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 circumstances Browning has made, her thought would have been quite clear at its root, and indeed in its branches.  She is represented as in love with her husband.  Were she really in love, she would not have been so involved, or able to argue out her life so anxiously.  Love or love’s sorrow knows itself at once and altogether, and its cause and aim are simple.  But Browning has unconsciously made the woman clear enough for us to guess the real cause of her departure.  That departure is believed by some to be a self-sacrifice.  There are folk who see self-sacrifice in everything Browning wrote about women.  Browning may have originally intended