My Star -- Robert Browning

(Poem #352) My Star All that I know Of a certain star Is, it can throw (Like the angled spar) Now a dart of red, Now a dart of blue; Till my friends have said They would fain see, too, My star that dartles the red and the blue! Then it stops like a bird; like a flower hangs furled: They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me, therefore I love it. -- Robert Browning

A highly uncharacteristic poem by Browning - so much so, in fact, that I
would not have guessed it for one of his. Absent is the sheer energy that
spills out from so many of his poems - 'My Star' is an altogether quieter,
more reflective, almost mystical poem of the sort far more characteristic of
Blake[1] or possibly one of the Romantics in an abstract mood. There is also
a rather charming naivete about it - the use of the diminutive 'dartle', the
easy enthusiasm, the ingenuousness inherent in 'what matter to me if their
star is a world?', the pathetic fallacy[2] - that is, again, so
uncharacteristic of Browning that I have to wonder if the poem was mainly a
stylistic experiment.

Experiment or not, though, it is a perfectly nice poem - the word 'pretty'
springs to mind. It also displays, in full measure, Browning's almost
uncanny ear for rhythm - the combination of irregularity and flawlessness,
the seamless way in which the transitions between different metrical
patterns are handled is truly amazing; and the last four lines are pure
music.

[1] indeed, the first time I read this poem I took it for one of his, though
that probably bespeaks nothing more than my unfamiliarity with Blake's work

[2]Pathetic fallacy: A term used by John Ruskin to decry the ascription of
human attributes, traits, feelings, and so forth to nonhuman objects. Such
ascriptions, he argues, "produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of
external things." The term is also used nonpejoratively to denote a common
feature of descriptive poetry; it is related to but somewhat less formal
than the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia, or personification.
    -- http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/Pathetic_fallacy.html

Links:

Never has Bierce's summation seemed apter: poem #148

We've had a number of Browning poems appear on Minstrels -
[broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index_poet.html

And for the biography, see poem #65