And Now Love is Here C’mon and Try It: Robert Browning’s Love Among the Ruins

For his poem, Love Among the Ruins, Robert Browning invented an entirely new stanza form. The form itself resembles that of a normal stanza with missing pieces, almost like the time-torn ruins of an old poem. The poem seems to chronicle the sites and times of an old forgotten city, presumably the speaker’s “country’s very capitol” (9). Browning begins the poem with a description of the land, telling of the “quiet-colored end of evening” that “smile[‘s], / Miles and miles / on the solitary pastures” and its inhabitants, the sheep (1-3). His elegant drawing of the surrounding land gives the reader, at first, a sense of peace and beauty, yet the land’s past ruler is “wielding far / peace and war” (12). The last line of this part begins a pattern that follows throughout the next few stanzas where the first six to eight lines of each segment concern the painting of scenery, while the last four lines or so describe times of war for this great city.

Part two begins by the speaker going into a deeper discussion of the countryside in his dear city where it “does not even boast a tree” (13). The only thing that disrupted the flowing hills of the countryside is the palace that “shot its spire / up like fires / o’er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall” (19-21). Even the palace has a sort of violent description of warlike proportions when the speakers describes the palace as shooting its spires up like licking flames. Dispersed even in the descriptions of the town are little bits of violent and harmful diction. Browning uses the peacefulness of the countryside to juxtapose the more violent and warlike city. The last line of the stanza paints a picture of the soldiers that are housed within the city walls. But even the soldiers will march on the pleasant and peaceful countryside that was described in the first and second stanza. The scent of war and the city taint the countryside. But the countryside is still there even after the city is gone. There are only ruins of the city where our speaker is talking from. No matter how powerful the palace soldiers were, or however many used to march on the grasses of the countryside, they are all merely ruins now.

Browning’s speakers details the life and times of the great city throughout the seven stanzas of this sequence, but the main focus is the relationship in parts five through seven. Now the speaker is jumping between the present and the past. He says that “a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair / waits me there…when the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb / till I come” (55-60). The girl stands now where the king once stood, one waiting for war, the other waiting for love; both silent in the wake of what is to come. For the king, it is destruction. Fr the girl, however, it is her love. The king “looked upon the city, every side, / far and wide, / all the mountains topped with temples…all the men!” (61-63, 66). The king saw what he loved: the power, the “lust of glory,” and all of his men (33). The girl sees what she loves. The last half of the stanza draws an amazing picture of the speaker and this woman standing on the hill embracing each other as they “extinguish sight and speech” (71). The only thing that remains in these lands now is love. The speaker tells of the downfall of the great city in the last stanza and ends with one simple phrase: “Love is best” (85). The last image is of love among the ruins. These powerful men who fought to gain land and power all were turned into nothing more than ruins, yet love was able to survive. There, on that hill top, where men once fought and worshiped gold, these two lovers lose themselves in each other: love shall conquer all.