Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
Amalfi
By Samuel Rogers (1763–1855)T
And he who steers due east, doubling the cape,
Discovers, in a crevice of the rock,
The fishing-town, Amalfi. Haply there
A heaving bark, an anchor on the strand,
May tell him what it is; but what it was,
Cannot be told so soon.
The time has been,
When on the quays along the Syrian coast,
’T was asked and eagerly, at break of dawn,
“What ships are from Amalfi?” when her coins,
Silver and gold, circled from clime to clime;
From Alexandria southward to Sennaar,
And eastward, through Damascus and Cabul
And Samarcand, to thy great wall, Cathay.
Then were the nations by her wisdom swayed;
And every crime on every sea was judged
According to her judgments. In her port
Prows, strange, uncouth, from Nile and Niger met,
People of various feature, various speech;
And in their countries many a house of prayer,
And many a shelter, where no shelter was,
And many a well, like Jacob’s in the wild,
Rose at her bidding. Then in Palestine,
By the wayside, in sober grandeur stood
A hospital, that, night and day, received
The pilgrims of the west; and, when ’t was asked,
“Who are the noble founders?” every tongue
At once replied, “The merchants of Amalfi.”
That hospital, when Godfrey scaled the walls,
Sent forth its holy men in complete steel;
And hence, the cowl relinquished for the helm,
That chosen band, valiant, invincible,
So long renowned as champions of the Cross,
In Rhodes, in Malta.
For three hundred years
There, unapproached but from the deep, they dwelt;
Assailed forever, yet from age to age
Acknowledging no master. From the deep
They gathered in their harvests; bringing home,
In the same ship, relics of ancient Greece,
That land of glory where their fathers lay,
Grain from the golden vales of Sicily,
And Indian spices. Through the civilized world
Their credit was ennobled into fame;
And when at length they fell, they left mankind
A legacy, compared with which the wealth
Of Eastern kings, what is it in the scale?—
The mariner’s compass.