Guide to spelling, punctuation and grammar

Meeting at Night
The grey sea and the 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 in the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears, 
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
Robert Browning
Opening paragraph
In ‘Meeting at Night’, the poem is attempting to
communicate the excitement of a lover as he hastens
towards a love tryst with his beloved. Browning
effectively uses the cadences and rhythms of the
verse, striking imagery and the form of the short
poem to express the protagonist’s mounting
excitement as he nears the meeting place and his
lover. The lovers’ embrace at the end of the poem has
been prepared for by the intensity of feelings that
have been already expressed. 
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OW TO WRITE ESSAYS

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Paragraph 2
Browning sets the scene in the first two lines of the
poem. The monosyllables ‘grey sea’ and ‘long black
land’ establishes a bleak empty landscape as
background to the drama. He uses simple diction
with long vowels to start the poem with a slow
rhythm. This contrasts with the quickening rhythms
and rising cadences that follow. The alliteration of
‘long black land’ and ‘large and low’ adds to the
resonance of the verse. The rhyming pattern of the
verse, which will be replicated in the second stanza,
of a b c c b a helps to create the cohesion of this half
of the poem.
Paragraph 3
By the third line of the verse, then, the cadence is
rising and this is reflected in his use of metaphor:
the waves are ‘startled’ and they ‘leap in fiery
ringlets’. The sea in the agitation caused by the
‘pushing prow’ reflects the excitement of the lover as
he races to the meeting place. Even the use of
‘quench’ to describe the boat’s landing on the ‘slushy
sand’ only manages to reinforce the feverish haste of
the lover. The alliteration of ‘pushing prow’ and
‘speed in the slushy sand’ helps to emphasise the tone
of wild excitement.
Paragraph 4
The second stanza starts similarly to the first with a
slowing of the rhythm and falling cadences: ‘a mile
of warm sea-scented beach’ and ‘Three fields to
cross’. Then the short, almost staccato rhythms and
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AMPLE ESSAY
3:
WRITING ABOUT POETRY

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the rising cadence of the lines that follow anticipate
the climax of the poem: ‘ A tap at the pane’ and ‘the
quick sharp scratch’. The images of the ‘blue spurt’
and ‘lighted match’ suggest the explosive emotions of
the lovers. Browning effectively communicates the
intensity of feeling by describing the voice of one of
the lovers as being ‘less loud’ than the sound of their
hearts beating as they embrace. ‘Each to each!’
underlines with the additional emphasis of the
climactic exclamation mark the need of the lovers to
be together again. As in the first stanza, the first two
lines of the poem are end-stop lines, then the next
two lines are examples of enjambement where the
meaning flows without pause from one line to the
next. The rising cadence of ‘And’ as the first word of
both lines four and five helps to keep the flow of the
verse going, underlining the intensity of the feelings.