The Full Text of “Confessions”
1What is he buzzing in my ears?
2"Now that I come to die,
3Do I view the world as a vale of tears?"
4Ah, reverend sir, not I!
5What I viewed there once, what I view again
6Where the physic bottles stand
7On the table's edge,—is a suburb lane,
8With a wall to my bedside hand.
9That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
10From a house you could descry
11O'er the garden-wall; is the curtain blue
12Or green to a healthy eye?
13To mine, it serves for the old June weather
14Blue above lane and wall;
15And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether"
16Is the house o'ertopping all.
17At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
18There watched for me, one June,
19A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,
20My poor mind's out of tune.
21Only, there was a way... you crept
22Close by the side, to dodge
23Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
24They styled their house "The Lodge."
25What right had a lounger up their lane?
26But, by creeping very close,
27With the good wall's help,—their eyes might strain
28And stretch themselves to Oes,
29Yet never catch her and me together,
30As she left the attic, there,
31By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether,"
32And stole from stair to stair,
33And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
34We loved, sir—used to meet:
35How sad and bad and mad it was—
36But then, how it was sweet!
The Full Text of “Confessions”
1What is he buzzing in my ears?
2"Now that I come to die,
3Do I view the world as a vale of tears?"
4Ah, reverend sir, not I!
5What I viewed there once, what I view again
6Where the physic bottles stand
7On the table's edge,—is a suburb lane,
8With a wall to my bedside hand.
9That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
10From a house you could descry
11O'er the garden-wall; is the curtain blue
12Or green to a healthy eye?
13To mine, it serves for the old June weather
14Blue above lane and wall;
15And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether"
16Is the house o'ertopping all.
17At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
18There watched for me, one June,
19A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,
20My poor mind's out of tune.
21Only, there was a way... you crept
22Close by the side, to dodge
23Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
24They styled their house "The Lodge."
25What right had a lounger up their lane?
26But, by creeping very close,
27With the good wall's help,—their eyes might strain
28And stretch themselves to Oes,
29Yet never catch her and me together,
30As she left the attic, there,
31By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether,"
32And stole from stair to stair,
33And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
34We loved, sir—used to meet:
35How sad and bad and mad it was—
36But then, how it was sweet!
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“Confessions” Introduction
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English poet Robert Browning's "Confessions" is a tale of love and memory. The poem's speaker, an old man on his deathbed, makes a last confession to a visiting priest—but perhaps not a very contrite one. Instead, he remembers with pleasure how he and his secret girlfriend used to sneak out and meet each other one long-ago summer. Love, this poem suggests, leaps all kinds of boundaries: class, morality, and even time can't stand in its way. Browning first published this poem in his 1864 collection Dramatis Personae.
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“Confessions” Summary
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What's that nonsense this priest is whispering in my ear? "Now that you're about to die, do you see the world as a place of trials and sorrows?" Dear Father: no, I most certainly don't!
What I once saw in the world—what I seem to see again, there where the medicine bottles stand at the edge of the table—is a suburban street, with a wall over here on the side of the bed where my hand lies.
That street, like those bottles, sloped, running downhill from a house you could catch a glimpse of over the garden wall... would you say my bedroom curtain is blue or green, if you see it with healthy eyes?
To me, at any rate, it looks like the blue sky of long-ago June above the street and the wall. And that furthest medicine bottle, the bottle of anesthetic, is the tall house at the top of the hill.
From a balcony up close to that bottle's cork, a girl looked for me one June. I know, Father, it isn't right I should tell you about this; forgive me, my poor old mind isn't at its best.
But, you see, there was a path...you could get there if you tiptoed right along the wall, to keep out of sight of all the eyes in the house but that girl's. The family called their house "The Lodge."
What right did a layabout like me have to come up their fancy street? But, if I kept really close to the friendly wall, it didn't matter if the family stared so hard that their eyes went round as the letter O: they still couldn't catch the girl and I together as she tiptoed downstairs from the attic up by the top of the anesthetic bottle and met me under the rose arbor at the front gate.
Oh dear, yes, we loved each other, Father—we used to meet with each other. How shockingly wrong and crazy of us—but, on the other hand, how very, very sweet it was.
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“Confessions” Themes
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Love, Memory, and Consolation
Lying on his deathbed, the speaker of “Confessions” fondly remembers a secret romance from his youth. He knows that it was “sad and bad and mad” of his young self to sneak out and meet a girl against her parents’ wishes, but he also remembers their romance as deeply “sweet.” It was so sweet, in fact, that he gets lost in his memories, transported from the sickroom around him to the street where he and his girlfriend used to canoodle. Memories of love, the poem suggests, offer some of the deepest pleasure and consolation there is.
The poem’s speaker is a very sick man: the priest has come to hear his last confession, and his bedroom is stocked with “physic bottles” (that is, bottles of medicines). The presence of “Ether,” a strong anesthetic, suggests that he might be in serious pain, too.
In spite of his suffering and his coming death, the speaker pooh-poohs the priest’s idea that life is a “vale of tears”: because he once had a secret love affair with the girl next door, he knows for a fact that life isn’t all suffering. The mere memory of a long-ago “June” when he and his girlfriend used to “creep[]” out secretly to meet each other by a “rose-wreathed gate” assures him that life has plenty of pleasures.
In fact, the longer he reflects on this long-ago romance, the more he’s swept away into his memories, until the sky-blue curtain over his window seems to become the “old June weather” and the bottle of anesthetic becomes the house where his girlfriend lived. Memories of love, in other words, transform his sickroom around him, making a place of pain and disease into a miniature stage set for his romantic past to play out on.
The speaker’s memories of his forbidden love, the poem suggests, are better than any anesthetic, giving him enduring consolation and sweetness that can sustain him even through the painful end of his life.
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The Thrill of Forbidden Love
The priest who comes to hear the speaker’s last confession on his deathbed expects him to say that the world is a “vale of tears”—to soberly reflect on his sins and prepare to leave this world for a better one. The speaker, perhaps to the priest’s surprise, refuses. Instead, he tells a story about how an illicit romance from his youth was one of the best things that ever happened to him. Through the speaker’s happy memories, the poem suggests that it’s not a sin to fall in love, even love that conventional morality forbids. For that matter, the poem suggests that forbidden love often triumphs over rules and restrictions!
The priest who visits the speaker at the beginning of the poem has a preconceived notion of what the speaker might want to talk about. He immediately asks if the speaker “view[s] this world as a vale of tears” (in other words, whether he sees the world as a miserable place). The speaker waves this grim suggestion away as an irritating “buzzing,” and insists that he doesn’t see things that way at all. To this speaker, life has been more a joy than a slog through suffering and sin.
That’s especially clear in the speaker’s description of a secret love affair he enjoyed in his youth. He confesses this tale to the priest with a rueful “Alas,” showing he knows he should feel some remorse for it, but his detailed memories of how he and his girlfriend used to sneak out together make it clear that he remembers these events with much more fondness and pleasure than regret and shame.
His girlfriend’s family were snobbish and conventional: they “styled their house ‘The Lodge,’” giving their suburban home a fancy name, and didn’t want a “lounger” like the speaker sniffing around their daughter. The speaker knows that, by both the priest’s and the family’s standards, this romance was “sad and mad and bad.” That doesn’t stop him from remembering it mostly as deeply “sweet.”
Through this speaker’s fond, wistful voice, the poem thus argues that plenty of forbidden or unconventional love might really be part of what makes life worth living—and that no stern priest or watchful parent can get in its way. In this light, the sinful old world isn’t just a grim “vale of tears” people must slog through on their way to Heaven, but a place of many delights.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Confessions”
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Lines 1-4
What is he buzzing in my ears?
"Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?"
Ah, reverend sir, not I!This dramatic monologue—a poem spoken in the voice of a particular character—begins with its speaker, a sick old man, lying on his deathbed. He might be ill, but he still has enough energy for an outburst of irritation: "What is he buzzing in my ears?"
The irritating whisperer here, it turns out, is a priest, who (as the poem's title suggests) is probably here to hear the speaker's last confession. He's begun with a traditionally priestly question, asking the speaker if he "view[s] the world as a vale of tears" now that he's at the end of his life. He might mean to encourage the speaker to repent for his past sins and look hopefully toward heaven; the old line about life as a "vale of tears" alludes to a hymn to the Virgin Mary, asking her to take care of all the poor sufferers down on earth.
This speaker, however, isn't willing to play along. Does he view the world as a place of sorrow, suffering, and trials? No! Even as he respectfully addresses the priest as "reverend sir," he clearly takes a different view of the world (and seems annoyed to be interrupted in his own thoughts by these pious "buzzing[s]."
The rest of this poem will explain how the speaker does see the world: as a place of many joys, some of them ones the priest wouldn't approve of. Right from the start, the poem's shape suggests this deathbed confession won't be a tragic one:
- The bouncy accentual meter doesn't stick to any one flavor of metrical foot, like dactyls or trochees. Instead, it uses a predictable number of stresses arranged in unpredictable patterns, alternating between four-beat lines (as in "Do I view the world as a vale of tears?") and three-beat lines (as in "Ah, reverend sir, not I!")
- That choice makes the poem feel flexible, conversational, and lighthearted: there's no rigidly regular meter here, just a jaunty, propulsive beat.
- A singsongy ABAB rhyme scheme supports that upbeat feeling.
This speaker's last thoughts on earth, these choices suggest, will be of happy things (and perhaps slightly irreverent ones).
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Lines 5-11
What I viewed there once, what I view again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table's edge,—is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O'er the garden-wall; -
Lines 11-16
is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?
To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether"
Is the house o'ertopping all. -
Lines 17-20
At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune. -
Lines 21-24
Only, there was a way... you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
They styled their house "The Lodge." -
Lines 25-32
What right had a lounger up their lane?
But, by creeping very close,
With the good wall's help,—their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to Oes,
Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic, there,
By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether,"
And stole from stair to stair, -
Lines 33-36
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir—used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!
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“Confessions” Symbols
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Going Uphill
Whenever the speaker sees his girlfriend, he has to scramble uphill to do it: she waits for him in the attic of the tallest house at the top of a hilly street. All that elevation symbolizes the social distance between the couple. The girlfriend's snobby family, who call their house "The Lodge" and keep a suspicious eye out for no-good boyfriends, see themselves as above the speaker (and probably most people on their street, too).
The girlfriend herself has no such scruples: she's eager to creep down the stairs and out into the street to meet the speaker by the "rose-wreathed gate." In other words, the two meet in the middle, on level ground: their summer romance flattens out their class difference.
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“Confessions” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
The speaker's imagery gives readers a simultaneous picture of his cluttered sickroom and his childhood hometown.
As the poem begins, the speaker is lying on his deathbed, irritated by a priest "buzzing" in his ears—an image that suggests the priest is coming in close to whisper a few last sober questions to this sick man. It seems to take the speaker a moment to figure out exactly what's going on. Both his ears and his eyes are fuddled by his illness; he can no longer even tell if his curtains are "blue / Or green to a healthy eye."
Even as his capacity to see the world around him fades, he has a keen vision of his past. That vague bluish greenish curtain becomes a clear June sky, "blue above lane and wall," when he starts remembering the street where his secret girlfriend lived. The speaker's memories of the June when his girlfriend used to sneak out and meet him involve a clear map of exactly how he used to get to her house, "creeping very close" to a convenient concealing wall and meeting her under a picturesque "rose-wreathed gate."
As compared to his vague impression of his not-altogether-pleasant surroundings now, the speaker's images of his past feel simultaneously precise and rose-colored, tinted with his nostalgia for a sweet summertime romance.
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Repetition
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Pun
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Synecdoche
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Allusion
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"Confessions" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Reverend
- Physic bottles
- Descry
- O'er
- Ether
- O'ertopping
- Terrace
- Styled
- Stretch themselves to Oes
- Stole
- Mad
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Honored, holy.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Confessions”
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Form
"Confessions" is one of Browning's trademark dramatic monologues: poems spoken in the voice of a particular character. This speaker, a dying man confessing the story of his young love to a priest, tells his tale over the course of nine jaunty quatrains (or four-line stanzas).
This deathbed confession sounds more cheerful than contrite. The poem's bouncy accentual meter and singsong ABAB rhyme scheme make it clear that the speaker doesn't feel too remorseful about how he and his beloved "used to meet" in spite of her parents' disapproval. He's relishing these memories even as he makes his last confession to the (perhaps rather reproachful) priest.
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Meter
"Confessions" is written in accentual meter. That means that the lines don't stick to a single kind of metrical foot (like iambs or trochees), but they do use a regular number of stresses. Here, the speaker alternates between lines with four stressed beats and lines with three stressed beats, as in the first stanza:
What is he buzzing in my ears?
"Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?"
Ah, reverend sir, not I!This flexible meter helps the speaker's voice to sound light, natural, and jaunty. He's not sticking to a strict, elegant form; rather, he's telling a tale he knows by heart, perhaps getting some naughty fun out of shocking the priest he's "confessing" to. The bouncy, propulsive rhythm suggests he's getting caught up in his fond memories, carried happily away into the past.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's rhyme scheme runs like this in each stanza:
ABAB
This singsong pattern makes the speaker's deathbed confession sound awfully cheerful. He might be telling an "improper" tale of illicit love to a scandalized priest, but he clearly doesn't feel much remorse: the simple sweetness of his rhymes reflects the simple sweetness of his memories.
One of the poem's most distinctive rhyme moments doesn't come from its end rhymes, but a run of internal rhymes in the poem's final stanza:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
All those short, flat rhymes in a row sound a tiny bit silly, a tiny bit mocking: the speaker clearly finds his youthful romance's "sweet[ness]" far more lasting and important than its sadness, badness, and madness.
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“Confessions” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is an elderly man lying on his deathbed—a sweet old fellow who nonetheless seems to enjoy shocking the priest who comes to visit him. The speaker might know that, in some sense, his youthful relationship was "sad and mad and bad" in the eyes of the world, but to him, its remembered delights outweigh any worries about propriety or sin.
Readers might be tempted to see a little of Browning himself in this character. Like the speaker, Browning enjoyed a forbidden love affair, though his was a serious and lasting one: he eloped to Italy with his wife, fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, after her father forbade the couple to marry. Perhaps in a nostalgic mood himself, he published this poem three years after his wife's death.
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“Confessions” Setting
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The poem takes place in the speaker's sickroom, where he lies dying. Through his eyes, readers see this cluttered room of "physic bottles" transformed into the suburban street he grew up on, the place where he and a girl-next-door enjoyed a secret summer romance.
The speaker's impressions of that street are a lot clearer than his impressions of his bedroom. He's not sure whether his curtains would look "blue / Or green to a healthy eye," and he only sometimes remembers that the "bottle labelled 'Ether'" is indeed a medicine bottle, not his girlfriend's elegant family home.
He remembers very clearly, however, the geography of the street where his girlfriend lived—and the classism that tried to keep the two of them apart. The girl's family, he notes, "styled their house 'The Lodge," pretentiously giving their home its own name, and felt a "lounger" like him had no right to come anywhere near their daughter. To his delight, that didn't stop her from sneaking out to meet him!
The poem's setting suggests that memory—and especially happy memory—can often feel more real, more alive, and more compelling than the present.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Confessions”
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Literary Context
Robert Browning (1812-1889) was a great Victorian writer—and one quite unlike those around him. Considered a minor poet for most of his early career, Browning became famous toward the end of his life for his wild dramatic monologues: theatrical poems spoken in the voices of characters ranging from murderous Italian dukes to good-hearted 16th-century soldiers. This poem's nostalgic, cheerfully naughty speaker (who first appeared in Browning's 1864 collection Dramatis Personae) is one of the sweeter figures in a gallery of scoundrels.
Many of Browning's contemporaries didn't quite know what to do with his poetry, which—with its experimental rhythms and sometimes earthy language—rarely conformed to the elegant standards of his time. Many suggested that he'd make a better novelist than a poet. Even Oscar Wilde, a great Browning enthusiast, couldn't resist quipping that "[George] Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning." The Modernist poets of the early 20th century, though, admired Browning's poetry for the very strangeness and narrative vigor that put so many of the Victorians off.
Browning's greatest influence was, without question, his beloved wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poetry he deeply admired. This literary duo critiqued and championed each other's work for 14 happy years of marriage. But like many Victorian writers, Browning also followed in the lyrical and imaginative footsteps of the earlier Romantic poets. As a young man, he particularly respected Shelley as both a poet and a radical political thinker.
While Browning was ahead of his time in many ways, more and more writers and thinkers learned to admire and appreciate his work as the 19th century rolled into its final years. His reputation has only grown since his death.
Historical Context
This nostalgic speaker's memories of a forbidden love affair may well draw on Browning's own experiences. Browning was a deeply romantic man, and he lived out one of literature's most touching love stories.
In 1845, Browning paid his first visit to a rising star in the literary world: Elizabeth Barrett. Unusually for a woman writer of the time, Barrett had become wildly famous; Browning was only one of many readers to be moved by her soulful, elegant poetry. He wrote her a fan letter, and the two began a warm correspondence. Eventually, they fell deeply in love.
Barrett's tyrannical father was having none of it, however. Besides preferring to keep his talented daughter (and her earnings) to himself, he disapproved of Browning, who was several years younger than Barrett—unconventional in a Victorian marriage—and not yet a commercially successful writer himself. In order to defy Mr. Barrett, the couple had to elope; they left England for Italy in 1846. Outraged, Elizabeth's father disinherited her.
The newlywed Brownings, undaunted, set up house in Florence, where they would live happily for over a decade before Elizabeth fell ill. She died in Robert's arms at the age of only 55.
Browning would publish this poem three years after her death—perhaps in much the same nostalgic (and defiant) frame of mind as his speaker.
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More “Confessions” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Visit the Poetry Foundation's website to learn more about Browning's life and work.
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Browning's Legacy — Learn how Browning's work finally rose to acclaim at the end of his life (and enjoy novelist Henry James's witty mock-epitaph for him).
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Browning's Influence — Read an appreciation of Browning that discusses what he means to writers today.
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Portraits of the Brownings — Visit the National Portrait Gallery's collection of Browning portraiture for a glimpse of the great (and forbidden!) love affair that may have inspired this poem: Browning's relationship with his beloved wife, fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Browning
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