Browning Decides To Be A Poet

In these red labyrinths of LondonI find that I have chosenthe strangest of all callings,save that, in its way, any calling is strange.

Like the alchemistwho sought the philosopher's stonein quicksilver,

I shall make everyday words—the gambler's marked cards, the common coin—give off the magic that was theirwhen Thor was both the god and the din,the thunderclap and the prayer.

In today's dialectI shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:

I shall try to be worthyof the great echo of Byron.

This dust that I am will be invulnerable.

If a woman shares my lovemy verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;if a woman turns my love asideI will make of my sadness a music,a full river to resound through time.

I shall live by forgetting myself.

I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,

I shall be Judas who takes onthe divine mission of being a betrayer,

I shall be Caliban in his bog,

I shall be a mercenary who dieswithout fear and without faith,

I shall be Polycrates, who looks in aweupon the seal returned by fate.

I will be the friend who hates me.

The persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.

Masks, agonies, resurrectionswill weave and unweave my life,and in time I shall be Robert Browning.