FullReads

When the hour grows ripe, and a certain dotard
Is pitched, no parcel that needs invoicing, 250
To the worse side of the Mont Saint Gothard,
We shall begin by way of rejoicing;
None of that shooting the sky (blank cartridge),
Nor a civic guard, all plumes and lacquer,
Hunting Radetzky’s soul like a partridge 255
Over Morello with squib and cracker.

This time we’ll shoot better game and bag ’em hot–
No mere display at the stone of Dante,
But a kind of sober Witanagemot
(Ex: “Casa Guidi,” quod videas ante) 260
Shall ponder, once Freedom restored to Florence,
How Art may return that departed with her.
Go, hated house, go each trace of the Loraine’s,
And bring us the days of Orgagna hither!

How we shall prologuize, how we shall perorate, 265
Utter fit things upon art and history,
Feel truth at blood-heat and falsehood at zero rate,
Make of the want of the age no mystery;
Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras,
Show–monarchy ever its uncouth cub licks 270
Out of the bear’s shape into Chimaera’s,
While Pure Art’s birth is still the republic’s.

Then one shall propose in a speech (curt Tuscan,
Expurgate and sober, with scarcely an “issimo,”)
To end now our half-told tale of Cambuscan, 275
And turn the bell-tower’s alt to altissimo:
And find as the beak of a young beccaccia
The Campanile, the Duomo’s fit ally,
Shall soar up in gold full fifty braccia,
Completing Florence, as Florence, Italy. 280

Shall I be alive that morning the scaffold
Is broken away, and the long-pent fire,
Like the golden hope of the world, unbaffled
Springs from its sleep, and up goes the spire
While “God and the People” plain for its motto, 285
Thence the new tricolor flaps at the sky?
At least to foresee that glory of Giotto
And Florence together, the first am I!

NOTE

3. Aloed arch. The genus aloe includes trees, shrubs, and herbs. The American variety is the century-plant. Browning’s hill-side villa evidently had aloes trained to grow in an arch.

15. The startling bell-tower Giotto raised. Giotto began the Campanile in 1334, and after his death in 1337 the work was continued by Andrea Pisano. Its striking beauty impresses the poet as he looks out over the city. But it does more than that, for it rouses in him reflections on the progress and meaning of art.

17-24. The address to Giotto, thrown in here as it is with conversational freedom, is partially explained in lines 184-248. See note on l. 236.

30. By a gift God grants me. The power to re-create vividly and minutely the past. The artists of bygone centuries are called back by his imagination to their old haunts in Florence.

44. Stands One. The “one” (l. 44), “a lion” (l. 47), “the wronged great soul” (l. 48), and “the wronged great souls” (l. 58), all refer to the unappreciated early artists.

50. They. That is, the famous great artists such as Michael Angelo and Raphael. Critics “hum and buzz” around them with praise to which they are indifferent.

59. Where their work is all to do. Their place in the development of art is not yet understood. It must be made clear, Browning thinks, that painters like Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) come in natural succession from earlier obscure artists like Dello, that art is a real and continuous record of the human mind and heart.