Prospice

In the lines entitled Prospice it is death the adversary that is confronted and conquered; the poem is an act of the faith which comes through love; it is ascribed to no imaginary speaker, and does not, indeed, veil its personal character.

Robert Browning Dowden, Edward 1904

How "like one entire and perfect chrysolite" is the little piece called "Prospice"!

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 Various

It has been said that next to Browning's "Prospice" it is the greatest death-song ever written.

Poems Every Child Should Know The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library 1884

"Prospice," by Robert Browning (1812-89), is the greatest death song ever written.

Poems Every Child Should Know The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library 1884

It seems to me that if these two poems only, "Prospice" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra," were to survive to the day of Macaulay's New Zealander, the contemporaries of that meditative traveller would have sufficient to enable them to understand the great fame of the poet of "dim ancestral days," as the more acute among them could discern something of the real Shelley, though time had preserved but the three lines --

Life of Robert Browning William Sharp 1880

_ In "Prospice" death is reckoned an adversary to be courageously met and overcome.

Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning Robert Browning 1850

"Prospice" ( "Look forward") was written in the autumn following Mrs. Browning's death.

Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning Robert Browning 1850

From the unsparing vigor of these lines we turn for relief to "Rabbi Ben Ezra" and "Prospice."

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 Various

It is, among songs over the dead, what Rabbi ben Ezra and Prospice are among the songs which face and grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as those.

Robert Browning Herford, C H 1905

Prospice would not be the great uplifting song it is were the note of struggle, of heroic heart to bear the brunt and pay in one moment all “life's arrears of pain, darkness, and cold,” less clearly sounded; and were the final cry less intense with the longing of bereavement.

Robert Browning Herford, C H 1905