Despite studying his poem My Last Duchess for O-level, Robert Browning (1812-1889) has never been a poet who spoke to me as directly as many other poets, including other Victorian poets. His poems are often tricky and require untangling (a pleasure with Donne’s poems but somehow irritating with Browning’s) but some poems are simple and straightforward—for example. How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Having decried his tricky poems, the simple poem below could hardly be more straightforward. It’s a love poem and for me erotic. Eight of the 12 lines are a journey, three arrival, and one consummation. Although I’m heterosexual, I like that no gender is mentioned. Who might be the owners of those two hearts?

Meeting at night by Robert Browning

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!