greykit.poetry — #1830s

• 1838 [henry-wadsworth-longfellow] A Psalm of Life
  Voices of the Night

  Life is real, life is earnest — a refusal of the dream of numbers and the grave as goal, urging footprints on the sands of time and a heart for any fate: still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.

  #lyric#exhortation#1830s
• 1836 [robert-browning] Porphyria's Lover
  Dramatic Lyrics

  A lover tells how Porphyria came in from the storm, laid her hair on his cheek and whispered she loved him — and he strangled her with it, to hold that perfect moment forever; all night they sat, and yet God has not said a word.

  #dramatic-monologue#psychology#gothic#1830s
• 1830 [alfred-lord-tennyson] Mariana
  Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

  A moated grange going to rot around a woman who cannot stop waiting — every stanza closing on the same refusal to arrive: He cometh not, she said; I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead.

  #lyric#isolation#waiting#1830s