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I YOUR ghost will walk, you lover of trees, | |
| (If our loves remain) | |
| In an English lane, | |
| By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies. | |
| Hark, those two in the hazel coppice— | 5 |
| 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, | 10 |
| With the beanflower’s boon, | |
| And the blackbird’s tune, | |
| And May, and June! | |
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II What I love best in all the world | |
| Is a castle, precipice-encurl’d, | 15 |
| In a gash of the wind-griev’d 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)— | 20 |
| In a sea-side house to the farther South, | |
| Where the bak’d cicala dies of drouth, | |
| And one sharp tree—’t is a cypress—stands, | |
| By the many hundred years red-rusted, | |
| Rough iron-spik’d, ripe fruit-o’ercrusted, | 25 |
| 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, for ever crumbles | 30 |
| 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 | 35 |
| Was shot at, touch’d 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— | 40 |
| (When fortune’s malice | |
| Lost her Calais) | |
| Open my heart and you will see | |
| Grav’d inside of it, “Italy.” | |
| Such lovers old are I and she: | 45 |
| So it always was, so shall ever be. | |
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