Browning Decides To Be A Poet

In these red labyrinths of London

I find that I have chosen

the strangest of all callings,

save that, in its way, any calling is strange.

Like the alchemist

who sought the philosopher's stone

in quicksilver,

I shall make everyday words—

the gambler's marked cards, the common coin—

give off the magic that was their

when Thor was both the god and the din,

the thunderclap and the prayer.

In today's dialect

I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:

I shall try to be worthy

of the great echo of Byron.

This dust that I am will be invulnerable.

If a woman shares my love

my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;

if a woman turns my love aside

I will make of my sadness a music,

a full river to resound through time.

I shall live by forgetting myself.

I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,

I shall be Judas who takes on

the divine mission of being a betrayer,

I shall be Caliban in his bog,

I shall be a mercenary who dies

without fear and without faith,

I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe

upon the seal returned by fate.

I will be the friend who hates me.

The persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.

Masks, agonies, resurrections

will weave and unweave my life,

and in time I shall be Robert Browning.