This is a chain of short songs from Browning’s play *Pippa Passes*, each with its own voice and feeling. The first thrills to a sunrise boiling over the cloud’s edge — pure gold spilling into the world. It’s an ecstatic, almost breathless celebration of light breaking through. That mood shifts abruptly into a quiet meditation on God’s will, where every deed, great or small, turns us into His puppets. Then comes the famous morning hymn: dew on the hillside, a lark rising, and the peaceful certainty that “God’s in His heaven — All’s right with the world.” It’s childlike trust, utterly serene. The final stanzas drop us into a page’s aching, mischievous love-song. He longs for a lady he can never have, speaking with dramatic fervor while two eavesdropping women dismiss him as just a boy feeding the hounds. The sequence moves from wild natural beauty to humble faith, and finally to the comic ache of unrequited desire — leaving you with a vivid, fleeting sense of lives narrowly brushing past each other.
Songs From Pippa Passes — Summary
Day! Faster and more fast, O'er night's brim, day boils at last: Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim. Where spurting and suppressed it lay, For not a froth-flake touched the rim Of yonder gap in the solid gray Of the eastern cloud, an hour away; But forth one wavelet, then another, curled, Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, Rose, reddened, and its seething breast Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
All service ranks the same with God: If now, as formerly He trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work--God's puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first. The year's at the spring And day's at the morn: Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in His heaven-- All's right with the world!
Give her but a least excuse to love me! When--where-- How--can this arm establish her above me, If fortune fixed her as my lady there, There already, to eternally reprove me? ("Hist!"--said Kate the queen; But "Oh," cried the maiden, binding her tresses, "'Tis only a page that carols unseen, Crumbling your hounds their messes!")
Is she wronged?--To the rescue of her honour, My heart! Is she poor?--What costs it to be styled a donor? Merely an earth to cleave, a sea to part. But that fortune should have thrust all this upon her! ("Nay, list!"--bade Kate the queen; And still cried the maiden, binding her tresses, "'Tis only a page that carols unseen, Fitting your hawks their jesses!")