Leaving Glory for Yellow Hair: the Poetry of Robert Browning

Robert Browning wrote about all sorts of inherently fascinating, even alluring, subjects: his Childe Roland, his many engaging plays, and all of the beguiling characters apparent in his dramatic monologues. Yet he saves an innovative stanza form that he invented himself to describe nothing more than a love story taking place on an historic location. This apparent contradiction speaks at once to the themes present in “Love Among the Ruins,” a beautiful poem about present love’s triumph over past glory. The place described is singularly beautiful: “such plenty and perfection, see, of grass / Never was!” (lines 25-26). Rolling, gorgeous hills frame the speaker’s sight, and it is a perfect scenic representation of a thoroughly lovely pasture.

Not only is this place beautiful; it is significant: here, “a multitude of men breathed joy and woe / Long ago; / Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame / Struck them tame” (31-34). Clearly, this site is that of some epic war, a war that inspired men to do things they had never done and feel emotions they had never felt before. Browning’s speaker spends several stanzas idolizing this great city of old, that gave so much to the modern day and left such wonderful stories.

In fact, the speaker seems so wrapped up in the circumstances of this ancient city that it is scarcely noticeable when he transitions away from it, to the plain statement “That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair / Waits [him] there” (lines 55-56). Browning proceeds to compare this yellow-haired, eager-eyed girl with the great kind of old, describing where “the king looked, where she looks now,” as being the same (line 59). Of course, the poem advances to its oft-quoted conclusion, scorning material and warlike glory: “For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin! / Shut them in, / With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best” (lines 81-84). If taken line-by-line, Browning spends many more precious words on the beauty of the ancient city than the beauty of the girl; he tells its story more thoroughly and well before he makes any mention of her. Thus, the reader knows that he really means his final statement—“Love is best”—after giving the matter careful consideration.

The distinctive stanza scheme of this poem, with its long trochaic lines punctuated by short rhymes, can be a puzzle indeed. Initially, the poem is difficult to access; the wildly atypical rhyme scheme seems unnecessary. However, given the general theme of the poem—that of love being best, and of individual happiness, no matter how ordinary, triumphing over any story of blood and glory—the line scheme fits quite well. Browning is a man given to extravagance in his words, but not in these short lines. Indeed, he saves his most flowing, graceful turns of phrase for the long lines, leaving his short ones simple and to-the-point. All the while, however, Browning knows which lines people pay more attention to: the short ones. His beautiful, memorable words (like “the quiet-coloured end of evening” (line 1) as well as many others), in a sense, pale in comparison to the simple ones with their equally simple words, in the same way that the stories and glories of war pale in comparison to one simple yellow-haired girl, waiting in an old tower for her love.