Explore "Too Late" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Here was I with my arm and heart / And brain, all yours for a word, a want / Put into a look -- just a look, your part, -- / While mine, to repay it... vainest vaunt, / Were the woman, that's dead, alive to hear, / Had her lover, that's lost, love's proof to show! / But I cannot show it; you cannot speak / From the churchyard neither, miles removed, / Though I feel by a pulse within my cheek, / Which stabs and stops, that the woman I loved / Needs help in her grave and finds none near, / Wants warmth from the heart which sends it -- so!
Did I speak once angrily, all the drear days / You lived, you woman I loved so well, / Who married the other? Blame or praise, / Where was the use then? Time would tell, / And the end declare what man for you, / What woman for me, was the choice of God. / But, Edith dead! no doubting more! / I used to sit and look at my life / As it rippled and ran till, right before, / A great stone stopped it: oh, the strife / Of waves at the stone some devil threw / In my life's midcurrent, thwarting God!