Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!"
* * * * *
This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse Cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. But only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream, if Porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? What truly happened on that night of wind and rain?—that night which is real, whatever else is not . . . I ask, we all ask; but does it greatly matter? Enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning—the sanity in the madness. As Porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the little cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the love at last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was herself. When in all the rest of life would such another moment come? . . . How many lovers have mutually murmured that: "If we could die now!"—nothing impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the sanity in the madness, the courage in the cowardice. . . . So this lover felt, brooding in the "madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have been:
"And thus we sit together now,
And yet God has not said a word!"
Six poems of exultant love—and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even he puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the nameless girl in Count Gismond and from Balaustion—these only—do we get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just now shown. . . . Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I think it is not at least so true, but true in some degree it must be, since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of love? Or that she understands them better? . . . Perhaps all of these things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the "tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love consists for woman.
FOOTNOTES:
[205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the minds of some. In Berdoe's Browning Cyclopædia the difficulty is frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the last line of Parting at Morning as meaning that the woman "desires more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the man who speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him." Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him" refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.
[208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break in sense or sound."