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Browning's Love Among the Ruins Essay

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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, …show more content…

Indeed, we are not even able “to distinguish slopes of verdure” though “certain rills / From the hills / Intersect and give a name to” the pasture’s contours, a bare minima of delineation, “else they [the slopes] run / Into one.” Formerly, distinction had been well-marked in a blazoning hierarchy of “the domed and daring palace,” tempting feats of Imagination in the name of outward-bounding Power on the plane of material abundance converted to the glory of man’s conquest.

Yet never in that soaring epoch had there been, as in the poem’s present, “such plenty and perfection, see, of grass.” Such are the riches of these wastes, whose “carpet …, this summer-time, o’erspreads / And embeds / Every vestige of the city, guessed alone, / Stock or stone.” The final winter of the empire buried all, and with the new spring and finally summer, all vestiges have been digested into the land, digested even into the language of the land, “stock or stone.” Had the stock, or stump, been a turret or domicile? Had the stone been a piece of temple, an eroded tablet of Law & Commandment forgotten? Here, one might recall The Prelude’s stone carried by the horseback Arab in Book V. It emblematizes “Euclid’s Elements,” the Formulae of mundane reality, geometry and mathematical reason. In Blake too, Ulro’s

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