Andrew's Wiki
Love Among

Content

• Setting: where an old city was, where armies marches and great palaces rose above the hills, now you can’t tell it at all. There are some sheep and an unrivalled plot o’ grass
• The old civilization had a mix of glory and shame, both of which their “gold / Bought and sold”
  • Notice how he puts the shame of exploitation at the heart of greatness…in the PAST, whereas his wife is willing to admit the inequalities of today
• Part of the Victorian era’s love of antiquity, of ruins, of picturesque tourism

Form

• 7 verses; each verse made of 6 sets of two lines each, where first line is iambic pentameter and then the second line is three syllables long and has end-rhyme
• Has a lilting, dreamlike feel b/c of this FAST rhyming: you have ten syllables, but then you have the rhyme coming after only three more syllables, rather than ten
• Contrasts a century’s “folly and sin” with the humbler goals of love, which are better. You get nothing from conquest, so just love.
• History becomes reified as a background for love, not only in the artistic and cultural phenomenon of the cult of ruins and antiquity, but also in this poem, where we have the beauty of and old civ conjured up for us in detail only to be whipped down

Completely Unrelated: Rich Doyle on Lamarcke v Darwin

• Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, 108
• Lamarcke: inheritance of acquired characteristics is a holistic model of the relationship between the organism and the environment without a true distinction from outside/inside
• Darwin: represents triumph of separation of inside/outside, where the creature “confronts” the environment: in Rich’s words reacting to Lewontin’s argument, “the environment…becomes a problem the organisms are trying to solve”