Since he chose to change
Gold for dust,
If I gave him what he praised
Was it strange ?
While I found some way undreamed
Paid my debt!
Gave more life and more,
Till, all gone,
He should smile, "She never seemed
Mine before.
OUR ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (If loves remain)
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice,
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the bean-flowers' boon,
And the black bird's tune,
And May, and June!
What I love best in all the world,
Is, a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,
And come again to the land of lands), -
In a seaside house to the farther south,
Where the baked cicalas die of drouth,
And one sharp tree ('t is a cypress) stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water's edge. For, what expands
Without the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sca, and not a break?
While, in the house, forever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl barefooted brings and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there 's news to-day,
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling.
- She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary's saying serves for me,
(When fortune's malice
Lost her, Calais.)
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, "Italy."
Such lovers old are I and she;
So it always was, so it still shall be!
Round and round, like a dance of snow
In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go
Floating the women faded for ages,
Sculptured in stone, on the poet's pages.
Then follow the women fresh and gay,
Living and loving and loved to-day.
Last, in the rear, flee the multitude of maidens,
Beauties unborn. And all, to one cadence,
They circle their rose on my rose-tree.
Dear rose, thy term is reached,
Thy leaf hangs loose and bleached:
Bees pass it unimpeached.
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