Love in a Time of Extinction: Poetic Category and Temporal Impasse in Robert Browning's "Love Among the Ruins"

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• Love in a Time of Extinction: Poetic Category and Temporal Impasse in Robert Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins”
• John McBratney (bio)

As the first poem in Men and Women (1855), Robert Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” sets the main theme for the collection, establishing (so it seems) in its final line—“Love is best”—a scale of value in heterosexual relationships against which the treatment of romantic intimacy can be gauged in other poems in the volume.¹ Yet why, as the title of the poem denotes, would Browning set such an all-important human emotion—and such a lyric poem—among the ruins of an ancient city? What connection can there be between two such seemingly ill-sorted entities as romantic passion and antique urban ruins? And how might the yoking of two such disparate themes as eros and an ancient city’s ruination bear on the matter of the poem’s category?²

To answer these questions, we might put critical responses to the poem into two clusters grouped around the two key terms from its title. Critics in the first cluster (by far the larger of the two) have been concerned with the degree to which readers ought to assent to the final line’s bald declaration of love’s preeminent worth. Some insist that we believe it without question, others insist just as vehemently that we view it ironically, and still others feel deeply uncertain whether we ought to find it credible. Critics in the second, smaller cluster have focused more narrowly, in a kind of archaeological source hunting, on linking the ruins in the poem to actual historical ruins—some of them under excavation during the time of the poem’s composition—that might have served as inspiration for the urban remains in Browning’s verse. To each cluster, we might assign a suitable category—the love poem for the first and what Susan Stewart calls the “ruins narrative” for the second—as a pair of lenses through which to examine the themes of romantic passion in the present and the ruination of civilizations in the past.³ This examination is especially [End Page 267] critical in analyzing the interest that both categories in this poem take in the phenomenon of extinction. By exploring this shared interest, we can see not only why these two apparently incompatible partners might belong together in this poem but also how their interaction problematizes the poem’s closing motto.⁴ As I hope to show in a revisionist reading of the poem, although we are enjoined to assent to this motto’s declaration, that assent entails acknowledgment of a daunting temporal and romantic impasse—one that prepares readers for the fraught connection between love and time in many of the remaining poems in Men and Women. I conclude by glancing at two sets of poems in the collection, all concerning the imbrication of love and temporality: the first presenting instances of impasse like that in “Love Among the Ruins” and the second offering a means of breaking that deadlock. Throughout, I keep in mind the question of category, building to some final thoughts on the relation between the love lyric and the ruins poem. Let me begin by defining more sharply the two poetic categories that intertwine themselves throughout Browning’s work.

In The Art of Love Poetry, Erik Gray “explores the nature of both love and poetry by examining the associations between them, inherent and inherited” (p. 5). He notes the breadth of poetry about love, a breadth that includes many genres: “Love poetry is a capacious category that comprises all poetic genres, and this book draws examples from many types of verse, including longer narrative, dramatic, and didactic poems” (p. 8). “Love Among the Ruins” is, despite its dramatic speaker, clearly a love lyric.⁵ The poem’s narrative trajectory—one in which the speaker in the poem (perhaps a shepherd in keeping with the work’s pastoral mode) approaches his beloved for a tryst amid the ruins of an ancient city, encounters her, and finally, in the climax of the lovers’ story, engages her in a kiss—bears this out. Given its climax...