Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) by Robert Browning Read Free Book Online

can I care?
’Tis the world the same
For my praise or blame,
    And endurance is easy there.
Wrong in the one thing rare –
    Oh, it is hard to bear!
    XVIII
    [120] Here’s the spring back or close,
    When the almond-blossom blows:
We shall have the word
In a minor third
    There is none but the cuckoo knows:
Heaps of the guelder-rose!
    I must bear with it, I suppose.
    XIX
    Could but November come,
    Were the noisy birds struck dumb
At the warning slash
[130] Of his driver’s-lash –
    I would laugh like the valiant Thumb
Facing the castle glum
    And the giant’s fee-faw-fum!
    XX
    Then, were the world well stripped
    Of the gear wherein equipped
We can stand apart,
Heart dispense with heart
    In the sun, with the flowers unnipped, –
Oh, the world’s hangings ripped,
    [140] We were both in a bare-walled crypt!
    XXI
    Each in the crypt would cry
    ‘But one freezes here! and why?
When a heart, as chill,
At my own would thrill
    Back to life, and its fires out-fly?
Heart, shall we live or die?
    The rest, … settle by-and-by!’
    XXII
    So, she’d efface the score,
    And forgive me as before.
[150] It is twelve o’clock:
I shall hear her knock
    In the worst of a storm’s uproar,
I shall pull her through the door,
    I shall have her for evermore!

Up at a Villa – Down in the City
    (As Distinguished by an Italian Person of Quality)
    I
    Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare,
    The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square;
    Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!
    II
    Something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear, at least!
    There, the whole day long, one’s life is a perfect feast;
    While up at a villa one lives, I maintain it, no more than a beast.
    III
    Well now, look at our villa! stuck like the horn of a bull
    Just on a mountain-edge as bare as the creature’s skull,
    Save a mere shag of a bush with hardly a leaf to pull!
    [10] – I scratch my own, sometimes, to see if the hair’s turned wool.
    IV
    But the city, oh the city – the square with the houses! Why?
    They are stone-faced, white as a curd, there’s something to take the eye!
    Houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry;
    You watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who hurries by;
    Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun gets high;
    And the shops with fanciful signs which are painted properly.
    V
    What of a villa? Though winter be over in March by rights,
    ’Tis May perhaps ere the snow shall have withered well off the heights:
    You’ve the brown ploughed land before, where the oxen steam and wheeze,
    [20] And the hills over-smoked behind by the faint grey olive-trees.
    VI
    Is it better in May, I ask you? You’ve summer all at once;
    In a day he leaps complete with a few strong April suns.
    ’Mid the sharp short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well,
    The wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its great red bell
    Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell.
    VII
    Is it ever hot in the square? There’s a fountain to spout and splash!
    In the shade it sings and springs; in the shine such foam-bows flash
    On the horses with curling fish-tails, that prance and paddle and pash
    Round the lady atop in her conch – fifty gazers do not abash,
    [30] Though all that she wears is some weeds round her waist in a sort of sash.
    VIII
    All the year long at the villa, nothing to see though you linger,
    Except yon cypress that points like death’s lean lifted forefinger.
    Some think fireflies pretty, when they mix i’ the corn and mingle,
    Or thrid the stinking hemp till the stalks of it seem a-tingle.
    Late August or early September, the stunning cicala is shrill,
    And the bees keep their tiresome whine round the resinous firs on the hill.
    Enough of the seasons, – I spare you the months of the fever and chill.
    IX
    Ere you open your eyes in the city, the blessed church-bells begin:
    No sooner the bells leave off than the diligence rattles