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,—

The happier they!

Draw yourself up from the light of the moon
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the beanflowers' boon,

And the blackbird'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 sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree-'tis 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
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, forever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there's news to-day—the king
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 shall ever be!

Robert Browning (1812-1889]

ITALIAN RHAPSODY

DEAR Italy! The sound of thy soft name
Soothes me with balm of Memory and Hope.

Mine, for the moment, height and sweep and slope

That once were mine. Supreme is still the aim

To flee the cold and gray

Of our December day,

And rest where thy clear spirit burns with unconsuming flame.

There are who deem remembered beauty best,
And thine, imagined, fairer is than sight
Of all the charms of other realms confessed,
Thou miracle of sea and land and light.
Was it lest, envying thee,

The world unhappy be,

Benignant Heaven gave to all the all-consoling Night?

Remembered beauty best? Who reason so?
Not lovers, yearning to the same dumb star
That doth disdain their passion-who, afar,
Seek touch and voice in velvet winds and low.
No, storied Italy,

Not thine that heresy,

Thou who thyself art fairer far than Fancy e'er can show.

To me thou art an ever-brooding spell;

An old enchantment, exorcised of wrong;

A beacon, where-against the wings of Song

Are bruised so, they cannot fly to tell;
A mistress, at whose feet

A myriad singers meet,

To find thy beauty the despair of measures full and sweet.

--

Of old, ere caste or custom froze the heart,
What tales of thine did Chaucer re-indite,-
Of Constance, and Griselda, and the plight
Of pure Cecilia,-all with joyous art!

Oh, to have journeyed down

To Canterbury town,

And known, from lips that touched thy robe, that triad of renown!

Fount of Romance whereat our Shakespeare drank!
Through him the loves of all are linked to thee

By Romeo's ardor, Juliet's constancy.

He sets the peasant in the royal rank;

Shows under mask and paint

Kinship of knave and saint,

And plays on stolid man with Prospero's wand and Ariel's prank.

Another English foster-child hadst thou

When Milton from the breast of thy delight

Drew inspiration. With a vestal's vow

He fed the flame caught from thy sacred light.
And when upon him lay

The long eclipse of day,

Thou wert the memory-hoarded treasure of his doomèd sight.

Name me a poet who has trod thy soil:
He is thy lover, ever hastening back,
With thee forgetting weariness and toil,
The nightly sorrow for the daily lack.
How oft our lyric race

Looked last upon thy face!

Oh, would that I were worthy thus to die in thine embrace!

Oh, to be kin to Keats as urn with urn

Shares the same Roman earth!-to sleep, apart, Near to the bloom that once was Shelley's heart, Where bees, like lingering lovers, re-return;

Where the proud pyramid,

To brighter glory bid,

Gives Cestius his longed-for fame, marking immortal Art.

Or, in loved Florence, to repose beside
Our trinity of singers! Fame enough
To neighbor lordly Landor, noble Clough,
And her, our later sibyl, sorrow-eyed.

Oh, tell me—not their arts,

But their Italian hearts

Won for their dust that narrow oval, than the world more wide!

So might I lie where Browning should have lain,
My "Italy" for all the world to read,
Like his on the palazzo. For thy pain
In losing from thy rosary that bead,
England accords thee room

Around his minster tomb

A province conquered of thy soul, and not an Arab slain!

Then take these lines, and add to them the lay,

All inarticulate, I to thee indite:

The sudden longing on the sunniest day,

The happy sighing in the stormiest night,

The tears of love that creep

From eyes unwont to weep,

Full with remembrance, blind with joy, and with devotion

deep.

Absence from thee is such as men endure

Between the glad betrothal and the bride; Or like the years that Youth, intense and sure, From his ambition to his goal must bide. And if no more I may

Mount to Fiesole .

Oh, then were Memory meant for those to whom is Hope denied.

Show me a lover who hath drunk by night
Thy beauty-potion, as the grape the dew:
"Twere little wonder he were poet too,
With wine of song in unexpected might,
While moonlit cloister calls

With plashy fountain-falls,

Or darkened Arno moves to music with its mirrored light.

Who can withstand thee? What distress or care
But yields to Naples, or that long day-dream
We know as Venice, where alone more fair

Noon is than night; where every lapping stream
Wooes with a soft caress

Our new-world weariness,

And every ripple smiles with joy at sight of scene so rare.

The mystery of thy charm-ah, who hath guessed?
'Twas ne'er divined by day or shown in sleep;
Yet sometimes Music, floating from her steep,
Holds to our lips a chalice brimmed and blest:
Then know we that thou art

Of the Ideal part

Of Man's one thirst that is not quenched, drink he howe'er so deep.

Thou human-hearted land, whose revels hold
Man in communion with the antique days,
And summon him from prosy greed to ways
Where Youth is beckoning to the Age of Gold;
How thou dost hold him near

And whisper in his ear

Of the lost Paradise that lies beyond the alluring haze!

In tears I tossed my coin from Trevi's edge,—

A coin unsordid as a bond of love,

And, with the instinct of the homing dove, I gave to Rome my rendezvous and pledge. And when imperious Death

Has quenched my flame of breath,

Oh, let me join the faithful shades that throng that fount

above.

Robert Underwood Johnson (1853

ABOVE SALERNO

SILVERY the olives on Ravello's steeps,
Terraced the verdure of her nurtured hills;
Far, far below the blue Salerno sweeps,

And on the shore her emerald largesse spills.