We have read the poem The Lost Mistress by Robert Browning who was an English poet and one of the best known Victorian poets. He has ability to create an image, a scene, which is not simply vivid and moving, but also somehow, psychologically accurate. A situation that can happen to everybody, and it almost happens to everyone sooner or later. The poem is about a break-up, right after it happened, when the boy cannot even believe that the girl has just broken up with him.
He does not talk about it like in usual break-up poems, all sad and sorrow, instead he is shocked and wants to make it back, before the girl said anything. He doesn’t want her to break up with him, he wants to make it sound like a small misunderstanding, and continue like it never happened. At first he repeats the sentence, just to himself; he does not want to believe it. The writer is talking in short sentences, but these are just enough to lay before us the entire history of the romance and its possible future.
After that he starts to talk about birds and leaves, trying to change the subject for a more everyday-like conversation about the weather. Pretending he has not heard what he just repeated, they can continue the conversation and talk about the weather. I think it must be the end of autumn according to “leaf-buds on the vine are woolly” and “the red turns gray” and winter always means the end of something. But he is hopeful. That tomorrow they can meet again and he can hold her hand. Saying that they will be friends, mere friends, but sticking to his point such as “only a thought stronger” and “or so very little longer”.
But deep down he knows that despite everything, the world goes on and it will be winter. The reader is positioned like someone listening to them in the park, or where it happened, hearing out their conversation making them feel that could happen to them; that, in fact, it may already have happened. At first the reader can hear the girl breaking up with him, and then the boy’s shock, how it is such a surprise to him, but he is still trying to be calm, not freaking out, and trying to persuade the girl to change her mind about him.
The poem has an alternating abab rhyme scheme. In every stanza, one of the rhymes is a feminine and the other is a masculine rhyme. In the first three stanzas the feminine is the first and the masculine is the second. I think it is trying to show the reader who is in charge in the relationship.
Overall, this is a simple, beautiful poem about coming to terms with the nature of relationships on the one hand and the longevity of the feelings that go with them on the other. Telling us we cannot stop the way of nature, but what we can do, is stop and think about them, and try to make it better the next time it happens.
