Poem of the Day: ‘Life-Long, Poor Browning’

The Virginia poet Anne Spencer (1882–1975), one of three African-American women included in the 1973 “Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry,” struck a uniquely Romantic note among the voices of the Harlem Renaissance. After a West Virginia free-ranging mountain childhood, Spencer entered the Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia, at age eleven. While there, she met her husband, with whom she would spend the rest of her life in Lynchburg, in a colorful house with a large garden, whose beauties often feature in her poems. She was active in civil-rights causes, opening her home as a salon for dignitaries in that movement, activists and artists alike. Yet her deep-seated charism lay in the garden house, built for her by her husband, where she retreated to write. Today’s Poem of the Day breathes the air of that garden house. In this poem, Spencer claims the Victorian poet Robert Browning as her subject, with the authority of one who does not doubt her own place in the English literary tradition. The poem unfolds in easygoing abab pentameter quatrains, with a couplet at the end as if it were an extended Shakespearean sonnet. It speaks tenderly, if eccentrically, of Browning as we might speak of a beloved, departed relative, upon whom we hope the light of heaven shines after a life of deprivation and hardship. Further, if perhaps also eccentrically, it evokes Virginia as that heaven, with a particularity that, again, speaks of the acute observation to which love gives rise. The poem’s eye lingers over the landscapes rivers and hills, naming its trees and flowers as if to speak them into being. This is an act of claiming: confident and undoubting. As Browning belongs to the poet, simply because she loves him, so does the land where she locates him, in all the beauty of an eternal springtime. Life-Long, Poor Browning by Anne Spencer Life-long, poor Browning never knew Virginia, Or he’d not grieved in Florence for April sallies Back to English gardens after Euclid’s linear: Clipt yews, Pomander Walks, and pleachéd alleys;Primroses, prim indeed, in quite ordered hedges, Waterways, soberly, sedately enchanneled, No thin riotous blade even among the sedges, All the wild country-side tamely impaneled . . .Dead, now, dear Browning lives on in heaven, — (Heaven’s Virginia when the year’s at its Spring) He’s haunting the byways of the wine-aired leaven And throating the notes of the wildings on wing; Here canopied reaches of dogwood and hazel, Beech tree and redbud fine-laced in vines, Fleet clapping rills by lush fern and basil, Drain blue hills to lowlands scented with pines . . .Think you he meets in this tender green sweetness Shade that was Elizabeth . . . immortal completeness!___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Life-Long, Poor Browning’

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