Today’s Poem: Life-long, Poor Browning

Anne Spencer imagines Robert Browning in a heaven that looks like Virginia

Anne Spencer’s garden retreat (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, “Life-Long, Poor Browning,”  breathes the air of the Virginia garden house where the poet Anne Spencer (1882–1975) retreated to write. Spencer, one of three African-American women included in the 1973 Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, strikes a unique note among the voices of the Harlem Renaissance, as a nature poet with Romantic sympathies. After a free-ranging childhood in the West Virginia mountains, she spent her married life in a colorful Lynchburg house, home to a family of children and visited by such figures as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marian Anderson. Beyond the intellectual stimulation of these frequent guests, the beauties of the  large garden surrounding the house clearly informed Spencer’s poetic imagination. 

In “Life-Long, Poor Browning, 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. Here the deprivation is imagined ultimately in terms of the parting-by-death that exiles a husband from his wife, but also in terms of a life-long exile among orderly, Euclidean English gardens. 

Anne Spencer in her wedding dress, 1900 (Wikimedia Commons)

Further, if perhaps also eccentrically, the poem 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!

---