Arthur Hugh Clough

Amours de Voyage Arthur Hugh Clough

Amours de Voyage (1849) is a novel in verse and is arranged in five cantos, or chapters, as a sequence of letters. It is about a group of English travellers in Italy: Claude, and the Trevellyn family, are caught up in the 1849 political turmoil. The poem mixes the political ('Sweet it may be, and decorous, perhaps, for the country to die; but, /On the whole, we conclude the Romans won't do it, and I sha'n't') and the personal ('After all, do I know that I really cared so about her?/Do whatever I will, I cannot call up her image'). The political is important - hence the Persephone edition reproduces nine London Illustrated News drawings of the battlefront - but the personal dilemmas are the crucial ones. Claude, about to declare himself, retreats, then regrets his failure to speak. It is this retreat, his scruples and fastidiousness, that, like a conventional novel, is the core of Amours de Voyage.