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Pomegranates from an English Garden / A selection from the poems of Robert Browning cover

Pomegranates from an English Garden / A selection from the poems of Robert Browning

Chapter 13: LOVE AMONG THE RUINS.
By Robert Browning
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British LiteraturePoetry

About This Book

A selection of poems by Robert Browning gathers lyrical and dramatic pieces that probe the inner life, moral choice, and imaginative response to love, loss, faith, and art. The poems alternate intimate domestic reveries, vivid narrative moments, and philosophical meditations, often voiced through distinctive dramatic speakers; they combine concise, sometimes rugged diction with dense allusion. Recurring concerns include the development of individual character, the presence of the divine in experience, encounters with mortality, and the duties of memory and courage. Varied meters and tonal shifts reward close reading and emphasize psychological intensity over neat resolution.

LOVE AMONG THE RUINS.

I.
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.
II.
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 pressed
Twelve abreast.
III.
And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o’erspreads
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.
IV.
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.
V.
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.
VI.
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.
VII.
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.
Oh 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.

The supreme value of love is a constantly recurring thought in the poems of our author. We shall meet it in its higher ranges in selections to come. Here we are still in the sphere of the mere earthly affection, with only the suggestion, in contrast with the transitoriness of earthly glory, of its indestructibility.

No explanation seems needed, excepting perhaps to call attention to this, that the “little turret” in stanza 4 is not a bartizan, but a staircase turret, or it could not “mark the basement, whence a tower in ancient time sprang sublime.”

Observe, in each stanza, the striking contrast between the former and the latter half, so balanced that the poem might be divided into fourteen single or six double stanzas.

There is not much of the descriptive in the poems of our author; he is the poet, not of Nature, but of Human Nature; but when he does touch landscape, as here, it is with the hand of a master.