In “Love Among the Ruins”, Browning compares the past with the present giving love more weight than material things through the persona that he creates. In this poem, Browning creates rhyme through paring long trochaic lines with short sentences often made of only three words. The persona compares what he is seeing at that particular time which is a pasture in the ruins where sheep are grazing to what used to be there; a great city led by a superior king.
Browning emphasizes giving a detailed picture of the city using figurative language, which makes the poem more engaging and memorable. This aspect of the poem makes it stand out in that the reader identifies with the situations described. For instance, “When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb” (Browning line 59) a line that elicits more imagination from the reader to be able to identify with the environment being described. This poem together is one of the works by Browning that would qualify him to be regarded as the quintessential poet of the Victorian times.
Works Cited
Browning, Robert. Love among the Ruins: The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.