“Love Among the Ruins” Introduction

• In Robert Browning's "Love Among the Ruins," a lover makes his way across a grassy landscape to meet with his beloved in the ruins of an old tower. A majestic ancient city once stood on this very ground—but there's barely a trace of it now. Since glory and pomp inevitably fade and vanish, the speaker reflects, it's a mystery why people pour so much feeling and effort into pursuing them. To him, there's no point striving after any triumph but one: "Love is best." The poem first appeared in Browning's important 1855 collection Men and Women.

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“Love Among the Ruins” Summary

• Out in the wide fields where the quiet light seems to smile at dusk, in the remote pastures where the drowsy sheep wander home at twilight with their bells jingling, sometimes stopping to eat a mouthful of grass—out here, they say, there used to be a great and beautiful city. Long ago, it was the capital of our country, the place where a legendary monarch used to reign, holding court, running councils, and declaring war or peace across the land.

  These days, this stretch of countryside isn't interrupted by so much as a tree (as you can see). The only marks that separate one stretch of grass from another are the little streams that run down from the hills. These follow the foundations of the mighty domes and steeples of the great palace, which once shot up into the air like flames over a great wall with a hundred gates that encircled the city. The gates in this marble wall were so huge that twelve men could march through them side by side without any difficulty.

  You never saw such a lush and gorgeous stretch of grass as the one that grows here now! Every summer, this grassy carpet covers every last trace of the ancient city, so that you can only guess what was there before. Once, countless people lived full, passionate lives here: they hungered for glory, feared disgrace, and saw wealth as the measure of both glory and failure.

  Now, the only trace of that ancient city that still stands—one part of a ruined tower alone on the plains, overgrown with capers, squash vines, and blossoming leek flowers that show through in the cracks in its walls—shows where a mighty ancient edifice stood, a tower around which chariots used to race, blazing their trails while the king and his underlings and his ladies watched.

  As I look on the crumbling remains of this tower, I know that (while the departing twilight smiles on the homeward-bound sheep and the hills fade away into greyness) a yellow-haired girl with longing in her eyes waits for me. She's in that old tower where the charioteers used to whet their appetites for victory; where the king used to look down, now she looks down, waiting (silent and eager) for me to arrive.

  But the king used to look down on a mighty city that stretched out all around him; he used to see temples atop the mountains, pillared woodlands, raised roads, bridges, aqueducts—and so many people! When I arrive, the girl who waits for me won't say a word. She'll just stand up, put her hands on my shoulders, and embrace me with her eyes before we rush together into a kiss, seeing and saying nothing.

  In just one year, the ancient city sent a million soldiers to the south and the north; they built a sky-high brass column in honor of their gods; and after all that, they still had a thousand golden chariots on reserve, ready to fly into battle. Oh, the human heart! Oh, blood that runs hot and cold with emotion! This is how the earth responds to century after century of foolishness, uproar, and sin. Bury them all, earth, with their victories and splendor and all the rest of it. Love is better than any of that.

“Love Among the Ruins” Themes

• 

  Human Transience and Mortality

  "Love Among the Ruins" joins a long tradition of poems reminding readers that all human things, even the mightiest, fade and fall. As the poem's speaker makes his eager way across a field to meet with his beloved, he takes the time to contemplate the ruined tower where she's waiting for him. This, he observes, is the last vestige of what was once a glorious capital: an ancient city of marble and gold once stood in these very fields. But one would never know it now: aside from that one crumbling "turret," there's not the slightest sign of the splendid civilization that once spread out to the horizon here. Instead, the speaker sees a sea of grass that stretches for "miles and miles" and is inhabited only by wandering sheep.

  These sights lead him to reflect not just on all the glory that has vanished from this scene, but also on all the long-lost emotion, conflict, and drama that made that glory possible. Those palaces and walls and temples were all the outward signs of "blood that freezes, blood that burns"—that is, they were built on the back of intense human feelings. "Millions" of people lived and died to make that ancient city what it was. Now, nonetheless, barely a trace of all that grand energy remains. The people who made this city are long gone and so are their works: the earth, the speaker says, has "shut them in" for good.

  With that in mind, something seems almost ridiculous about striving for political power, wealth, and glory. To this speaker, standing in the midst of ruins so ruined you'd hardly know they were there, the sensible conclusion is clear: "love is best," far more worth seeking than any kind of passing splendor (no matter how splendid).

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• 

  Love vs. Worldly Glory

  Love, to the speaker of "Love Among the Ruins," is grander and more glorious than any kind of worldly power, no matter how splendid. Trekking across fields on his way to a date in a ruined tower, this poem's speaker can hardly wait to take his beloved in his arms. He knows just what she'll do when he gets there: she'll hold him gently by the shoulders for just a moment, gazing into his eyes, until the two of them fall into a tender embrace. Such a simple moment of intense love, he feels, is by far the "best" thing a human being can hope for in this world.

  He feels particularly strongly on this point because of the landscape he's traveling over. Under his feet, he knows, lie the ruins of an ancient city—a place of splendor, wealth, and military might, built through the struggles of a "million fighters." But all their violent effort and power, he observes, eventually came to nothing. Now there's only that one crumbly little ruined tower to show where this mighty city once stood.

  The speaker's vivid images of the lost city suggest that there's something more than a little absurd about seeking power and glory, and perhaps something rather unpleasant, too: if it takes a "million fighters" to build and defend your city, a lot of blood is getting shed to raise your marble walls and adorn your golden chariots. What's more, all that violence and struggle comes to nothing in the end; the city doesn't even last.

  Love might not last forever either, of course. But in the moment that the speaker makes his way over the fields, he feels that his adoration for his "girl with eager eyes and yellow hair" is the "best" thing in the world, better by far than worldly power.

  The poem thus suggests that love is more powerful than power itself. The joy of two lovers as they meet in a ruined tower, for this speaker, overwhelms the thought of whole centuries of golden glory.

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• 

  Nature vs. Humanity

  In "Love Among the Ruins," nature gently, slowly conquers even the grandest of humanity's works. The poem's speaker, making his way across the countryside to a rendezvous with his beloved, admires the landscape along the way. On this "quiet-coloured evening"—a lovely night whose stillness is broken only by the "tinkle" of sheep bells—he sees glorious "verdure" (or greenery) stretching out for "miles and miles," as far as his eye can see. This lovely scene seems utterly peaceful and undisturbed, as innocent as the Garden of Eden. But the apparently untouched "plenty and perfection" of natural beauty here, the speaker observes, disguises what used to be in these fields. Though one would need a trained eye to pick them out, the ruins of a vast ancient city lie just beneath all this grass. Once, this very ground bustled with ambitious humanity; a massive "hundred-gated" wall of marble surrounded a city that boasted grand towers, beautiful temples, and a "million fighters."

  Now, though, the stump of a single tower is the last vestige of the city visible above ground—and its crumbling walls are already "over-rooted" by weedy plants. Nature, in other words, has consumed almost every last sign of the city. Great though the civilization that reigned here once was, all its power and glory are long gone now. The grass has reclaimed what used to be thoroughly civilized territory.

  When the speaker sees a "blossom wink[ing] / Through the chinks" (or cracks) in the remains of the tower, then, it's as if personified nature is making a little joke at humanity's expense. No matter how powerful a civilization or how vast a city, that winking blossom warns, it can't last forever: perpetual, ever-renewing nature always gets the last word. When cities fall—and all cities do—the grass, the weeds, and the flowers will sweep in to take their places.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Love Among the Ruins”

• Lines 1-12

  Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
  Miles and miles
  On the solitary pastures where our sheep
  Half-asleep
  Tinkle homeward through 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.

  "Love Among the Ruins" begins in utter peace. The speaker describes a countryside scene, a grassy field that stretches out for "miles and miles," all the way to the horizon. It's around dusk, and the landscape is so still that it even looks quiet: this is a "quiet-coloured end of evening," imagery that might invite readers to picture sunset painting the landscape with soft pink-gold light. The only sound breaking the silence is the "tinkle" of sheep making their way home through the twilight, perhaps pausing here and there to "crop" (or munch) a mouthful of grass.

  Even the poem's shape suggests wide vistas and spacious quiet:

  • The meter here starts out with a long line of trochaic hexameter—that is, a line of six trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm (as in "Where the | quiet- | coloured | end of | evening | smiles").
  • Then, abruptly, it switches to a brief line of trochaic dimeter (just two trochees, as in "Miles and | miles").
  • Notice, too, that the meter here is catalectic: that is, the lines drop their final unstressed syllables. That makes the rhyme scheme of couplets (as in smiles / miles) stand out all the more dramatically: the rhymes always land on a strong stress.

  The poem will sway back and forth between these longer and shorter lines all the way through. The shorter lines leave roomy silences behind them, pauses as quiet as the countryside the speaker describes.

  Perhaps, though, those sudden short lines also suggest something cut off, something missing. For the speaker knows that this lovely pastoral landscape wasn't always so wide-open and peaceful. These "solitary pastures," he reveals, were:

  [...] the site once of a city great and gay,
  (So they say)

  That is, a legendary ancient city once stood in these very fields. It was the "very capital" of the country the speaker lives in now, the seat from which its noble "prince" once held court and waged either "peace or war" (depending on his mood at the time, one supposes).

  This city, the speaker suggests, was very great indeed—but you certainly wouldn't know it to look at the sheep-dotted sweep of grass the speaker gazes upon now. The remarkably complete disappearance of a city that once seemed all-powerful will become one of this strange, picturesque poem's central images.

• Lines 13-24

  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.

  

  

• Lines 25-36

  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.

  

  

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• Lines 37-48

  Now,—the single little turret that remains
  On the plains,
  By the caper over-rooted, 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.

  

  

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• Lines 49-60

  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.

  

  

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• Lines 61-72

  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.

  

  

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• Lines 73-84

  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.

  

  

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“Love Among the Ruins” Symbols

• 

  The Ruined City

  The poem's ruins symbolize mortality and impermanence.

  Once upon a time, the speaker reflects, the wide-open countryside he travels through was the site of a majestic city. This was a place of tall towers, marble walls, and golden chariots, the capital of an ancient world power. Now, however, only the faintest traces of that city remain: a few ridges in the grass and a lone "turret," a crumbling tower.

  Looking on the empty fields, the speaker reflects that this is the inevitable fate of all human endeavors. The earth swallows up even the grandest cities (not to mention all the people who built them). With that in mind, he prefers the fleeting pleasures of love to the fleeting pleasures of glory.

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“Love Among the Ruins” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Imagery

  The poem's imagery paints a picture of nature's soft persistence overwhelming even the grandest civilizations.

  Looking out over a countryside landscape at the "end of evening," the speaker feels as if the quiet is so deep that it's visible: this is a "quiet-coloured" world, a "solitary" place of utter peace where the only sound is the gentle "tinkle" of sheep bells. Unbroken even by a single tree, grass sweeps out to the horizon in a thick, plush "carpet."

  You wouldn't suspect it, the speaker says, but beneath this unbroken "verdure" (or lush greenery) lie the ruins of a great city. Once upon a time, a "domed and daring" palace loomed over a city bounded by marble walls—walls with gates so grand that soldiers could march through them "twelve abreast" without feeling the least bit cramped.

  All the speaker's images of this lost city emphasize its grand scale and its richness. This was a place where even the chariots were clad in "gold, of course." Now, though, the only sign of the city is a "single little turret," riddled with "chinks" (or cracks) and overgrown with vines and weeds.

  The contrast between the images of the city—which once held "a million fighters" and a mighty court—and the present countryside, where only sheep are there to watch as the speaker meets his beloved "girl with eager eyes and yellow hair," stresses how utterly gone the city is, and how strange it seems that this should be so. It also makes the soft, dim, "quiet-coloured" countryside feel like a relief, a soft landing after a lot of martial chaos. Perhaps it's no bad thing, the speaker's imagery hints, that the sheep and the grass reclaim all cities, in time; the gentle "ruins" are a better place for love than that long-ago city would have been.

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• Repetition

  

  
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• Juxtaposition

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

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"Love Among the Ruins" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Tinkle homeward
• Crop
• Distinguish
• Verdure
• Rills
• Spires
• Bounding
• Pressed
• Abreast
• O'erspreads
• Vestige
• Chinks
• Whence
• Minions
• Dames
• Dumb
• Colonnades
• Causeys
• Ere
• Brazen
• Returns

• The sheep "tinkle" as they head home because they're wearing bells so the shepherds can keep an ear on them.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Love Among the Ruins”

• Form

  "Love Among the Ruins" is written in an odd form of Browning's own invention: seven stanzas of twelve lines apiece, each with a surprising meter that alternates abruptly between long and short lines. This form makes the poem itself look rather ruinous. Its jagged shape on the page suggests crumbled towers and sudden collapses.

  But there's also a certain gentleness here. The short lines create quiet, wide-open spaces that evoke the soft, grassy, sheep-dotted countryside the poem describes—and allow the speaker to come to the simple conclusion that "love is best" without wasting a syllable.

• Meter

  "Love Among the Ruins" uses a strange and striking meter. The poem's odd-numbered lines are written in trochaic hexameter: that is, lines of six trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm (as in "quiet"). These lines are also catalectic, meaning they drop their final unstressed syllable. Here's how that all sounds in line 1:

  Where the | quiet- | coloured | end of | evening | smiles,

  The poem's even-numbered lines, meanwhile, are written in catalectic trochaic dimeter—that is, just two trochees, again with the final unstressed syllable cut off. Here's how that sounds in line 2:

  Miles and | miles

  The meter here reflects both the poem's themes and its setting. The up-front punch of those trochees suggests might and grandeur; the truncated short line suggests abrupt endings. The sawtoothed edge of the poem on the page might even evoke the crumbling ruined tower that is the last visible vestige of the ancient city.

• Rhyme Scheme

  "Love Among the Ruins" uses a simple rhyme scheme of couplets, which runs like this:

  AABBCCDDEEGG

  ...and so on. Those paired rhymes draw special attention to the poem's short even lines—and thus reflect the poem's themes. The surprise of those lines coming to such an abrupt close fits right in with the speaker's observations on the transience of worldly glory.

“Love Among the Ruins” Speaker

• This poem's speaker is a lover with a philosophical bent. As he makes his way to the ruined tower where his beloved awaits him, he takes the time to vividly picture the ancient city that once stood on this ground and to shake his head over all the blood, sweat, tears, and gold that humanity pours into things that don't last. Even the grandest city falls into ruin someday, this speaker observes—and if one must choose between passing pleasures, he prefers the joys of love to the thrill of worldly achievement.

  Readers might hear a hint of the passionate Browning's own attitudes in this speaker's voice. This poem appeared in Men and Women, the first volume of poems that Browning published after marrying his wife Elizabeth Barrett. Both its setting (which sounds not unlike the campagna, the stretch of beautiful countryside that once surrounded Rome) and its conclusion that "love is best" might draw on Browning's own experience of eloping to Italy with his beloved.

“Love Among the Ruins” Setting

• "Love Among the Ruins" is set in a beautiful stretch of countryside, a place where "miles and miles" of lush grass reach out to the horizon. It's the early evening; the sun is just setting, giving way to twilight, and the sheep are making their way home.

  But the poem's speaker knows that, years ago, this pastoral landscape looked very different. His vision of the mighty ancient city that once stood here conjures up a vivid parallel setting of gleaming domes, marble walls, towering monuments, and chariots clad in gold.

  It's the very splendor of this lost city that makes its total disappearance so remarkable. Now, the speaker observes, there's nothing left to see here but a few "rills" (or ridges) that show where a palace stood—that and the lone, overgrown ruin of a tower where he plans to meet his beloved.

  While the city has vanished from the landscape, however, it clearly hasn't disappeared from memory, making the speaker's reflections on the transience of worldly glory a little more complicated. The city itself has fallen, but there's no denying it lives on in the speaker's imagination.

  Browning purposely doesn't specify a location in this poem: this is an every-ruin and an every-countryside. That hasn't stopped critics from speculating that the ruins might belong to any ancient city from Rome to Troy to Jerusalem.

Literary and Historical Context of “Love Among the Ruins”

• Literary Context

  The English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) was most famous in his time for not sounding much like a poet. His contemporaries were confused by his most distinctive works: his dramatic monologues, in which he inhabited a character like an actor playing a part. Even Oscar Wilde, a big Browning fan, famously said that "[George] Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning." The Victorian literary world was much more at ease with the melancholy lyricism of Tennyson or the elegance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Browning's wife, and a much more famous poet at the time) than with the novelistic storytelling of Browning's work.

  But it's on his earthy, vibrant dramatic monologues that Browning's enduring reputation rests. His best-known poems form a veritable rogues' gallery, with narrators from a corrupt bishop to a murderous Italian duke to an equally murderous lover. By allowing these hideous men to speak for themselves, Browning explored the darker corners of human nature—and took a particular interest in the ways that people justify their terrible deeds. Villains, Browning's monologues suggest, don't tend to think that they're villains. Browning's poetry wasn't all theatrical murder and greed, though; he also wrote tenderly about heroism, homesickness, and heartbreak.

  "Love Among the Ruins" is a poem in this latter mode—though its gentle conclusion that "love is best" only arrives after many remarks on human folly and vanity. This poem first appeared in Browning's 1855 collection Men and Women, and it became so popular that it has everything from a painting to a novel to a film named after it (though only the painting draws directly on the poem).

  Historical Context

  This poem's picturesque romance (and its equally picturesque setting) might well draw on Browning's own experiences. In 1845, Browning paid his first visit to a rising star in the literary world: Elizabeth Barrett. Unusually for a woman writer of the time, Barrett had become wildly famous; Browning was only one of many readers to be moved by her soulful, elegant poetry. He wrote her a fan letter, and the two began a warm correspondence. Eventually, they fell deeply in love.

  Barrett's tyrannical father was having none of it, however. Besides preferring to keep his talented daughter (and her earnings) to himself, he disapproved of Browning, who was several years younger than Barrett—unconventional in a Victorian marriage—and not yet a commercially successful writer himself. Defying Mr. Barrett, the couple eloped to Italy in 1846 (which they might have rather enjoyed, following as they were in the romantic footsteps of their heroes Mary and Percy Shelley). Outraged, Elizabeth's father disinherited her. The newlywed Brownings, undaunted, set up house in Florence. There, they would live happily for over a decade until Elizabeth fell ill. She died in Robert's arms at the age of 55.

  The Brownings' love story and their time in Italy alike inspired many of Robert's works. The unspecified landscape here might draw on his observations of the campagna, the beautiful sweep of countryside that once surrounded Rome (and the setting in which he placed "Two in the Campagna," another famous love poem).

  The poem's portrait of a mighty, fallen empire might also reflect some mid-Victorian anxiety about Britain's place in the world. When Browning was writing, Britain was a massive world power. Proverbially, the sun never set on the British Empire, so far-flung were its holdings. Such pomp and glory, history suggested, couldn't last forever. Browning was not the only 19th-century poet to muse (whether uneasily or rebelliously) that even the most awe-inspiring earthly might isn't eternal.

More “Love Among the Ruins” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.

  • Browning's Influence — Read an article celebrating Browning's legacy.

  • More on Browning — Learn more about Browning's life and work at the Victorian Web.

  • A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Browning.

  • Portraits of Browning — Admire some of the portraits of Browning held in London's National Portrait Gallery.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Browning

  • A Face

  • A Light Woman

  • Among the Rocks

  • A Toccata of Galuppi's

  • A Woman's Last Word

  • Confessions

  • Epilogue

  • Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

  • How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

  • Life in a Love

  • Love in a Life

  • Meeting at Night

  • My Last Duchess

  • Pictor Ignotus

  • Porphyria's Lover

  • Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

  • The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church

  • The Laboratory

  • The Last Ride Together

  • The Lost Leader

  • The Lost Mistress

  • The Patriot

  • The Pied Piper of Hamelin

  • Women and Roses