[EVELYN HOPE]
In this lyric are embodied Browning's faith in personal immortality, his belief in the permanence of true love and in the value of love though unrequited in this world.
34. What meant. From this point on through line 52 the lover repeats what he shall say to Evelyn Hope when in the life to come he claims her.
[LOVE AMONG THE RUINS]
A man is on his way across the fields to a turret where he is to meet the girl he loves. As he walks through the solitary pastures he mentally recreates the powerful life and varied interests of the city which, tradition has it, once occupied this site, and he seems to be absorbed in a melancholy recognition of the evanescence of human glory. The girl is not mentioned till stanza 5. Does the emphasis on the scenery and its historic associations unduly minimize the love element of the poem? Or is the whole picture of vanished joy and woe, pride and defeat, but a background against which stands out more clearly the rapture of the meeting in the ruined turret?
80. Earth's returns. This phrase refers to the ruins which are all that now remains of the centuries of folly, noise, and sin. "Them" in l. 81 refers apparently to the "fighters" and the others of the first part of the stanza.
[UP AT A VILLA—DOWN IN THE CITY]
"It is an admirable piece of work crowded with keen descriptions of Nature in the Casentino, and of life in the streets of Florence. And every piece of description is so filled with the character of the 'Italian person of quality' who describes them—a petulant, humorous, easily angered, happy, observant, ignorant, poor gentleman—that Browning entirely disappears. The poem retains for us in its verse, and indeed in its light rhythm, the childlikeness, the naïveté, the simple pleasures, the ignorance and the honest boredom with the solitudes of Nature—of a whole class of Italians, not only of the time when it was written, but of the present day. It is a delightful, inventive piece of gay and pictorial humor." (Stopford Brooke, The Poetry of Browning, p. 322.)
33. Corn. In Great Britain the word is generally applied to wheat, rye, oats, and barley, not to maize as in America.