FullReads

Their ghosts still stand, as I said before, 185
Watching each fresco flaked and rasped,
Blocked up, knocked out, or whitewashed o’er:
–No getting again what the church has grasped!
The works on the wall must take their chance;
“Works never conceded to England’s thick clime!” 190
(I hope they prefer their inheritance
Of a bucketful of Italian quicklime.)

When they go at length, with such a shaking
Of heads o’er the old delusion, sadly
Each master his way through the black streets taking, 195
Where many a lost work breathes though badly–
Why don’t they bethink them of who has merited?
Why not reveal while their pictures dree
Such doom, how a captive might be out-ferreted?
Why is it they never remember me? 200

Not that I expect the great Bigordi,
Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose;
Nor the wronged Lippino; and not a word I
Say of a scrap of Fra Angelico’s;
But are you too fine, Taddeo Gaddi, 205
To grant me a taste of your intonaco,
Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye?
Not a churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco?

Could not the ghost with the close red cap,
My Pollajolo, the twice a craftsman, 210
Save me a sample, give me the hap
Of a muscular Christ that shows the draftsman?
No Virgin by him the somewhat petty,
Of finical touch and tempera crumbly–
Could not Alesso Baldovinetti 215
Contribute so much, I ask him humbly?

Margheritone of Arezzo,
With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret
(Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,
You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) 220
Not a poor glimmering Crucifixion,
Where in the foreground kneels the donor?
If such remain, as is my conviction,
The hoarding it does you but little honor.

They pass; for them the panels may thrill, 225
The tempera grow alive and tinglish;
Their pictures are left to the mercies still
Of dealers and stealers, Jews and the English,
Who, seeing mere money’s worth in their prize,
Will sell it to somebody calm as Zeno 230
At naked High Art, and in ecstasies
Before some clay-cold vile Carlino!

No matter for these! But Giotto, you,
Have you allowed, as the town-tongues babble it–
Oh, never! it shall not be counted true– 235
That a certain precious little tablet
Which Buonarroti eyed like a lover–
Was buried so long in oblivion’s womb
And, left for another than I to discover,
Turns up at last! and to whom?–to whom? 240

I, that have haunted the dim San Spirito,
(Or was it rather the Ognissanti?)
Patient on altar-step planting a weary toe!
Nay, I shall have it yet! Detur amanti!
My Koh-i-noor–or (if that’s a platitude) 245
Jewel of Giamschid, the Persian Sofi’s eye;
So, in anticipative gratitude,
What if I take up my hope and prophesy?