Confessions

Confessions

Original Text
Robert Browning, Dramatis Personae (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864). PR 4209 A1 1864 ROBA
1  What is he buzzing in my ears?
2    "Now that I come to die,
3Do I view the world as a vale of tears?"
4    Ah, reverend sir, not I!
5  What I viewed there once, what I view again
6    Where the physic bottles stand
7On the table's edge,--is a suburb lane,
8    With a wall to my bedside hand.
9  That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
10    From a house you could descry
11O'er the garden-wall; is the curtain blue
12    Or green to a healthy eye?
13  To mine, it serves for the old June weather
14    Blue above lane and wall;
15And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether"
16    Is the house o'ertopping all.
17  At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
18    There watched for me, one June,
19A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,
20    My poor mind's out of tune.
21  Only, there was a way... you crept
22    Close by the side, to dodge
23Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
24    They styled their house "The Lodge."
25  What right had a lounger up their lane?
26    But, by creeping very close,
27With the good wall's help,--their eyes might strain
28    And stretch themselves to Oes,
29  Yet never catch her and me together,
30    As she left the attic, there,
31By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether,"
32    And stole from stair to stair,
33  And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
34    We loved, sir--used to meet:
35How sad and bad and mad it was--
36    But then, how it was sweet!
Publication Start Year
1864
RPO poem Editors
J. D. Robins
RPO Edition
2RP 2.480.
Rhyme