Meeting at Night
{{Short description|Poem written by Robert Browning}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}
{{italic title}}
{{Infobox poem
|name = "Meeting at Night"
|image = Thomas B. Read (American, 1822-1872) - Portraits of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.jpg
|image_size = 300px
|caption = Elizabeth and Robert Browning in 1853
|author = Robert Browning
|written = {{start date|1845}}
|first = Dramatic Romances and Lyrics
|country =
|language = English
|lines =
|oclc =
|wikisource = Meeting at Night
}}
"Meeting at Night" is a Victorian English love poem by Robert Browning. The original poem appeared in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) in which "Night" and "Morning" were two sections. In 1849, the poet separated them into the two poems "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning". In the poem, the speaker is in urgency to meet his beloved and for this he has to travel through the sea at night to reach the beach where his lover is waiting.
The poem (like others of the 1845 collection) was written during the courtship period of Browning with his future wife Elizabeth Barrett. Kennedy and Hair describe the poem as the "most sensual poem" he had written up to that time.{{cite book|author1=Richard S. Kennedy|author2=Donald S. Hair|title=The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life|url=https://archive.org/details/dramaticimaginat00kenn_0|url-access=registration|year=2007|publisher=University of Missouri Press|isbn=978-0-8262-6552-4|pages=[https://archive.org/details/dramaticimaginat00kenn_0/page/134 134]–136}}
Background
John Kenyon, a distant cousin of Elizabeth Barrett, presented a copy of Barrett's 1844 poems to Sarianna Browning, sister of Robert Browning. Browning, discovering his name in print in the poem volume, wrote a letter to Barrett on January 10, 1845. Upon getting a reply he sent her the manuscripts of poems and plays of the Dramatic Romances and Lyrics for proofreading.{{cite book|author=Mary Sanders Pollock|title=Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IfuY5sdwphYC&pg=PA61|date=1 January 2003|publisher=Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.|isbn=978-0-7546-3328-0|pages=61–62}}
The poems in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics were arranged in groups of two or three with the two love poems "Night" and "Morning" as complementary. They are described by Kennedy and Hair as "a compact dramatic narrative reflecting a decidedly masculine attitude toward love."
Themes
The poem is written in two stanzas of six lines each. The first stanza describes the excitement of a secret journey by a boat on the sea. The second stanza describes the joy of the meeting of the two lovers. The main theme of this poem is the urgency and desire for the lover to meet the beloved.
Like its sister poem "Parting at Morning" which uses pronominal reference to attribute the gender of the person in the boat (as male), the poem never reveals the identity of the two lovers.{{cite book|author=Poetics and Linguistics Association. Conference|title=The State of Stylistics: PALA 26|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EpsEZl5FY1kC&pg=PA19|year=2008|publisher=Rodopi|isbn=978-90-420-2428-1|pages=19–21}} It follows the rhyme scheme ABCCBA DEFFED.{{cite book|author1=Jeanie Watson|author2=Philip McM. Pittman|author3=Warren W. Wooden|title=The Portrayal of Life Stages in English Literature, 1500-1800: Infancy, Youth, Marriage, Aging, Death, Martyrdom : Essays in Memory of Warren Wooden |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8IzjhOxActcC&pg=PA22|date=January 1989 |location=Lewiston, New York |publisher=Edwin Mellen Press |isbn=978-0-88946-462-9|page=22|quote= Robert Browning is doing in "Meeting at Night" [in two six-line stanzas, rhyming abccba]}}
Reception
There are two published accounts of this poem: one by F. R. Leavis{{cite book|author=F. R. Leavis|title=The living principle: "English" as a discipline of thought|date=1975|publisher=Chatto & Windus|isbn=978-1-56663-172-3|pages=120–2}} and another by Ronald Carter and Walter Nash.{{cite book|author1=Ronald Carter|author2=Walter Nash|title=Seeing Through Language: A Guide To Styles Of English Writing|date=8 January 1991|publisher=Wiley|isbn=978-0-631-15135-7|pages=123–9}} Kennedy and Hair explain that Browning's urgent love for Elizabeth Barrett had led him to write "the most sensual poem he had yet created."