Robert Browning: Selected Poems

First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863, 1863², 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855. This, and Another Way of Love, are the only poems in M & W for which there are no variants in H proof.

Sharp, who identifies Two in the Campagna as one of the poems written in Rome, states: ‘I have been told that the poem entitled “Two in the Campagna” was as actually personal as … “Guardian Angel” ’ (p. 259); and, like Guardian Angel, it seems to be based quite closely on incidents from B.’s own life. Excursions of the kind described in the poem were undertaken frequently from March 1854 onwards, as EBB. indicates in a letter of 10 May 1854 to Mary Russell Mitford: ‘The pleasantest days in Rome we have spent with the Kembles—the two sisters .. who are charming & excellent, both of them, in different ways—& certainly they have given us some exquisite hours on the campagna, upon picnic excursions .. they, & certain of their friends’ (EBB to MRM iii 409). A letter written by EBB. the day before their departure from Rome notes that ‘Robert has been present at fourteen Kemble picnics—and I at some five or six’ (EBB to Arabella ii 80). The ‘Kembles’ were Frances Anne (‘Fanny’) Butler (née Kemble), the famous actress and writer, who had married and then divorced Georgia plantation owner Pierce Butler, and her sister, the singer Mrs Adelaide Sartoris. ‘Fanny and Adelaide had known Robert Browning for years, having met him often at the houses of Bryan Procter and Henry Chorley. His wife was a newer acquaintance, though the sisters had heard many times of her romantic elopement with her husband to Italy’ (Ann Blainey, Fanny and Adelaide [Chicago 2001] 255). A strong friendship formed between Fanny and the Brownings during their residence in Rome, with Fanny visiting them alone in their apartment on a number of occasions. (For Fanny Kemble’s possible influence on B.’s poetry, see headnote to Light Woman, III 608.)

Betty Miller suggests that the poem might have an even more precise connection to this period, seeing its origins in an incident evoked by B. in a letter to Mrs Fitzgerald of 15 July 1882, in which he comments with some asperity on the fact that Fanny Kemble had only just begun to appreciate his poetry: ‘none of the kind things she says now can move me like a word of hers in the Campagna “You are the only man I ever knew who behaved like a Christian to his wife”—and this simply because, on an excursion, that wife [was] unable to follow the party [on a walk]’ (Learned Lady 142 and 143 n.8). Despite Kemble’s tribute, Miller reads Two in the Campagna as indicating a certain estrangement in the relationship between B. and EBB., and a ‘desperate longing for the un-impaired communion of happier days’ (Miller 182–3). Mrs Orr in contrast (Life 199–200), vehemently denies any suggestion of a ‘personal’ dimension to Two in the Campagna:

We are told … in Mr. Sharp’s ‘Life,’ that a personal character no less actual than that of the Guardian Angel has been claimed for it. The writer, with characteristic delicacy, evades all discussion of the question; but he concedes a good deal in his manner of doing so. The poem, he says, conveys a sense of that necessary isolation of the individual soul which resists the fusing power of the deepest love; and its meaning cannot be personally—because it is universally—true. I do not think Mr. Browning meant to emphasize this aspect of the mystery of individual life, though the poem, in a certain sense, expresses it. We have no reason to believe that he ever accepted it as constant; and in no case could he have intended to refer its conditions to himself. He was often isolated by the processes of his mind; but there was in him no barrier to that larger emotional sympathy which we think of as sympathy of the soul. If this poem were true, One Word More would be false, quite otherwise than in that approach to exaggeration which is incidental to the poetic form. The true keynote of Two in the Campagna is the pain of perpetual change, and of the conscious, though unexplained, predestination to it. Mr. Browning could have still less in common with such a state, since one of the qualities for which he was most conspicuous was the enormous power of anchorage which his affections possessed … I make no deduction from this statement when I admit that the last and most emphatic words of the poem in question [ll. 58–60] did probably come from the poet’s heart, as they also found a deep echo in that of his wife, who much loved them.

For me, I touched a thought, I know,

Has tantalised me many times,

(Like turns of thread the spiders throw

Mocking across our path) for rhymes

10 To catch at and let go.

The champaign with its endless fleece

Of feathery grasses everywhere!

Silence and passion, joy and peace,

An everlasting wash of air—

25 Rome’s ghost since her decease.