and graves and swallows' call?

Was there nought better than to enjoy?
No feat which, done, would make time break,
And let us pent-up creatures through
Into eternity, our due?
No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?

No wise beginning, here and now,
What cannot grow complete (earth's feat)
And heaven must finish, there and then?
No tasting earth's true food for men,
Its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet?

No grasping at love, gaining a share
O' the sole spark from God's life at strife
With death, so, sure of range above
The limits here? For us and love.
Failure; but, when God fails, despair.

This you call wisdom? Thus you add
Good unto good again, in vain?
You loved, with body worn and weak;
I loved, with faculties to seek:
Were both loves worthless since ill-clad?

Let the mere star-fish in his vault
Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed,
Rose-jacynth to the finger tips:
He, whole in body and soul, outstrips
Man, found with either in default.

But what's whole, can increase no more,
Is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere.
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
You knew not? That I well believe;
Or you had saved two souls: nay, four.

For Stephanie sprained last night her wrist,
Ankle or something. "Pooh," cry you?
At any rate she danced, all say,
Vilely; her vogue has had its day.
Here comes my husband from his whist.

Here the woman speaks for herself. It is characteristic of Browning's
boldness that there are a whole set of poems in which he imagines the
unexpressed thoughts which a woman revolves in self-communion under the
questionings and troubles of the passions, and chiefly of the passion of
love. The most elaborate of these is _James Lee's Wife_, which tells
what she thinks of when after long years she has been unable to retain
her husband's love. Finally, she leaves him. The analysis of her
thinking is interesting, but the woman is not. She is not the quick,
natural woman Browning was able to paint so well when he chose. His own
analytic excitement, which increases in mere intellectuality as the poem
moves on, enters into her, and she thinks more through Browning the man
than through her womanhood. Women are complex enough, more complex than
men, but they are not complex in the fashion of this poem. Under the
cir