Topic 5 (session A) - Sound > Meeting at night > Task B > Our answer

Meeting at night

Task B - our comments

Overall, we appear to have a representation of a meeting at night between two lovers. In the first stanza, the man is described in a boat on the sea, arriving at his apparently secret destination, a beach (not a harbour, note). Given that the poem was written in the C19, this leads us to assume that he has probably rowed, or perhaps sailed, secretly to the beach. The boat is beached on the sand.

The second stanza describes the man walking for a mile along the beach (so he has not landed as near as perhaps he could to his final destination, again suggesting the need for extreme secrecy). He leaves the beach, crosses three fields and arrives at a farm. He does not knock on the door of the building he goes to, but taps quietly at the window pane, suggesting that there are others in the house or perhaps in a nearby building (maybe the woman is waiting in an outhouse), who are asleep and are not to know about the meeting. Hence the action appears to take place in the middle of the night, not a winter evening, for example. The woman on the other side of the window lights a match and whispers to her lover. Then she opens the door and they embrace (we are not told this, but have to infer it from the fact that at the end of the poem the two hearts of the lovers are very closed together, beating as one).

The identity of the two lovers is never revealed in the poem. So our assumption that the person in the boat is male and the person in the farmhouse female is based on schematic assumptions related to romantic situations. Even in these liberated days we would probably expect the boat to be rowed by a male and for the man to travel towards the woman for the secret tryst, rather than the other way round.

In fact Browning wrote another, even shorter, poem, 'Parting at Morning' which is a sequel to 'Meeting at Night' (so the lovers clearly stay together for the rest of the night, wherever they are). If you want to you can read 'Parting at Morning' quickly before going on with the other tasks. It confirms the male and female ascriptions we have assumed above.

Hence the woman appears to accompany the man back to the beach just before dawn, and he sails/rows back towards the rising sun in the east. The path of gold appears to be the reflection of the sun in the sea as it appears over the eastern horizon.

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