Browning, ‘In Three Days’ (1855)
In ‘In Three Days’ (in Men and Women, 1855) the speaker looks forward to seeing his beloved again — in three days time, as per the title.
It is a poem about anticipation, erotic longing and looking-forward. But the timescale is something of a puzzle. Take the first stanza:
So, I shall see her in three days
And just one night, but nights are short,
Then two long hours, and that is morn.
See how I come, unchanged, unworn!
Feel, where my life broke off from thine,
How fresh the splinters keep and fine, —
Only a touch and we combine!
Three days necessarily entails two nights — so saying ‘I shall see her in three days and just one night’ must mean ‘I shall see her in three days and two nights and then another night’ — except that this is a strange way of putting it: one would rather say ‘three days and three nights’. And doesn’t this rather imply that the speaker will be seeing his beloved on the fourth day? Which is to say: in four days?
Then there’s the extra two hours: are we to add these on at the end? As it might be: ‘three days and two nights, and then another night, then my beloved will arrive two hours after dawn’? Or is it the speaker’s present situation: he (I assume a he) is speaking the poem two hours before the dawn from which he will then start the countdown to his lover’s reappearance? It could be either. The gist, I suppose, is of a lover anxiously counting the precise hours until he sees his beloved again — not ‘I shall see her again soon’ or ‘… in a few days’ but ‘in three days, then another night, and exactly two hours’: an index of the longing, or obsession, as a recovering alcoholic might say ‘it’s been two years, four months six days, one hour and twenty five minutes since my last drink ….’ But the confusion of the timings here throws a strange unknowing over the whole.
The image the speaker then gives us an image of their separation: they are like a plank of wood that has been broken, such that the jagged, splintery broken edges can be fitted precisely back in to one another. It’s a wrenching sort of image, a kind of rough Metaphysical-poetry conceit: something ouch-y and dangerous about it — in stanza 3, below, the speaker imagines the physical embrace the two of them will enjoy when they are back together not in terms of fleshly softness but, with him brushing her copious hair, a kind of static electricity sharpness and prickliness, which connects with this broken-beam image. More: we can fit the broken wood back together, but it will not be stable. You wouldn’t use such a beam in a load-bearing position. Is this an intimation that the damage done to this relationship by the enforced separation can only be superficially repaired? That the couple are, longer term, doomed? Stanza 4 returns to this question. But first, the second stanza:
Too long, this time of year, the days!
But nights, at least the nights are short.
As night shows where her one moon is,
A hand’s-breadth of pure light and bliss,
So life’s night gives my lady birth
And my eyes hold her! What is worth
The rest of heaven, the rest of earth?
It’s summer, then: long days and short nights. The speaker sees the moon, and knows that she is looking at the same moon — and longing, like him, for the time when they can reunite. But even at arm’s length, the moon is not a hand’s breadth wide: it’s quite a bit smaller. The moon subtends about 30 arcminutes: at less than a metre away (the length of your arm) your thumb subtends about the same arc. Is this supposed to read as an error? That is, Browning characterising his narrator as unreliable? The third stanza:
O loaded curls, release your store
Of warmth and scent, as once before
The tingling hair did, lights and darks
Outbreaking into fairy sparks,
When under curl and curl I pried
After the warmth and scent inside,
Thro’ lights and darks how manifold — -
The dark inspired, the light controlled
As early Art embrowns the gold.
There is a thesis to be written on the Victorian eroticism of hair, which here, as often in 19th-century literature, stands as a synecdoche for sexual activity more fully (the speaker’s ‘release’ of his ‘loaded store’; his penetrative burrowing and ‘prying’ into the yielding, electric body of hair). Of the line ‘as early Art embrowns the gold’, Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield say: ‘as the gold in early paintings turns brown with time’ but that can hardly be correct: the poem isn’t saying that the lover’s hair is fading, over time, but that its streaks of gold are set in a rich brown. Browning is thinking of paintings like this:
The line means: ‘my beautiful beloved is like a Madonna from the era of Giotto: as the gold of the halo from such a figure is surrounded by brown in early Art, so my beloved’s hair is streaks of gold in a lager body of rich brown curls.’ But the line is also playing with Browning’s own name — since we know that he was in love with brunette, copiously-hairdo’d Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, and critics have long read the poem as a memorial of some time when they were separated (Jack and Inglesfield think, an occasion when Browning was in Paris and Elizabeth in London in the early 1850s).
She is gold; he embrowns her. But at the same time there is, in the static electricity sparking through this stanza, something prickly. Will the reunion be as smooth and joyous as he hopes?
What great fear, should one say, “Three days
“That change the world might change as well
“Your fortune; and if joy delays,
“Be happy that no worse befell!’’
What small fear, if another says,
“Three days and one short night beside
“May throw no shadow on your ways;
“But years must teem with change untried,
“With chance not easily defied,
“With an end somewhere undescried.”
No fear! — or if a fear be born
This minute, it dies out in scorn.
Fear? I shall see her in three days
And one night, now the nights are short,
Then just two hours, and that is morn.
The waiting occasions two fears in the speaker. The ‘big fear’ is that three days is long enough for things to change, circumstances to alter, perhaps for the beloved to change in her feelings. The small fear is that three days is not long, but that once they are reunited they will have the rest of their lives to spend together — and that’s long enough for all manner of changes. The answer to both is, the speaker says, the calculus of waiting itself: three days, a night, two hours. But this reverts us to the opening stanza. There is something splintered, something fractured, in the temporal reckoning, as in yhe splintery image of the broken plank, or the prickly sparks of static electricity in her hair. It tells against the smooth recombination the reunion is supposed to promise.
