Volume IV Part 7 (2/2)

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if G.o.d choose, I shall but love thee better after death.

XLIV.

Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers Plucked in the garden, all the summer through And winter, and it seemed as if they grew In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.

So, in the like name of that love of ours, Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too, And which on warm and cold days I withdrew From my heart's ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue, And wait thy weeding; yet here's eglantine, Here's ivy!--take them, as I used to do Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.

Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true, And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine.

CASA GUIDI WINDOWS

A Poem, IN TWO PARTS

ADVERTIs.e.m.e.nT TO THE FIRST EDITION.

This poem contains the impressions of the writer upon events in Tuscany of which she was a witness. ”From a window,” the critic may demur. She bows to the objection in the very t.i.tle of her work. No continuous narrative nor exposition of political philosophy is attempted by her. It is a simple story of personal impressions, whose only value is in the intensity with which they were received, as proving her warm affection for a beautiful and unfortunate country, and the sincerity with which they are related, as indicating her own good faith and freedom from partisans.h.i.+p.

Of the two parts of this poem, the first was written nearly three years ago, while the second resumes the actual situation of 1851. The discrepancy between the two parts is a sufficient guarantee to the public of the truthfulness of the writer, who, though she certainly escaped the epidemic ”falling sickness” of enthusiasm for Pio Nono, takes shame upon herself that she believed, like a woman, some royal oaths, and lost sight of the probable consequences of some obvious popular defects. If the discrepancy should be painful to the reader, let him understand that to the writer it has been more so. But such discrepancies we are called upon to accept at every hour by the conditions of our nature, implying the interval between aspiration and performance, between faith and disillusion, between hope and fact.

”O trusted broken prophecy, O richest fortune sourly crost, Born for the future, to the future lost!”

Nay, not lost to the future in this case. The future of Italy shall not be disinherited.

FLORENCE, 1851.

CASA GUIDI WINDOWS.

PART I.

I heard last night a little child go singing 'Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church, _O bella liberta, O bella!_--stringing The same words still on notes he went in search So high for, you concluded the upspringing Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green, And that the heart of Italy must beat, While such a voice had leave to rise serene 'Twixt church and palace of a Florence street: A little child, too, who not long had been By mother's finger steadied on his feet, And still _O bella liberta_ he sang.

Then I thought, musing, of the innumerous Sweet songs which still for Italy outrang From older singers' lips who sang not thus Exultingly and purely, yet, with pang Fast sheathed in music, touched the heart of us So finely that the pity scarcely pained.

I thought how Filicaja led on others, Bewailers for their Italy enchained, And how they called her childless among mothers, Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers Might a shamed sister's,--”Had she been less fair She were less wretched;”--how, evoking so From congregated wrong and heaped despair Of men and women writhing under blow, Harrowed and hideous in a filthy lair, Some personating Image wherein woe Was wrapt in beauty from offending much, They called it Cybele, or Niobe, Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such, Where all the world might drop for Italy Those cadenced tears which burn not where they touch,-- ”Juliet of nations, canst thou die as we?

And was the violet crown that crowned thy head So over-large, though new buds made it rough, It slipped down and across thine eyelids dead, O sweet, fair Juliet?” Of such songs enough, Too many of such complaints! behold, instead, Void at Verona, Juliet's marble trough:[2]

As void as that is, are all images Men set between themselves and actual wrong, To catch the weight of pity, meet the stress Of conscience,--since 't is easier to gaze long On mournful masks and sad effigies Than on real, live, weak creatures crushed by strong.

For me who stand in Italy to-day Where worthier poets stood and sang before, I kiss their footsteps yet their words gainsay.

I can but muse in hope upon this sh.o.r.e Of golden Arno as it shoots away Through Florence' heart beneath her bridges four: Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows, And tremble while the arrowy undertide Shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes, And strikes up palace-walls on either side, And froths the cornice out in glittering rows, With doors and windows quaintly multiplied, And terrace-sweeps, and gazers upon all, By whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out From any lattice there, the same would fall Into the river underneath, no doubt, It runs so close and fast 'twixt wall and wall.

How beautiful! the mountains from without In silence listen for the word said next.

What word will men say,--here where Giotto planted His campanile like an unperplexed Fine question Heavenward, touching the things granted A n.o.ble people who, being greatly vexed In act, in aspiration keep undaunted?

What word will G.o.d say? Michel's Night and Day And Dawn and Twilight wait in marble scorn[3]

Like dogs upon a dunghill, couched on clay From whence the Medicean stamp's outworn, The final putting off of all such sway By all such hands, and freeing of the unborn In Florence and the great world outside Florence.

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