Journal Post #1 (Dr. Masters)

Browning's "Two in the Campagna" highlights Italy as a site for the celestial, as a territory that evokes the sublime and transcends the corporeal body; it caters to the microcosmic and meniscal. Though the poem underscores various (archetypal) tropes--Italy as muse, as vehicle through which one (can) find or experience 'love' and 'beauty' in the purest, rawest sense, and as a seemingly liminal space wherein one is personally met with the ghosts of old and spirits new--the narrator (arguably Browning), like Keats, is forced to realize/confront his mortality; so the transcendental moment still must surrender itself back to the temporal, (re)occupy the physical body. Thus, at the end of the poem, the narrator grapples with the unsustainable, and, arguably, ascertains the truth, the facts of the land: it as a beatific artifice, a chameleon, and being something rather of a coquette than a faithful lover; a fleeting territory.
On the other hand, Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" appears to refuse the art and divine nature of this imagined space. The dramatic monologue forces apposition, imposes contradiction(s) and deceit, on the idiosyncrasies of the divine, of the saintly, of the constructionally beautiful creations (murals) of man--by creating, in turn, the very thing desired most in "Two in the Campagna": a longing to capture/experience a moment outside of the temporal, capable of a return.