Robert Browning, "Youth and Art" (1864)

"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, --been happy."

A young man and a young woman live in the same street (probably in a neighborhood a bit like my own) as they pursue their artistic vocations--his as a sculptor, hers as a singer. She's telling the story: "You wanted a piece of marble, / I needed a music master" and "For air we looked out on the tiles, / For fun watched each other's windows." An unspoken intimacy develops, though neither one ever talks to the other. Yet even in spring, the time of year when birds of a feather flock together, as it were (and I take the image from the poem itself), they never really intersect, no sign is given, no connection made--as if genre and gender are impassible, allowing only these sorts of passive-aggressive performances that have her singing "in a playful mood" to the "foreign fellow" of a piano tuner as revenge for the models she sees going into his studio, "some minx / Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles."

It should have been different, of course. They should have gotten together, swept each other away to heights of artistic achievement. But our young artists aren't "rash" and they grow up and sell out instead. He becomes academically respectable, she marries "a rich old lord," their old rivals still stand unchallenged:

And nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever:
This could but have happened once,
And we missed it, lost it forever.

This one strikes quite close to home, particularly in the stubborn suggestion that the intimacy might be all in Kate's head as she recalls this time in her life, a time whose poverty is marked not only by the images of picking at crusts but also by the way in which intimacy is fashioned from absences, from the missed possibilities of encounter in a shabby street, and from a kind of romanticization of the camaraderie of struggling artists in the city. How easy it is, in these kinds of situations, to begin to look out of your window as people go about their lives across the street in their own homes and to think that maybe they're looking back and thinking as hard about you as you are about them. (And it's not just starving young artists in the city--isn't this one of the fantasies that gets played out in American Beauty? and other movies, I'm sure.)

The text of the poem is here.