Andrew's Wiki
Two Campagna

Content

• He says he wants to convert the feelings of love into a poem, but the feeling keeps moving: the narrator describes it floating along the landscape (over trees, into fruit, along the hillside)
• “Letting nature have her way:” in two ways, first the Roman campagna existing despite the human drama that’s played in and around it, and second letting yourself lose control b/c love has taken you over
• However, there’s always some kind of problem (“wound there must be”): this problem is never being able to stand still, to figure out what love is!
• Love escapes being described and identified: he thinks at first it’s in becoming one w/her, but then sees it in having a certain distance to see her from, and he’s off to the races again
• Time becomes a problem: “There a good minute goes.” “Already how am I so far / Out of that minute?”
  • Why? B/c that’s how things change
• Last line of course ruins the fun of all of this and tacks some meaning down, sonnet-style: “Infinite passion, and the pain / of finite hearts that yearn”
  • Like a good Victorian, like Tennyson in In Memoriam, he teases with lack of meaning and then finds it at the last minute, ha ha.

Form

• 12 verses of 5 lines each, ababa