| |
| THE MORN when first it thunders in March, | |
| The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say. | |
| As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch | |
| Of the villa-gate, this warm March day, | |
| No flash snapt, no dumb thunder rolled | 5 |
| In the valley beneath, where, white and wide, | |
| Washed by the morning’s water-gold, | |
| Florence lay out on the mountain-side. | |
| |
| River and bridge and street and square | |
| Lay mine, as much at my beck and call, | 10 |
| Through the live translucent bath of air, | |
| As the sights in a magic crystal ball. | |
| And of all I saw and of all I praised, | |
| The most to praise and the best to see, | |
| Was the startling bell-tower Giotto raised: | 15 |
| But why did it more than startle me? | |
| |
| Giotto, how, with that soul of yours, | |
| Could you play me false who loved you so? | |
| Some slights if a certain heart endures | |
| It feels, I would have your fellows know! | 20 |
| Faith, I perceive not why I should care | |
| To break a silence that suits them best, | |
| But the thing grows somewhat hard to bear | |
| When I find a Giotto join the rest. | |
| |
| On the arch where olives overhead | 25 |
| Print the blue sky with twig and leaf | |
| (That sharp-curled leaf they never shed), | |
| ’Twixt the aloes I used to lean in chief, | |
| And mark through the winter afternoons, | |
| By a gift God grants me now and then, | 30 |
| In the mild decline of those suns like moons, | |
| Who walked in Florence, besides her men. | |
| |
| They might chirp and chaffer, come and go | |
| For pleasure or profit, her men alive,— | |
| My business was hardly with them, I trow, | 35 |
| But with empty cells of the human hive; | |
| With the chapter-room, the cloister-porch, | |
| The church’s apsis, aisle or nave, | |
| Its crypt, one fingers along with a torch,— | |
| Its face, set full for the sun to shave. | 40 |
| |
| Wherever a fresco peels and drops, | |
| Wherever an outline weakens and wanes | |
| Till the latest life in the painting stops, | |
| Stands one whom each fainter pulse-tick pains! | |
| One, wishful each scrap should clutch its brick, | 45 |
| Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster,— | |
| A lion who dies of an ass’s kick, | |
| The wronged great soul of an ancient master. | |
| |
| For O, this world and the wrong it does! | |
| They are safe in heaven with their backs to it, | 50 |
| The Michaels and Rafaels you hum and buzz | |
| Bound the works of, you of the little wit; | |
| Do their eyes contract to the earth’s old scope, | |
| Now that they see God face to face, | |
| And have all attained to be poets, I hope? | 55 |
| ’T is their holiday now, in any case. * * * * * | |
| |
