Love Among the Ruins

First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863 (when it was placed in ‘Lyrics’: see Appendix D, p. 747), 1863², 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855. A fair copy MS with some corrections and revisions is at Harvard (Houghton MS Lowell 4). It is undated, but evidently earlier than 1855 and was not the printer’s copy. The title is ‘Sicilian Pastoral’; apart from this (important) difference, there are few substantive variants from 1855, but because manuscript evidence from the period of M & W is so scarce we record all variants except trivial copying errors. A facsimile of the MS was printed in the catalogue of the sale at the American Art Association, New York, 10 April 1922 (lot 35); see also J. Maynard, ‘Browning’s “Sicilian Pastoral” ‘, Harvard Library Bulletin xx (1972) 436–43. MS divides the poem into seven sections of twelve lines, with a gap after the sixth line; 1868–88 revert to the 12-line section but close up the gap. MS does not indent short lines. There was no verbal revision to the poem in eds. after 1855, a fact which makes it unique for a poem of its length in M & W.