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For me who stand in Italy to-day
Where worthier poets stood and sang before,
I kiss their footsteps yet their words gainsay.
I can but muse in hope upon this shore
Of golden Arno as it shoots away
Through Florence’ heart beneath her bridges four:
Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows,
And tremble while the arrowy undertide
Shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes,
And strikes up palace-walls on either side,
And froths the cornice out in glittering rows,
With doors and windows quaintly multiplied,
And terrace-sweeps, and gazers upon all,
By whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out
From any lattice there, the same would fall
Into the river underneath, no doubt,
It runs so close and fast ‘twixt wall and wall.
How beautiful! the mountains from without
In silence listen for the word said next.
What word will men say,–here where Giotto planted
His campanile like an unperplexed
Fine question Heavenward, touching the things granted
A noble people who, being greatly vexed
In act, in aspiration keep undaunted?
What word will God say? Michel’s Night and Day
And Dawn and Twilight wait in marble scorn[3]
Like dogs upon a dunghill, couched on clay
From whence the Medicean stamp’s outworn,
The final putting off of all such sway
By all such hands, and freeing of the unborn
In Florence and the great world outside Florence.
Three hundred years his patient statues wait
In that small chapel of the dim Saint Lawrence:
Day’s eyes are breaking bold and passionate
Over his shoulder, and will flash abhorrence
On darkness and with level looks meet fate,
When once loose from that marble film of theirs;
The Night has wild dreams in her sleep, the Dawn
Is haggard as the sleepless, Twilight wears
A sort of horror; as the veil withdrawn
‘Twixt the artist’s soul and works had left them heirs
Of speechless thoughts which would not quail nor fawn,
Of angers and contempts, of hope and love:
For not without a meaning did he place
The princely Urbino on the seat above
With everlasting shadow on his face,
While the slow dawns and twilights disapprove
The ashes of his long-extinguished race
Which never more shall clog the feet of men.
I do believe, divinest Angelo,
That winter-hour in Via Larga, when
They bade thee build a statue up in snow[4]
And straight that marvel of thine art again
Dissolved beneath the sun’s Italian glow,
Thine eyes, dilated with the plastic passion,
Thawing too in drops of wounded manhood, since,
To mock alike thine art and indignation,
Laughed at the palace-window the new prince,–
(“Aha! this genius needs for exaltation,
When all’s said and however the proud may wince,
A little marble from our princely mines!”)
I do believe that hour thou laughedst too
For the whole sad world and for thy Florentines,
After those few tears, which were only few!
That as, beneath the sun, the grand white lines
Of thy snow-statue trembled and withdrew,–
The head, erect as Jove’s, being palsied first,
The eyelids flattened, the full brow turned blank,
The right-hand, raised but now as if it cursed,
Dropt, a mere snowball, (till the people sank
Their voices, though a louder laughter burst
From the royal window)–thou couldst proudly thank
God and the prince for promise and presage,
And laugh the laugh back, I think verily,
Thine eyes being purged by tears of righteous rage
To read a wrong into a prophecy,
And measure a true great man’s heritage
Against a mere great-duke’s posterity.
I think thy soul said then, “I do not need
A princedom and its quarries, after all;
For if I write, paint, carve a word, indeed,
On book or board or dust, on floor or wall,
The same is kept of God who taketh heed
That not a letter of the meaning fall
Or ere it touch and teach His world’s deep heart,
Outlasting, therefore, all your lordships, sir!
So keep your stone, beseech you, for your part,
To cover up your grave-place and refer
The proper titles; I live by my art.
The thought I threw into this snow shall stir
This gazing people when their gaze is done;
And the tradition of your act and mine,
When all the snow is melted in the sun,
Shall gather up, for unborn men, a sign
Of what is the true princedom,–ay, and none
Shall laugh that day, except the drunk with wine.”