Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
Venice
By John Edmund Reade (1800–1870)T
In golden hues yon clouds that steadfast keep
Their station on the far horizon sleeping,
Breasting the sky yet blended with the deep:
Lo, from their braided edges glittering creep
Sharp pointed spires, in blue air faintly shown
O’ershadowed as the sea-mists round them sweep;
Away, those azure mists are substant grown,
Fair Venice there reclines upon her ocean-throne!
Her spires and gilded domes reflected shine
In the rich lustre shed by twilight dying;
Silent and lone as a deserted shrine
Reared o’er that mirror’s floating hyaline;
Ancestral Venice! earth to her bowed down
Deeming her Roman birth should mock decline:
There still is throned the queen without her crown,
The halo round her forehead of her past renown.
Where all is strange, grotesque, mysterious, wild,
Ye glide through paths that are the ocean stream;
Mid palaces with sea-green weed defiled,
Looking desertion, yet unreconciled
To be the sepulchres of greatness fled:
Where silence is a presence felt, the child
Of desolation, for ye hear no tread,
No shout, no trump, to wake this city of the dead!
Yea, all is here romantic, strange and wild,
And mystical and dreamlike: lo, the square
Where domes and spires and minarets are piled,
The ducal hall’s barbaric splendor there,
The steeds of bronze that glitter in the air
Bridled: the towering Campanile’s height
Where Galileo found his starry chair,
And yonder triple shrine that fills the sight
With a strange sense of awe, of marvel, yet delight.
Spires reared o’er Moorish cupolas appear;
The long arched front, with myriad columns lined:
Behold, undisciplined by art severe,
The poetry of architecture here:
Heaped up and as a conqueror’s spoil displayed,
The o’er-crowded wealth of either hemisphere,
Enter, where mantled in her deepest shade
Religion hath her own the sanctuary made.