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Man:
O VINE along my garden wall, | |
| Could I thine English slumber break, | |
| And thee from wintry exile disenthral— | |
| Where would thy spirit wake? | |
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Vine:
I would wake at the hour of dawning in May in Italy, | 5 |
| When rose mists rise from the Magra’s valley plains, | |
| In the fields of maize and olives around Pontrémoli, | |
| When peaks grow golden and clear and the starlight wanes. | |
| I would wake to the dance of the sacred mountains boundlessly | |
| Kindling their marble snows in the rite of fire; | 10 |
| To them my new-born tendrils softly and soundlessly | |
| Would uncurl and aspire. | |
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| I would hang no more on thy wall a rusted slumberer, | |
| Listless and fruitless strewing the pathways cold. | |
| I would seem no more in thine eyes an idle cumberer— | 15 |
| Profitless alien, bitter and sere and old. | |
| In some warm terraced dell where the Roman rioted, | |
| And still in tiers his stony theatre heaves, | |
| Would I festoon with leaf-light his glory quieted, | |
| And flake his thrones with leaves. | 20 |
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| Doves from the mountain belfries would seek and cling to me, | |
| To drink from the altar, winnowing the fragrant airs. | |
| Women from olived hillsides by turns would sing to me, | |
| Beating the olives or stooping afield in pairs. | |
| On gala evenings the gay little carts of laborers, | 25 |
| Swinging from axles their horns against evil eye, | |
| And crowded with children, revellers, pipers, and taborers | |
| Chanting, would pass me by…. | |
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| There go the pale blue shadows so light and showery | |
| Over sharp Apuan peaks—rathe mists unwreathe, | 30 |
| Almond trees wake, and the paven yards grow flowery, | |
| Crocuses cry from the earth at the joy to breathe. | |
| There through the deep-eaved gateways of haughty-turreted | |
| Arno—house-laden bridges of strutted stalls— | |
| Mighty white oxen drag in the jars rich-spirited | 35 |
| Grazing the narrow walls! | |
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| Wine-jars I too have filled, and the heart was thrilled with me. | |
| Brown-limbed on shady turf the families lay: | |
| Shouting they bowled the bowls; and old men, filled with me, | |
| Roused the September twilight with songs that day. | 40 |
| Lanterns of sun and moon the young children flaunted me, | |
| Plaiters of straw from doorway to window cried. | |
| Borne through the city gates the great oxen vaunted me, | |
| Swaying from side to side. | |
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| Wine-jars out of my leafage that once so vitally | 45 |
| Throbbed into purple, of me thou canst never take: | |
| Thy heart would remember the towns on the branch of Italy, | |
| And teaching to throb I should teach it, perchance, to break. | |
| It would beat for those little cities, rock-hewn and mellowing, | |
| Festooned from summit to summit, where still sublime | 50 |
| Murmur her temples, lovelier in their yellowing | |
| Than in the morn of time. | |
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| I from the scorn of frost and the wind’s iniquity | |
| Barren, aloft in that golden air would thrive: | |
| My passionate rootlets draw from that hearth’s antiquity | 55 |
| Whirls of profounder fire in us to survive. | |
| The serried realms of our fathers would swell and foam with us— | |
| Juice of the Latin sunrise; your own sea-flung | |
| Rude and far-wandered race might again find home with us | |
| Leaguing with old Rome, young. | 60 |
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