Guide to spelling, punctuation and grammar

Meeting at Night
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed in the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears, 
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
Robert Browning
Opening paragraph
In ‘Meeting at Night’, the poem is attempting to
communicate the excitement of a lover as he hastens
towards a love tryst with his beloved. Browning
effectively uses the cadences and rhythms of the
verse, striking imagery and the form of the short
poem to express the protagonist’s mounting
excitement as he nears the meeting place and his
lover. The lovers’ embrace at the end of the poem has
been prepared for by the intensity of feelings that
have been already expressed. 
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Paragraph 2
Browning sets the scene in the first two lines of the
poem. The monosyllables ‘grey sea’ and ‘long black
land’ establishes a bleak empty landscape as
background to the drama. He uses simple diction
with long vowels to start the poem with a slow
rhythm. This contrasts with the quickening rhythms
and rising cadences that follow. The alliteration of
‘long black land’ and ‘large and low’ adds to the
resonance of the verse. The rhyming pattern of the
verse, which will be replicated in the second stanza,
of a b c c b a helps to create the cohesion of this half
of the poem.