Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.

Introductory

The Daisy

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

O LOVE, what hours were thine and mine

In lands of palm and southern pine,—

In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,

Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.

What Roman strength Turbìa showed

In ruin, by the mountain road;

How like a gem, beneath, the city

Of little Monaco, basking, glowed.

How richly down the rocky dell

The torrent vineyard streaming fell

To meet the sun and sunny waters,

That only heaved with a summer swell.

What slender campanili grew

By bays, the peacock’s neck in hue;

Where, here and there, on sandy beaches

A milky-belled amaryllis blew.

How young Columbus seemed to rove,

Yet present in his natal grove,

Now watching high on mountain cornice,

And steering, now, from a purple cove,

Now pacing mute by ocean’s rim

Till, in a narrow street and dim,

I stayed the wheels at Cogoletto,

And drank, and loyally drank to him.

Nor knew we well what pleased us most,

Not the clipt palm of which they boast;

But distant color, happy hamlet,

A mouldered citadel on the coast,

Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen

A light amid its olives green;

Or olive-hoary cape in ocean;

Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,

Where oleanders flushed the bed

Of silent torrents, gravel-spread;

And, crossing, oft we saw the glisten

Of ice, far up on a mountain head.

We loved that hall, though white and cold,

Those nichéd shapes of noble mould,

A princely people’s awful princes,

The grave, severe Genovese of old.

At Florence, too, what golden hours

In those long galleries were ours;

What drives about the fresh Cascinè,

Or walks in Boboli’s ducal bowers.

In bright vignettes, and each complete,

Of tower or duomo, sunny-sweet,

Or palace, how the city glittered,

Through cypress avenues, at our feet.

But when we crost the Lombard plain

Remember what a plague of rain;

Of rain at Reggio, rain at Parma;

At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain.

And stern and sad (so rare the smiles

Of sunlight) looked the Lombard piles;

Porch-pillars on the lion resting,

And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles.

O Milan, O the chanting quires,

The giant windows’ blazoned fires,

The height, the space, the gloom, the glory!

A mount of marble, a hundred spires!

I climbed the roofs at break of day;

Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.

I stood among the silent statues,

And statued pinnacles, mute as they.

How faintly flushed, how phantom-fair,

Was Monte Rosa hanging there

A thousand shadowy-pencilled valleys

And snowy dells in a golden air.

Remember how we came at last

To Como; shower and storm and blast

Had blown the lake beyond his limit,

And all was flooded; and how we past

From Como, when the light was gray,

And in my head, for half the day,

The rich Virgilian rustic measure

Of Lari Maxume, all the way,

Like ballad-burden music, kept,

As on the Lariano crept

To that fair port below the castle

Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept;

Or hardly slept, but watched awake

A cypress in the moonlight shake,

The moonlight touching o’er a terrace

One tall agavè above the lake.

What more? we took our last adieu,

And up the snowy Splugen drew,

But ere we reached the highest summit

I plucked a daisy, I gave it you.

It told of England then to me,

And now it tells of Italy.

O love, we two shall go no longer

To lands of summer across the sea;

So dear a life your arms enfold

Whose crying is a cry for gold:

Yet here to-night in this dark city,

When ill and weary, alone and cold,

I found, though crushed to hard and dry,

This nursling of another sky

Still in the little book you lent me,

And where you tenderly laid it by:

And I forgot the clouded Forth,

The gloom that saddens heaven and earth,

The bitter east, the misty summer

And gray metropolis of the North.

Perchance to lull the throbs of pain,

Perchance to charm a vacant brain,

Perchance to dream you still beside me,

My fancy fled to the South again.