Amours De Voyage

Reading time

about 1 h

Length

14,141 words · 136 pages

Structure

63 chapters

Language

English

Era

Victorian

Claude, a diffident, over-analytical young Englishman touring Rome in 1849, meets Mary Trevellyn, travelling with her family, and falls for her by degrees — while his own habit of examining every feeling before trusting it keeps him from ever quite declaring himself. The French siege of the Roman Republic scatters the English visitors just as Claude finally works up to a decision, and the rest of the poem follows his half-hearted pursuit of the Trevellyns across Italy: a missed letter, a wrong turn, a day's delay each costing him the chance the day before would have given him, until his own self-doubt has done what circumstance alone could not. Told entirely in verse letters — mostly Claude's own to his friend Eustace, with Mary's side glimpsed through her letters to a family friend — the poem lets its hero talk himself out of the one thing he wants, in real time.

Clough wrote Amours de Voyage in Rome in 1849, amid the events the poem describes, but held it back for years; it first appeared in print in the American Atlantic Monthly in 1858, the same year Clough revised it for the audience the magazine's editor had found for it, and was not published in Britain in his own lifetime.

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Subjects

Voyages and travels — Poetry

About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) was an English poet, a schoolfriend of Matthew Arnold's at Rugby and later his fellow scholar at Oxford, where Clough held an Oriel College fellowship until resigning it in 1848 over doubts about subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles. He worked at University Hall in London and then, from 1853, as an examiner in the Education Office, writing in his free hours the poetry — including The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich and Amours de Voyage — for which he is now chiefly remembered. In his last years he thoroughly revised the seventeenth-century translation of Plutarch's Lives known as Dryden's, correcting it against the Greek; published in 1859, his edition remained the standard English Plutarch for the rest of the century. He died in Florence in 1861.