The following is the text of the poem “Meeting at night” by Robert Browning.

I have
put here this as an attachment to my lesson plan and just to give you the idea and
procedures of the work, which we do at our seminars. First, comes the text of the
poem.

Robert Browning

Meeting at Night

The gray sea and 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 a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

I teach Stylistics and Discourse Analysis at the English Department and at my

lessons I use the four procedures suggested by Pr. Galperin with a slight changes.
So, first students guess from the title of the poem its content and in many cases they
find, though approximately the meaning of the text.

In the ‘taxonomic stage’ we define the style, the type of the text, and its form of
narration. Furthermore, students find the information about the author and author’s
work. They may say that Browning was one of the two great poets of the Victorian
poetry, and that he was open social and optimistic, that the poems of Browning are
harsh and ‘unpoetic,’ echoing the language of lively conversation which makes
Browning a modern poet.

As for the text “Meeting at Night,” is a poem organized into two 6 – line rhyming
stanzas and its form is narration.

In the ‘content – grasping stage’ students may write the main meaning of the
poem. “Meeting at Night” is the meeting of the two ‘hearts.’ Browning could create the
picture of the meeting with very emotive phrases. In the first stanza narrator is rowing
his boat at night across the sea towards land and in the second stanza he is walking
across the fields and meets his ‘lover’ at night.

While, working on the ‘semantic stage’ students decode the meanings of the
words, word combinations, and sentences. And we have joined to this stage the
fourth ‘stylistic stage,’ where students decode the author’s use of sound devices
like onomatopoeia, alliteration, consonance, assonance, rhyme and rhythm.

As for the poem’s rhyming scheme, it is abccba (ring rhyme). Further, the author
uses an alliteration, especially consonance in the poem. The repetition of the sound
/l/ in the line 3 ‘…startled little waves that leap’ is associated with the rowing of the
narrator at night, the sounds/∫/, /s/, /t∫/ in the line 6 ‘…quench its speed in the slushy
sand’ associate the sudden stop of the boat in the sandy beach.
In the second stanza, the author used the sounds /t/ and /p/ in the line 9 ‘A tap at the
pane…’ to suggest that the tapping is careful and silent…