Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop--
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
(So they say)
Of our country's very capital, its prince
Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.
Now the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see,
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
From the hills
Intersect and give a name to, (else they run
Into one)
Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires
Up like fires
O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall
Bounding all
Made of marble, men might march on nor be prest
Twelve abreast.
And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'er-spreads
And embeds
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,
Stock or stone--
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.
Now--the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks
Through the chinks--
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.
And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey
Melt away--
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come.
But he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.
In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force--
Gold, of course.
O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.
Robert Browning
Notes on "Love Among the Ruins"
Robert Browning (1812-1889) was not a love poet as such. For the most part, he wrote historical and narrative poems and various experimental poetry in the form of dramatic monologues. His
romantic courtship and secret marriage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
made him a celebrated figure of romantic love poetry however. This poem, Love Among the Ruins, was part of Men and
Women, a book of 51 poems written in Italy and published in 1855, after he had married Elizabeth Barrett. The book
helped to repair his reputation, which had been suffered at the hands of critics in 1840 when he published Sordello.
This poem was almost certainly evoked by a specific incident, though evidently nobody knows where these particular ruins
were. The poem was first published in volume I of Men and Women, 1855, in fourteen six-line stanzas; and later changed
to the present seven twelve-line stanzas in 1863. It was written in January 1852. The "certain rills from the hills"
intersect the slopes referred to previously in that line. "The caper overrooted" refers to a common Italian shrub.
The theme of the poem is straightforward - love is preferable to martial glory.
In the first part of poem, Browning uses an unusual scheme of rhyming couplets in which long iambic lines are paired
with short lines of three syllables. The poetic speaker, contemplating a pasture where sheep graze, points out
that once a great ancient city, perhaps his country's capital, stood there.
After praising the ancient city and its glories, the poetic speaker proclaims that "a girl with eager eyes and
yellow hair/Waits me there", and that "she looks now, breathless, dumb/Till I come." The poem closes by rejecting the
majesty of the old capital and preferring his love instead.
One can trace hints, or more than hints, of inspiration from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and
from the poem Ozymandias. In rejecting material things for love, Browning perhaps anticipates poets like
e e cummings. The use of parentheses in that way was probably very uncommon in that period as well.
Robert Browning (1812-1889) was a prolific poet of the victorian age. He did not achieve fame, however, until relatively late in life. His unconventional style and experimentation tended to confuse Victorian readers. His fascination with horror tales is in some ways reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe.
He is perhaps most famous today for his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett. He published a volume that included love poems, Men and Women, in 1855. Some of these poems were later recognized as masterpieces. His 20,000 line The Ring and the Book published in 1868 and 1869, was evidently inspired by Elizabeth Barrett, and achieved the fame that had eluded him earlier.
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