlieu of the god of love.
O! were we waken'd by this tyranny
To ungod this child again, it could not be
    I should love her, who loves not me.

Rebel and atheist too, why murmur I,
    As though I felt the worst that love could do?
Love might make me leave loving, or might try
    A deeper plague, to make her love me too;
Which, since she loves before, I'm loth to see.
Falsehood is worse than hate; and that must be,
    If she whom I love, should love me.

Re-posted from last November: One more pic from our friend's vacation trip to Hudson Bay:

Here's today's verse. It's a fox's Thanksgiving, I guess. Who can remember Bob Shane?

A Winter Night

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over,
Snow swept the world from end to end.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

As during summer midges swarm
To beat their wings against a flame
Out in the yard the snowflakes swarmed
To beat against the window pane

The blizzard sculptured on the glass
Designs of arrows and of whorls.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

Distorted shadows fell
Upon the lighted ceiling:
Shadows of crossed arms,of crossed legs-
Of crossed destiny.

Two tiny shoes fell to the floor
And thudded.
A candle on a nightstand shed wax tears
Upon a dress.

All things vanished within
The snowy murk-white,hoary.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

A corner draft fluttered the flame
And the white fever of temptation
Upswept its angel wings that cast
A cruciform shadow

It snowed hard throughout the month
Of February, and almost constantly
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer's dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye. 

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley (1792-1822) led one heck of a rebellious life - a classic poet's life full of tragedy, 

unconformity, love, and pain.

Ars Poetica 

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be.

 From A&C:

ENOBARBUS
How appears the fight?

SCARUS
On our side like the tokened pestilence
Where death is sure. Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt—
Whom leprosy o’ertake—i’ th’ midst o’ th’ fight,
When vantage like a pair of twins appeared,
Both as the same, or rather ours the elder,
The breese upon her, like a cow in June,
Hoists sails and flies.

Poetic language is an intensification of the use of words. Prof Booth likes to look at the "physics" of poetic language. When a person gets into a poetry state, whether writing or reading, the mind can take over and let the inner physics of the thing just happen the same way you can hit a moving car with a snowball without knowing the math and the brain physiology of it.

I found this essay to be fascinating, and had to re-read it:  Shakespeare’s Genius Is Nonsense - What the Bard can teach science about language and the limits of the human mind. One quote:

 As a playwright and businessman, of course, Shakespeare had a serious interest in shielding his audiences from the mechanics of his verse. In addition to its concordance with the 16th-century concept of sprezzatura—lightness, ease, the ability to make even the most difficult things look effortless—a play crafted to maximize delight helped Shakespeare fill theatres in a way that a lot of visible sweating over the lines might not have. For every ingenious device that Booth describes in the verse, he brings as much attention to the effort that went into keeping it unobtrusive. His theory may explain the ineffable mind-states that poetry creates in us: poetic experience as the interaction of barely perceptible mental processes whose delicate, scintillating play is usually washed out by the spotlight of conscious attention.

What Booth so elegantly shows us is how Shakespeare can free us from ourselves. His lush, prismatic verse grants us “a small but metaphysically glorious holiday” from how we usually comprehend language, a holiday that is in turn “a brief and trivial but effectively real holiday from the inherent limitation of the human mind.” Rather than plunging into the abyss of not-knowing, we soar above it. We are not falling, but flying.

On January 20, 1961, Robert Frost spoke at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. The snow-glare made it impossible for him to read his new poem for the occasion (he was 87 years old), so he recited a better poem, The Gift Outright, from memory.

~ The Gift Outright ~

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

When You Are Old

 When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

A hungry feeling
Came o'er me stealing
And the mice were squealing
In my prison cell
And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle
All along the banks of the Royal Canal

Oh! To start the morning
The warden bawling
"Get up out of bed, clean out your cell!"
And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle
All along the banks of the Royal Canal

Oh! the screw was peeping
And the lag was sleeping
As he lay weeping
For his girl Sal
And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle
All along the banks of the Royal Canal

On a fine Spring evening
The lag lay dreaming
And the sea-gulls were wheeling
High above the wall
And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle
All along the banks of the Royal Canal

Oh! the wind was sighing
And the day was dying
As the lag lay crying
In his prison cell
And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle
All along the banks of the Royal Canal

In the female prison
There are seventy women
It's with all of them
That I'd like to dwell
Then that auld triangle could go jingle-jangle
All along the banks of the Royal Canal.

This song was written by Irish playwright Brendan Behan for his play The Quare Fellow (slang for a condemned man). A lag is slang for a new prisoner. The song has been performed by The Dubliners, The Clancy Brothers, and The Pogues, and is recorded on one of Bob Dylan's practice "basement tapes" with The Band in a folk-rock style.

Photo: Behan with Jackie Gleason, 1960.

She was a phantom of delight (1804)

SHE was a Phantom of delight
          When first she gleamed upon my sight;
          A lovely Apparition, sent
          To be a moment's ornament;
          Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
          Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair;
          But all things else about her drawn
          From May-time and the cheerful Dawn;
          A dancing Shape, an Image gay,
          To haunt, to startle, and way-lay.                          

          I saw her upon nearer view,
          A Spirit, yet a Woman too!
          Her household motions light and free,
          And steps of virgin-liberty;
          A countenance in which did meet
          Sweet records, promises as sweet;
          A Creature not too bright or good
          For human nature's daily food;
          For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
          Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.             

          And now I see with eye serene
          The very pulse of the machine;
          A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
          A Traveller between life and death;
          The reason firm, the temperate will,
          Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
          A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
          To warn, to comfort, and command;
          And yet a Spirit still, and bright
          With something of angelic light.                            

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
  So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

WS was right about that, wasn't he? How did he know how long his lines would live?

The Betrothed, by Kipling

"You must choose between me and your cigar."
       -- Breach of Promise Case, Circa 1885

Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,
For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.

We quarrelled about Havanas -- we fought o'er a good cheroot,
And I knew she is exacting, and she says I am a brute.

Open the old cigar-box -- let me consider a space;
In the soft blue veil of the vapour musing on Maggie's face.

Maggie is pretty to look at -- Maggie's a loving lass,
But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the truest of loves must pass.

There's peace in a Larranaga, there's calm in a Henry Clay;
But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away --

Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown --
But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o' the talk o' the town!

Maggie, my wife at fifty -- grey and dour and old --
With never another Maggie to purchase for love or gold!

And the light of Days that have Been the dark of the Days that Are,
And Love's torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar --

The butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep in your pocket --
With never a new one to light tho' it's charred and black to the socket!

Open the old cigar-box -- let me consider a while.
Here is a mild Manila -- there is a wifely smile.

Which is the better portion -- bondage bought with a ring,
Or a harem of dusky beauties, fifty tied in a string?

Counsellors cunning and silent -- comforters true and tried,
And never a one of the fifty to sneer at a rival bride?

Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes,
Peace in the hush of the twilight, balm ere my eyelids close,

This will the fifty give me, asking nought in return,
With only a Suttee's passion -- to do their duty and burn.

This will the fifty give me. When they are spent and dead,
Five times other fifties shall be my servants instead.

The furrows of far-off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main,
When they hear my harem is empty will send me my brides again.

I will take no heed to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal,
So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall.

I will scent 'em with best vanilla, with tea will I temper their hides,
And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides.

For Maggie has written a letter to give me my choice between
The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick o' Teen.

And I have been servant of Love for barely a twelvemonth clear,
But I have been Priest of Cabanas a matter of seven year;

And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cheery light
Of stums that I burned to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight.

And I turn my eyes to the future that Maggie and I must prove,
But the only light on the marshes is the Will-o'-the-Wisp of Love.

Will it see me safe through my journey or leave me bogged in the mire?
Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I follow the fitful fire?

Open the old cigar-box -- let me consider anew --
Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.

Light me another Cuba -- I hold to my first-sworn vows.
If Maggie will have no rival, I'll have no Maggie for Spouse!

The Female of the Species

When the Himalayan peasant meets the
he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster,
who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends
the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more
deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the
careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and
avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where
she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more
deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached
to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the
vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors,
turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more
deadly than the male.

Man's timid heart is bursting with the
things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him
isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands,
each confirms the other's tale -
The female of the species is more
deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations -
worm and savage otherwise, -
Man propounds negotiations,
Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him,
ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even
to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger -
Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue -
to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him,
every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue,
armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue,
lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male.

We only have fragments of Archilochus' lyric poetry (ie accompanied by a lyre), which have been found over the years on shreds of papyrus. Here are a few of those fragments:

- My one great talent lies in making
those who wrong me suffer horribly.

- I  am the servant of Ares, Lord of Battle,
and I know the lovely gift of the Muses.

- Some Thracian is delighted with the shield, which beside a bush
I left unwillingly, an excellent and perfect armament.
Myself I saved! Why should that shield be important to me?
The hell with it! I'll get another, just as good.

- Not many bowstrings will be stretched nor slingshot
flying thick, when Ares makes his killing field
on the plain. Then it will be the grievous work of the sword.
They are the Lords of this kind of battle -
The spear-famed Lords of Euboea.

- I long for a fight with you, just as a thirsty man longs for drink.

- The fox knows many things,
but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

- There is no country fair and desirable
or lovely, like that around the banks of the Siris.

- I have no interest in the business of Gyges and all his gold,
nor has such envy ever grasped me, nor do I feel envious
of the works of the gods, nor have I love for high rulership,
for all these things are very far from my eyes.

Archilochus, the first great Greek poet we know after Homer and Hesiod, is thought to have been a soldier, maybe a mercenary, possibly of the nobility - and the inventor if iambic verse. He was a master of meter, and seems to have been a cranky and vengeful SOB who never got over not being permitted to marry the gal he wanted. His vengeance drove her family to suicide. He died in battle, as he no doubt would have wanted to do. Not the type to die in a bed.

Here's a brief piece on his poetry.

Here's a brief bit on Greek lyric poetry.

Here are the types of Greek lyric poetry. Most names quite familiar to us.

The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world!

Those famous lines are from Browning's 1841 Pippa Passes. It's Pippa's song. Pippa is a silk mill worker in Asolo, and has three holidays per year. The poem goes through the morning, noon, evening and night of Pippa's day off. She treasures her precious free time. This is from "Morning":

Oh, Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,
A mite of my twelve-hours treasure,
The least of thy gazes or glances,
(Be they grants thou art bound to, or gifts above measure)
One of thy choices, or one of thy chances,
(Be they tasks God imposed thee, or freaks at thy pleasure)
My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure,
Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me!
Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing,
Whence earth, we feel, gets steady help and good
Thy fitful sunshine-minutes, coming, going,
As if earth turned from work in gamesome mood
All shall be mine! But thou must treat me not
As the prosperous are treated, these who live
At hand here, and enjoy the higher lot,
In readiness to take what thou wilt give,
And free to let alone what thou refusest;
For, Day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest
Me, who am only Pippa, old-year's sorrow,
Cast off last night, will come again to-morrow
Whereas, if thou prove gentle, I shall borrow
Sufficient strength of thee for new-year's sorrow.
All other men and women that this earth
Belongs to, who all days alike possess,
Make general plenty cure particular dearth,
Get more joy, one way, if another, less:
Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven
What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven,
Sole light that helps me through the year thy suns!
Try, now! Take Asolo's Four Happiest Ones
And let thy morning rain on that superb
Great haughty Ottima; can rain disturb
Her Sebald's homage? All the while thy rain
Beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane,
He will but press the closer, breathe more warm
Against her cheek; how should she mind the storm?
And, morning past, if mid-day shed a gloom
O

O'er Jules and Phene, what care bride and groom
Save for their dear selves?  Tis their marriage-day;
And while they leave church, and go home their way,
Hand clasping hand, within each breast would be
Sunbeams and pleasant weather spite of thee!
Then, for another trial, obscure thy eve
With mist, will Luigi and his mother grieve?
The Lady and her child, unmatched, forsooth,
She in her age, as Luigi in his youth,
For true content? The cheerful town, warm, close,
And safe, the sooner that thou art morose,
Receives them! And yet once again, out-break
In storm at night on Monsignor, they make
Such stir about, whom they expect from Rome
To visit Asolo, his brother's home,
And say here masses proper to release
A soul from pain, what storm dares hurt his peace?
Calm would he pray, with his own thoughts to ward
Thy thunder off, nor want the angels' guard!
But Pippa just one such mischance would spoil
Her day that lightens the next twelve-month's toil
At wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil!
And here I let time slip for nought!
Aha, you foolhardy sunbeam caught
With a single splash from my ewer!
You that would mock the best pursuer,
Was my basin over-deep?
One splash of water ruins you asleep,
And up, up fleet your brilliant bits
Wheeling and counterwheeling,
Reeling, broken beyond healing
Now grow together on the ceiling!
That will task your wits!
Whoever quenched fire first, hoped to see
Morsel after morsel flee
As merrily, as giddily . . . 
Meantime, what lights my sunbeam on,
Where settles by degrees the radiant cripple?
Oh, is it surely blown, my martagon?
New-blown and ruddy as St. Agnes' nipple,
Plump as the flesh-bunch on some Turk bird's poll!
Be sure if corals, branching  'neath the ripple
Of ocean, bud there, fairies watch unroll
Such turban-flowers; I say, such lamps disperse
Thick red flame through that dusk green universe!
        I am queen of thee, floweret;
        And each fleshy blossom
        Preserve I not (safer
        Than leaves that enbower it,
        Or shells that embosom)
        From weevil and chafer?
        Laugh through my pane, then; solicit the bee;
        Gibe him, be sure; and, in midst of thy glee,
        Love thy queen, worship me!

Worship whom else? For am I not, this day,
Whate'er I please? What shall I please to-day?
My morning, noon, eve, night how spend my day?
To-morrow I must be Pippa who winds silk,
The whole year round, to earn just bread and milk:
        But, this one day, I have leave to go,
        And play out my fancy's fullest games;
        I may fancy all day and it shall be so

The entire piece is here. Yes, Browning specialized in the dramatic monologue. I can easily imagine Pippa as a one-person stage performance. Off topic, but I always got a kick out of the name of Pippa Passes, KY, aka Caney Creek.

Break of Day

'Tis true, 'tis day; what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise, because 'tis light?
Did we lie down, because 'twas night?
Love which in spite of darkness brought us hither
Should in despite of light keep us together.

Light hath no tongue, but is all eye;
If it could speak as well as spy,
This were the worst that it could say -
That being well, I fain would stay,
And that I loved my heart and honour so,
That I would not from her, that had them, go.

Must business thee from hence remove?
Oh, that's the worst disease of love!
The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath business, and makes love, doth do
Such wrong as when a married man doth woo.

Image is Picasso's Meditation, 1904