I.
Two in Campagna
I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
The “Campagna” refers to the countryside around Rome. Until the middle of the twentieth century it grew fairly wild and unclaimed. Because its swampy areas nurtured mosquitoes carrying malaria, the conventional English tourist largely avoided the Campagna, leaving it to the Italian peasants, who farmed sections of it. 
 However, in nineteenth-century literature the Campagna also symbolized a sort of alternative space, where rules of society did not apply and anything could happen; we see this expressed in Henry James’s Italian-set novels and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. 
 In this poem, the Campagna seems to suggest to the speaker that he can in fact transcend his human limitations to put his subtle ideas into poetry or see the world through his lover’s eyes. However, the wild space merely plays a cruel trick; teased and disappointed, the speaker is left more melancholy than ever.
Two in Campagna