Browning's Love Among the Ruins

Browning's Love Among the Ruins

Among the failed and fallen works of man, the mundane, indeed profane, outcome of our history’s cyclic vastation, human affection may finally reign. This is the claim of Browning’s Love Among the Ruins, published in his monumental volume Men & Women, in 1855. Subtler emotions of kindliness and endearment between two persons only take the foreground of our affairs when the brazen dynamo of the days of kings and their mobs collapse in their mad, millenary mill-race. In this poem, Browning’s moment of Love achieves Power in “the quiet-coloured end of evening” after History has run its course, and the land is tired, fallen back to earth, and perhaps back to simpler times: a simpler space, a simpler time, Arcadian, “half-asleep.” However, there is also a sense in the poem that the weight of a rich poetic tradition has collapsed for the post-Romantic generations, and the unfulfilled attainment of the Sublime has left such a desire, or even simply the notion of it, flattened, slowly decaying, covered in English moss and lichen.

The pasturage is an archaeological blank stretching “miles and miles” as deepening twilight “smiles;” its sheep “tinkle homeward.” This tinkling is of the Romantic’s conception of non-compositional, acoustic Nature as opposed to the orderly, cultured classicism of the music of the Enlightenment, let alone the stately, processional pomp of court and state (“a city great and gay / (So they say)”). That tinkling sound will “stray or stop,” as the sheep will to crop. “Stray or stop,” it does not matter in an age when the energies of the great and gay have fallen beneath the reigning “verdure.” No one is “wielding far / Peace or war,” because those civilized opposites...

... middle of paper ...

... were born only a couple generations before him. Those previous poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats, and of course, stretching back to Wordsworth and even Blake) inhabit legendary ruins in a manner Browning never will. They were the first and last poets to finally work out the human relationship with outside nature. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats inhabit a landscape that seems so natural we might think them to be 'nature poets' at times. That would be wrong, however. They create those landscapes and express the human longing that at once generate and inevitably inhabit those vistas. They were masters of reality. We, and Browning, showed up late.

Works Cited

Robert Browning’s Poetry. Edited by James F. Loucks. New

York: Norton, 1979.

Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Harold

Bloom & Adrienne Munich. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1979.