Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
Riviera di Ponente
By James Freeman Clarke (18101888)O
Over olive-bearing mountains, by the deep and violet sea,
There, through each long happy day, winding slowly on our way,
Travellers from across the ocean, toward Italia journeyed we,—
Each long day, that, richer, fairer,
Showed the charming Riviera.
Eagle-like, gray Esa, clinging to its rocky perch, looks down;
And upon the mountain dim, ruined, shattered, stern, and grim,
Turbia sees us through the ages with its austere Roman frown,—
While we climb, where cooler, rarer,
Breezes sweep the Riviera.
Quiet, half-forgotten city of a drowsy prince and time,
Through the mild Italian midnight, rolls upon the wave the moonlight,
Murmuring in our dreams the cadence of a strange Ligurian rhyme,—
Rhymes in which each heart is sharer,
Journeying on the Riviera.
Eastward gleams a rosy tumult with the rising of the day;
Toward the north, with gradual changes, steal along the mountain-ranges
Tender tints of warmer feeling, kissing all their peaks of gray;
And far south the waters wear a
Smile along the Riviera.
Gazing over nearer summits, with a fixed, mysterious stare,
Down along the shaded ocean, on whose edge in tremulous motion
Floats an island, half transparent, woven out of sea and air;—
For such visions, shaped of air, are
Frequent on our Riviera.
Chief whose infancy was cradled in that old Tyrrhenic isle,
Joins the shades of trampling legions, bringing from remotest regions
Gallic fire and Roman valor, Cimbric daring, Moorish guile,
Guests from every age to share a
Portion of this Riviera.
Moulding Gaul and Carthaginian into one all-conquering band,
With his tuskéd monsters grumbling, mid the alien snow-drifts stumbling,
Then, an avalanche of ruin, thundering from that frozen land
Into vales their sons declare are
Sunny as our Riviera.
Thus forever, in our musing, comes man’s spirit interfusing
Thought of poet and of hero with the landscape and the sky;
And this shore, no longer lonely, lives the life of romance only:
Gauls and Moors and Northern Sea-Kings, all are gliding, ghostlike, by.
So with Nature man is sharer
Even on the Riviera.